The Future of Product Management: AI and Beyond

0:00Season three of the Built Right Podcast is right around the corner, but we've got one big change coming your way. The Built Right Podcast is now the Talking AI Podcast, and we've got a lot to talk about in AI. In the Talking AI Podcast, we'll be having in-depth conversations with both AI experts and early adopters of AI. That way you can understand how the technology works and how early adopters are beginning to implement and, more importantly, get value from AI. Our guests range from AI research scientists to founders of AI products to industry leaders putting AI to work in their business. While you're waiting for season three, go ahead and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform so you don't miss an episode.

0:41And make sure to leave us a comment about the AI topics that you want to hear about. So get ready to talk some AI in the new Talking AI Podcast, coming your way August 6th.

0:53Welcome to Built Right, a podcast by Hatchworks where we help you learn how to build the right digital product the right way. In this season, we're going all in on generative AI with guests ranging from international AI speakers, founders of Gen AI products, experts in specific domains of Gen AI, and leaders across industries. We're here to help you figure out how to take advantage of this new emerging technology so you can win in the market. So whether you're an AI techie or just AI curious, we got you covered. Let's get into it. Welcome, Built Right listeners. Today, we're thrilled to have a special guest, Bo Brown, the Director of Product Management at NCR Boyix, a global leader in the fintech world, a local Atlanta company here as well.

1:38Our focus today, though, is unraveling the intricate kind of differences of product management in large organizations. And NCR has been around since, I think, 1884, so very large, to small startups and scale-ups. What's the difference there with product management. And then towards the end, we're going to get into how the future is being shaped in product management with some of the crazy changes going on with AI. So make sure you stay tuned for that. But welcome to the show, Bo. No, thanks for having me. Product is my passion. I've been in product for 20 years now, driving strategy for large organizations, mostly fintech, but a little bit agnostic around a couple of industries.

2:20But it's all been around real-time processing and data. Yeah, and you know, we're kindred spirits, I think. My original background is in product. I love product folks. I love how product people think. But let me hit you with kind of a, maybe a deeper like philosophical question. Like what is the purpose of product management and what is good product management in your book? Sure. To me, product management is the role that is trying to solve a problem that the market is willing to pay for. You hear a lot of things are asked for, but when you try to price it or drive revenue, it becomes a little bit harder that way.

3:05and one of the reasons I fell into product is I went from a small startup doing sales where the president of the company, the vice president of sales, the VP of engineering all sat in the same room, they had the vision but as I went to larger companies they really have too many functional areas competing for what needs to be done and product is that role to help prioritize a market vision from an outside-in perspective of what we need to be doing, being the product CEO, trying to make those decisions and write it like a business. Yeah, that first point you made there is so critical and I think so many people miss this.

3:51It's what the market's willing to bear. It's the pain point that the market has. What's the famous quote? and everybody has a plan until you get punched in the face. Mike Tyson, it's that kind of idea. And the product folks, that's why I love them. They're in the trenches. They're helping to find the strategy, the features that you need, all the fun stuff, while building something that's actually viable for the business. I think that's a piece that gets forgotten a lot of the times. Any thoughts there just on the viability piece that sometimes gets overlooked? Sure. For some odd reason, it's really hard to be the outside-in product manager where you have enough market expertise that you can say, here's the problem.

4:39Here's how I see it. Here's the return on investment if they spend on this. Instead, organizations, especially large ones, want to suck you into the weeds of execution and getting things done and turning them on. And then grinding the sausage through the large organizations to get legal to approve it, to get marketing, to update collateral, to do sales training. It's a lot of internal focus when anybody that would show you a best practice this book would say product should be out of the office. no hito i believe it is nothing interesting happens inside the office and so it's really uh large orgs have they struggle with that because execution at the same time is very critical as well and product people tend to own it and drive and have a sense of urgency that some of the other roles don't um so all of a sudden products pushing uh buttons and poking people's sticks to make sure that it gets done instead of maybe handing it off and then going back out in the market and trying to solve the next problem.

