The new manifesto for product builders - Faith Forster (Chief Product Officer)

0:00This is a market shift. It can't just be about one person's opinion or one organisation's experience. The Addoor Manifesto was built for a very different time. It was when the world was transitioning from selling software in boxes on shelves to it being available through the internet. How do you really dig out that durable advantage? It needs to become a living, breathing part of your decision making. You really do need to have a part of the people's love in that context because if they kind of beg to do, then they'll find something else. understand your purpose understand why you exist and focus on solving that like you still need a reason to exist

0:41hi faith welcome to the product experience how are you doing i'm good thanks so good nice to see you again uh yeah i was gonna say i should should really say welcome back to the product experience because this is your third time here so um third time's a charm before we get stuck into our topic for today it'd be great if you could give our listeners in case they didn't hear the other two interviews with you a quick intro into who you are and what you have done in products and what you're up to today yeah sure um I'm I've been a product leader for about 15 years now last times I was talking to you I was VP of product at Dext which we sold to our software for about 600 million.

1:26And then I think I was listening to you as I was starting at Legal, which is a payments and compliance platform for door fans, where I was CPO. More recently, I have gone deep on the whole AI thing, as we were about to talk about. So I've been building my own platform called discovery.com, which is an AI-native product to help product leaders and teams make better product decisions faster. So it acts as sort of the context layer and connects into all your various tools to share insights on your competitors and customers and growth strategy and goals and helps focus all the product work we do towards customer and commercial goals.

2:06And I've also been organizing the Makers Manifesto, which is what we're here to talk about today. So take us back to the beginning of the story of the Makers Manifesto. Like, what is it? Why did it happen? How did it get created? that kind of thing. So where it kind of came from, in the process of doing our from beta for discovery, I spoke to 96 different product leaders and managers, mainly leaders. And one of the things that struck me from those conversations was how wildly different people's understanding of AI was, but also the indications it would have in their organisation. We had everything from, you know, I spoke to AI native businesses who had completely automated the flow of not necessarily their roadmap items but paper cuts or bugs or quick wins like a human wasn't just not involved through to people who just wanted a way to sort of make PRDs quicker which in my mind was literally the definition of a faster horse and so but there's there was also a lot of fear and tension about AI and sort of in that lack of understanding as well and I'd been to some like lots of events and conferences and heard a lot of chat on different groups.

3:19And it just sort of felt to me like this is a market shift. It can't just be about one person's opinion or one organisation's experience. And so there's a lot of, you know, chat on LinkedIn at the moment. There's also a lot coming out from the foundational model companies themselves which have an agenda. And so I thought there really needed to be an independent voice where people came together and said, this is what you now need to think about. This is the foundation that you need to think about what this means for your organization. And I was chatting to Adrienne in particular from Living the Product in Australia because I put together my pitch on, you know, this is how product management is going to be different.

4:05And then kind of undermined my own pitch, saying, like, yeah, this really needs to come from a group of people rather than an individual. And I said, it's almost like we need the next Agile Manifesto. And she was like, I love it. So next thing you know, I was messaging a few of the guys I know here in London saying, I've got this crazy idea, what do you think? And they were like, absolutely, we need this. I'm in. and then it was really sort of adrian from the product and andre from productized who really helped me reach out to people globally so we had quite quickly actually a lot of really well-known names in the industry come together and say yeah i agree like i'm seeing the same things we definitely need this and overwhelmingly the response was they were honored to be asked to be involved.

5:01But it really happened quite organically from there. So we had such a strong group to start with that the approach I kind of took is like, if you respect someone and think they should be involved, then they're very welcome. And so it kind of created this network effect where we, yeah, it just sort of took on a bit of a life of it. Sorry, it got far bigger than I expected initially. We ended up with 45 contributors across the different regions. We did actively try and seek out more people in Asia and Africa. Unfortunately, you couldn't get a new one from those regions, which was a bit unfortunate.

5:36And we were really actively trying to recruit people that weren't product management people. So the group is a little bit skewed in that way. It's purposely both people from AI native businesses, from a private study, as well as those that are larger and trying to transform. But we were really actively trying to get, you know, leaders of tech businesses and engineering and design and marketing representatives as well so that it would become a cross-disciplinary and global effort. It really needed to be representative, I thought, for it to have the value of potential that it could have. And so do you see the manifesto that you have created with this working group, do you see that as replacing the Agile Manifesto or is it just a different like set of principles and values?

