#2.2 Martin Eriksson, Entrepreneur, Author, Speaker and Product Leader

00:00:00: designers, engineers and product managers should be excellent at strategy because it's a problem-solving exercise at the end of the day.

00:00:07: So I think for sure, a hundred percent there's room for intuition.

00:00:11: I think technology, people, all of us have to look a little hard at ourselves as well, right?

00:00:17: We have some responsibility to play there.

00:00:20: I think we can also think bigger of like, okay, so maybe we need less product managers building e-commerce websites because I can kind of do a lot of that for us.

00:00:28: But maybe that frees us up to go do some much more interesting challenges instead,

00:00:31: hopefully.

00:00:40: Moin from Hamburg and welcome to Produktmenschen, the podcast that meets the people behind our products.

00:00:47: I'm your host Tobias Freudenreich, an independent product leadership coach and co-founder of Hey Clarity.

00:00:53: Wow, that was quite a big resonance I got for the first episode of the second season.

00:00:59: Thanks everyone for your comments, your likes and your own posts on social media as well as for your feedback you sent me via

00:01:07: email

00:01:08: or via messenger.

00:01:10: That really motivates me to continue.

00:01:12: And for those of you who haven't listened to the first episode yet, I had the MC of product Mr.

00:01:19: Marty Cagan as my guest, so maybe you want to listen into this episode just after you heard today's episode.

00:01:28: So speaking of feedback, this is what helps me a lot and motivates me a lot to continue

00:01:34: this

00:01:34: tiny little podcast.

00:01:36: So you would do me a big, big favor if you have a couple of minutes to help spreading the word, tell your friends and colleagues about the podcast, recommend it on social media, on LinkedIn, on Instagram, wherever you are, subscribe to it in your favorite podcast app and leave a five star rating and a little review in your favorite podcast.

00:01:57: app, that

00:01:58: would mean

00:01:59: a lot to me.

00:02:00: Thanks in advance for supporting the podcast and help spreading the word.

00:02:05: That said, you can also subscribe to the newsletter on produktmenschen.de and you are always happily invited to send me positive or negative feedback.

00:02:16: to feedback@produktmenschen.de.

00:02:20: You find both the link to the website as well as the email address as well as every other link that's mentioned throughout the episode in the show notes.

00:02:30: And now without further ado let's jump right into today's episode.

00:02:47: Hi!

00:02:47: I'm Shaun Russell.

00:02:48: I'm Arne Kippler.

00:02:49: And I'm Tobias Freudenreich.

00:02:50: Together

00:02:51: we are Hey Clarity.

00:02:53: We help company leaders build strong product organizations.

00:02:57: Find out how we can help you at hey-clarity.com.

00:03:02: And now, enjoy today's episode.

00:03:04: Probably 

00:03:05: everyone working in digital products has seen the product then.

00:03:10: Those three iconic circles that remind us that great products happen at the intersection of business, UX and technology.

00:03:18: It's become so embedded in our collective thinking, it feels like a map we all carry in our heads, quietly guiding our way through the terrain of product work.

00:03:29: But as with most maps, we rarely ask who drew it first.

00:03:35: Well, this guy invented it.

00:03:38: Maybe you've been to a product tank meetup in your city, a cozy gathering of product people sharing stories and learnings from each other.

00:03:46: Well, this guy invented it.

00:03:50: Or you've read something on mindtheproduct.com, joined one of their trainings or found yourself inspired at one of the big Mind the Product conferences.

00:03:59: Well, you guessed it, this guy invented it.

00:04:03: And what started as a small gathering in a London pub grew to the biggest product community in the world.

00:04:10: Lately, you might have heard someone say in your org, we need a proper decision stack.

00:04:17: And well, you guessed it again, this guy invented it too.

00:04:22: There's that saying that you should never meet your heroes, cause you might be disappointed.

00:04:27: That's definitely not the case here.

00:04:29: Since meeting him in person years ago, my respect and admiration have only grown.

00:04:35: not just because of his sharp thinking and deep experience, but

00:04:40: because

00:04:40: of his big, big heart.

