20Product: Why You Should Not Go Into Product Management, Why the CEO is Always the CPO, How to Build the Best Product Teams & Why You Should Hire People Who Aren't In Product Already with Databricks SVP Product, David Meyer

23:03So I call my dad, I have this deep decision to make. Do I go into fine art or engineering? He's like, it's not a decision. You go into engineering. So there's a lot of things I put on pause that I love, but there's beauty in solving problems for humans. And if you're not inspired by what's possible and what you're doing, then you should take a hike. You mentioned that fine art and engineering are a wonderful balance between art and science. I'm always conflicted on how much product is art or science. I've had Gustav at Spotify say on the ship, 99 % science. Most people just site 10 to 50, go 50, 50, which was good.

23:41So like it gets back to this data driven thing. Like I've known a lot of products managers that ship a product and don't observe how it's behaving in the wild through data. I think they're fucking insane. You spent all this energy and willpower creating this thing and you're not obsessively watching exactly how it interacts with the world, that's crazy. So it's a little bit like content, which is the biggest problem with content as people spend hours, hours, hours, especially a large company is creating and making everything a beautiful distribution, just press publish. Yeah. Oh, okay. I mean, we could, ah, ah.

24:15Like, putting stuff again on your website is not marketing. You gotta get in the mindshare of the person who's probably you're solving. There we go, look at your website. Yeah, it's crazy. I've never run marketing. So I'm always telling them how they should do their job better. It's the same thing as the flip -ups before. Do you worry they don't like you, not in a bad way, But like here's the thing like and this is the core of being a humanist having empathy I think everybody's a genius maybe not at their job, but there's something and they're trying to do the best they can So if you lead with that kind of empathy and understanding and try to enroll them and why it should be different Do you know at doing the best they can on I don't know I want my fucking ass off hold on so it's a good point The dirt between hustle doing the best you can like okay I'm having, you know, relationship stress.

25:03I didn't sleep well. I have a migraine. I just want to get through the day. That might be the best you can. You might be dialing it in a work because of some other meta. People don't want to suck, but everybody's world is infinite. So with that mindset, if you're talking to someone in marketing or sales or something, you want to see different behavior, it's the same as talking to an engineer. You need to enroll them in why the missing opportunity and just understand being inquisitive and be open as to why don't we attack it this way? Wouldn't this be opening up a whole new thing? And when I do that, I learn a lot.

25:37And a lot of times it's like resource constraints and CEO needs this, all these things sales. So it's just like me, people thinking product managers a God role when it's a service role. So if you were to put a number on product being art or science, what would it be? Well, this is where it's unfair. Because I presume that the only way to interact with the world is to fully understand the functioning system you're in and then have intellectual rigor and observation of data behind it. So I just assume that that's how brains work, but not everybody's brain works that way. So if you assume that that's just free, then it's 90 % art.

26:13But if that's not a natural inclination of people, then it's probably a lot more of that being done purposefully. Have you always felt like that? Often what I see with product leaders is they tend to find that science leads the way in their early product leaders. I was just gonna go there. Like, I have created so many detailed frameworks. And it's basically like, I have mathematical proof that this is what we should do, but it's so fallible. There's something like the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, it's an economic theory. And the gist of it is, the more detail you see, the more correct you think something is.

26:51You can have this incredible financial model. Like, you know, people do financial models and spread cheats all the time. You can have like a very simple model or you can have one billions of pages and you're like they put so much work into that They're really good, but it's bullshit So the key is using your collective experience and there's a lot of science and math and that to find holes in the strategy Because humans are not mathematically Defineable and products are for humans. So overrigger is just waste in the system of how do you then and be that in the team I didn't even show that they don't put together a 50 sheet.

27:26Anybody listening to this, that's worked for me? I think I'm totally full of shit now. I ask people to do tons of shit and they're like, this is meaningless. Do you justify it? Do you say, well, no, it is actually valuable and it's valuable for these reasons. What do you say, listen? No, I always want to get to the why. Like, let's talk about people on your team or people, you know, in a close adjacent, do your team love you despite what you just said? I think that's because of the human connection. I am maddening to work for. I'm maddening because, like I said, I need to understand the system.