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6:23Yeah. And you mentioned it's, uh, that, that metaphor is like stuck in my head now of the, the sausage making in the large organization. You hope it comes out the other side tasting like something good and not something a bit foul. I mean, let's segue there. So we're getting into this idea of working in a very large organization and running product is different than working in kind of a startup or scale up environment. And you've been someone that's done both. Where do you think the, maybe we start with what's the biggest difference between the two in your mind? well i would say it is the breadth and scale of inertia for a large organization uh smaller orgs normally have one product maybe two products everybody's passionate everybody understands it but the large companies i've worked for have all been made up of acquisitions so not only do you have suites of products often sometimes competing against each other in the market let alone internally uh you have different cultures you have different systems that don't play well together you have um and then you have a lot of clients and and really uh smaller groups are trying to grow through building and i think i hate to say it this way but i think a lot of large companies grow through acquisition so they're they're they're not risk tolerant enough to try to build new things inside often.

7:54Yeah, you hit it. It's hard to kind of shift a giant ship as it's moving. It's kind of the innovator's dilemma when something new hits the market. Sometimes you got to upend your whole business model there. But you hit on an interesting point. I wasn't even thinking of this, but small company, it's D product. It's A product. Large company, it's portfolio of products. What does that look like? how does that differ whether it's the management structure or how you're thinking in this kind of portfolio mindset versus like, here's our one thing and this is all we do. Yeah. Um, it definitely complicates it.

8:33It makes it a matrix organization because not only is there one director of product or one VP of product, there are 20 VPs of products or, or, or 30 directors of product and, uh, aligning those goals because often uh the advantage of having a portfolio or is to build into some sort of suite of offerings that all work well right so the pitches the integration is always a challenge we already pre-integrate and all these things well doing that internally is still hard now we try to hide that ugly from the uh end customer uh or or the merchant but it's still there we're just handling it on their behalf um i think what's really interesting is because the groups get so large and powerful they have real needs and agendas i'll give a primary example yeah um jason brett from product coffee taught us the 60 second business case a long time ago just in these way to prioritize could be a backlog of features it could be a backlog of projects just puts it in an order and i had to use that tool to go in front of the vp of support the vp of engineering uh the general manager of the group and say hey guys you they can't all be number one help me i'm i'm willing to build whatever you need to be built but you're all saying different things.

10:03And so it helped create some alignment because they all have real needs that are pain points internally, let alone in the market. I'd be curious, what's the... I've never heard of that, the 60-second. What's kind of the breakdown there? It's a decision matrix. It tries to take some of the science of product management and add a little bit of the art as well, looking at net new revenue, retained revenue, innovation In fact, are you the first to market with it? Does it create some buzz? Does it make any cost savings? And then an interesting one that I think we could talk about is what percentage of your customer base is this feature or project going to impact?

10:46Because everybody knows there's always one large client that says they have to have a sunroof. Yeah. yeah so all of a sudden some executive promised them a sunroof and all of a sudden that floats to the top of the list and no one else wants uh their windows work fine the air conditioner works fine and so um this was just a way to score everything you could weight those uh models i'm happy to share with you or in your audience um and it just helps and it's called the 60 second business case because at least in large companies uh you can never get enough data to do a real business case yeah so this helps organize what's most important and then you take off the top like any other backlog and start to flush out uh with more detail the most important things most impactful things yeah yeah it said that kind of weighted aspect to uh prioritization so yeah i got about like five different angles that i that i want to go down now off of that the first one though just for the audience this triggered one thought it's a past episode in kind of a methodology we have called MVR, Minimal Viable Replacement.

11:52But it's the idea of like, if you're modernizing something existing, what triggered to me was your sunroof comment. Like you gotta be cognizant of who your customers are and what their current workflows are. So we see a lot of times where somebody's modernizing something, they take the MVP approach. And it's the analogy of, well, we're gonna do, you know, skateboard to bicycle to car, which I love. But if your customer that's, you know, accounting for 80 % of your revenue, expects a car with the sunroof and the Bluetooth and all that. And you give them a skateboard and say, hey, go ride down the highway.

12:26It may not work out so good. But for the listeners, go check that out. Google MVR, Minimal Viable Replacement. But the area I want to get into next, you're hitting on kind of the internal politics when you're in a large organization. So small company, you're basically just working in that small group, like you mentioned, working towards the vision, prioritizing, but large organization, you have all varying business units, different stakeholders. How does that start to come into play when you're in product in a large organization? I think it changes your approach to getting things done. You have to do a better job socializing it and getting buy-in.