6:27I think it's different. So the Agile Manifesto was built for a very different time. It was when the world was transitioning from selling software in boxes on shelves to it being available through the internet. And so it really was bringing to life the idea that we need to be a little bit more iterative. We need to understand our customers and work with our customers. But it is only about the software development process. And what we've created with the Maker's Manifesto is purposely border. It's about how you create value for customers through products. And so it does incorporate a lot more than just the build.

7:02And it's actually why we quite consciously chose the word maker instead of builder to indicate that this is much more of a holistic kind of the process of creation, I guess. The part of that is about realising value and adoption and that's kind of it that comes with having something of value.

7:23Faith Forster: I'll add to that one, Faith, because in turn we had a lot of debate on the inside in the working group about the word builder versus maker. And what we realized is when you look at this, when you're building a house, some people are the bricklayers, other people are designers, they're architects and other things like that. And they say, no, I'm not a builder. I do another part. I'll do more of a white collar job rather than a blue collar job. And the reality is we are all makers. We're all part of making things regardless of how you see each other now, see yourself now. And I think the word maker was a lot more meant to be a lot more inclusive about that and be very specific about that.

8:06Faith Forster: And the other side of this is building up from the Agile Manifesto. So there was, you know, for my entire career, for 20 years or so, it's been about how can we build a better process? How can we create a better process so that we're not wasting time and effort, so that we're not just doing waterfall and waiting six months to two years to see if something's actually going to work or not? And the reality is now we can do that way faster, whether it's a prototype or whether it's a real thing. So everything that's in this, the maker's manifesto, which is more about alignment and purpose and ethics and things like that.

8:45Faith Forster: It's not that this wasn't important before. It's just that we had to actually have a better process so we could get stuff done and learn about whether it was worth doing. Now we can do that fairly fast, incredibly fast in some cases. So this stuff that was always important is just way more important and more paramount. So we wanted to raise this into the forefront. We'll go through some of the specifics of the manifesto in a minute, because it's basically quite a short document, similar to the Agile Manifesto, which is a guide. But as Randy was saying as well, and Faith, as you kind of mentioned too, it very much leans into from what I can see as an outsider coming in and consuming it, that it is a lot of the principles and ways of working that are core to sort of modern product management practices, with a bit of consideration for what AI changes for you, rather than here's a load of like principles of how to work with AI.

9:52Like it's not that sort of narrow and specific. It's like you say, it is a broader kind of maker's manifesto rather than an AI manifesto, if that's fair to say. Yeah. And that was quite conscious. We, again, we had that debate within the group, whether this should cover what stays the same as well as what changes or whether it should just link into what changes. And we were very conscious that, yeah, this concept of makers, it's not just people who have been product managers or designers or engineers or founders to date. It opens up the possibility of so many more people being involved in creating products that haven't done those directly before.

10:32And so it's also an opportunity to kind of give those people a sort of foundation to say these are the things that are important if you want to make something that's really great. And so it is consciously takes out the jargon and really talks to kind of, of all the things that you could think about or do, these are the things that you need to make sure are taken care of. These are the most important foundations for you to create something that's really effective.

10:59Faith Forster: And in a world where, you know, I can do, as the product person, I can do 80 % of an engineer's job, 80 % of a designer's job, and they can do 80 % of my job, and the CEO can do 80 % of all of our jobs. And anyone can build something over a weekend with some prompts. This was incredibly important. We were very intentional about saying this isn't about a product manager only following it. This is anyone who is involved in the making process or wants to be involved in the making process. These are just some good, sound management principles for how to do it responsibly, do it well, and do it effectively.

11:36So take us through how the manifesto is structured. So there's four values and 16 principles and quite similar to the agile manifesto. In their four values, so we've got purpose over possibility, value created over effort spent, learning loops over launch plans and. Human accountability for full automation. Yes. And so for each of those, we've got a quick description underneath, but we've also talked about what it's not. And I think that's probably almost more important in a situation where we've got this sort of experimental transitionary phase of people trying to understand AI and what it means and how you can use it, where, you know, there's been some really poor examples of like leaderboards of tokens spent and that being seen as an important part of your job or a basis of performance.

12:32reviews or potentially even worse, pushing people out of the organization, that's really missing the point. And so we kind of wanted to call out some of those things as well to say that actually it has to be about creating value for your customers. It can't just be chewing up tokens. Like that's not creating value for anyone. And so there's a few things we've called out in that respect.