27:58If there's something that's done that I don't understand, I'm picking it apart and asking a million questions because until I get the system, I might give wrong advice. But that seems like, and oftentimes, is a little micromanaging. I'm maddening. I think I connect with people on a human level, so they respect the intent of my maddeningness. ness. When you say let's talk about the team, what have been your biggest lessons in terms of what it takes to build fucking amazing product teams? It's hard. One of my biggest lessons on leadership and management is actually it's my job to know How each person internalizes feedback and actually I was always like true -seeking what I'm gonna be direct Yeah, there's some people actually need a little bit more hand holding a little bit more love and nurturing Yeah, yeah, and actually you have to tailor the leader that you are to the employees that you have totally Everyone on one I have is fundamentally different.

28:47Yeah, but that's the cause of people like choose your style and you stil - Yeah, but that gets to, I mean, you have empathy, EQ, and human understanding to enable you to do that. And that's really key in a leader. I think a lot of leaders are formulaic. And I think people follow people that see them. When I'm in a room and I'm frustrated, with I feel like I'm not kind of in the core of the conversation, but I have a point of view that I think they need to hear. I just want to feel seen if I'm not seen I feel ignored and I think when you give people feedback You need to get their feedback on your feedback You might not give them any space to talk about the why or you know what they're going through that doesn't mean Not to be resolute on the feedback like I need you to do this and if they you know if they look ashen and they You know they're like stressed out figure out why it's your job to figure out why because otherwise you've lost them Do you know when you've lost them?

29:42I'm overly confident in this topic. So sometimes you do. Sometimes it's clear, right? But I generally have this unspoken or sometimes spoken contract with people that work for me. If you're going to leave the company, I'm going to help you find the best job imaginable. But first I'm going to figure out if you're running away or running towards. Like if you're running away from the company because something's broken, I want to fix it. If you're running towards an unimaginable opportunity, I'm going to guarantee you get it if I can. But then some people don't trust me. A lot of people tell me six months and nine months before they're gonna leave and I helped them get a kick -ass job.

30:14But some people don't trust me, tell me, oh, I've already accepted this offer from blah, blah, blah. I'm like, what did I do wrong? Did you make that offer clear enough? Do you say to everyone, listen, if there is ever a time when you were tempted to leave, just let me know. We can talk about it. I won't dissuade you. So I do that with my immediate staff, but often, you know, oftentimes, this layers in an organization and you know not everybody knows you that well. Yeah. But I feel, because I feel strong connections with people, I feel that they should know me that well. Don't you know me? Don't you get that I wouldn't like walk you out of the building in anger?

30:51No, because most people actually are different to how they present. Yeah. Which is one thing. And then it's not what you say, it's not what you do, it's how you make people feel. I know exactly, exactly. And the challenge is if they're a manager removed from you, they may not be made to feel the way that you would want them to. No, exactly. And when I come into meetings in my maddening way, there's like, you know, the term like seagull management, like swooping and shit over everything and fly away. I don't have the habit of it. I just have like the birds, I overview, you just appear to have it.

31:20No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You sweep in. It's like shit. Someone like categorized a bunch of animals and like, so I asked people that know me, like, was I too seagull in that meeting. And sometimes, to my directs, it's fine, but then a new product manager that doesn't know me like, why is this SVP giving me shit about all this stuff? Do you worry that you become a cynic over time? I worry about this, because I'm a little bit of a CEO. I have to be on top of everything. But I do come down. It's the fifth day of time I've seen kind of a BI tool for SMB's piece of shit next. He can't lose the optimism in venture, and he can lose the optimism in product.

31:56Yeah. Do you worry about becoming cynical with time? I can't even brace becoming cynical with time. Because I mean, we talked about one of my weaknesses is I'm too optimistic. I think that's unlocked incredible things in my life, incredible things. But it gets back to if you haven't enrolled people in the vision. Oftentimes you can't achieve the vision. And then it falls apart. And then like, why were you such an idiot for being so optimistic? I'm like, well, if you believe we would have gotten there, it's your fault, you know, don't say that. But be more selective about the things you care about.

