Why great AI products are all about the data | Shaun Clowes (CPO Confluent, ex-Salesforce, Atlassian)

25:32You'd say the JIRA is a form on a database. Workdays are form on a database. So it sells for us to all forms on databases. All vertical, SaaS or business SaaS is ultimately forms on databases. And you'd be like, well, how hard can that be to replicate? And the answer is unbelievably hard, unbelievably hard. And people just, you totally get it wrong. Because it's not actually just about the data model. So if you think about the, if it forms some databases, it's these beautiful user experiences that sit on top of data models. So whatever the object is, might be a customer object or a campaign object or some employee object, right?

26:07You could say that, well, there's some elements of lock -in in the object, like the object itself, like this yields a field object. I'm like, hmm, pretty boring, right? That's not very interesting, but short, maybe. Certainly there's some value in being the system of record, like the default that everybody uses. There's definitely some value in the UX. Like the, well, you know, I want to be the best, you know, HR facing applications for working ziplotty data. Yeah, there's some value there. But the real thing, which is staring everybody in the face, is that it's all about the business rules. Like that is what drives the locking.

26:37Because why do you buy Workday? You don't buy Workday for its out of the box configuration. You buy Workday because you want to configure it to be, you know, Lenny Inx HR processes. It becomes Lenny Inks workday. It's not Sean Inks workday. It's Lenny Inks workday. And actually, as the longer you have the software, the more it becomes that, the more it becomes less and less like workday, more and more like your specific company. Which makes sense because it was built to be configured to meet the needs of an specific company and every company is their own precious snowflake. And as that happens, those configuration pieces that makes the application native and a fit for your organization, makes it a fit for nobody else's organization and also makes it a black box.

27:17To the point that you don't even understand how it works anymore. If you went to, for example, Salesforce, and he said, hey, could you define all of the processes by which software were sold inside Salesforce, they couldn't tell you that without reading the code of their Salesforce instance. That's not a proprietary secret, that's obviously true. Because over time, that's literally how sales happened. There is no other way to do a sale other than through their internal tooling. And so what that means is that it's not the UI that matters. And it's not the data models that matters, although those are both very useful.

27:50It's the years and years of evolution, of the underlying workflows of the product to support the customers, but also the customers evolving those workflows to make them work the way they do. And so how does that impact AI companies, right? You could say it's easier than ever to build forms on a database application. And so I'm like, yeah, okay. that presumably drives the incremental value of every new one of those to zero. So probably the leads to more power to the existing winning systems of record, because there'll just be a gazillion competitors who are just more forms on databases. So like, how would you ever choose between them?

28:25You may as well just go with the winner. You know, nobody ever gets fired for buying sales force or whatever you may as well start from the kind of the premier vendor. That's one element. You could go the other way and you could say, I've heard a few people mount inside, which I think is really interesting that at the end of the day, agents are going to take away most of the use of that user interface. So let's say for example, your Salesforce for Service Cloud, a few people say, well, a lot of those service agents might end up getting being replaced with agentic workflows that will mean that, there is no person operating the UI.

28:57If the UI doesn't even exist anymore, then why do you even need Salesforce? You may just have raw database tables and who even needs forms of databases? You can literally just have databases. But that also doesn't make any sense either, because the agents have to operate against the rules of the system and the rules are defined by the business processes. So think about Salesforce without a head. Imagine Salesforce had no UI. It would still have those business rules that I was talking about. And those business rules are what define what the agent should do. They're almost telling the agent what it should do and how the world can operate, what is possible, what is allowed.

29:29And so from my perspective, like this idea that this just completely destroys like the differentiation of these kind of business, business process SaaS applications. It just seems like a fantasy, crazy fantasy. The only way I could really believe it is if you said, well, like, you know, you could have a new startup that introspected all of the rules that are configured into a Salesforce to try and reverse engineer what your actual business processes are and then kind of operate on top of that. But the best place people to do that would be Salesforce themselves. or that's in the lessons case or workday in workday's case.

30:03I just can't see a world in which this thing, I think one of two things could happen. All this moving AI makes those applications even better, even more, even more, I'm a soluble, they basically get stronger. It makes the stronger stronger, or it could enable some new level of applications that come from a more platform -based thing, So less a domain specific thing like, you know, HCM or ERP or, you know, engineering or, you know, less of the domain specific stuff, it could enable a more platform like play where you have more business objects and business object have rules and you could imagine a world in which like there's kind of a whole evolution of new more platform like sound applications that do more than one business function worth of the business rules and the way things move around in enterprise.

30:53But that doesn't exist today. So you could say that that could exist. And it could say it could be way better than it would than we've ever thought of because of AI. Or you could say that the rich are going to get richer. The most likely outcome is that the currently dominant company is going to get more dominant. But I don't think this idea that it will just cause a spring up of a whole bunch of new apps that will more easily challenge the incumbents and makes any particularly. It's not straightforward to me how that would happen. Wow. That was extremely fascinating. and there's so much there.

31:24I can go in so many directions. One is, I thought you would actually go in this direction, which is distribution advantage is become even more important. If it's easy to, like today I could sit there and hire a team, clone Salesforce might take a while, but I could copy it, but by the time I'm done, they've evolved their moving, their adding features, their ahead, right? You're skating toward the puck was. And so if that's the case, one of the advantages, one of the ways to get anywhere is to have some kind of distribution advantage. Like it's one thing to have Salesforce as a product clone. Now there's to get anyone to know about it, to adopt it, to sell it, procurement, all that stuff.

32:00So do you have a sense of like distribution advantages being even more valuable in that world? Yeah, I mean, it certainly makes sense. Like ultimately, then the distribution is always an advantage because the hardest problem is to even be in the consideration set for any given problem. Like the one is full of problems. It's just when people have that problem, They first think they're going to solve it at all, and when they do, you think of solving it, they don't think of you. So distribution is always an incredible advantage. But again, in the world of AI, it seems like distribution is more like they're going to get hard than easy.