12:52Faith Forster: Well, it's absolutely creating value for the AI firms, but. Yeah. Yes. Not so much for customers. And actually even that in itself is something that we debated because some products are made for agents. They're not made for humans. And so we also talked about that and how do we make sure that we accommodate both those things. And so where we kind of landed on that is like even if a product is for the benefit of an agent, that agent like ultimately at some point down the line it needs to be of benefit to a human. And so even in that context you should be thinking about the consequences for the human.

13:29At some point it will have consequences for a human. But we, yeah, so it's a little bit loosely attached, but underneath each of those we then have four principles under each. We did try to get it down to 12 or less and we felt like we were artificially doing it or we were missing really important considerations if we brought it down any less. And so, yeah, we decided it was better to sort of have the coverage, the breadth of things that we needed to consider rather than trying to keep it short because it's not meant to be memorised and repeated off the top of your head. It's meant to be used as a reference point that you could use for things like developing skills or competency frameworks or product processes or thinking about who you need to hire and how they operate.

14:18And so it's not necessarily meant to be memorised quickly and so that's why we chose to have more rather than less so that we're covering the right things.

14:29Faith Forster: And it's available both as a PDF that you can download, but also as an MD file, because you can put it into QOD, you can put it into OpenAI, you can put it into whatever, and use it as a guiding principle or as a bedrock for when you're building. So it is meant to work both for humans and for agents. We actually have people running some experiments on that at the moment, so A-B testing the impact that having the manifesto has on the agents versus not. Interesting. Interesting. I look forward to the results of that then. And so one of the elements of the manifesto is everything may be possible, but not everything is worth building.

15:09And, you know, I think you both mentioned this earlier, but in this era where it's suddenly so much cheaper to build all sorts and anyone can do it. How should teams be enforcing this kind of principle? Like how should teams be using this manifesto in real life to kind of enforce some of these guiding principles? Yeah, so this one is part of the purpose over possibility value. So it's really talking about the context within which any team, and that can be humans and agents, is operating. And so it's understanding kind of what do you stand for, what is it that your product is about, and what's your purpose.

15:53but also understanding your competitor landscape, understanding what's possible with technology, but looking for the opportunity within that possibility in terms of what you can do with it to help do more for your customers. And then the last one is then talking about being more ambitious. So, you know, this technology means we can do so much more than we could do before, both in a practical sense that we can do it quicker and so it's not such a trade-off. But also the technology itself, us and it does things that we historically couldn't do very well previously. And so this is really a call to arms to sort of be really clear on like, why do you exist?

16:34What is it that you're trying to service and who for? How does that fit within a very rapidly changing landscape, far more than it ever was before? And historically it's not been something we've put a lot of effort and respite into understanding, but also like, yeah, we've got this amazing technology available to us now let's like let's use it and so this this kind of idea that um not everything is worth building is is saying like understand your purpose understand why you exist and focus on solving that like give yourself you still need focus you still need a reason to exist but exploring and understanding what's possible within that can take many forms um i've heard you know i've seen on linkedin debates around like we should only be doing discovery now and you kind of go well actually like building is a way of learning right and actually it's far easy to build and learn that way now and so I do think there is a balance between doing your homework up front to understand kind of what your customers needs are what what what the problems are what what's well serviced already by other products or you know what's possible but then also you're learning through actually building but having the discipline around making sure that not everything you build will work and work well.

17:53And so how do you manage that in that context? So I think in this context, experimentation becomes far more important, whereas historically B2C products will be pretty good at that, not so much B2B. I think in all cases it becomes more critically important.

18:10Faith Forster: And resources still aren't infinite, whether you're talking about compute, whether you're talking about natural resources or cash or people's time and attention. They're still not infinite. You need to have a north star of what you're trying to achieve. And you can do lots of experimentation around it. But if you just ship everything, the surface that you're going to have to maintain, the complexity that you have to maintain is going to become unwieldy. And more nimble people, more nimble companies will go past you very, very quickly. So the ability to know what is it you're actually trying to achieve and ship something and maintain a product that is focused on doing what it needs to do is still a really important thing.