32:27I would imagine investing in a company. You need to care a little bit. And so not caring about another the BI tool is a blessing. There's so much optionality in the world that when you reduce dimensions, you get more powerful because you can focus, have more domain context, more point of view, and probably more impact. Well, that was what I was gonna say, which is you said before narrowing the scope as a gift. How do you think about that applied to products? There's so many dimensions of it, but one of the classic failure modes of the startup is they get like early signal of product market fit and then they start talking to customers.

33:01customers and customers big deal, you know, roll this out to all these users if you just do this, but it's not coherent with like the focus, you know. Suddenly you're going large enterprise and SMB. Suddenly you're going after the practitioner and the business person. And then you try to be all things all people, it's just way, way, way premature and then you're nothing to anyone. Now, you can choose a raw narrow focus and implode that that's the balance. I think the one thing I always is that it's like slowly they open up the aperture of the available customer. And so it used to be like, BI analysts in SMBs.

33:36Yeah. And then it's like, oh, BI analysts. And that's like, the Zanolists. And it's suddenly like a premium tool for everyone. Then it's a prosumer. Yeah. Because they get nervous as time goes on, the trash and what it happened. But you loosen your product marketing tightness with every expansion. There's a funny, what's that new, like the diabetes drug that everybody's losing Oh, it was them pick. Yeah, so I read this article and someone was concerned that it'll be the collapse of society. These drugs not only... That's quite a jump. Curb appetite, they curb other addictive things. They're good for people that have a gambling problem.

34:12But then someone looked at the data and this power users are the thing that makes the revenue for all companies, basically. Like there's people that I don't know if you have Chipotle here, but say a fast food that eat it every meal. I go once a year. The company makes a lot more revenue from these people. And if you take away the addictive tendencies of the super users, no one will make profits in any sector of any business anymore, because the 80 -20 rule means you're going to lose 80%. Obviously, that's crazy, but it gets to the... Same in gaming, obviously. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so the whole world's going to collapse.

34:44But you need your fanatic users. If your product becomes everything to everyone, you lose the fanatics. But your fanatics are the ones that talk about it in bars, bring their friends in, have the viral coefficients and stuff, but they're also the ones that push you to do unimaginable things, to really break through barriers. I had Scott, the founder of Atlassian on the show. Yeah, I watched, I watched. Yeah, and we talked about Jira and like, you know, Blum, it can be quite hard for people to drop into. And my question to you is, how do you build for fanatics to retain them, to inspire their love even further?

35:17But also not make it holy shit for someone to drop in on day one. It's hard like you need to use your product every day and you're not going to always be the persona is for But you need to at least have an appreciation for what that persona goes through products become complicated over time You add a future for one person it might be another click for another person But I think that's where the art is it gets down to the human connection a simple always better and product Simple is like the dumbest word, you know, it's like yeah, what a shit question What does it mean? Well, I mean, fewer. So fewer options, fewer buttons, fewer color schemes, as small a option based as possible.

36:00Clearly, is it always better, no? If it's possible to still give the superpowers to the person you're giving superpowers, but you can't dilute their superpowers, right? So when I came into Databricks, I started using the product and I was like, good lord, you know, I'm not a developer. I mean, I've done it, I'm not good at it. Good lord. And I, there were all these things that I saw as, you know, broken edges to the product. And I thought it was really important that we fixed them. But most of the things I wanted to focus on didn't matter at all. Didn't matter at all. It's like the speed of execution, mattered, auto -completeing, encode, mattered, consistent gutter width on the UI.

36:41Don't be gave a shit. But it hurt my eyes to see it. Because different things matter to the developer wanting to be in the flow of their work. than the goofy product manager that joins a company that's like, you guys not pretty. So it's not clear what simple means. Simple doesn't mean removing optionality, unless it does, and that's where it gets complicated. You don't want to give people five ways to do things. If you can give people one way to do things, that's great if they can still do the thing, that they need to do, that they're using the product for, which oftentimes, I remember, so I've been using it last season for a while.