32:32So if you think about, for example, diminishing returns on cold email, because cold email is getting easier and easier to send even worse. It sounds better, but it's effectively causing everybody to become desensitized everything. I don't know if you've noticed half the linked -end reach charts now are all basically clearly LLM generated spam. I mean, to some degree, it's actually worsening the signal to noise ratio. And so I think that a lot of the kind of breaks through distribution mechanisms, the startups often use, seem to be getting more crowded just in general and more expensive. So that doesn't bode well for kind of, I'm the not with good Salesforce, I'm the not with good Salesforce, but I'm cheaper.

33:13It kind of has to be something different. You have to, there has to be some angle upon which you are materially better. And what I saw happening and what I've been seeing happening, I think it's been really interesting, is a lot of modern, next -gen applications bringing data as a first -class citizen into the workflow. And I think that that's pretty compelling, right? So if I give you a look at the next generation of applicant management products that deal with, inbound job applicants, a lot of them now, like the latest core ones, they include your time to fill data. They include outcome data of like, who's got the best hiring outcomes, who over what period of time has the worst attrition.

33:54Literally all the way back to the interviewers and where the interviews were in the interview cycle. So basically embeds data into the whole life cycle. And I think, so I think that there are kind of these ways in which startups can bring these experience benefits by just bringing a kind of different approach to the world that doesn't able them to capitalize on traditional disruptive innovation. Like at the end of the day, this is just disruptive innovation. It means that most companies have overshot the utility, like the average utility, so you can win by meeting the average utility and being different.

34:28Meet the bar and be different. Meet the bar and be different is the way to cut through. So that makes sense, that's a half -decent playbook. But even for those companies, Now, they're going to have all these AI competitors who are using AI to engineer faster, to be able to compare it to just like them as quickly as possible and start jamming it into the channel. It's going to be interesting to see how this whole thing evolves. It kind of got raised to the bottom characteristics around it. You probably are at the distribution is still the hardest part in software, particularly when you're getting started.

34:59Right. So, if you have some kind of clever, fair advantage, it feels like that becomes even more powerful. say, have a platform of an audience or something like that. You mentioned this ATS product they really like, is there one you want to give some love to you? They think it's really cool. Are you like, or do you want to keep it anonymous? Yeah, it's Ashby. It's the one all the cool kids are talking about now. And it's funny because people literally talk about it in comparison to all the, even the last generation of modern SAS ATSs or whatever, and they talk about it in glowing ways because of the way they put data inside the actual workflow.

35:32So that the actions and its outcomes are directly tieable to each other in the application you're doing to work in. I think that's a pretty compelling user experience. So just to maybe close this thread before I move in a different direction, this point you're making about how valuable data is and how that's like at the core of being successful and differentiating in the future, especially with AI tooling and products. Any advice you'd give to someone that wants to do that? Is it just make sure you have a, is it like half for proprietary data? is it like make it a first class citizen? Like what's the advice you'd give to founders who are trying to do this, which you're suggesting?

36:08Yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, it's kind of all of those things, isn't it? Like if you have first party data, but you can't bring it to bear, then it's not very much use. If you have third party data, and you bring it to bearing interesting ways, the problem with data is like, we're all surrounded by all the data all the time. Like so that is everywhere, right? What really matters is the right data at the right time in the right place, because we're all humans, right? And so to me, there are obviously data advantages, and there even data network effects. If you can end up in a situation where you have very valuable first -party data, but in any case, it's still about being able to bring the right data at the right place, the right time for those users to be able to get advantage from it.

36:47A little segway, I guess, on that one is I spent, I know I still love my career. Weedlay actually, I've been a product person for a long time, But weirdly, I've ended up inheriting data teams. So I've actually run data teams and a lot of different companies, which is weird because data, because product managers don't know their own data teams. I think it's because I have just a really massive affinity for data. I've always been really, it's a common self -data driven. It was kind of my jam. And because I, and in hindsight, I look back and I think like data is the opposite. Data is more like a compass than a GPS, right?

37:27Like if you look at data as a wave like giving you the answer, you're always wrong. You're always wrong or you're slow, wrong or slow or sometimes both. Because mostly data doesn't give you the answer. It just tells you if what you just said is like ridiculous or this potentially something there. So it's more like about disproving whatever you think. And you end up being slow because if you try and use data for everything, your brain is ultimately a data sifter or whatever. So the reason your intuition tells you something is because you've seen a ton of data that tells you that this is almost like the answer and so and so being like data driven being data Obsessed is like it's something you can easily overdo very very very easily overdo so it's about right sizing data Having the right day or your fingertips having the right kind of view on data rather than kind of like trying to expect data to give you the answer.

38:18We're trying to use data as a weapon. We're trying to use data as a way to kind of force people to believe you or to go in your direction. But data is kind of at the center of everything and about how to influence and be successful in products you're building and arguments you're mounting internally and everything else. I love that you went there. This is, I definitely want to spend time on here. It's interesting you say that. There used to be data driven, like I was a Mr. data driven. and you created the ReForce course, data for product managers, and also retention engagement course and ReForce.

38:50And by the way, we'll link to these. You're still helping with these courses. By the way, they're still running. They're awesome. People love them. Great. So we'll point people to those. I love that you're also saying, you're like, I think the way you described it to me before this is your reform data driven PM. A lot of people say this. They're like, don't just tell, don't just do what data tells you to do. Use your intuition, use it as a guide. It's hard like on the ground to operationalize that advice. What's your say like to your PMs and your teams when they have data telling them, hey, this experiment is a huge success or there's a huge onboarding conversion opportunity.