18:56Faith Forster: You still need, you know, you can move faster, but so can everybody else. So being able to know what you're trying to do and being able to maintain it and continue to develop and support and iterate on it is incredibly important. um and you mentioned earlier as well learning loops over launch plans i feel like that's definitely a sort of core product principle that's been around for years do you think ai puts this at risk because it is so easy to just launch stuff really quickly well so this is the one where we've had the most sort of like oh yeah we already do that i'm like no you don't I think the thing here is that it is so quick and easy to either build a fixture or change a fixture now it is no longer about the fixture so much so we used to consider something shipped once it went into production I think AI changes that definition of done so that it's now about adoption so we should be readily working alongside our customers watching how they're using the product and understanding kind of what's working, what's not, where is that friction and making improvements, like it's so much easier.

20:14And so like, there's really no excuse for bad experiences anymore where we kind of do things before because, you know, something got discouraged because you had to get it launched at a certain time or, you know, inevitably all the delight things got, got cut like there there really isn't an excuse anymore for doing having experiences that are exceptional and customers expectations will increase significantly with that as well like there are a lot of examples we when you actually go and watch people use products it's it's a bit funky it doesn't quite work it doesn't fit with their processes internally the way i ai works now is it enables you to be so much more flexible with the user experience, so much more.

20:59You're able to be more adaptive based on understanding what the user is trying to do. And so it really shouldn't be this sort of clunky, one-size-fits-all, kind of squish it in there. Maybe it might work for some people, hopefully. Like we really should be trying to work alongside our customers, build with, not just for our customers, and create a lot better experiences. um so like i've you know with my own product i've you know there's been times i've literally sat and watched users use it made an update ask them to refresh their screen and the update is there like it is just that easy and so it that is fundamentally different to having to go back write a brief put it in the backlog hopefully in two months or six months someone might get to it like it's it is it's a fundamentally different way of working and i think that's that's what people need to be aiming for is creating an exceptional experience with everything that they build.

21:55Faith Forster: Well, you said this one sounds familiar. I mean, to me, this is no different than fail fast, but no executive has ever responded well to the idea of fail fast. All they hear is the word fail. So this is, yeah, just hopefully this is a language that people will actually respond to. And to what Faith said, you know, putting things into production was never the idea that is a means to an end distribution adoption usage realizing value those are the only important things so the faster we can iterate and make sure people are getting that out of it the better we're doing and yeah anything that helps us do that better is a good thing it also means we can work far closer with like customer support sales teams like marketing people like there's no reason why we can't work alongside them or they could be part of the building process as well like you don't have to have the brick wall around the product org anymore there's no reason why customer support can't be doing some of those prompts and as long as it's being checked against right here before the pull request is done make sure it makes sense in the way the product works like there is an opportunity to really open that up and be far more responsive to the commercial needs of the business but also the customers and what they're asking for I have so many questions so I'm just going to try and pick and choose which direction to go in but you mentioned there about you know customer service um you know getting more involved in the product development side of things and I think in the manifesto it talks about makers as custodians of the customer experience so is that the sort of direction that you see product development going that you know it's not just designers product managers and engineers that are building things or making things it's also founders marketers sales people customer service people or even AI agents potentially you know making decisions about the customer experience and pushing things out to customers that is the opportunity I think but but but there's a big caveat to that so for that to work well you have to have really clear context in terms of the direction that you're trying to move in which is one of the other principles around making context express it for people to understand the trade-off decisions like on what basis should they go ahead and do things or not but also have the right so we talk about accountability have the right checks and balances in place in terms of who makes the final decision on yes this is okay you can go ahead and that that shouldn't if it's material if it's going to have a significant impact on the customer experience on data security on safety and vending description commercial implications then a human should be accountable but there is there is a lot of opportunity within that in terms of you know that there is no reason why it has to be a product person in the same way that i think designers have been really great at embracing the fact that they don't have to be pushing every pixel anymore that you know they set up the organ the design system they they enable the rest of the organization to apply good design in anything they are building i think the same principle can easily apply in terms of what we're building within the product across the organization if people choose to set it up in that way.

25:24Faith Forster: I'm going to disagree with you very slightly, Faith, in that what you said about it doesn't have to be a product person. I absolutely do think it has to be a product person, but they don't have to have the title product manager. So a designer, customer support, dev, anyone, sales, marketing, they can all be product people, but as long as the context is explicit enough. The best teams I've worked with over the years, even before AI became an enabling tool and a problem, were teams that were very inclusive, that had sales, that had customer success, that had support, that had marketing explicitly as part of the team.