37:16In fact, we talked to them, I was at this company plumb tree. Jay Simon's, I don't know if you've talked to him. Yeah, of course, his machine last time. I actually about the share. Oh, yeah, yeah, he's an old friend. I shouldn't have said in his name, but he has plenty of stories. We tried to acquire Atlassian back in 98 or something. We thought we should get them cheap. They're a little picky company, but they had a plan, and they're like pound sand, there's no way. But it's just in Gira, then there's like this wiki confluence thing, you know? But then in that product, early on, you could do a lot with like markdown and stuff like that.

37:48But they moved a lot of those things to a like clickable tech editor. And like I was serious. I was like, these people are jokers because like I wanna do all these things now all these things is no button for it and there's a lot harder. Now that was the right choice. It radically opened up the tim right? There were a lot less people like me, you know, you need to go into that acknowledging that you're gonna get rid of some people. Are those people you're getting rid of key to your vision? Developers have to love us. Because they're going to be the ones influencing the decision that the CFL makes.

38:18I'm fascinated. You said they're about different types of feedback, different segments of customers, or give you product reviews. They're kind of hailed as this kind of black box. How often do you do product reviews? Who's invited? Who's that the agenda? And you just won't be doing it like other. Okay. So in short, it's like fractal. I use a product all the time. I'm reviewing the product when I'm using it like continuously. And so getting into like the preview, we have this dog food system and stuff like that. That's kind of like asynchronous product review. But then, you know, in the classic scrum sprint methodology, you demo every Friday.

38:51You want the core group to be seeing things as it's being built, because you can't waste time if it's going the wrong direction you need to know soon. You should have like continuous product reviews for the core team, and then monthly or quarterly for management. But the danger, the danger is like the seagull management. Like, how do you bring them along enough in the vision? And so like, let's take Databricks. So when I got there, there's a lot of founders, they're all ridiculously smart, they're all operating in the company. And you want to include them in your early thinking because they have so much context.

39:25But then there's also the danger. If you have a handful of founders, they might not all have the same opinion about the button placement. it, you know? And so that can be very wasteful to like do cycles on exactly how something should look with a lot of people. But the intent and the context they bring to it is super critical. So the danger is the more people in the room, the worse it is. In a bigger company, people in the management chain, I'll feel like they need to be in the room and there might be multiple levels there. And then it's just a ceremony. Like more than six people, if you're going to try to make a decision, how many people you have in the room, like it's got to less than 10, probably more than four.

40:02I say four to six, it's like vanishing partnerships. Yeah, yeah. But a four to six is really where you get the ultimate stage of making I think. But then if you have 20 people, it's a ceremony. I totally agree. Does remote or work from home change that in some way, where people can be on mute, people can listen in, you don't feel their presence. Does that open up the aperture or change anything? Yeah. Because you dilute the clarity and the intensity of what you say, the more people are in the room. Even simple as like being glib, using curse words and things like that. You feel uncomfortable because like you actually can be quite important.

40:38It can emphasize pain. It can advise that actually it's for sure a second. That's a fucking nightmare. Yeah. It's a big difference. Because that takes maybe four seconds to say it politely takes 10 seconds. And so you want conversations to be as high band with this possible. Like if If we work together a lot, we have the same lexicon, right? We can be efficient high bandwidth. If you get 10 people in the room, though oftentimes it'll be like damaging. We'll understand each other. They'll interpret it differently, and they'll report the news to other people that's wrong. How do you deal with that in terms of documentation of decisions made at Ashen Items to ensure that that communication downstream is efficient?

41:17It's so important, and everybody's terrible. I'm terrible at it. I like to be partnered with a program management type person because I'm not fistidious. I want notes to be sent out and oftentimes I'll just like if I join a meeting and there's no document link to take notes for the meeting I go apoplectic and then I'll create one and I'll write really bad notes and then I'll forget to send them out but I'll invite other people to and then they'll send them out so like I really believe in the importance of that I'm kind of shit at it personally but it's so important because at any company of any size any venture of any size.

41:51People do stupid shit. But if we get back to they're doing the best I can. So why would they do stupid shit? Well, if someone does stupid shit on my team, I didn't give them the context because they're smart people. So if they're doing something dumbass, it's because I failed to give them the context and the framework to understand why it's dumbness. When you review that, why have you in the past failed to give them the context? You're too busy. The other thing is like, I need to understand the system of something before I give advice on it, so I like dig in hard. I assume everybody's brain works like mine, but I have a FOIBLE of thinking people think like me.