39:27I guess just like, what's your tactical advice to folks that have data telling them one thing and maybe something else telling them something else? I think the first thing I was encouraged people to do is to look at a piece of data. If you're looking at a piece of data and the result tells you something that your intuition tells you is like insanely wrong Like it probably not right First believe your intuition and go and prove yourself right. I give it Don't just take it at first glance because most of the time it's like outcomes are either most likely explanation for something that is insanely not intuitive is said it's just wrong That there's there's a problem somewhere now occasionally Sometimes you actually will be right now.

40:05Those will be paid over moments Those are the moments that make it all worth it. Like there are times when you do find the nugget of gold. Like you're like just staring at it and like, this is it, this was the problem. This was the thing we were looking for this whole time. But you have to be very diligent about like following it through like really understanding what you're looking at. Is this data representative? Is this data like a good sample of the audience we care about? How is it already subject to some sort of selection bias? Like oftentimes when I see analysis from different product leaders, you're even data teams, you can drive a truck through it.

40:38Like literally drive a truck through it. And if you present data with authority, and that data is ridiculous, or the analysis is just full of holes, you don't just not get benefits for that. You lose a whole bunch of brownie points. It would be better not to show up with an analysis that isn't clear, than it would be to show up with an analysis that's done. And I see people self -immolate, like on this, actually relatively regularly, because they just bring a knife to a gunfight or whatever, like they should bring in an analysis that is just not, it doesn't hold water, and they present it and then get shot down live, which is, you know, nobody's idea of a good time.

41:21So, so kind of, if I give you a little bit of additional tactical things about that, it would be okay. If I'm looking at a piece of data, what was upstream of this piece of data, and does that that look normal. So this thing happened or whatever, which you're very, very excited about, what happened before that? And does that match what you think should have been right? So what happened before this woman's situation? And then, okay, for that thing that you're looking at, what happened after? Like if you have an idea of what happened before and after, that gives you some idea of whether or not this thing is at all worth interesting, interesting to talk about.

41:53And then go one click above this stage that you're looking at. So it's like, okay, these things, Let's say it's, you know, I'm looking at onboarding success. Let's look at onboarding success to second week retention. Also look at that. I'm like, I have found this thing that totally crushes it. This intervention crushes it. If you go upstream and you find out that this intervention only applies to 2 % of the inbound onboarding stream, it's meaningless. It's most likely just a random aberration, but even if it was not a random aberration, it's not a useful tool. And so you can see you've got to go up and then you might go downstream and you might find, And yep, they last for two in the second week, but in the third week, they all turn.

42:29They're basically pointless. Why are we even talking about this? Or then you might step all the way back and go, okay, yes, those people do get retained for longer, but their average ASP is smaller. Because what we really care about, we do care about engagement and we care about more customers, but we want to keep the customers at a high ASP to reach a certain revenue goal. Like the final goal is happy customers paying as money. So that's what I mean about like getting going a click up. If you go a click to the left, a click to the right. So before and after and then I click up and you still see the thing that tells you the story that you want to tell Then now you've got something that's very compelling because people want to hear about that They want to hear what did happen before what did happen after and why is that it?

43:08Why is that outcome happening? But you have to really do your homework and really be rigorous about it to avoid fighting full -scaled I love that advice ASP what is that stand for by the way? Oh every shell press I've got this MRR or some other like revenue measure. Got it. This point you made about how a lot of time to experiment show positive and then they end up not having anything. I had the head of growth from Shopify on the podcast and they do this really cool thing where they keep holdouts for years of cohorts. And then it auto emails them. I think a year or two later, hey, check this and see these cohorts are still, this is still higher or not.

43:45and 40 % of the time turns out neutral after a positive experiment long -term. Interesting. It's really funny because at Adassi we did some mix similarly, we had a global holdout group actually. There was held out of all experiments. There was an NETS of the experiment platform couldn't target that group at all. So 10 % of all people never saw anything ever. So if that's really really helpful, because you can always compare them against whatever the experience was for any of the same vintage of cohort I agree with you. But the other thing is I really love some of that thinking process just in general.

44:13it's like, hey, let's say an experiment does show a temporary benefit. If an experiment shows a temporary benefit, but that benefit does not persist forever, does that mean the temporary benefit was never worth them? What does that just mean? The temporary benefit was an opportunity to reach another level. You just didn't cap it less on. I don't think there's a perfect answer. It's what I'm trying to say. I do think that the fact that a benefit doesn't last forever means that you failed. But I agree with you that not trying to understand what is the benefit being, what is the net lift being. There's also really important too.

44:44It's way worth it so hard, like worth it's part of product is so especially hard. Marketers, I know that you love TLD yards so let me get right to the point. Weeks Studio gives you everything you need to cater to any client at any scale all in one place. Here's how your workflow could look. Scale content with dynamic pages and reusable assets effortlessly. FastTrack projects would built in marketing integrations like Meta, C API, Zapier, Google Ads and more. ABTEST landing pages in days, not weeks, within intuitive design tools, connect the tracking and analytics tools like Google Analytics and Semrush, and capture key business events without the hassle of manual setup, manage all your client's social media and communications from a unified dashboard, then create, schedule, and post content across all their channels.

45:29If you're working on content rich sites with Studio No Code CMS, let's you build and manage without touching the design. And when you're ready for more, Wix Studio grows with you. Add your own code, create custom integrations with Wix -made APIs, or leverage robust native business solutions. Drive real client growth with Wix Studio. Go to WixStudio .com. So you built the first B2B growth team when you were at Lassian. Correct? Yes. Yeah, I was not. Makes me feel like an old person, but yes, it was a very long time ago. Slash it maybe, you know, it's a new thing. It's, yeah, it's either a long time ago or it's just we've just recently figured out this is a thing that you could do in a B2B is like focus on growth.