26:03Faith Forster: They were working towards a goal of creating and realizing value, and they worked together to make that happen. That doesn't mean they all came to stand-ups and they all took JIRA tickets, but they all were explicitly focused on the context of what is the thing we're trying to do and what does success look like? And I see some people arguing now, and this is a continuing conversation we're having within the working group and with some other people, which is what does a team look like in the age of this? Does it go down to one person? Because, you know, we talked to Dan Dahl ages ago and he said, you know, he's hooked up his design system to an MCP and so he can push production ready code.

26:44Faith Forster: So is he one person products team. You know, we used to talk about the two pizza team, and it may not be that many people anymore, but it's probably not a meal deal team of one person either. Because people use tools differently, they communicate this good friction that comes from trading ideas. And so I don't know exactly what the team looks like. And I don't know exactly what the specific roles on the team are in terms of titles. But yeah, there definitely have to be product people regardless of whether the title is there or not. And it depends on what part of the product you're talking about.

27:16If it's something that's like really core infrastructure, then clearly you'd want an entity looking at that. Anya McKay, he's one of the contributors. She's the CTO at Autogen, which is one of the original AI-made businesses here in London. And they create, their product sort of helps create business proposals. They're really complex, big business proposals. and they've been doing this for four or five years now. So they've been through a lot of different iterations of different things that they've tried in terms of building AI native. And they had prompt engineers and then they, I think they got rid of most of them.

27:52She actually said that one of the best prompt engineers actually they have in the organisation is one of their SMEs, so someone who has spent their entire career writing these business proposals. and it just so happens that the skill set of writing a business proposal is very good for writing prompts because you have to be so specific about your word choices but also like he he knows exactly how the features should work and so I think there is something in that in that depending on your context you know compliance regulatory requirements is another one that's always historically has been quite difficult to translate things there are some really savvy compliance people who are very great product thinkers and so actually like you could really fast track thinking about what's possible with people who are SMEs if they are part of that process.

28:47Interesting so on that point really as well you mentioned that in the manifesto there is I think it's one of the principles about durable advantage so what does durable advantage look like when everyone has access to the same AI capability and everyone can move fast. So, you know, your competitor can build a feature and you can build that same feature the next day. Like, how do you really dig out that durable advantage?

29:18Faith Forster: It might take you a few days in some cases, but yeah, quick. Within a week. Well, that's the point is that pictures alone are no longer remote. And so it's things like, you know, I think purpose still plays a role in that, how you think about the problem that you're trying to solve. But a lot of it comes down to data, relationships, distribution, you know, different business models and pricing. You know, they aren't all necessarily new things. But what it's saying is you can't just rely on your fixture set as a basis of protecting you in terms of your value proposition you're offering to customers anymore.

29:58And so thinking about what else needs to become a really active process because I also don't think the concept of product market fit is static anymore. So that concept comes from the idea of, you know, you spend maybe a couple of years working out your customers needs and your product design and you get to the point where you've got this lovely match and that's distinct from your competitors. And then you double down on that and you just keep scaling and scaling and scaling until you're like really big. now the competitors are rapidly changing around you your product is rapidly changing your customers expectations are therefore also going to rapidly change and so product market fit is something that can you can come in and out of pretty quickly and so it's really thinking about how do you it needs to become a living breathing part of your decision making within your business around how you build that advantage and it won't be standard anymore.

30:57Faith Forster: I talked to Sarah Stone-McDevitt for the podcast the other week and I'm not sure if it's coming up before this one or right after this one, but she talks a lot about people in her family and the relationships that they formed and how that was a specific moat because no one could replicate their understanding of the customer, their attitude and their relationships and the loyalty that people felt towards them. And I like to look at parallels to other industries. You know, when YouTube came out, when Spotify came out, or even before Spotify, when streaming and free streaming or piracy first came out, there was the idea that originally the big record labels were the big record labels because they had distribution.

31:37Faith Forster: They could get you into your music, into the record store if you were a band. So you want to sign with one of them. They didn't go away when streaming happened because they had marketing power. They could still buy lots of ads. There were still things that they could do. But the balance of power shifted a little bit and more bands did more indie things and more people came out without signing with those labels. But those labels still had real power. Having money and having a dominant market position is still a huge advantage. It's just not as much of an advantage as it used to be. And it's easier to break through, but it's not a given that just because you're a good product or have a good idea that you will break through.

