#2.1 Marty Cagan, Founder of the Silicon Valley Product Group

00:00:00: So I'd like to think that I would have been one of those people.

00:00:04: I don't know if I'd have been Lady Gaga, but I would have been somebody who like, oh, this is awesome.

00:00:09: And hopefully I'd had the skills to stand out.

00:00:13: We saw Elon Musk destroy Twitter.

00:00:17: He had amazing products since he had developed around aeronautics, around electric cars, but that did not help him with Twitter.

00:00:29: So that gives me hope that our discipline will still be needed in a couple of years.

00:00:34: So I have a lot of hope that the discipline is, but not as it's practiced in most of Europe.

00:00:42: In general, though, I don't talk about myself too much just because I don't think anybody would be interested.

00:00:55: Moin from Hamburg and welcome to season two of Produktmenschen, the podcast that meets the people behind our products.

00:01:03: I am Tobias Freudenreich, an independent product leadership coach and co-founder of A Clarity.

00:01:09: My guests in this podcast work in product management, design

00:01:12: or engineering.

00:01:13: They lead or coach product people or entire product organizations.

00:01:18: I want to get to know them, understand what they are passionate about, where they want to go next and why they ended up in product in the first place.

00:01:26: Four years have passed since the last episode of the first season.

00:01:30: These eleven conversations, all recorded in German, are still available if you would like to listen to them again.

00:01:37: Over the years many of you have repeatedly asked me about the podcast, so I couldn't really break my promise and had to release another season.

00:01:45: And within the blink of an eye, the time has come.

00:01:48: Here we are.

00:01:50: This season has no ratching theme, intuition.

00:01:53: What shapes it?

00:01:54: When does it help us?

00:01:56: When does it get in our way?

00:01:57: And how is its significance changing in the age of AI?

00:02:03: Today's episode was recorded during this year's Product at Heart conference in Hamburg.

00:02:08: If you want to be part of the next edition of that outstanding event, the ticket resale started today.

00:02:15: So, better be fast and grab your ticket at productathart.com.

00:02:20: To kick off the new season I'm joined by truly remarkable guests and I'm already excited to receive your feedback.

00:02:28: If you enjoyed the show please subscribe to the podcast, leave a five star rating and share it with someone who might appreciate it as well.

00:02:37: You can also subscribe to the product mention newsletter at product mention.de and if you have feedback or suggestions I would love to hear from you at feedback at product mention.de.

00:02:51: And now, without further

00:02:53: ado,

00:02:53: let's dive into today's episode.

00:03:21: What the Beatles are to music, Michelangelo is to art, and the Kardashians are to reality TV.

00:03:28: That's what my guest today is to product management.

00:03:33: By now, most of you probably know who I'm talking about.

00:03:36: But for those unfamiliar with the works of the Beatles, Michelangelo, or the Kardashians, let me just mention the titles of his three books.

00:03:48: Inspired, Empowered, and transformed.

00:03:52: And we all hope there will be many years to come before he ever starts riding retired.

00:03:59: Yes, I'm talking about the founder of the Silicon Valley product group and today I want to find out has his career always been a straight line to where he is now?

00:04:09: You might think so, just looking at his initials, MC, because he is truly the MC of product.

00:04:17: I'm deeply honored to welcome you to the product mentioned podcast.

00:04:21: Hello, Mr.

00:04:22: Marty Caden.

00:04:22: Hello.

00:04:23: Thanks very much.

00:04:25: Hello.

00:04:25: Nice having you Marty.

00:04:27: To warm up, I would like to start with a few quick sentence completions and I would ask you to answer as quick and as intuitively as possible.

00:04:40: There's no right or wrong answers.

00:04:42: Just whatever comes to mind

00:04:44: first.

00:04:45: Are you ready?

00:04:47: Okay, but I'll warn you, I spent most of my time coaching people to think and not to do that.

00:04:51: So if I end up thinking before I give you an answer, it's not my fault.

00:04:57: Yeah, I guess we can take that risk.

00:05:00: So are you ready?

00:05:01: Sure.

00:05:02: The biggest myth about product work is?

00:05:08: See, that's not easy.

00:05:15: Probably that there's, that it's a role in a process.

00:05:21: That leads me to the second one process.

00:05:24: people are to me.

00:05:28: Well intentioned but very damaging.

00:05:33: I will change the importance of intuition to

00:05:38: thinking.

00:05:40: The safe framework is

00:05:44: waterfall.

00:05:46: The intuition of most leaders is

00:05:52: well.

00:05:53: The intuition of good product leaders with good product sense is quite good.

00:05:57: The intuition of product leaders with no product sense is no good.

00:06:02: In ten years AI will just to put an easy one at the end.

00:06:08: Will have changed partially everything.

00:06:11: Wonderful.

00:06:12: So thank you very much.

00:06:13: As you might have recognized there were some questions around the topic of intuition which will be and that's a difference to the first season of the podcast.

00:06:23: the leading theme for all the interviews.

00:06:26: So I want to figure out what intuition is and how it comes to play in product management.

00:06:34: And yeah we gonna touch ground on that particular topic a bit later in the show.

00:06:40: before that i would wanna get to know you cuz the podcast is more about the people behind the products.

00:06:45: And many of us might feel that we know you very well that we know you're thinking your principles your values cuz we follow your writing your talks and your work.

00:06:58: But what's maybe a bit surprising is how little we actually know about you as a person, about you personally.

00:07:04: Apart from the story where you drove a pregnant colleague's wife to the hospital and somehow ended up in the local newspaper as the baby's father, there's hardly anything out there.

00:07:18: And I wanted to ask you if that's a conscious choice.

00:07:21: Do you prefer to let your ideas speak for themselves or are there other reasons behind keeping your personal life so private?

00:07:30: Honestly, I don't think it is very private.

00:07:34: For example, I tell several stories that were influential in my life in the books.

00:07:39: One of the really important things that led me to what I do is my father who was who was a professor of computer science and a PhD in computer science.

00:07:52: And so I dedicated one of the books to him and told that because he taught me to program at seven years old.

00:08:01: That's today.

00:08:02: That's not so uncommon.

00:08:04: But when I did it, it was very, very uncommon and super lucky for me.

00:08:10: So I talked, told about that story.

00:08:12: I told about sort of what led me into product and In general, though, I don't talk about myself too much just because I don't think anybody would be interested.

00:08:22: That's all.

00:08:23: I don't think so.

00:08:24: Let's see.

00:08:25: I guess we're going to have many downloads of that episode and people will be very interested.

00:08:32: So let me start with a very personal question, maybe.

00:08:38: What do you smell the moment you feel at home?

00:08:45: Well, I live in the mountains, and so I'd probably say the mountains.

00:08:49: The mountains.

00:08:50: What do mountains

00:08:51: smell like?

00:08:52: Well, it's very high altitude, where I live.