46:10Yeah, it is. So it's like when I, so there was around about 2012 and at that time kind of gross hacking was a thing. People didn't really use that term anymore. In B2C it was a very big deal because people could see Facebook doing their 10 friends in seven days and they could see this kind of thing that was working for people and they're like, man, that's amazing. And I think we set out to go, okay, well, do those techniques working B2B. And also they, you know, it's kind of obvious now that a lot of them do and that it's worth doing. But at the time it wasn't that obvious because for a lot of B2B companies, I mean, you some were as early as any distribution covers all faults.

46:48Like almost all ills can be, you know, filled in by really great distribution. Like if you have a really good ground game, really good marketing, a really good ground game, and kind of jamming your product into the channel, like you're jamming your product in front of people, and you're papering over the ugly parts with, you know, customer success people and services and consulting and whatever, then people will buy almost any software. Or you can certainly be successful with a lot of different software, but back in 2012, I wasn't clear of like, okay, which instead you went at this differently, and you've heard them in software that sell itself, is the juice worth the squeeze, right?

47:24And you know, now I would say that it's pretty clear that the juice is worth the squeeze to the point that people, lots of people think about at this all the time, but it was a bit of an interesting time at that time. And that was essentially the beginnings of product -like growth. Is that a simple way to think about it? Yeah, basically, it's now called POJ, but at that time, we didn't even know what to call exactly. Just growth. So based on that experience, a lot of B2B companies now have growth teams through investing growth. What makes a great growth team in B2B any pitfalls you often find folks fall into that you think they should try to avoid?

47:57Ultimately, a lot of these types of endeavors are a matter of balance. So what I remember that is growth team's seem to go through a set of phases. The first phase is proving their value at all. So that's called at the gold rush phase. This thing's probably not worth even doing. Why are we doing this? Mary band of people are they trying to prove that there's some growth phase somewhere. That's the proof of phase. And so, you know, the advantage of that phase is that life's good because there's usually a lot of growth to be found because nobody's gone looking before so life's good. But it's pretty random because you're literally searching across a random search phase going, have we tried X, have we tried Y, have we tried Z.

48:37Then kind of once you get that model going, then it starts to be okay, you know, how do we scale this thing? Like is this just a flash of the pan? We just find a little bit of low -hanging fruit and there's nothing else here that existed the project we should have done rather than an ongoing thing. So you have to kind of make it a system, like you have to prove that it can be repeated. And then you have to scale it. I can just become a thing. It has to become part of your DNA. You have to be taking a POD lens to everything you do all the way from paid acquisition to activation, retention, engagement, cross -product expansion, upsells, you name it.

49:13like all the different ways you can grow a product by revenue or engagement. There's many different ways ways to go about that and soon I'm having to scale out and be able to do all of those different things. Then you have to figure out how you fit in with the rest of the organization because there's other people who build products all day every day. There's other people who sell that product all day all day. There's other people who mark at that product all day all day. So, you know, growth organizations are in this interesting space. They're in between everybody else. They're kind of in everybody else's sand pit and a little bit in a little way.

49:41and they kind of at the edge of everybody's kind of full -time job and they are very valuable, but they can be complicated because of all those relationships and because of the way they see amongst all of the other parts of the organization. So many organizations fail because they don't really find much of the wins or when they do find wins it just seems totally random or they do find a lot of wins but they all can't understand them because they just they seem like they're just a random walk through a bunch of potential opportunities. There's many different ways to the kind of fail to fit as you go through your growth phase from trying the ideas to success, to scaling, to operationalizing.

50:18One of the biggest memes along these lines is a lot of companies claim, there's like just PLG rarely ever works. You always event either you try it and it just doesn't work or it eventually just peeders out. I guess any thoughts on just like what are signs that your product has a chance to work like peel product -led growth versus you're just, just go straight to sales immediately and don't even worry about this. The first set's examined the counterfactual, right? So let's start with the opposite of your question and say, hey, you know, how would the world be sad, sadder? If we all just gave up on PLG, like if we just said, hey, just let's just don't point at doing it in beta B says, the problem is that there is not a natural force that pulls companies towards thinking about the end users' enjoyment and success earlier in the early in their journey.

51:13There is no natural force, there's no natural counter -vailing force. Why is that? I mean, 101, the buyer is the most important person, the economic buyer is the most economic person that their needs are the number one thing, they're usually the person driving the RFP, they're usually the person dealing with the sales organization, so the needs of the person who you hear are usually all feature driven and they're not from the end users. And so you're kind of sowing a seed of your own demise. If you don't think about that end user, but it's one thing to say that you should think about the end user.

51:41It's a whole other thing to have a system by which you do that. Because people pay lip service to all sorts of things. But you know, I'm sure you've heard this one before, but in economics, like people only do what their incentives told them to do. Like broadly speaking, that is what they do. That is what happens. You get what you set out to measure. You get what you give people incentives to do. If there is nobody in the organization who's true incentive is to measure that success, the end user success, their enjoyment, their happiness, their retention, their engagement early on, it will not happen.

52:11Or a best, it will be a hobby. And so then by extension, if I start from there, then it's okay, let's say it doesn't exist, PLD doesn't exist, and therefore it's a hobby. And therefore there will be a bunch of hobby people who care about this. Then you ask yourself, okay, will that mean that there will be many products for which like those experiences really suck? And does that mean that that will be an opportunity for competitors of those products to be better at that? And is that a differentiation differentiated competitive advantage? Yeah, I say it is. I'd say it is. And so they're kind of working.

52:40I just work my way backwards. And I go, okay, you can say that your PLG investment might be too high. You could be like, well, if I invest more, I won't get any more juice. Like this is not, I can't spend my life just experimenting in the onboarding. Like, that's not the only thing that matters. And that's very, very true. But it's very hard to argue it should be turned to zero. And so to me, therefore, it's about the balance. It's about, OK, how does POG fit? We see other different ways that I grow in my business. So a comment on, for example, we have a POG function. We do grow with self -serve signups, people who sign up, literally they're credit card, lots of them sign up.