00:04:42: I'm deeply honored to welcome to the show Mr. Marty – ehm –

00:04:47: Martin Eriksson.

00:04:49: Yeah, the other Mart.

00:04:53: That was the one I was worried about the most.

00:04:56: My brain is doing things at the beginning.

00:04:59: So good thing we're not on video because I would be blushing right now.

00:05:02: So thank you for the introduction.

00:05:03: Thank you for being on the show, especially because you took the time not only to come to my office here in Hamburg, which I guess you also did because of this conference going on in town.

00:05:18: One of my favorites,

00:05:19: one of your favorites, which is a big compliment from someone who founded Mind the Product and the big conference in London.

00:05:27: And we are speaking about product at heart, which is these days.

00:05:31: in Hamburg.

00:05:32: But it's not only product at heart because today also is your birthday, so special thanks for making the time.

00:05:40: Let me ask two things.

00:05:41: What does a birthday mean to you these days and how on earth did you manage to look better year by year?

00:05:52: I think as you get older, birthdays definitely change, right?

00:05:54: I kind of miss the days when you were five years old or ten years old and it was kind of the best day of the year and all you got was presents and it was kind of, you know, just always fun.

00:06:03: For me, I think it's definitely a day of reflection of, like, another turnaround of the sun and another year on the planet.

00:06:10: What have we, you know, what have I done?

00:06:12: What's the year been like?

00:06:14: And so I spent a bit of the morning doing that and looking at, you know... I think it's been a pretty good year.

00:06:19: It's been a year of transformation for me and change and focusing on health and things.

00:06:23: So it's been a good year.

00:06:24: And I think maybe if I do look better on my forty eighth birthday than my forty seventh, that's because I've been able to focus on that.

00:06:32: And yeah, it takes some time out this past year to do that.

00:06:35: was your biggest motivation for that transformation?

00:06:38: you called it yourself?

00:06:40: A health reason?

00:06:40: Yeah, I mean, I haven't had any health problems, but I think anyone who's seen me on stage before and knows my nickname as the big friendly giant, since I was in high school, I've always been a really big guy.

00:06:53: And I've never had health problems with it.

00:06:55: But obviously, you know, that the risks go up.

00:06:58: And so with time and longevity, and you start getting older, you start thinking about, well, maybe I want to be around for a while.

00:07:04: And So yeah, it was mostly focused on longevity and thinking about long-term health, not any immediate issues, but yeah.

00:07:12: Yeah, perfect.

00:07:14: And we are also service podcast.

00:07:16: So what's your best tip to lose weight?

00:07:20: I mean, I've been privileged to be able to take time out, right?

00:07:23: So I took time out of work because I just couldn't do it in the day-to-day context of, you know, I used to do a lot of work travel and I think it's almost impossible to kind of manage diet and exercise and stuff when you're on the plane every week, basically.

00:07:35: And you're not in control of, you know, when you go out for lunch or dinner with colleagues and customers and things like that.

00:07:42: So I think that's the biggest one for me.

00:07:45: Otherwise, I think... you know, all the classic stuff is true.

00:07:49: It's calories in, calories out.

00:07:50: It's kind of think about where you're eating, eat healthy, get more exercise.

00:07:55: There's no rocket science to this stuff, but being able to take the time has been a privilege and is really what made a difference for me.

00:08:02: I'm now on sixty six kilos in eighteen months.

00:08:06: Lost lost sixty six.

00:08:08: Yeah, because

00:08:08: if you were on sixty six because you're a tall man, I would be very worried to warm us a little bit up.

00:08:17: I start with something every guest of this season has to go through and that is a quick sentence completion and there are no right or wrong answers just like in user research just whatever comes to mind.

00:08:34: and please ask quick and as intuitively as possible.

00:08:40: Are you ready?

00:08:41: Let's

00:08:41: go.

00:08:42: Excellent.

00:08:43: The biggest myth about product work is

00:08:48: that we are the CEOs of the product.

00:08:50: The product then to me is

00:08:53: misunderstood.