13:08Smaller hordes, a lot of the product vision comes from the entrepreneurs, comes from the founders, the originators, or you have a lot of direct relationship with that. Now, almost taking a business case to a group of leaders, it's almost cold to them, but potentially. So you have to make sure prior to the pitch, that you've explained to them, shared with them, get someone from their team to say yeah they agree it's important to have a key salesperson say yeah if i could sell that and do a little bit better job of and i don't want to call it politics because but it's really um i'm socializing it's probably a better term because if they've never heard of it they've got other wiki wheels you're going to have a hard time winning um but it does uh it does widen the number of pools you have to sell i'm a former sales guy i love sales so i'm not really a technologist uh like some of the other people but you have to be able to change the way your pitch sells to sales this is going to make it easy for you to hit your quota support this is going to eliminate calls operations this is easy uh to train on it's simple uh you know you have to talk the language each of those functional areas to get the buy-in and and get their head nod to move forward yeah yeah and for any young uh product managers we have out there socialize remember that because i've done it before and it sounds like you have obviously too you run into the buzzsaw of presenting a business case for the first time to a group that hasn't seen it before.

14:53Always smart in a large organization. Just talk to them about it. Run it by it because you're going to get good feedback. You'll probably think about things that you didn't think about before because there's a lot of intricacies in large organizations. What drives them? What metrics are they worried about? What's going on in their organization? So any young product managers, consider that socializing beforehand. And it's a great, great approach there. I worked for a large Fortune 6 healthcare technology company and one of their groups related to pharmacy. And we had a quarterly business planning meeting where you got in front and you pitched your business cases.

15:39And it was a little bit like Shark Tank. People wanted to know how to get back to EBITDA. uh what why that over something else and it it made you be in business shape where you had to get in there and defend it and and and do your homework before the meeting because if you didn't you would never know what they're going to ask or what they care about yeah another another lesson for young product managers we got we got a whole course going from bow today learn how to read a pml right so that's a big one uh the other one you said though that caught me was like talk to the sales guys or gals and ask them, can you sell this?

16:15What's your take on it? Because at the end of the day, no matter what you come up with, they got to be able to go out and execute on it. What I loved, you hit on some points of what's the point of value. You didn't talk anything about feature XYZ. You talked about value. I'm reducing cost. I'm increasing efficiency, whatever it may be. Maybe go deeper there, that connection point of value and product. Sure. So two parts are, especially in large companies, you have to speak the language of business, which is the P &L. You have to ideally make the money, potentially save the money, and at a minimum, impact their customer experience or their net promoter score.

16:57And those are things based on metrics and they're tangible, and you've got to be able to show them. um one of the best pieces of life i got uh about being an entrepreneur is before you even start your company and so i kind of use it in products and i try to run my products entrepreneurially if you don't have to build anything you can call on a prospect and say hey are you interested in this widget for a thousand dollars a month subscription yeah and if you can't sell it to somebody, then there's no need to go try to build it. And so, and sales, at least in larger words, has the most contact with clients and prospects.

17:39So working with them, even back to the socialization, you've got to make sure that not only the product is easy for them to sell, but they have a portfolio of solutions to take the market. And they are, as everyone jokingly says, are coin-operated. so if you have an easy sale with high margins and high commissions and someone tried to launch a product that is complicated uh not as high a revenue potential and more commissions you can't even get sales to take it to market even if there isn't so yeah uh some of the ways i've solved that is literally through bundling you and i i've managed key key products i've also managed suites of secondary products, whether it's risk scoring, fraud, chargebacks, some compliance products.

18:34It's hard to get your foot in the door to talk to somebody about that. So one of the unique ways I think I handle it is starting to build out bundles. It's easier for sale. It raises the total revenue or the total contract value for sales. It makes it easier to sell. A lot of these clients want it. But if you're trying to go back in later and sell a small item hard to get the priority out of those stakeholders externally as well to add an amendment or do something that yeah you know have to reinvolve everybody so do it once that you can yeah another good kind of go-to-market motion there the bundling especially if you're in that large organization where you do have a suite of uh of products so all right getting into the hot topic right now, AI, right?