00:08:55: Clear and fresh air.

00:08:56: Oh,

00:08:56: twenty-five hundred meters up, so the air is very... crisp and dry.

00:09:03: We are recording in Hamburg and the weather outside is like freezing nearly and we call it summer.

00:09:11: So before

00:09:13: we dive

00:09:14: into your career, I'd like to rewind even a bit more and I'd love to learn what shape the way you think and lead or lead before you founded the Silicon Valley product group.

00:09:29: I want to go far to the past and want you to think about your childhood.

00:09:34: You mentioned your father and his role studying computer science in the end.

00:09:40: But when you think about your childhood, how would you describe it in three words?

00:09:45: Three words.

00:09:49: I don't know.

00:09:50: The three word part is makes it hard.

00:09:54: And it was a typical child of a teacher in a typical sort of American Californian family.

00:10:05: Nothing really special, but I remember the definitive thing as far as, I mean, I played sports every day and I was actually, maybe I haven't told this, but my first.

00:10:23: I paid my way through college as a coach, as a tennis coach.

00:10:28: So I was very into sports before, but like I said, I learned to program at seven, so I was programming, and that gave me great job opportunities, even before college, just by doing little things for businesses.

00:10:49: My father knew.

00:10:50: And so it was a good way to make some money.

00:10:54: And then I knew what I wanted to do in college.

00:10:58: I wanted to program.

00:10:59: Would you say that because you did that so early already, like programming and also making some money with programming?

00:11:08: you learned a lot about the business case behind it already?

00:11:10: Like at this age, or was it more like fun and I'm lucky to get some money?

00:11:15: It was fun and I was lucky to get some money.

00:11:17: My father, who was really, he was literally the first PhD in computer science in the US.

00:11:23: So he was like very early, but he was terrible at business.

00:11:28: Just terrible.

00:11:29: He had no interest in the business.

00:11:31: He was interested in the pure engineering side.

00:11:36: And so I think I was a little bit of both.

00:11:40: I saw that limitations of just knowing the engineering, but I also saw how much fun the engineering was.

00:11:49: So I think I was more open to the business side, but I know for a fact that I didn't pursue that because I didn't have a single finance class in college, so not a single one.

00:12:03: So I realized later how... That was not smart.

00:12:06: I should have had a business of a finance class at least But I didn't.

00:12:11: so I had to learn that later.

00:12:14: Yeah, but I guess that's something you can learn

00:12:16: on the job right you can learn.

00:12:17: I would say though.

00:12:18: I was most interested in just building things.

00:12:22: Just I like to program and I like to build.

00:12:25: I thought you know programming is a very creative act.

00:12:30: I think it's not a coincidence that I write so much books and articles because it's also creative.

00:12:37: Is that what excited you the most back then about programming?

00:12:42: Building things.

00:12:43: Yeah, I just love building things.

00:12:45: Were there other hobbies where you built things like, I don't know, remote control planes?

00:12:50: No,

00:12:50: not really.

00:12:52: Because especially it was just exactly at the time these things were becoming possible to program.

00:12:59: There was literally the first programming language to program robots.

00:13:04: And I learned that language and I got to control a very primitive robot.

00:13:09: That was just fun.

00:13:11: But today, of course.

00:13:13: It's Lego Mindstorms today.

00:13:14: Today is orders

00:13:17: of magnitude more advanced.

00:13:19: Yeah, but also further away from the roots and from understanding what's going on underneath the hood, right?

00:13:26: That's

00:13:26: true, but I think the abstractions help much more than they hurt.

00:13:32: Yeah, so you don't fear that people don't

00:13:34: know any longer.

00:13:35: And I used to discuss this with my father because he learned starting with the cables, the connections, the tubes.

00:13:45: he learned at that level.

00:13:47: And he learned like before calculators with slide rules.

00:13:52: and he was, but he was like, yeah, I'm so glad I don't have to waste time on that anymore.

00:13:57: And I don't feel like I needed to learn that.

00:14:01: I did learn assembly language, which not even, a lot of people don't even know what that is anymore, but it was at the lowest level you do.

00:14:09: But most, you know, a lot of people are too young for that.

00:14:13: They consider like a language like Java or even C as a, very low level language.

00:14:18: But anyway, I learned at that level, but I don't think I ever even used it once.

00:14:26: building products

00:14:27: i remember that i programmed the mouse driver because i wanted to have a digital darts board which my parents didn't want to buy and so i had to program something and i had a graphical interface where you could click.

00:14:42: that was like the plan and therefore i needed a mouse driver which had to be built in assembler.

00:14:47: but i think i just copied from from a book like way to type like.

00:14:54: there were books with like I remember ten pages of code which you just had to type and when there was one mistake it's like yeah stories from the past right.

00:15:03: yes

00:15:04: luckily this one is a story from the past.

00:15:08: So if you could travel back in time and let's say you could travel back to the time where you've been ten years old and you would visit your younger self, what do you think?

00:15:21: Would he be proud of what you had achieved today or would he be confused or surprised?

00:15:31: I don't know.

00:15:33: I think at ten years old, I thought I was going to be a professional tennis player, so I probably would be surprised.

00:15:40: Yeah, okay.

00:15:41: Because at ten years old, I don't think you have a very good judge of the world.

00:15:45: And let's say at fifteen years old, you were already thinking about making a career in software development?

00:15:51: Yes, I think I was.

00:15:54: So there were not these astronauts, firefighters,

00:15:57: police

00:15:58: officers, dreams of... not a quote unquote normal child.

00:16:03: So would you say that you've been a nerd?

00:16:08: I did.

00:16:09: Like I said, I played sports heavily every day.

00:16:12: So I was kind of both on this.

00:16:15: I love science and I love the engineering side of things.

00:16:20: But I also was just, you know, I spent most of the days.

00:16:25: So you had a tan, you had a social life, you had friends.

00:16:29: You were not that kind of kid sitting in the basement, just in front of a computer screen.

00:16:33: Right.

00:16:34: Okay.

00:16:34: Kind of did both.

00:16:36: And when we hear in Germany, like somebody grew up in California, we imagine a life at the beach surfing, but you've not been into surfing?

00:16:45: Not really.

00:16:46: It's just socially we would, I lived by the beach.

00:16:50: Yeah.

00:16:52: Wonderful.

00:16:53: So let's maybe move on a bit further into your career.

00:16:58: Like you already told us, you studied computer science.

00:17:03: And I want to talk a bit about your path from being an engineer to becoming one of the most influential product voices out there.

00:17:12: Was that a journey as

00:17:14: straight

00:17:14: as it looks from the outside or in hindsight?

00:17:18: No, I don't think it was straight.

00:17:20: And I wrote about this and I think it was inspired that I got pulled in the product like a lot of engineers get pulled in the product because even

00:17:33: these days,

00:17:35: but it's forever.