42:28I assume that things that I find self -evident, you find self -evident because it's self -evident. But that's the luxury of me being in a bunch of meetings you're not in. It's not clear to me what is in someone else's brain, and I misread that a lot. You mentioned that you hire the obviously very small people. I think the hiring process is a very challenging one. Yeah. How do you structure the hiring process for new additions to your product teams in terms of the structure? The first conversation I have with someone, it's the same as a customer interview or we're talking to someone in another function and moving to product.

43:00So I want to understand impact you've had and then you'll say something and until I think I could do it, I keep asking questions. But you do that until you find someone's floor. I have an engineering background or at least a civil engineering background and I can decompose systems You know and a lot of product managers don't know how their shit works in some consumer companies I might be okay, but in enterprise software you got to know how the shit works because otherwise you'll make bad decisions Because you won't understand the dependencies right so we talked about how you know someone that was at Google during the Outs whatever they did the numbers went out, but was it causal is the question so trying to understand and how they dealt with a difficult situation.

43:38And then, is it other people's fault? Do they take responsibility? How did they get out of it? Or other people damaged in the way they got out of it? Is that in the first conversation? Is that in the first meeting? Yeah, I like, I try to connect as a human in the first meeting, because first of all, what's my main goal in the first meeting? I want a fast fail if they wouldn't be a fit, and I want them to want to talk to us again. Oftentimes, you forget the second part. But like, being deeply, deeply curious about what someone's done, they feel seen. And if you feel seen, you feel a connection, and you want to talk again.

44:10That's my hypothesis, or at least people for whom that doesn't work, I just lose in the process. Okay, so we find that she does someone really interesting, and we want to do a second meeting or so many. How do we deep down on that technical skills? Is that case studies? Is that how do we understand the ability? So I think that it's great to find a low stakes way to do work together. The best way to figure out if someone's good to work work with is to work with them. But then if you say, give me advice on my product, that's a big lift for them. And also they didn't have the context. If I get your products, you'll present.

44:41And they could say something stupid and I haven't given them the context and I judge them for that. So if we take a problem from their domain, change part of the context, change a constraint and see how they deal with it and talk through it, you're working with them. You get them. The thing I find hard there is that you then didn't have the context and they've been working for three years and say whatever they say, you'll be like, wow, smart and it's like, well, you just know nothing and they've been what you want to know. Three is that's true, but it's powerful to know nothing because you ask questions that seem dumb, but it can kind of throw people off because they're not the questions they're expecting.

45:13And you see the internal consistency of what they're talking about. And again, how they're talking about it. If they're just taking credit for shit without the how, it's really the meta. It could be anything. It could be talking about how civilizations on Mars operate, they don't exist, but it's like a great world -building fiction book feels real, but it's all made up. But there's a lot of intellectual coherence in what they're talking about. So I think you can smell bullshit pretty easily. Even in a domain you've never seen before, if you're just intellectually curious and you keep digging into the understanding.

45:47And so it's where it's five -wise. Why did you do that? Yeah, exactly. It's a five -wise process. But deal with humans. What's the biggest mistake you've made in hiring in person. So people can be incredible in one company and a total failure in another company. I've worked with people who were brilliant game changers. Oftentimes they didn't show up first that that was obvious but then they like accomplished amazing things and then I brought them to interview at another company, convinced they'd be a game changer at the other company and then the panel was like this person isn't a fit at all. They give me you know a bunch of reasons that are true.

46:26And it's just because different companies have different cultures and different needs. And like, let's say you know someone would be great, you know they would. But there's people that doubt in the process. If someone comes in and there's non -believers, confirmation bias is very real. So if you can't enroll the hiring committee to believe that this person's great, they're going to fail. Have you searched your hiring committee? Not too big. You have to have people whose job it is to prove that the person's a better hire. If I have people that work for me as the only people on the hiring committee and they know I really like a person, it'll color their view.

47:03So you have to have antagonists in the system. A small number, it should be cross -functional. You need to have someone technical, well, in enterprise software, you need to have someone product, someone technical, and some naysayer, as like the core three, and all three of them have to be deeply, deeply respected in the work. And that's a hard part. Then you need their signal to matter. What are the first things to break down in scaling product tools? We have these higher in -procise, we hire many people. You've been in very fast scaling product tools before. What are the first things to break?