53:15And they're very successful. Never speak twice. We also have like an enterprise else team that sells directly to very big companies, some of the biggest banks in the world. people you would definitely know of. I don't think it has to be one of the other. I think that, you know, it's about a balance, it's about getting the motions to work. And for really sophisticated companies, the people who really nail this, it's about making both motions work together. Like if you can get a PLG motion work to feed your sales team, and a sales team motion work to feed your PLG funnel when the sales leads aren't ready yet, and kind of you can get those motions into playing with each other, you can make a lot of money.

53:52It can be an extremely successful way to go to build a very resilient business. Why? Because you get a lot of customers and you get a lot of revenue. You can't be that successful as a company if you have a lot of revenue, but a small number of customers because you're captive, everyone knows that. You can't be that successful as a company if you have a lot of customers, but not enough revenue because you just don't have enough money to sustain operations. So the magic is in having both a very large number of customers and a very large amount of revenue. It's very hard to knock out over a company like that.

54:20If I look back on my time at ASEAN, I think that they shared their most recent numbers, I can remember what it was producing the public data or whatever, some 80 ,000 or 100 ,000 customers. So I'm going to give that. That's a lot of customers. That's a lot of customers. Let's say you're going up against Jira and you're like, yeah, man, I'm going to pick off a thousand customers from ASEAN. That's a lot, right? Obviously, a thousand customers is a lot. You only have 19, sorry, it's going to be like, you know, 89 ,000 to go or 79 ,000 to go. Well, however many it is to go, I can't remember their exact number of customers, but it's very hard to assail a company which has a very large number of customers and a very large amount of revenue.

55:02And so that's where I think that PNG as a mechanism is incredibly important for almost any type of company. If you can make the motion work, like obviously there are companies from whom the motion and just easy reliant. But for those where it does matter, it seems like the juice is worth the squeeze. That was an awesome answer. I looked up, last year, they have 300 ,000 customers. Man, I'm so far off when I left. I must have made the customers. We've done good work since then. Also, you're talking about incentives and how the power of incentives, Charlie Munger, has this great code I looked up just to make sure I get it right.

55:37Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome. Yeah, exactly right. Exactly right. I've seen like cases where like a sales team was people trying to get a sales team to do like a P or G motion and you can beat them over the head as much as you like. You can get into a meeting and tell them do you really really want them to do this but at the end of the day like they're not going to do it and the same is true for every other kind of like function. It's just a nature of things. I have some newsletter posts around the stuff of folks wanting to deeper also. Elena Verna had an awesome podcast episode talking about product like sales in kind of the combination of these two things that we'll point to.

56:12Just like a whole other topic we can give deep deep on, but we're not going to do that in this episode. Maybe just one more question. So you mentioned all the companies you worked up. So you've been at Salesforce, your product officer, MuleSoft specifically within Salesforce, Metramile, Blastion, Confluent now. A lot of really interesting and different roles. How do you choose where to go work? and how do you choose which opportunities to take and imagine you have many options? I like to think of my career and certainly having hindsight looking at it this way, ladies, I don't know if forward looking, it was obvious to me this way, but looking back, my career's been a little bit like a bingo card.

56:52Like I've always been looking for to fill in boxes I didn't have filled, because I felt like that would make me a better professional. It's like, if I didn't know anything about that specific type of sales model or that type of marketing or that type of product management or that type of product or that layer in the stack or that kind of thing is I wish I'd learn about that thing. I will become more versatile. So, actually, two things. It's fun to learn something new. It's fun to prove to yourself that you can do those new things. And then it makes you more versatile because it means that any given problem you go up against, you've seen something that pattern matches to it.

57:30It kind of feels like you end up bringing it down to an eye fight in a way because every The problem you look at, you're like, oh, I have seen this from the other side. I've seen this from some other angle. And so I know that this is likely to work and this is unlikely to work. And so when I joined, only running my career as working for a big enterprise software company, sorry, small enterprise software company that sold to the Fortune 100, when I joined that last year and I cashed everything with you, we had no sales force at all actually. At all, literally nobody does sell this off for it. Sold itself or it didn't get sold at all.

58:00And we grew to have 80 ,000 customers. like it was just pure product that grossed and just an incredible company. Then I was a metronome, which was a consumer company that got acquired, made an insurance product and consumers. So they got nothing to do with technology products, like literally a complicated internet of things device you installed in your car. But ultimately it's an insurance product that you'd sell to grandmothers in Florida as much as you would have in my nails. And then we also have to a totally backend software that's used by IT organizations and a console and infrastructure that's used by developers everywhere to build really interesting data driven applications, data powered applications to all sorts of things in real time.

58:40And you look at a console that and you hear it would sort of be at random, right? But I didn't see it that way because I'd learned, you know, I actually was in sales for a bit. So I was a ran -up presale engineering group went around the world selling software. So when I joined the bus in, I wanted to kind of understand what it was to sell software at massive scale with no sales team. Like, can it even be done? Right? And so I learned a lot in my time at Atlassian. When I went to Metro Marl, I'm like, well, I've never built a consumer product before. Like I can say that I've actually built a product that's touched many millions of people because Dura has, so I felt pretty good about that.

59:12But I've never built one that I could say, yeah, a consumer, your average consumer can use this thing. It's so simple, even my grandma can use it. I've never built a product like that. So I got that experience. I've met your mother, what you're really fun. I've never worked inside an organization as big as Salesforce, or an organization with as good as Salesforce version. Like you talked about distribution earlier. Salesforce is an absolutely insane distribution machine, just an incredible company within just an amazing distribution network and a fantastic marketing approach that's like a PhD in marketing.