00:17:36: I think it's always been the case that, you know, as you know, product people come from all over everywhere, but many come from engineering.

00:17:45: And I had really focused on engineering.

00:17:49: And my goal was actually career goal was to be a co-founder of a startup as an engineering leader, which I did.

00:17:56: I was the CTO of a startup.

00:17:59: But I realized, garbage in, garbage out, as we say.

00:18:05: So you realize that engineering is not enough.

00:18:11: You need to understand what you're building.

00:18:15: I also got a good appreciation for, you have to make sure that other people can understand how to use this product, not just the people, of course the people who build it know how to use it.

00:18:25: They could, they built it so they know exactly how to use it.

00:18:29: But people who didn't build it often think about things very differently and you learn the importance of design and you learn the importance of product.

00:18:38: If you don't have a way to get your product into the hands of customers, if it doesn't also satisfy the business needs, it's not enough for just the customers to love it.

00:18:47: So I got a deeper appreciation by doing, you know, ten years of products on the engineering side for how important product management and design were.

00:19:00: The truth is, for my entire career, I have never considered myself just for product management.

00:19:09: My interest has always been product teams.

00:19:12: It's always been product teams.

00:19:14: And I don't really care what the titles are.

00:19:16: I just care that you have these skills on a team.

00:19:21: It is true, though, that There are so many good resources for engineers, so many good ones for designers, but... especially for most of my career, there was very little for product people.

00:19:37: Very little.

00:19:38: Really almost nothing for product managers.

00:19:41: And the stuff that was there was from the consumer packaged goods industry, which is a very different thing.

00:19:47: It's about pricing and packaging and promotions.

00:19:51: It's really closer to what we call product marketing.

00:19:54: And so there was almost nothing.

00:19:57: And that, I found myself spending more time helping on my own staff, you know, on my own people, helping the people responsible for the product management side of things.

00:20:10: Cause so many of them had never learned the craft.

00:20:16: Yeah.

00:20:17: That's pretty interesting.

00:20:18: Cause I also feel when discussing with people who read your books, which many of the people I do discuss in my daily work with have, There is this misconception that because you write about product leadership that you are just referring to the product managers.

00:20:35: So people who are leading product managers.

00:20:37: But I remember from a discussion we had in London that you explicitly said like no with product leadership.

00:20:44: I mean at least UX design, engineering and product management.

00:20:50: Yes.

00:20:51: Yeah, that's that's oftentimes a confusion because we cut things short too often.

00:20:55: And so people confuse product with product management and confuse the role with the actually team sport, which is building products.

00:21:05: And especially, you know, the just language differences in Europe, many people use the term product leader for an individual contributor product manager.

00:21:15: which

00:21:15: is a whole other.

00:21:17: Once I figured that out, I remember being so confused.

00:21:21: But I said, what are you talking about?

00:21:23: Let's not discuss titles and organizations.

00:21:26: It's a mess, right?

00:21:27: It is a mess.

00:21:27: And I'm like, well, you have to be clear.

00:21:29: It's a very different job to actually build, to do product management versus lead product managers.

00:21:35: So those are different jobs.

00:21:37: And once I understood there was that confusion, I was able to clarify it, at least with in my own work, in my own writing.

00:21:47: But different parts of the world, there are these different issues that pop up and that just happens to be one of them.

00:21:53: that's been an issue.

00:21:54: I guess you've learned a lot about these differences because your books are being read all over the globe.

00:22:01: But let's maybe for a moment, again, go back to where everything has started.

00:22:08: I mean, basically you've been part of shaping the early internet, first at Netscape, then at eBay, two places that defined what... Digital products could be.

00:22:19: in the end.

00:22:19: and for the younger ones listening back then we all couldn't even imagine that a browser other than Netscape would ever have a chance.

00:22:29: So looking back was that when your core product philosophy started to emerge like where were their moments or patterns that shaped your beliefs?

00:22:40: like where did they come from.

00:22:43: It was actually before the internet.

00:22:45: The internet happened in the mid-nineteen nineties, but during the late nineteen eighties is when I realized that engineering was not enough.

00:22:57: And so I was very, you know, so much as luck, but there was a person who was extremely strong product leader, real product leader.

00:23:08: He had started four different businesses, successful hundred million dollar businesses.

00:23:14: And he agreed to coach me and teach me product management.

00:23:19: And I was just an engineer.

00:23:21: I had done engineering leadership also by then, but I didn't know anything about it.

00:23:25: And he agreed to coach me.

00:23:28: And that happened before the internet happened.

00:23:31: In fact, I think that's probably why I got the job at Netscape because I was an engineer that had all of this, had some other skills.

00:23:41: And that was, I mean, there was.

00:23:46: Netscape was a very intense and iconic example of many, many products very quickly.

00:23:57: So it's very similar to what we're experiencing right now with open AI sort of being at the center of the generative AI ecosystem.

00:24:06: Well, Netscape was at the center of this emerging internet ecosystem.

00:24:11: And so it was.

00:24:14: every day there were products we were building and there were products others were building that were meant to work with those products.

00:24:19: And it was wild.

00:24:22: Every single day was.

00:24:23: changes.

00:24:24: I can imagine it was exactly the time when I started programming my first websites and made some money with that back in school.

00:24:32: And yeah, Netscape, four dots seven, if I remember correctly, that was like the standard.

00:24:38: And you had to discuss like, if you should even optimize for Internet Explorer, because it's not relevant at all.

00:24:46: And nobody I would expect a company like Google to emerge and then like taking over the browser business.

00:24:53: So it was really, really a defining product at these days, like the internet was Netscape.

00:25:01: It was, but that was very, very early.

00:25:04: You know, that was very early in the internet.

00:25:06: And so, you know, many things developed.

00:25:09: In fact, Chrome, the original developers on Chrome came from Netscape.

00:25:16: Yeah.

00:25:18: So the person that inspired you in the eighties, I guess that was back in HP, right?

00:25:26: Yeah,

00:25:26: it was.

00:25:27: And was it that you'd say you got trained in how to do, how to fill this like missing role, like the product role, something like that?

00:25:39: Or is it that you just thought for yourself

00:25:42: no no i was.

00:25:43: how should that be done?

00:25:44: or there wasn't really training.

00:25:45: there

00:25:46: were no role models.

00:25:47: right.

00:25:47: well

00:25:47: there was role models.

00:25:49: there has always been role models for this but they were only in very, you know, a small number of companies.

00:25:55: You have to remember back then the industry was very small and all in one city, basically Palo Alto.

00:26:03: They were all in the heart of what is Silicon Valley.

00:26:07: I guess

00:26:08: some people would argue for Seattle as well,

00:26:10: right?

00:26:10: I mean, back then, not really Seattle, they would have said Boston.

00:26:14: But there was, okay, small, but they were still a small number of companies.