32:17Faith Forster: So it's a combination of luck, it's timing, it is, as well as distinguishing yourself really amazingly on some dimension that your competitors have it. And that's kind of basic marketing and positioning theory, but it's really important. It's not just building the thing, it is what you do with that and how you do it. That is incredibly important. I think it's something that we're yet to really see the impact of, but MCP connections make it so much easier. to pass data between systems as well. And so I think where before we had sort of systems of record and that, you know, you could be in a pretty lazy position if you were the ones that held that data, I think that would change quite quickly because people could shift it in and out of systems much easier.

33:03And so I do think there's going to be a lot more of this. Relationships is definitely one of them. But you really do need to have a product that people love in that context because if they kind of make do, then they'll find something else pretty easily. I think in this new environment. Interesting. So you mentioned earlier, Faith, that you are working on an AI native business yourself. And we also mentioned that you were next to one of your customers and just sort of like updating something on the platform and seeing them sort of use the update that you had literally just been working on. And I think one of the principles of the Maker's Manifesto is to stay close to the people you serve how do you see that changing um with the ai world that we're in now like i've seen lots of tools out there for creating synthetic users lots of ai research summaries there seems to be this like sort of proliferation of shortcuts when it comes to user research and getting close to your customers so how do you really stay close to your customers in in this day yeah i do fenders Yes, discovery helps do some of that.

34:15So we pull detailed competitive profiles and I'm seeing a bit of landscape but also your customer segments. We create personas, the jobs to be done. We look at your different competitors' fictions against those jobs to be done. So we do help shortcuts on those. I think that the big caveat within that is it doesn't replace having the relationships with your customers and actually talking to your customers and building that understanding. and so there's two points in the manifesto we talk about judgment like the basis of judgment having good judgment one is understanding having those relationships and the other is understanding i think your strategy or kind of your purpose and what it is you're trying to achieve you can't like there's a lot that you gather from just sitting and watching or having a conversation with your users your customers that you just don't get through a transcript or you know an summary that's come from somewhere like you lose a lot of the meaning and intent behind things but i also think you know i for years i've said that people who are doing user interviews should understand the markets or the context within they're doing that interview because they'll understand their understanding of what comes out of that feedback will be different based on having a better understanding of how the market works but where the user comes from or you know the way process works.

35:37And I think that's true here. Like if you rely too much on AI to do all that heavy lifting for you, you are going to miss the gold nuggets that gives you the opportunity to do something that's truly different and special. And so in an environment where it's going to be much harder to differentiate, the ability to differentiate is going to come from that inherent understanding of your customers that only comes from direct interaction.

36:04Faith Forster: Faith, I think we've got time for one last question, and I'm going to sneak in with it this time. Let's talk about how should people be using this? What is the call to action around this? I mean, a manifesto is meant to be provocative and spark a movement. And, you know, granted, it's not like the Agile Manifesto did that overnight. It was a long, slow build. What are you hoping? You've been the driving force behind this. What are you hoping is going to happen with the Makers Manifesto? yeah it's interesting um so we've had we've had that feedback that it you know it feels like there's nothing different here which is absolutely not true like if you understand the nuance in some of the word choices there are fundamental shifts depending on that so i think that's on us we need to be much more explicit about that so we are working on some updates at the moment where we talk about sort of some of those you know some of the shifts that we believe are coming in are driving some of these principles.

36:59We may also, you know, the whole environment with AI is so rapidly changing. We may update this as well. It was always something that we thought it's better to get something out there than have nothing because people were genuinely feeling quite lost and anxious and burnt out and overwhelmed by it all. And so we felt like we needed to give something that people could refer to and use as a reference point or something to hold on to. But I guess what's different in this context to when the Addo Manifesto was created is like the Addo Manifesto was, it did create that alarm, I guess, or that like people did really rally either for it or against it.

37:43Whereas that's already happening with AI. The world has sort of already been turned upside down. And actually, I kind of feel like the role of this one might be slightly different, maybe. I'm open to it, not think, but in that it's really about giving people a reference point or something to hold onto to be able to filter all the noise and work out what's important. But it is, there are some huge fundamental shifts. And I think we have, exactly as we just talked about with learning loops over launch plans, people are interpreting it based on their existing understanding or knowledge, which is still wildly different.

38:18And so I think what we need to be clear on is what are the fundamental shifts and what's really different here and what people need to be aware of. Yeah.