47:31Losing touch with the day -to -day of the individual contributor, I don't know what people spend their time on intrinsically. There's things I assume I ask for something to be done by everybody in the org. And in my mind, it's just a tiny, tiny extra effort every week. But these things can pile up and be meaningless to the point where They're just running the machine and they're not doing the art. They're doing the what not the odds. Yeah, they're not deeply truth -seeking what really matters for the customer They're filling out how to entertain that at scale Integrate them into customer support once a month.

48:05I mean, you know measure. I hate that measure what people do But make sure they're talking to customers all the time a third of their time should be talking to customers A third of their time should be used in the product and working with engineering and a third of their time should be thinking probably But it never works out that way because usually 60 % of their time is filling up bullshit What is the most frictitious functions? And that's a way of question But is the engineering and sales where sales sell ahead of time and then say engineering? I need this feature Is it between products and engineering is it from products sales engineering and sales?

48:33Engineering sales yeah, why because they're an opposite? So like when I came into to data bricks it was by modal engineers thought sales ran the company and we're destroying it And sales thought engineering ran the company were destroying it. There was no real product muscle I'll be right back with any of the CEO and there's a gap right engineers and sales have opposite is a good word Motivations short -term long term. They're always gonna think the company would be better if the other had less influence I salesperson like this is a customer that wants to give me five million dollars are you on crack?

49:07Why aren't we building this feature to get the five million dollars engineers like it would destroy the company because Nobody else wants with that company. You know, it's the you want to work on this security thing over this new product is gonna get its guaranteed revenue. Do you mediate that as a product? I'm like the fixer or the media for a lot of these things. So like I always try to find a third way. People always present options that are myopic, you know? We don't do this and we lose the revenue or we do it and it delays our strategy. I'm like, no, I don't like either of those options. So you talk to the customer and you find out they don't even need the feature.

49:44It happens all the time. You're like, we could do this for you. We could do this for you. But wouldn't it be better if we did this for you? And no, no, I really need this. But then you just tease it out. I'm like, but if we did this, this whole scope of work you have to do first half of next year would disappear. So again, you talk to the customer, you diffuse the situation, you enroll them into what you really want to do. And then you make the salesperson realize you never needed the feature. Now, it doesn't always happen. And because I'm too optimistic, sometimes I like come up with a crazy third -way.

50:13It's possible if everybody was inside my brain, but then coordinating all the pieces to do weird shit Sometimes doesn't scale either. Possibly if everyone was inside my brain, it's like reality distortion fields. Or something good reality distortion and bad reality. So I think that every great leader in startups, you're bending reality. You're creating things that seem impossible. You have to enroll people in that and once they're enrolled, if you think something's impossible, But you convince three friends, then the four of you think something's impossible, but the world reality thinks it's impossible.

50:49That's reality distortion. But you enroll people in it so they can hunker down and prove everybody wrong and accomplish it. As organizations grow and leaders have ego, you can believe yourself and not be truth -seeking. And then you can do your company a lot of damage and you can do people a lot. Think about how many people that have been traumatized by startups. It was kind of like we want to accomplish this by any means necessary because it's the right thing to do and You start to see less and less what you're compromising to do that if you get caught up in your own reality distortion field It might be impossible So you've convinced all these people that something impossible is possible and they're gonna waste a lot of their career chasing you on it Because you're so convincing.

51:31That's when it gets a dark side What's the best relationship between a head of products or a CPO and a CEO? Yeah, this is funny. After every product role I do, when I'm seeking my next role, I want to be anything but product. And then you meet someone like, you know, Oli, pulls back this curtain and you're like, holy shit, I want to be part of this. Let me do some products. But the CEO is the CPL. So it gets back to, are you a rock star or are you a roadie? You're a roadie. It gets complicated because you want to exercise your craft and do something that you know is the right thing to do. The CEO is driving the vision of the company and knows the right thing to do.