00:26:24: And some of those companies were building amazing products like the original Macintosh or if you remember like the PDP-Eleven from digital equipment was a very important computer at the time and that was out of Boston.

00:26:38: So there were amazing products and behind all of those products were some pretty sophisticated product people.

00:26:46: Now, I mentioned I was lucky because I had one of these people.

00:26:50: His name was Mike Bako.

00:26:53: He was not my manager.

00:26:55: My manager was an engineering VP.

00:26:57: So he didn't know how to coach me on product, but he knew him and he asked him to coach me.

00:27:03: And that's what he did.

00:27:04: It was not hard.

00:27:05: It took him three months of coaching me generally once a week.

00:27:10: But like I said, it wasn't really training.

00:27:13: He did an assessment of me.

00:27:17: And it wasn't very... pretty because all I had was engineering skills.

00:27:23: But I remember he asked, look, you can learn this stuff if you want to.

00:27:29: But he asked me point blank, what is I willing to put in the work to learn this?

00:27:33: And I said, absolutely.

00:27:35: I absolutely believed it was the most important thing to learn.

00:27:40: I believed that there were two hard problems in product, figuring out the right product.

00:27:45: I felt like I'd spent ten years on learning how to build it right, and it was time to learn how to build the right product.

00:27:52: And so I was very willing.

00:27:55: And so after the assessment, he gave me some books like on finance because I didn't know anything.

00:28:00: He gave me books on analytics.

00:28:03: He had a finance person coach me on the KPIs that were relevant for our products.

00:28:09: So I also, he introduced me to salespeople and how the sales organization worked and marketing.

00:28:16: I hadn't even met these people before, let alone knew what they did.

00:28:20: So.

00:28:22: There was a lot for me to learn.

00:28:24: But literally, in just about three months, I think it was just under three months, he said, you're ready to be a product manager.

00:28:34: Up until then, he was very clear that I couldn't make any decisions without running them by him.

00:28:39: Wow, okay.

00:28:40: And then you became a product manager at HP?

00:28:43: Yeah.

00:28:44: I actually continued as an engineering leader and also covered product management.

00:28:50: They let me do a dual role.

00:28:52: What would you say about setting up such dual roles today?

00:28:56: So this is what the CTPOs are.

00:28:58: Yeah.

00:29:00: Well, first of all, I think that's the future.

00:29:03: Yeah.

00:29:03: That's another discussion with AI.

00:29:06: We're going to see a lot more of that.

00:29:08: Product and engineering is going way closer to each other.

00:29:12: But I always told people there were real synergies.

00:29:16: And there are, but I also warn people that it is, that's two jobs.

00:29:21: It's very, a lot of work, a lot of hours.

00:29:24: Did you know when this guy said, are you willing to put the effort in?

00:29:29: Did you have an idea how much effort it actually will be?

00:29:31: Yeah,

00:29:32: but it wasn't that bad.

00:29:34: He was just saying, are you willing to put the effort to learn these skills?

00:29:40: It wasn't that hard.

00:29:41: And you're saying you learned it in three months?

00:29:42: Yeah,

00:29:42: three months.

00:29:43: And I'm not, and I, I had further to climb than most people.

00:29:49: But I remember he said, you can't make any decisions until you visited at least fifteen customers.

00:29:56: And he wanted, no, he said thirty customers, fifteen in the U.S.

00:29:59: and fifteen in Europe.

00:30:01: That was my first business trip to Europe.

00:30:03: Yeah,

00:30:04: cool.

00:30:05: Bubble again.

00:30:07: If I never said it right, outside of Stuttgart, there is a building.

00:30:13: And that was so.

00:30:14: there was an HP division there.

00:30:15: I was part of my visits and I visited customers.

00:30:19: Anyway, it was amazing, these customer visits, because I had not done that.

00:30:25: I'd only visited really.

00:30:28: So

00:30:28: that were basically your first user interviews or customer interviews?

00:30:31: Yes.

00:30:32: And he taught me how to do those.

00:30:34: It was amazing.

00:30:35: And then you took notes and brought them back to the US and started to see some patterns and

00:30:41: started to build products.

00:30:43: Yeah.

00:30:44: Yeah.

00:30:44: Wow.

00:30:45: And was like, what was this setup like?

00:30:48: Like you've been the engineering manager still and the product manager.

00:30:52: So I guess it was not like flat hire keys cross functional teams.

00:30:56: It was cross functional teams.

00:30:58: But I was, I was, you know, even today.

00:31:03: Even though the agile people don't like it.

00:31:04: A lot of times the engineering manager is on the team.

00:31:08: Yeah, which is a very good concept.

00:31:10: I do think it's

00:31:11: not the end of the world.

00:31:14: So I was doing both.

00:31:18: Yeah.

00:31:19: And remember, like almost everybody on the team was an engineer anyway.

00:31:24: Yeah.

00:31:24: So

00:31:26: what was the product?

00:31:28: The product was this is the.

00:31:32: So I did one product which motivated me to learn.

00:31:35: That was ironically an AI product.

00:31:38: An AI product from way before.

00:31:41: it was ready to be an AI product.

00:31:44: But then we did a different product, which was not an AI product, but it was a software development environment.

00:31:50: You would call it an IDE today.

00:31:53: And that was a very successful product.

00:31:56: So other HP developer teams have been your customers,

00:32:00: basically?

00:32:00: Well, yes.

00:32:02: Initially, they were just HP employees, but then they were all HP customers, which were all over the world.

00:32:09: I visited Deutsche Telekom, I visited FedEx, I visited BMW, all these places.

00:32:16: Yeah, cool.

00:32:17: That must have been very exciting times.

00:32:19: It

00:32:19: was.

00:32:20: Being on the first business trip and stuff.

00:32:24: Do you remember a particular moment of an early success as a product manager or product leader where you thought like this is how it should feel like after you've described that I'd say frustration of ten years of building the thing right but not building the right thing like what was the first time you ever thought this is how it should be?

00:32:46: well I would probably because I had just had that coaching and it was really getting some really good advice and the timing was very good.

00:33:01: That was a really fun and successful product that we did.

00:33:05: It was sold for twenty years.

00:33:11: It was a very interesting product too because there was some terrific university technology that inspired it and it was just one of those, you know, great product is something your customers love, but it's just now possible.

00:33:27: And this was one of those products that was just now possible.

00:33:31: And so, yeah, the customers genuinely loved it and they could do things they could never do before.

00:33:38: Yeah, cool, cool.

00:33:40: And then you just said, I want to have more of these success moments.

00:33:43: Try to keep, yeah.

00:33:45: I remember actually that The guy who coached me told me.

00:33:50: a couple said something very interesting.

00:33:53: He said, you can't guarantee home runs.

00:33:57: You know what we mean by home runs, right?

00:33:59: Big successes.

00:34:01: Because you never know.

00:34:03: You really never know.