38:29Faith Forster: So, you know, one of the core tenets of being agile is that if you're not embarrassed by the first thing you put out, you waited too long. And I don't want to say I'm embarrassed by this because I'm incredibly proud of it. I stand by every value and every principle. I think it's incredibly important and incredibly valuable. However, it is also a bit anodyne. It is not as strident or provocative. People aren't going to carry banners with this one on, with these things on it. They're just solid and good. And I think that is very much recognized within the signatories and the working group around this.

39:08Faith Forster: And one of the challenges I've had to back to people is, I totally agree with you when you say it's not good enough. It doesn't go far enough. But what should it say? And it was only, I think, last week, maybe two weeks ago, that somebody came back with a provocative version of it that goes further. And my feedback to them was, there are a couple of things in here that I totally disagree with you on, but there are other things I'm jumping up and down saying, yes, yes, yes, yes. So now we're in the refinement phase on that and trying to say, does everyone agree on this? Is there enough agreement on some of this?

39:41Faith Forster: Do we want to moderate a couple of the principles or change a couple of them? But I'm looking forward to, I don't know exactly what this is going to look like, whether it's going to be, you know, flight levels of this is a basic version, and then we'll have a more advanced version, or whether there will be a version two or what it might be. But I'm really looking forward to seeing what this looks like. And the big ask that I know, Faith, you've had and I have is for anyone who's listening to this, anyone who goes to makersmanifesto.org and reads this, please feedback. This is not meant to be a sacrosanct tablet that is etched in stone.

40:15Faith Forster: This is meant to be a starting point. And we want feedback. We want iteration. We want evolution on this. This is meant to be, you know, it's not the Agile Manifesto, but we are agile about it and want feedback in it to change. but it is it's also i think an incredibly sound set of principles for for any organization and we've had um over 200 downloads which as soon as is either for people to share with their teams or for agents who the leverage on that would be higher i guess not saying that we can track and we've had i think we've just cracked three digits on the number of people who have chosen to sign or pledge their support for this which i can't really interesting i do wonder like like obviously I think this is important it's like created it but I was like gonna think what what is it that motivates people to plan to support like you can agree with something but actually plan to a support mode that um I find quite interesting so like I think that's it's a good sign it's certainly resonated with people we've had loads of people you know choose to share it um either within their organizations and on on LinkedIn so I think it is resonating and it's like it's only going to get better from here.

41:25And so I think that's a really positive thing is, you know, use it within your organisations, put it to your agents, tell us what impact that has. You know, what is it that has worked really well in it, what hasn't? I think one of the things that's become quite clear out of the workshops when we've asked people how would you apply this in your organisation, the one thing that consistently comes up that people say is that they're going to go back to the office and do something about now is around making context explicit. That's something that everyone sort of recognizes is fundamentally different now with agents.

41:56Someone do need to do better at making, you know, the strategy deck that someone saw at the start of the year and is completely forgotten about is probably not enough. Look, we need to have these things codified in a way that it can be leveraged in day-to-day decision making, both by humans and agents. And that's something that no organization is well setups do today. Yeah.

42:18Faith Forster: One last comment about this is that I have seen other people over the years try and do a new agile manifesto and it has always failed. It has been too long. It has said too many cooks spoiling the broth. What's really nice about this is there's a whole bunch of consultants and thinkers and speakers and those types of people involved in this, but there are also executives and doers and having faith running the, being the driving force and saying, screw it, ship it and things like that has been absolutely fantastic. And I think it's really nice to see that, that group of people. So when he went to, when Adrian was kind enough to debut this and run a couple of workshops at leading the product in Australia, when you and I took it to productized in Lisbon, when you and Simonetta took it to product at heart in Hamburg, the responses from people have been fantastic.

43:10Faith Forster: And the workshops have been really valuable discussions. People got a lot out of it. they really thought deeply about what they're going to do with this. So I think that, yeah, I'm really proud of the work that's been done. I'm also looking forward to seeing what comes next. And we will, if people do sign up to support on the website, they can choose to be added to our mailing list. We will be running online webinars where people can get involved in a discussion on the different principles of values and what they mean and how they can apply those to their organisation, but also give us feedback.

43:43So that's also something you can do. amazing well thank you so much for coming on this evening and sharing um more about it with us and our audience and uh yeah look forward to seeing the next provocative iteration the product experience hosts are me lily smith host by night and chief product officer by day

44:05Faith Forster: and me randy silver also host by night and i spend my days working with product and leadership teams helping their teams to do amazing work. Luron Pratt is our producer and Luke Smith is our editor.