52:10And you can't be in their brain and they can't be in your brain and you're both working really hard and really busy and probably don't talk that much. So there's always this conflict between your hearing that we need to do things that you don't understand the full context of and it's fructive with what you know you need to do. But you don't have the bandwidth or the time to articulate what's in your brain to the CEO. How do you have great communication then? Again, it gets back to hiring, but high bandwidth, and truth seeking, taking ego out of it. I've had a lot of difficult songs to speak to Ali.

52:42Very seldom, but is generally messaging and calls late at night because the key is to be sympathical enough. Like for example, for the second half of the year, I listed all the main objectives I had and the tide of the vision and what outcomes they drive. I get his buy -in on that, And I just relentlessly go after those. I oftentimes, I send a lot to him that I don't necessarily get responses on unless he disagrees. There's a lot of delicate shit that goes on. I send to him, probably, you know, a couple other leaders, founders, Adam or whoever. And then if I hear nothing, I just execute like mad.

53:20Final ones, we do a quick fight. When you let review yourself as a product beta, what would you say you mostly need to improve on? Because I form this human connection with people. I underestimate the negative impact my words can have. What does that mean in reality that you help people more than you think? Yeah. I might be despondent about something unrelated to the topic at hand. My body language conveys that and that's interpreted as disappointment in the topic at hand. How would you change that? Move on. Being cognizant of it minimizes it and takes the edge off it, but it's just moving fast.

53:57or is it communicating to them that actually this is just how I am and don't be this heartened or along the X or Y? Yeah, I think that gets to like you talked about how everyone I want is different, right? Yeah. Just be direct and honest, be vulnerable and share What's going on and then they'll assume best intent with how you communicate? Do you think leaders of vulnerable to that all the great ones are and then you get to a level where you're a politician Where you get to earn name names with certain heights and you suddenly then have to embrace being a politician It's so funny, we built the J Simon's well, right?

54:29And he just talked about like there's a stage you get when an elevator ride is like heightened and consequential for how you interact with everybody in the elevator because of your role. And people want things from you, people want to feel seen by you, it gets crazy. Sometimes you can have a very brief interaction that's very asymmetric in how much it meant. If you're a scotted, a lasso, or you're a market sales force, that's the highlight of someone's date meeting. If you don't have that, for sure you're one of them here, because I'm sure for a bit tired. Haven't had you coffee in the morning.

55:04You're worse, you said a girl, you're husband's not a guy, you're not like, Oh, hi David, hi! It cannot actually not be the best. Yeah, no, that's hard. That's really fucking hard. And that's why sometimes it's like, so we're doing this conference, you know, so I gave a couple of keynotes yesterday, customer meetings for five hours, And then I go to dinner with like 50 customers. Are you kidding me? It's so loud you can't hear people, bizarre accents. You have to really focus. You're just done. You just need quiet time. Okay, we're gonna do a quick fight. All right. So what should you focus on if you want to get promoted as the PM?

55:36Really know the customer and really, really know the product. Know exactly how the product works and know exactly what the customers need in aggregate. What would you say is the biggest mistake found is made when hiring product teams? not being clear about the level of agency they'll have. A founder CEO is gonna be in the details of all the shit and that's good. And some people expect complete agency calling the shots as a product leader and they will fail. I think you've only worked with good founders. What I mean by that is quite often when I hear it's like, oh my god, I mean that's so far removed.

56:10They just kind of left me to all of my own abilities. Okay, okay, okay, so I was talking about good founders. Yeah, I've worked with a lot of people that were basically like the right thing for me to say was I've got it And I tried that for the first six months of Databricks And that's not what Ali wanted to hear he didn't want me to go off and do something and then show him how awesome it was You know, he wanted to be deeply involved and have the founders deeply involved in the sausage making because they had so much more context And I wouldn't go through you know waste of time that way What one piece of advice would you give to someone starting a new role as a CPO a product either is a failure mode where you feel like you have to put together comprehensive frameworks that sales is, you know, given confidence by and just give yourself time.

56:54Do as little changing the world of how the company works as possible in the first 90 days. Should you live for early easy wins? Yeah, but they shouldn't be vanity wins, you know. If the early wins are human, more than technical, you'll build the followership you need. What are some most important skills to build early in your current products? So when I was at Plum Tree and Phil Sofer left and told John Coons to make me run product, I met with John Coons and he was at Adobe in the great days, you know? And I was like, John, I'll do this. I'll do this if you want me to do this. But I need you to be my mentor.