00:34:04: And I think that is really true.

00:34:06: You can't know.

00:34:07: You can't guarantee home runs, but he said, you can guarantee you don't strike out.

00:34:13: which is a big fail.

00:34:15: You don't, you can get it.

00:34:16: And I couldn't believe that because so many products fail.

00:34:21: And he said, if you do these things, you will not fail.

00:34:25: You might not have a huge success, but you'll have some level of success.

00:34:30: And well, where are those things?

00:34:31: There's things where basically prototype, put it in front of customers, make sure customers love it before you build the real thing.

00:34:37: It's not like rocket science.

00:34:41: But there's techniques around this.

00:34:43: It's called customer discovery today.

00:34:47: But I found he was right.

00:34:50: I found that he was right.

00:34:51: That if you do these things, you're not going to fail.

00:34:56: They're not all great successes, but they are reasonable successes.

00:35:03: At least.

00:35:04: And that's doing way better than most.

00:35:07: Definitely.

00:35:08: From listening to you, one could understand product management is like simple common sense.

00:35:16: Like what's the tricky part?

00:35:20: Process people.

00:35:23: Yeah, it's amazing how process people unintentionally, really through the best of intentions, best of motivations, but unintentionally undermine innovation.

00:35:35: because, you know, show me a great product, I'll show you really happy customers and a solution that was just now possible and that's innovation.

00:35:44: And that, the way you do that is not a recipe, it's principles.

00:35:52: So you cannot just copy the way other teams work, because it's not guaranteeing that

00:35:59: you're working

00:35:59: on the right thing.

00:36:00: You

00:36:00: can't even copy the way you worked last week, because what you did last week is a function of what the problems were you were trying to solve.

00:36:09: Not what you're trying to solve next week.

00:36:13: This is when I was taught.

00:36:15: I was taught there are these principles that you've got to do.

00:36:18: That's what matters and you use those principles as appropriate Based on the problem you're trying to attack.

00:36:25: Hmm, but so many people are not taught that they're taught things like safe or they're taught things like you know.

00:36:32: Yeah, it's like when we do a daily Stand up when we do a planning when we do a refinement and when we do a review we will have a a successful product.

00:36:42: That's not the case.

00:36:43: Just not the case.

00:36:44: In fact, arguably, if that's what you're focused on, you may have heard process is a substitute for thinking.

00:36:55: Yeah.

00:36:55: And you still think thinking is important, right?

00:36:59: I think that's really all that's really important.

00:37:03: Yeah.

00:37:05: Let's maybe touch ground on the theme of the podcast series, which is or the season, season is the term I was searching for.

00:37:17: It's by the way, the first time I do a podcast interview in English.

00:37:21: And it's it's challenging not to be a native speaker and your

00:37:26: English is perfect.

00:37:28: So

00:37:30: let's touch ground on the topic of intuition.

00:37:34: I know it's something you've spoken about in the past, so I'd love to hear how that plays out in your own experience.

00:37:43: And one quote I've got from you is, product management is both an art and a science.

00:37:52: So what does the

00:37:53: art part look like in your daily?

00:37:56: life or in your date in your day to day work today?

00:37:59: Well, I should clarify now.

00:38:01: You just mentioned, you know, normally you do this in German and now English.

00:38:06: This is one of those discussions where the words have nuance.

00:38:14: For example, art is nothing to do with intuition.

00:38:19: in the way, you know, I explain these and think of these.

00:38:25: Art is amazing.

00:38:27: intuition is interesting, they're different things.

00:38:30: So when we talk about art and science, the craftsmanship of creating products is both art and science.

00:38:38: I mean, there's design, for example, is a great example of both real principles, psychological principles on how people think and learn and conceptual models, and also what we often call taste, but the idea that that does.

00:38:53: certain designs are beautiful, certain designs are make you trust where you otherwise wouldn't.

00:39:01: So there's real art that combines with the engineering to yield an amazing product.

00:39:08: So that's great.

00:39:10: That's a totally different thing than the role of intuition.

00:39:16: What is the role of intuition then?

00:39:18: Yeah, so that's what I think you wanted to talk about.

00:39:21: I just want to be clear.

00:39:22: that's different.

00:39:22: Yeah, so what I understand is like art doesn't mean you need artists in order to build products, right?

00:39:28: That's true too, yes.

00:39:30: But now back to nuance.

00:39:35: I don't like the word intuition.

00:39:38: for what we're talking about because I think it's perfect

00:39:41: statement for this is misleading

00:39:43: is all.

00:39:43: it's a misleading don't get me wrong.

00:39:45: I think there is being called intuition.

00:39:48: for sure we all have it.

00:39:50: you meet somebody on the street you have a sense on on maybe what their intentions are.

00:39:58: it's probably driven by intuition product.

00:40:02: I believe intuition is a poor word to represent product sense.

00:40:10: So, and product sense, intuition feels like it's something you're born with.

00:40:19: Product sense, that is something we build.

00:40:23: Every good product person I know builds product sense.

00:40:28: When I coach, I'm coaching them to develop their product sense.

00:40:32: The person who was coaching me and made me go out there and talk to customers was like, you need to build some product sense.

00:40:39: You need to get a real understanding of your customers and the problems they have and what they're looking for in solutions.

00:40:48: Now, once you've done that, people are like, oh, that person's amazing.

00:40:53: Everything, you know, they decide is a good choice and they knew this was going to happen before the rest of the world did.

00:41:00: That's not intuition.

00:41:02: That's product sense.

00:41:04: They have learned and now they have knowledge that helps them predict what's going to happen.

00:41:13: and recognize patterns and so forth.

00:41:15: So how is product sense then different from experience?

00:41:20: It's based on experience.

00:41:22: But I think it's, experience is just kind of data.

00:41:26: And product sense is you've thought about that.

00:41:30: You see the patterns.

00:41:31: You can draw a line to what's probably going to happen next.

00:41:37: That's more, you know, it's on top of experience.

00:41:42: experience is critical.

00:41:44: And that's why developing product sense starts by learning these things, talking to customers, learning the data, learning the market, learning the industry trends, learning the technology.

00:41:55: We need to do this in order to build real product sense.

00:41:59: So you're saying we are not born with product sense.

00:42:02: There are not people who are good product manager because they were born.

00:42:06: Yeah, I think that's a common myth.

00:42:09: And it doesn't really come from product managers, the myth.

00:42:12: Most of the time it comes from founders.

00:42:15: Yeah, because they think there are Steve Jobs and Steve Jobs had that magical product sense.

00:42:21: So here's the thing.

00:42:24: Those founders, the good ones, have developed product sense.

00:42:29: Think about what a founder does from the beginning.

00:42:33: They have been at every single customer visit, probably.

00:42:36: They have done every experiment.

00:42:38: They have seen every mistake.

00:42:40: They have sweated over every competitor.