19:21So AI has been around for seemingly a very long time, right? But over the past year, this concept of generative AI has started to bubble up. What's your take, whether it's the generative aspect of the new thing, the new shiny object, or just AI in general, what's your thought of how it's impacting either product management or or it's just potential in general, whether that's in your business at NCR or other areas of opportunity. Sure, I can talk about both of those. So I am fortunate enough to be on a team that supports our analytics solution. That's Power BI and Azure, and it's merchant services or credit card processing.

20:04And so I'm not building AI or generative AI. I'm using it to help solve problems. So I have a very pragmatic approach. I don't work at a company that's trying to map the human genome or put somebody on Mars. I work with people, often assistant managers for a bar, trying to close their books at two in the morning and they don't know where the money is and they're not CPAs. So I'm trying to use natural language. I'm trying to use machine learning to see trends and put that in a simple context because I'm all about the user experience. If they can't use it or it's not simple, then it's not done correctly.

20:45They'll balance their books between their point of sale, their gateway, their processing engine, and their bank settlement. So I think there's a lot of value there. One of your former podcasters, Nick the Greek, I would solder his last name, I think. Yeah, yeah, that's a good one. And I really liked his quote, which was, AI is doing what you know you need to be doing and you could do if you had unlimited time and resources. So calling through all that data is really challenging to see a trend. So we're using AI to help assist people say, hey, on holidays, your sales goes up or your sales go down, things like that.

21:25So it's very pragmatic, and that's what our customers want. And so I see that being nothing but beneficial to companies and our merchants. on the flip side internally it's great for product people yeah data is key as well we can then aggregate it and roll up from one individual store or a chain or a merchant and start to see trends and patterns and start to say hey uh we see you have a large number of chargebacks we think this fraud goal would help save you money um so it's a sales opportunity for us to sell an additional service uh but uh but it's also solves the market need and that's what i've been talking about the whole time the second part um i'm going to get a little bit more internal is i feel a lot of product marketing has become more comps and product managers have to do have always had to create the value prop for what you're selling and help sales understand at marketing.

22:31But I think there's more and more pressure on product to own that and marketing to send it out. And so I see AI starting to be a great way to put together a lot of collateral campaigns. So combining that with some analysis of your own data and trends, you could really, I think, start to hammer home messages that were impactful to your clients. Yeah, that's great. And for anybody listening there, Nick the Greek. So Nick, it was episode 17, if everybody's curious. So Nick is the head of research and ML at Relational AI, episode 17. But he gets into how generative AI actually works. It's one of my favorite episodes.

23:17So kind of a must listen there. But you hit on one point though, it's like you called it a pragmatic approach to AI, right? It's sometimes the most mundane things that can drive huge impact in the business. I'll give you an example. My brother-in-law and wife have a floral business. So they do flowers for big weddings and events and things like that. and I've been playing around with GPTs, like creating custom GPTs. And a pain point they have is in their proposal process. They have to write it up by hand every time, figuring out how many flowers I need and I got to make it sound good for the price tag I'm putting on it and all that.

24:01But what they have is they have previous proposals so I can feed that into the GPT, right? I can give it context for what questions I need to answer to develop a proposal. And you can create this GPT. So I'm working with them to try to do this just for fun and have it to where, okay, instead of spending several hours writing a proposal, which is not the skillset of the person writing it, right? They're a designer, they're creative. Now they can just interface with this bot and have it spit out the proposal. But it's like a very mundane, you know, writing proposals. But which is the best thing to automate, right?

24:38Right. Yeah. No, those are the tasks that I focus on automating. Again, I would love to work in something really sexy and cool. But at the end of the day, fintech is about moving money. It's very critical. People get very emotional about it and it has to be done right. And to do it right, you have to pay attention to a lot of details across a lot of mundane tasks of taking in time and accounting work that most people are accountants and don't want to do it. if you're a small business owner uh in the restaurant world you have inventory you have staffing you have customers the last thing you want to do is send every night trying to figure out where your money is so we are using it to say hey this uh is a chargeback not always is it a chargeback but add value to it saying we don't think you should dispute this one it's not worth this chargeback was from a catering order for 500 you need to dispute it um the vision so I'm still honestly in a lot of the walk stage of building it out in NCR but the vision to get to the running and spreading is start to build really an opt-in less loyalty solution where we can start to take your data and understand who you are and know that you like to get dessert know that you come in on anniversaries and start to build that out from a loyalty perspective on top of Salus Temple but they're still crm really struggles to know if you're a shoe store what's that yeah yeah and they should know yeah it sounds mundane it is but it's really important to the customer that they have a sense that you know who they are i think that that's the crazy unlock for me is with the latest stuff going on is to to have developed this like llm large language model past.