59:44When you spend your time at Salesforce, this company is just one of a content. It's a one of kind and it's so outlandishly good at one specific thing. And so looking back, you know, all of these job labs have been, when I say a bingo card, like I've just got an outlandish education in these areas that, you know, are not obvious at all. And once you've seen them, they're like superpowers. They're superpowers to be able to bring that to bring that same experience to bear on things. And so one thing that I really, I'm trying to figure out is why often people don't do that. You know, oftentimes people stay in a very specific domain, like they prefer to stay in a domain, or they prefer to stay in a specific type of company or a role that works in a certain way, like companies that have the same operating model, or they plan the same way, or they try to stay with things that are pretty similar.

1:00:35But it seems obvious that they're most likely way to grow as the opposite. It's to constantly be choosing things that are outside that, not totally outside the lines, don't jump out of a plane if you've never parachute it before. Obviously, you want them to be in some way an adjacency. You want them to have something in common with what you know, but you want them to stretch you and change you. I had a really transformative experience many, many years ago when I was at a last -year in a guy called Tom Kennedy. He was our general counsel, so chief legal officer, basically. And a lifelong lawyer, very smart guy.

1:01:15I liked him very, very much. But just a lawyer, corporate counsel, I'm sure you know what they like. And really great guy. And I remember, so mostly in our meetings, like our meetings, he didn't talk that much except about legal things. But I remember in one meeting, we were having this vigorous debate about a product strategy question, about what we should do, should we go left or should we go right. And like as usual, he's there and he's mostly distinct silent. And eventually, the conversation's been going on for 15 minutes and he's like, hey, Everybody, like a year ago we talked about X, Y and Z and it proceeds to lay out our product strategy at that time And it's like just recently we said the following things and that was a product strategy whatever now you're saying this Isn't it obvious that that isn't this like what you was saying is not a congruent with that And if you really meant what you said back then we should be doing X and get like the room went silent Everybody kind of turned to him kind of nodded and then everyone yeah, okay I guess we probably should be doing it differently.

1:02:13And so the meeting stopped. Like when the GC randomly mentioned that he like deeply understood our product strategy and he knew enough to be able to contribute in that way. And so the life -changing part for me about that was just this realization that if I'm gonna be a really great professional, if I'm the type of professional I wanna be, is that type of person, the type of person who can contribute to the whole company in all sorts of ways. Like doesn't spend all of their time I mean, everybody else's business, but understands the business and has the mental horsepower and the experience to be dangerous in all sorts of, and I mean, they're in a conflict of way.

1:02:51I don't mean that in the negative way, but to be dangerous in all sorts of situations, I think that when you have kind of like leaders like that behind you and with you, then you're just unstoppable. You're an unstoppable force in business when you kind of have that motion happening. Wow, that was an awesome story And an awesome perspective. It's similar to the advice I always give, PMs of people who are always wondering, should I go deep on a specific subject? Should I just try different things? And I find just variety, especially early in career, is really powerful, not just to help you discover the thing you like, but also to your point, just using insights from all these different parts of the product and like internal tools and trust and safety and platform and consumer products side and growth and just core stuff.

1:03:38Like the more that you have the stronger you get. And I feel like another benefit of your approach is if you work at just me to be SaaS companies, you're never gonna, like if you have too many of that on your resume, it's very hard to get hired to consumer company. And so just having creates a huge optionality for you if you do what you did. Yeah, it's interesting because people used to talk about people who are T -Shaped or whatever. I never really loved the analogy because it's more like people are scribble shaped. Like, I mean, like, there's the really best people you've worked with. They're more like scribbles than they are T -shaped.

1:04:13Because, of course, you want to be horizontal, they're capable. So you want to be broad. And you do want to be deep. You actually want to be deep in way more than one thing. Now, obviously, when I say deep, I don't mean like, like, I'm not able to do the job of like, you know, our finance function all day every day. But I'm 100 % good enough to go like three clicks below. the simple financial analysis. Like I can go reasonably deep in our financials because I want to, because it's partly in manners. It's important to be able to do that. And so maybe a different way to think about that Bingo card is like, I've really regretted going deep in something that isn't quite my job.

1:04:51Like I've really regretted it. Like the worst case scenario is I've learnt something new that I will never use, which you know, I guess at least that made my brain slightly more agile. I don't know, there must be some potential benefit of that. But the very best case scenario is that when I lease suspect it at some point in the future, it will turn out to be the thing that that's like it will be the tool that I need. But I'm facing some important problem. And I will be like, oh my god, this was worth every cent. And so like if you think about it on an ROI basis, doing things that aren't in your wheelhouse, like that aren't the things directly in front of you, the ROI can really be outlandage.

1:05:24Like it can be off the charts great. But I guess it's speculative because it's, you know, you don't know you're going to need it tomorrow. I don't know if it's going to be something that's going to be a regular tool to use. It's interesting is the Bingo card is the analogy. Are you trying to, is there a Bingo moment at the end of this? Is there retirement? Is there, oh, you mean like you've got everything? You've got to be a Bingo. You've got to be a Bingo. You haven't got to be a Bingo anymore. Yeah, I was working with somebody at Salesforce and he was like a really, he'd been there a very, very, very successful person, like, honestly, it didn't need to work anymore.

1:06:01And he said to me that I found really useful. He's like, well, now I'm at the point of my life where I want to work at the intersection of things that I am good at, and things that will be valuable to the company to do. So basically, it feels like the reward of containing a bingo card is actually to just get to spend more time doing things that are leverage, that you enjoy and that are high leverage. And so that seems like a good outcome to me. like if it was not as though you're gonna, I don't think most people are gonna work and hopefully have some sort of great financial outcome and then go, well that's it.

1:06:31Picking up stamps, I'm retiring. I think for most people achieving some sort of financial outcome or some sort of, independence or whatever is really just another stage, at that point it will be okay, well now what do I do? What do I do with my life? Why? And so that was what I said earlier, are that at the end of the day, product management is like at times the worst job in the world and at times easily the best. And it's both. And it can be both. And so, you know, it's hard for me to think about what, you know, if I think about the things that are at the intersection of what I'm good at and valuable to the world, product management is a pretty fun one to do and it's different every day.