00:42:43: They have studied the industry analysts.

00:42:47: They have developed product sense.

00:42:49: Where they get in trouble, is that they don't realize that's how they got their product sense.

00:42:54: They just think it was a gift from God.

00:42:57: And

00:42:58: so then when they do their next startup, they're like, oh, I know what to do.

00:43:03: Everything I said was brilliant.

00:43:04: I just have to be inspired by God.

00:43:05: Yeah.

00:43:06: And I'm like, no, that is not how it works and you can see it.

00:43:09: We all saw that.

00:43:12: We saw Elon Musk destroy Twitter.

00:43:16: He had amazing product sense.

00:43:18: he had developed around aeronautics around electric cars, but that did not help him with Twitter.

00:43:28: Yeah, maybe that's a topic we should dive too deep into, but yeah, I guess speaking about Elon Musk could fill the entire hour and speaking about his craziness and recent developments.

00:43:42: I do have some recordings on my voicemail.

00:43:48: like i have nades answering machine

00:43:51: with the guests

00:43:51: from season one could ask questions.

00:43:55: now i feel like i should drop all these questions because you just said intuition is like a misleading term.

00:44:03: maybe we're gonna replace intuition with product sense and let me start maybe with someone you know very well and Yeah, has maybe a good follow-up question or maybe something we could dive deeper into.

00:44:20: Let's give it a try.

00:44:24: My name is Petra Wille and my question to you is, can you

00:44:28: coach or train

00:44:30: for intuition?

00:44:31: Let's say for product sense.

00:44:32: Like how do you coach or train for a

00:44:34: product sense?

00:44:34: Well, that's a perfect question really because it frames the thing.

00:44:38: I think you can't really coach or train for intuition because it's... if you believe that intuition is this innate thing, but you can absolutely coach and train for product sense, which is exactly what every good coach I know does.

00:44:57: So yes, if we take Petra at her meaning, can you develop this skill, this ability to really understand your customers, understand where things are going to be able to use to predict?

00:45:12: much of what you need to do.

00:45:14: Yes, you absolutely can.

00:45:16: I've seen it thousands of times.

00:45:19: Yeah, what I'm wondering is, I mean, we've all been two situations where we had like qualitative data, we had quantitative data, oftentimes speaking a very different language, or showing us very different results, which we cannot, in the end cannot.

00:45:37: put together like the puzzle pieces don't fit.

00:45:42: I feel there is always this little space which we try to minimize by following principles where we have to trust some gut feeling, don't you?

00:45:51: No, I see it well.

00:45:52: I don't frame it that way, but you're not wrong on what's going on.

00:45:58: Think about it this way.

00:46:01: Do you really believe that any good product person is a hundred percent data driven?

00:46:07: No, they're not.

00:46:08: No, they're not.

00:46:09: they're data-informed.

00:46:11: Yeah, the difference between Data-driven and data-informed is data-driven.

00:46:17: You don't need to think the data is somehow going to tell you what to do.

00:46:21: data is going to take the decision for

00:46:22: you.

00:46:22: It is.

00:46:23: That's not what good people do.

00:46:25: what they do is they take their product sense which they have developed over typically years and They combine that with the data which is informing a particular decision.

00:46:40: And they use that to make a judgment.

00:46:44: Good judgment, product sense is helping you make good sense of the data.

00:46:50: One of the principles that so many of the good companies do, like every good product company I know will, they are very data informed.

00:46:58: Absolutely, they run on data.

00:47:01: But like at Amazon, for example, one of their leadership principles is when The anecdotes differ from the actual data.

00:47:10: Look at those anecdotes.

00:47:11: They're telling you something.

00:47:13: It is a sign.

00:47:13: Yeah.

00:47:14: Yeah.

00:47:14: And they're trying to say, think.

00:47:17: Yeah.

00:47:17: Think your understanding combined with the data.

00:47:22: Yeah.

00:47:24: So yes, I think that is really important principle.

00:47:28: And if you think of it with that framing, that strong product sense, allows you to make good decisions as new data comes up every day.

00:47:40: We're looking at the results of a test.

00:47:42: We have a live data test going.

00:47:44: We look at the results.

00:47:45: What does that really mean?

00:47:47: What should we do?

00:47:48: That's where if you're just data driven, it's like, oh, well, we're canceling it or we're... Continuing it.

00:47:54: that's not a useful decision.

00:47:56: what you need to know is like really what should we do here?

00:47:59: maybe this is telling us something meaningful.

00:48:02: maybe it's not.

00:48:03: maybe we need to go talk to more people to figure out what's really going on.

00:48:09: More thinking

00:48:10: yeah I guess nowadays people start to feed all that data into a large language model and what want that model to decide.

00:48:20: I guess that's something you also dislike.

00:48:22: This is, you know, the people that are doing really great things with foundation models today are the ones that are thinking.

00:48:33: And the people that are just, and you know, it's, I think, I think it was my friend Shri Ash Doshi.

00:48:40: You may know Shri Ash.

00:48:41: He's a very good product thinker.

00:48:44: He was trying to say, look, if your belief is that you're going to make your decisions all based on data, then Your job can clearly be replaced.

00:48:54: Yeah.

00:48:55: So that gives me hope that our discipline will still be needed in a couple of years.

00:49:00: So I have a lot of hope that the discipline is, but not as it's practiced in most of Europe.

00:49:08: In most of Europe, it's a process role.

00:49:11: It's not what I'm talking about, not what we're talking about.

00:49:16: It's a process role.

00:49:19: those are the first to die.

00:49:21: Yeah, the keeper of the backlog.

00:49:23: Yes, those are those roles I do.

00:49:26: I don't know when it's going to happen.

00:49:28: I think it's already starting.

00:49:30: Maybe two years from now, four years from now, something like that.

00:49:35: The product owner role is gone.

00:49:37: Yeah.

00:49:38: And it should be gone.

00:49:39: Yeah.

00:49:39: Yeah.

00:49:39: I fully agree.

00:49:44: But there is then room

00:49:45: for

00:49:47: a product manager role.

00:49:48: that makes actual sense.

00:49:50: But that's all about thinking and not following

00:49:52: the

00:49:54: process.

00:49:56: Let me let us listen to the answering machine once again.

00:50:02: I see there's it's still a red blinking dot.

00:50:06: Speaking about technology from the past.

00:50:08: I mean, that's what we did a couple of times today already.

00:50:11: So here's another question.

00:50:17: Hi, I'm Lisa Rade and I would like to know, when hiring for a product manager, how do you make sure in an interview that somebody balances their intuition

00:50:26: with data?

00:50:27: I would frame that the same way.

00:50:28: How do we balance to?

00:50:30: what we're trying to do is we're, if you frame it instead of intuition, because again, intuition, what does that really tell people?

00:50:40: Just go with your gut.

00:50:41: That's the dumbest advice you could give anybody, right?