57:29I need you to teach me how to do products. I don't know what to do. And he's like, he can't teach it. That's all he said. Thanks John. That's super helpful, isn't it? But I'm throwing me in the deep and cheers brother. You should do it and I can't teach it. Okay. I think it's very difficult to teach parenting. Yeah. If you could cool yourself up the night before you had your first child, what would you say to yourself? Wow. Just like hold on to the wonder. What does that mean? The first kid we had, it's like urgency for them to like roll over. They're going to walk. Why are they going to walk?

58:02Why are they going to like second kid? You wanted to lay walking as much as possible. Because then you have to chase them, you know? Just watching them. You watch videos of them as babies now, and you're just like, it's just amazing. Every little thing they do is amazing. Stop trying to shape them. Just get a front row seat. Does it get easier? My wife says bigger kids bigger problems, you know? So it gets different. It's interesting. It ties into a career, right? Because these things are balanced. I used to think when I left work to go home, I was being selfish until I had kids. And then I thought when I stay at work and don't go home and being selfish I think the clarity is easiest when they're young because spending time is good and and what to do How to navigate as they get older?

58:48How much do you try to try to direct shape? I'm bad. I'm a bad disciplinary and you know in sales and engineering I try to find the third way the kid is opposite it you know the rules are this I try to find a compromise Compromise isn't always good for kids. You know you need to set boundaries I don't know. Isn't that why you have a partner? It's a very important thing. Go there. You got to balance it. What recent company, final one? What recent company product strategy are you most impressed by? So I'd say like two for me, which is like notion and canva, when you look at what they've done in terms of opening up the aperture of templates and how.

59:21Why did that happen 20 years earlier though? That's what I can't figure out. It seems so self -evident. When you ask a question I was thinking more about business model, because I think that's where disintermediating things and there's a business model. innovation is by true. That's where I get most excited about it. Not on the craft of the product. I really respect the craft of the product. The companies that I find most intriguing are ones that have a very unusual insight into business model. Like the early days of a company like O Power. They were using data to drive efficiency at power plants in the US because the power plants got paid by the government for reducing the demand of the energy.

1:00:01So it's like multiple way, it's very complicated to pull things off like that. Like figuring out the big problems of environmental transformation, energy, efficiency, social and economic equity, you have to come up with really creative business models to tackle those things. And I think those are the fun ones to think about. David, listen, I've loved doing this. I'm so glad that you didn't really read the schedule, spend much time watching it, because we didn't really stick to it at all. But this has been such a good experience. That was really fun, yeah. Man, thank you so much for that. I did tell you at the beginning, that is one hand of a personality from David, he was such a great guest on the show, also if you want to watch the full video it's a fantastic watch.

1:00:38You can see it on YouTube by searching for 20VC, we always love to see you there, but before we leave you today, I'm refreshing the 20VC Miro Boardnud, love your input again, it's really easy, just head on over to Miro .com for the Slash 2 .0 VC and leave your guest suggestions for future shows, and you can do it with a digital sticky note or a comment, And you can head over to myro .com forward slash 2 .0 VC and myro actually sponsored this episode. If you haven't already tried it, I think you'll love it. Myro is the online workspace for innovation. It's packed with the right capabilities to be your dream products home base that you can visualize content, data and research findings all in one space with no problem.

1:01:18It means this space is where you map customer journeys with the whole product team, create user behaviour dashboards and map process diagrams and finally it's where you'll run productive team sprints using integrations with tools you already love and use like Giro for developers, Asana for project managers, Figma for designers and so on. We use Mirror and love it to brainstorm future shows, vote on potential guests and leave feedback for the rest of the team in our own time and right now I'm using it to hear from you. Leave your thoughts on the board at mirror .com Ford slash 2020C. That's Miro .com Ford slash 2020C.

1:01:53As always I sir appreciate all your supporting states unit for an incredible episode this coming Friday around table with Jason Lampkin, Orren Hoffman and the one and only Jack Open.