26:32It was just so expensive, time intensive. But now these companies like OpenAI and Lano with Facebook and all those, now people have access to those. So it's kind of democratized it a bit. I think what's going to be really interesting is how people start to leverage those. You mentioned data and access to data. I had been playing around with it a bit where you feed chat gpt a large data set right and you start asking questions and it like unbelievably it's like giving you these insights i even did one where it's like okay you are a data scientist dude i was like asking it to do like you know stuff that's above my head above my pay grade but just like k means clustering and uh random forests and like these different uh data science type of things and it's actually going in doing it.

27:21It's kind of mind-blowing. But how does that equate to an NCR scale type of organization? I think that's where there's probably still a bit of a gap to go from here to there. But it'll be really interesting, I think. Well, I think it's coming. I think the product community that supports these open AI platforms are doing it great because they're making it user-friendly. You don't need to be a data PhD to get in there and mess with it. So first, is usability there? The data? Like you said, you're playing around with it and able to dive in. I will tell you on the flip side, large companies in general are very risk-averse about sharing data, sharing anything strategic with open source items or non-propriety items.

28:15So not just NCR, most companies won't let me dump client data into third-party tools, especially if I'm not a preferred vendor, signed contracts, NDAs, et cetera. And I think rightfully there is risk that, you know, you don't. So it's a little bit slower in the large works for those things to come in. They all talk about it. They all know it's important, but they're still trying to figure out. Yeah. how much uh to to open the uh kimono to let individuals inside the companies playing around especially with because you have some of these large companies like your open ais and you know they're they're backed by microsoft and the big dogs but then you have some of these smaller one-off ai tools i think that's even more critical like be cautious what data you're feeding in there because you know how are they using it um how secure is it so i think that's a definite uh concern i think that so the approach we're taking at hatchworks is just just start playing around with it just start testing it whether it's dummy data then you get some like proof of concepts that can kind of start you know sparking light bulbs and in people's heads and then you get to the tough question of okay well how do we how do we use this securely and all that all the all the uh quote-unquote fun stuff and then from a product perspective is how do you monetize uh you can do a lot of fun neat things but is there a need in the market to pay for it i'm starting to see it pop around in general apps which is great yeah but it's been a free value add which is again great for me the end consumer but it's probably a large spend for the company providing it and uh that that works in the in the in the innovative cycle but at some point it's got to be monetized and that's another interesting point i love you having the product kind of mindset right because it all comes down to kind of first principles like are you delivering value and i think it's kind of like the dot-com way we've seen a million gen ai gen ai companies pop up and each new feature that you know chat gbt or whatever starts to release their value just immediately gets erased because they don't have like a moat or differentiated value in a sense It still comes down to that at the end of the day, to your point.

30:44So really good call out there. I'm excited it's as open as it is because I think it'd be devastating if only a few people had the keys or it was very expensive. But at the same time, creating one, everybody can create an app kind of. It'll be like the app store at some point where there's millions of apps and even find the one you're looking for. So it'll be interesting. I do think it's transformational. I'm not a Luddite by any means and think it's going to destroy the world yet. But I do think it's going to have a lot of impact on how the world works. I already see it coming, really. It's been amazingly fast of the impact it's had.

31:26Yeah, it'll be a fun ride for sure. Well, Bo, thanks for being on the Bill Rite podcast. For all of our listeners, where can they find you? Is LinkedIn the best spot or any other areas? The folks link in, uh, just bow around on, on LinkedIn and, uh, happy to connect and talk to you about it and then talk to you about product and hope, hope to see you in the Atlanta product community. Awesome. Thanks for being on Bo. Thanks for that.

31:55Thanks for listening to built right. If you enjoy the show, give us a follow or subscribe on your favorite podcast platform. And don't forget to leave us a review for more info on built, right. visit us at hatchworkbuiltright.com.

32:35Or if you've already identified your AI use cases and want to just prioritize where to start, we offer an AI roadmap and ROI workshop to help you build a clear plan. It's all about going from we should use AI to actually driving real value with it. Head over to hatchworks.com to learn more.