00:50:45: Their gut is almost certainly wrong.

00:50:46: And so I don't like the framing of the gut.

00:50:52: Gut is here, brain is here, right?

00:50:55: Going with your brain is product sense.

00:50:59: That is not gut.

00:51:00: That's product sense.

00:51:01: It's informed by you doing the work.

00:51:05: If you've done the work and this is what I interview for, right?

00:51:08: Okay, tell me an example.

00:51:10: First of all, I'm interviewing if they're... if they've already been a product manager, I want to see if they have developed product sense on their last product.

00:51:19: It's not that hard to figure that out.

00:51:21: Or do they think their job is to follow some process?

00:51:25: And when I answered correctly, it's like interviewing them, like, how did you develop your product?

00:51:31: What was the way, what principles did you apply?

00:51:34: And you're checking whether or not they've reflected what they did there.

00:51:37: Yes.

00:51:37: And I'm tracking to see, like, Did they really do the work?

00:51:42: How many customers they really talked to?

00:51:44: What did they really learn from those customers?

00:51:46: What is their takeaway?

00:51:48: What do they think is gonna happen next in that market?

00:51:52: If they've developed the product sense, we'll see that.

00:51:57: If they've done that sense, then they are, I wanna make sure that they are doing.

00:52:02: just as the, questioner implied that you're balancing that because just because you have that sense doesn't mean that you're not learning every day, right?

00:52:10: And a lot of the source of learning is data.

00:52:13: So we've been running a test and it's surprising us.

00:52:17: Something is wrong.

00:52:18: We need to figure that out.

00:52:20: Our product sense is going to end up better at the end of it, but we have to figure out what we had wrong.

00:52:29: And that's why you need to have this both.

00:52:33: And it's not just data, I should say too.

00:52:35: It's also talking to more customers.

00:52:37: It's also following the newest technology.

00:52:39: There are things we could do today that we literally couldn't do yesterday.

00:52:43: Yeah.

00:52:43: Yeah.

00:52:44: This is all part of developing that product sense.

00:52:48: Yeah.

00:52:49: I'm wondering just... Maybe it's again a language nuance, but I would be so strict with the term of intuition.

00:52:57: I realize because for me and I've never discussed that with a psychologist.

00:53:02: Maybe it would be a good discussion to have because my understanding is like into the.

00:53:08: the human intuition also comes from having learned something having collected experience and like the brain doesn't build intuition.

00:53:18: because we are born with that.

00:53:19: it's

00:53:19: like it's something that emerges over time like like in when we when we learn how to drive a car in German there's the saying it takes.

00:53:29: I don't know if that makes sense in English.

00:53:30: I give it a try.

00:53:32: like it takes you seven years after you had your travels license to build the seventh sense for traffic like that's and that's all about like.

00:53:43: That's my understanding of intuition.

00:53:44: Like after seven years driving a car, you recognize those patterns.

00:53:48: and when a ball, when you see a ball, you realize there will be a child behind that ball and you push the brakes and stuff like that.

00:53:56: But if everybody understood the word intuition to mean this, which is really what I've described as product sense, then it's not issue.

00:54:07: But most people

00:54:09: think it's just a given.

00:54:10: They

00:54:10: think it's something here, not here.

00:54:13: Yeah, but also most people think that talent is something that's given and also everybody, we would prefer to be very talented.

00:54:22: They put a lot of effort into it.

00:54:23: That's

00:54:24: right.

00:54:24: Yeah.

00:54:27: You've already mentioned I to some degree and that's the last topic for today I wanted to speak to you about.

00:54:37: so let's look a little bit into the future and how I is reshaping our craft not by replacing product sense but by expanding it.

00:54:48: that's at least how I understood your recent writing as well.

00:54:52: so I'd like to explore this topic a little bit.

00:54:55: And what I see as one of the major disruptive innovations coming in probably just a few years ahead, it's been science fiction ten years ago, but nowadays it becomes very tangible because we have it to some degree already, that languages will no longer be a barrier for humans.

00:55:19: In a couple of years from now, it will be just fluent to speak to someone in a foreign language and everybody stays in their own language and I guess that's going to be a huge disruption for mankind.

00:55:34: I'm not yet sure if it's utopia or dystopia.

00:55:38: We need to see if conflicting parties will benefit from that or if it will build more conflicts because people understand each other finally.

00:55:47: But yeah, inspired by that thought, I was wondering, or I'm curious, what may disruptions do you expect in the upcoming years?

00:56:00: Well, you were just giving an example of natural language translations.

00:56:04: I mean, we already are seeing the new programming language that everybody's learning, which they know is English.

00:56:16: Yeah.

00:56:16: Actually, one of the questions I was wondering is, does vibe coding work just as well in German as it does in English?

00:56:23: I don't know.

00:56:23: I've never, all my examples have been in English, but in theory it should, right?

00:56:30: Yeah.

00:56:31: It should.

00:56:31: There's a smaller base probably for training in other languages, but the point is we will be able to program in our natural language.

00:56:43: that is happening.

00:56:44: And that's, I think that's dramatic and as revolutionary as anything that's ever happened on the technology side.

00:56:55: As far as what else, I mean, there are, as you know, I mean, it's, there is work going on in every field right now from medicine to manufacturing to robotics.

00:57:08: logistics to everything.

00:57:10: And so I think the next era will be what the term I've been using for lack of a better term really is intelligent products, intelligent products, which are both a blend of deterministic solutions, which is what we've always had.

00:57:28: And I think we always will have as well.

00:57:32: But What we haven't had is the probabilistic solution, and that's being introduced into so many different products today, and the results are truly intelligent products, which are something that we've wished we've had for fifty years, and now we finally are experiencing.

00:57:57: Yeah, and we still wish we'd have those when we speak to Alexa or Siri these days, which became very old fashioned right now.

00:58:06: Yeah, old fashioned.

00:58:07: Yeah, they're not quite there.

00:58:10: But I think it's just a matter of time.

00:58:14: Yeah, probably when you observe the rise of AI and that's my approach now to connect the dots between the beginning and the end of the podcast because.

00:58:24: As I said, it's all about the human behind the product.

00:58:28: And we spoke about your early days.

00:58:32: So when you observe the rise of AI, do you ever feel a bit jealous of the tools and capabilities that young product managers have at their fingertips these days?

00:58:43: Or is it rather that you feel relieved that you don't have to start your career in times like these?

00:58:52: Honestly, mostly I think I've been incredibly lucky.

00:58:57: I alluded to this at the beginning of our chat, but one of the very first products I worked on was literally an AI product in nineteen eighty five.

00:59:09: So long time ago, right?

00:59:13: Forty years ago.

00:59:14: I worked on an AI product and it was literally called the HPAI Workstation and it was just so far away from the technology that needed to be.

00:59:29: We thought we were close, we were very, very far away.