1:07:14So I think we're pretty privileged for those of you who listen, I mean, obviously your of podcast reaches a lot of product people. I think we're pretty privileged to be able to operate at that intersection, but it's not easy because you've got to show value. You know what I'm saying? It's a very complicated job to show value in and to demonstrate value to the world and to it's constantly being attacked. Like you mentioned, but it's still amazing. Like when it all goes right, you know, when a product is very successful in the market, it's hard to describe the joy you get from that. kind of along those lines to close out our conversation before a very exciting lightning round.

1:07:50I want to take us to failure corner. People will hear listen to these podcast episodes and everyone's always just sharing all these wins. Everything's always going great. The CPU of this, the CPU of that, just moving on up. And they people who want to hear times with things didn't go right. Because those are stories people don't share as often. Can you share a story when some didn't go right when you maybe had a failure in the course of your career? and if you learned something from that experience, what you learned. I mean, there's a lot of things that didn't go exactly to plan, Lenny. Very early on in my career, I was a developer and I accidentally deleted one of the core systems of the company that I was working at.

1:08:34So that's going to go down in for me. But luckily that one's far in the review mirror. That wasn't Atlassian. No, no, that was pre -Authasian. but very bad. Yeah, the one I like to talk about, I wasn't directly responsible for it, but I feel responsible for it. I was at a company and we launched a product that was one of those products that in hindsight should have been really obvious it was going to fail. But for some reason, we were all blinded by the potential. It was a product that was about, it was basically for to measure the environmental impact of your company and to help you reduce the environmental impact of your company by doing, think about as a power management, building power management, managing the power drawer of computers, managing the power drawer of AC and all of that stuff.

1:09:23That was division, basically, it's like a kind of a manager environmental impact of your business. Kind of the idea was pretty cool at the time and also it was the right time for that. And still a thing, it's a lot of area of active research and investment or whatever. But it was like one of those things, talk about the wrong company, wrong place, wrong time, wrong distribution. Like we had literally no right to win, no right to play. Like just absolutely no business in hindsight being in that business. And I feel really bad because I became a good idea wrong company. And at the end of the day, we launched the product.

1:09:59We actually kept the product in market for two years. And the final straw was weed, the final straw was actually when a customer finally wanted to pay for it. It had been a market for two years and we found ourselves with a customer who wanted to pay millions of dollars for it. They were ready to sign on the dotted line. And that was actually the moment we decided to kill the product because if this person signs this piece of paper, we are stuck with this forever. This one customer will be bound by contracts forever, longer, whatever. So we ended up killing it at the moment. After two years of failure, when somebody wanted to pay his money for it.

1:10:36And I looked back on that and I'm just like, man, that was a really big. I feel really bad because it should have been obvious. It should have been, it was obvious. And we shouldn't have been able to call a spade a spade and I guess speak truth to power. But instead, it kind of got through to the keeper and turned out to be a real accidental drain on resources for years and just a big mistake. So there's the lesson there. Just be real with yourself. Yeah, I like the Jettis forcing function of like, OK, the skin for real now. Is it like, I wish we had an earlier forcing function to force this to make a decision?

1:11:11Yeah, I think if I could do it differently, probably I might not have necessarily been able to 100 % change the decision, but I should have tried. Like, I mean, it was pretty obvious after six months. like this thing was a bit of a zombie product walking. And it would, you know, at least I could have done it said like this thing is that. Like we could have called it dead way earlier, but instead we proceeded for another year and a half investing in it. And so that's the bit that makes me feel like a real bummer about it. It reminds me of recent episode of the Raws, who is the CMO at Wiz. And she joined us the first PM and a few weeks into it with doing tons of calls with customers.

1:11:49She's like, I think I need a quick because I don't really understand what we're building. I don't get it and Everyone's like, you know like I don't need I don't either Just the conference founders just had a vague idea what they're doing But they didn't really have an idea and I just sparked the okay wait you're no one actually does Do more concrete and it helped them pivot and now I don't know if you know about whiz but they ended up being the fastest growing start a bit history. You see, isn't that amazing, right? It doesn't mean it's permanently fatal, but asking that question and going through that reckoning turned out the camera trick came much stronger.

1:12:29Scary, but it turns out it's for the best often. Before we get to very exciting, letting you round, is there anything else that you want to mention or leave listeners with, maybe a last nugget, something that you think might be helpful before we wrap? Maybe a couple of different things that I think... sometimes well understood but just repeating the way it is because it's very valuable to me. One is that if you let your calendar rule you, then nothing good will happen. I know people talk about that a lot but it's surprisingly common in product management in particular that the people end up ruled by their calendar and so it's related to that whole look at spend 80 % of your time thinking about things going on outside the business.

1:13:08Easy said, very hard to do and if you don't do it, no one's going to do it for you and so it's really hard to be successful unless you find a way to force that to happen. I'm not going to repeat that. Oh, kind of also, like somebody said this to me, and I never actually looked up the quote, but apparently Colin Powell said that if you're making a decision with less than 30 % of the available decision, 30 % of the available data, you're making a big mistake. If you're making a decision only after you have 70%, without the 70 % or 77 % of the exact number, when you have 70 % of all the available data, you have weighted far too long, right?

1:13:42And that's where it, I've always found that very insightful and it relates a little bit to what we're talking about about data earlier. But at the end of the day, we get paid in product management to make decisions, good decisions, paid to make good decisions that will deliver business benefit. And a decision with two little data is fatal. A decision that takes too long and collects too much data is also fatal. So like everything, it's about trying to find the balance of all of these different things to try and deliver business advantage. You agree with a circle back to all the things we've been talking about?