00:59:34: So it was a feasibility risk you didn't foresee?

00:59:38: We thought, I mean, Yeah, the technology was not there.

00:59:44: Yeah, we didn't even realize just how far it was.

00:59:48: Do you remember how it felt?

00:59:50: very much like you remember ten years ago self-driving cars were imminent?

00:59:55: Yeah.

00:59:57: If you go and ride a Waymo, it's real, but it took a while.

01:00:02: They spent a decade doing discovery on that.

01:00:06: So that is hard.

01:00:08: That's what we learned too.

01:00:10: Some things that look like we're imminent.

01:00:14: Like I was literally working on automatic programming.

01:00:19: But that was much harder than it sounded.

01:00:23: Much harder.

01:00:24: So the point is over the last forty years I've watched several waves of attempts at AI.

01:00:32: And honestly, I gave up trying to pursue those products myself because it was clear to me the technology wasn't ready until about three years ago.

01:00:43: And then as you may know, the technology changed.

01:00:48: Neural networks became the basis of what was done.

01:00:51: And that's where transformers came from.

01:00:53: And that's where the models came from.

01:00:55: And this has changed the game.

01:00:57: So now it's real.

01:00:59: I love that.

01:01:01: my career really started with this interest and will likely end with it being real.

01:01:09: So I kind of feel like I had a front row seat to all of that.

01:01:12: I do think, because I always, I started by saying I love, I got into this because I love to create products.

01:01:20: I don't think it's ever been easier and better time to create products.

01:01:24: So I think I like to believe that if I was just, you know, finishing school right now that I would be one of those people at that Y Combinators AI startup school.

01:01:38: Yeah.

01:01:39: Now that you mentioned that, I feel like Maybe it becomes more like making a career in the music industry because there's so many talented musicians out there who put a lot of effort into it, but not everyone becomes Lady Gaga in the end or the Beatles.

01:01:58: We had them so it was maybe easier to become the Beatles in the fifties.

01:02:03: Then it is today to become famous in the music industry and maybe that's the same for developing digital products in the future because there's like.

01:02:12: a lot of competition in the future when everybody has these capabilities at hand.

01:02:16: I honestly never thought about that analogy, but I like it because I do think, you know, the barriers to entry for a musician, yeah, if you can play an instrument, you know, or use your voice, you could, it's up to you.

01:02:31: Can you create something other people want to hear?

01:02:35: The barriers to creating products, digital tech powered products are dropping.

01:02:42: like a stone.

01:02:43: They're droppings very rapidly.

01:02:46: I saw a little video the other day that was amazing.

01:02:50: It was a group of children.

01:02:53: I mean, they looked to me about seven, eight years old in their school, a whole bunch of them, all in front of computers, they were all vibe coding.

01:03:04: And you should have seen their joy when they got something working.

01:03:09: Did it remind you of the joy you felt when you started

01:03:11: coding?

01:03:12: It did, but I was building trivial little things.

01:03:14: They're building real things.

01:03:17: And so that's just, that's a beautiful thing.

01:03:22: So I'd like to think that I would have been one of those people.

01:03:26: I don't know if I'd have been Lady Gaga, but I would have been somebody who like, oh, this is awesome.

01:03:31: And hopefully I'd had the skills to stand out.

01:03:35: and develop things.

01:03:36: I really do think though, once those, you know, the barriers to entry goes so low, what's left is product sense.

01:03:46: That's the differentiator.

01:03:48: Can you really see and understand what people need and see what it's going to take to solve their problems?

01:03:55: Yeah, I like that.

01:03:56: thought very much and it's a very nice final statement.

01:04:00: so as just two questions to round up our conversation and to finish that episode of the product mention podcast.

01:04:10: And the first one is which question do you not get asked enough but would love to answer.

01:04:21: I'm probably a terrible person to ask that too because I get.

01:04:25: thousands of questions.

01:04:27: I rarely get new questions and I rarely get, and if a question is not asked, but I think it's important, I write about

01:04:37: it.

01:04:38: So I'm probably not a good one for that.

01:04:40: So what is the question you're most annoyed of?

01:04:44: Oh, that's different.

01:04:47: Because

01:04:47: you get asked it like every time.

01:04:49: I get lots of questions which immediately, you know, when somebody asks a question, it does reveal a lot about where they're coming from.

01:04:58: What they know, what they don't know.

01:05:00: And a lot of people, it's clear they have not done any learning about our space.

01:05:07: They clearly don't understand the difference between discovery and delivery.

01:05:11: They don't understand the difference between what a good product manager is supposed to do and what a product owner does.

01:05:18: And so a lot of these are just very basic questions.

01:05:23: which I personally like because it tells me that there is still some work to do for us product coaches.

01:05:30: So last question, what advice would you give to someone who's unsure whether or not they can trust their product sense already?

01:05:42: I would tell them what all the time, test it.

01:05:46: So what do you think is a good solution?

01:05:49: Prototype that solution?

01:05:51: Never been easier to do?

01:05:52: put it in front of customers, see, you will know pretty quickly if you're, you know, got a good sense for this or not.

01:06:02: And if you don't, you'll learn.

01:06:05: You're, these are all part of the work to learn.

01:06:09: So it's, it can be, as long as you have, keep an open mind and keep at it, it's self-correcting.

01:06:15: Yeah.

01:06:15: So it's all about built measure learning.

01:06:17: Yes.

01:06:19: Excellent.

01:06:19: Thank you very much for being on the show today, Marty.

01:06:22: It's been a pleasure speaking to you and a very big honor for this little podcast, which probably will become a bit bigger after this episode gets published.

01:06:32: Well, thanks for inviting me.

01:06:34: I hope it was useful and I enjoyed the chat.

01:06:45: That was the first episode of the new season.

01:06:48: I hope you enjoyed it just as much as I did and that it gave you some new ideas to take away with you.

01:06:54: All links and references can be found in the show notes as always.

01:06:59: If you liked this episode and want to support this tiny little podcast then please subscribe to it in your favorite podcast app, give it a five star rating and recommend it to a friend or a colleague.

01:07:10: You may also want to subscribe to the newsletter

01:07:13: at

01:07:13: productmenschen.de to stay up to date on upcoming guests and behind the scenes news.

01:07:19: For feedback or ideas feel free to write to feedback at productmenschen.de and if you'd like to receive more content from me or stay in touch simply follow Tobias Freudenreich on LinkedIn.

01:07:32: Last but not least you may want to know who's next on the show.

01:07:37: Well, I cannot reveal that right now.

01:07:40: But

01:07:41: I do have a gut feeling that after Marty, someone called Martin would be a good fit.

01:07:47: Don't you agree?

01:07:49: Thanks for listening.

01:07:50: I hope you tune in again in two weeks when we continue with episode two.

01:07:54: See you then.

01:08:20: Find out how we can help you at hay-clarity.com.