1:14:10But with that, we reached our very exciting lightning round. Are you ready? Yes, let's do it. Let's do it. What are two or three books that you have recommended most to other people? Yeah. They're all these big goodies. It's probably going to be the main startup that I still find actually really good. And kind of key lessons in there. I still think of very applicable to a lot of people, particularly the cohort analysis bit, which for some reason I still don't see people do anywhere near enough cohort analysis. So there you go. That's my little tip. And then inspired how to build products that people love by Marik Aigan and the Silicon Valley product group.

1:14:46That's an oldie bit of goodie. I think it's got a lot of the key lessons of product management in it, even though it's been around for a long time. That was some classics, very cool. Do you have a favorite recent movie or TV show you really enjoyed? I'm watching a program, like it's just a... I don't get to it very much TV, mostly at night. I like to watch things that are extremely light that like just don't at all inspire any element of stress and that are very short. So basically short and funny is basically my thing. And there's a new program on Netflix. I think it's called Detroit's. I've been watching that.

1:15:20Yeah, it's really funny. I really like that. So ridiculous but very funny. So like that. That main guy he's so funny. I forget his name. Him, his weenie or something like that. Yeah, he's so good. Good one. I've been watching that. I'm loving it. It's like very quirky. I think the New York Times quote on there is like very weird. So weird. In the first episode I'm like what is this show? It's not even clear what time it's set in and it's very weird. It's really cool. Yes. Well, good way to describe it. Next question, do you have a favorite product you recently discovered that you really love? Yeah, this one.

1:15:51Some of your listeners might be using it but Glean, it's a pretty well known startup now. They recently raised a ton of money. We've been using Gleaner Consul for a long time and it's just amazing. I can't describe how good it is. I don't say this lightly because I think search, business search is probably one of the hardest problems in computing actually getting it right is one of the hardest problems in computing. It's not often I use a product and this thing is like 10 times better than anything that's come before it. It's one of those for me. What's the simplest way to understand what it does for you?

1:16:28It searches all of our organization's knowledge. So the thing you were just saying before, you're like, what does ISP mean? If I had that in the meeting, I just opened my new tab, but a lot of them had to take over my new tab. I was just like, what does ISP mean? And it would summarize back to me what ISP means. And it would give me a link to all the documents inside our company. They just grab what ISP means. And then it will tell me who the expert in ISP and our company is. Hey, it's like just it's like having a second brain. It's like an insanely cool kind of organization search. Great tip.

1:17:00Okay, two more questions. Do your favorite life motto that you come back to share with folks find useful and work your life? I think about this one a lot. You know when I started off in my career, I was a you know an engineer's engineer used to very much about like technical correctness and what computers were capable of and kind of technical righteousness, you know, the right answer rather than, you know, there is only one right answer in whatever. It's along we did when I was saying that I often think about this phrase which is, people don't care what you know until they know that you care. And so I've realized that really being able to influence people, it doesn't matter about whether or not you're right or whether you're wrong.

1:17:39And at the end of the day, it's first about trust and about relationships and caring about what each other's outcomes are, what their incentives are, and all good things sit on top of them. Thank you. Once you have those code of foundations, then you can build really good partnerships and that's where good progress comes from. Wow. That is so good. It connects with radical candor, similar, like in theory of just caring. People need to feel like you cared deeply about them before they take your advice. And it also connects with this parenting book I'm reading, called Listen, that previous guest recommended, which is all about how your kids have problems when they feel like your connection to them is weak.

1:18:18And so the solution is to build a stronger connection for them to know that you cared deeply about them. So this is really, connects with so much of what I've been reading. Yeah. Exactly. Great one. Final question. You're born in Sydney, folks. You may be guest by your accent. If someone were to visit Sydney, any tips, anything they think they should check out, favorite thing in Sydney. Yeah. Sydney is a really beautiful city. And it's kind of famous for its beaches. And it's basically a metropolitan city. People probably be very surprised when you visit it. It's a very big city, very metropolitan, a little bit like New York, but New York was really beautiful beaches.

1:18:51If you want to think about it that way, it's kind of crazy. But there's actually like a ton of really cool nature and beautiful things all around Sydney. So if you want to do something like off the beaten path, you can actually go to there's an area called the Blue Mountains, which is like an hour and a half drive from Sydney and you can have sail down a waterfall, which is, well, through a canyon full of water out and then you have sail of waterfall at the end and if you're looking for They just a really beautiful found kind of adventure like thing and hour a bit away from a massive metropolitan city That's my sort of happy place like really beautiful outdoors stuff.

1:19:29Well also next to beautiful city And you said you sail what sort of sail off the water from sail? You might think of it as repelling repelling I think okay Yeah, luring yourself down on a rope or got it Okay, because when I hear sale, I'm like thinking about just jumps through over the waterfall. Oh, and then no, app selling, which is also, I think in the States, you guys called it repelling. Repelling? Yeah. Wow. Very cool. Sean, you're awesome. This was extremely cool. Thank you so much for being here. Two final questions working folks finding online. If they want to reach out, also point folks to your reforged courses that you created and final question.

1:20:04How can listeners be useful to you? Sure. Yeah. So my reforged courses, you can check them all out at reforge .com. As you mentioned, the retention engagement course and the data for product managers course. So, you know, love to see folks get some value from that. Lots of people have been through those courses already and I really get a lot of value from it because, like I said, one of my goals is to help all of us be better product people. I think our leverage could be massive. We can get in touch with me, obviously LinkedIn, but also Sean M. Klaus on X. If you want to get in touch. And in terms of being useful to me, I mean, broadly speaking, I'm always open to new ideas like if people have ideas about how to do better B2B, P or G, better B2B in a product that sells, for example, better ways of going about distribution and product sales and product growth inside enterprise companies.

1:20:56I'm open to learn myself. We're all in one big journey learning how to do this better. So true. Thank you so much for being here. Awesome. Thank you very much for the name. It was great. 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'sPodcast .com. See you in the next episode.