00:08:55: AI will change the importance of intuition too.

00:09:00: Sorry to product.

00:09:01: No, I think AI, we might want to dig into that one.

00:09:05: I think AI is going to change everything, but we don't know what it's going to change yet.

00:09:09: I think it's going to change how we do product, but for the better.

00:09:13: The

00:09:13: biggest misconception about the decision stack is

00:09:17: that it is just top-down.

00:09:20: The intuition of most leaders is

00:09:24: to be top-down, to provide answers.

00:09:28: In ten years, AI will just to end with a simple one

00:09:32: have changed the world.

00:09:34: Excellent.

00:09:35: You're pretty much aligned with the other M guy, Marty, who's been on the show earlier.

00:09:43: You said the product then to me is misunderstood.

00:09:47: How?

00:09:49: I mean, I think there's a few different reactions that come to it that I hear a lot.

00:09:55: But one of the most common ones is that they People read it as because I have the you know product manager you are here in the middle of those those three circles.

00:10:06: A lot of people assume I mean that the product manager is the boss of product and UX and technology and that's not true right I think.

00:10:14: for me it's.

00:10:15: great product work comes out of the three of those skills coming together.

00:10:19: Some product people will have two or three and all of those.

00:10:22: But it's only really that together with our colleagues in design and engineering that we can do it.

00:10:26: So for me, it was meant to be a very collaborative thing and sometimes something we can only achieve as a team as opposed to an individual.

00:10:33: And I think a lot of people misunderstand it.

00:10:35: as this is, you know, every product manager has to be in the middle and that means they're in charge, right?

00:10:40: Yeah.

00:10:40: And they can command and control what the others do.

00:10:43: Yeah.

00:10:44: Yeah, yeah, fully understand.

00:10:47: Many people think of you and Marty Keying as the two pillars of modern product design.

00:10:52: Where do you see your approaches align and where do you see them differ the most?

00:10:57: I think largely we align on most first principles.

00:11:01: I think, you know, going back to the roots of what great product is, again, it's that trio, the three people coming or the three skill sets coming together.

00:11:08: I think it's about empowered teams.

00:11:11: So how do we put the people closest to the end user to the customer in charge of the decisions.

00:11:18: And then, you know, how do we be as iterative as possible?

00:11:22: How do we minimize risk?

00:11:23: Like all of those first principles were a hundred percent aligned on.

00:11:26: I then think we have different experiences largely driven by different sizes of organizations.

00:11:31: I think Marty spent a lot more of his time in the last.

00:11:34: Twenty years, especially helping large transformations, which I've been involved in a little bit, but I spend most of my time in kind of startups and scale ups.

00:11:42: And so they're just very different contexts.

00:11:44: And I think that's that comes back to one of those core misconceptions of product, right?

00:11:48: I think there's the number one answer in product.

00:11:51: is it depends for me, right?

00:11:52: I think the context is the thing that we have to talk about first.

00:11:55: And then we can talk about what Mike made sense in that context.

00:11:58: And so, yeah, I don't think we differ.

00:12:00: strongly on anything, but I think those contexts are very different.

00:12:05: You're a very humble person, right?

00:12:07: Speaking of startups and scalabs, but what you have in mind is, for example, Kazoo, the pretty... Car used car.

00:12:19: No, what is it?

00:12:20: What is it?

00:12:21: You tell it

00:12:21: that you've been there.

00:12:22: It was a used car.

00:12:24: Not really an even a marketplace because Kizu's business model was to actually buy in the cars refurbishment.

00:12:29: So it's basically used car dealer, but online and trying to do it at a significant scale.

00:12:35: So.

00:12:36: with the founder that we had in place.

00:12:40: He could go raise money that very few other people could do and actually go basically buy three thousand cars before we launched.

00:12:47: Build a whole product and technology team around that in order to deliver cars across.

00:12:52: the UK within forty eight hours of purchase.

00:12:56: And so it was a very interesting business model.

00:12:58: I think there's a lot of lessons learned around that, but yeah, that we scaled incredibly quickly.

00:13:03: I was the interim CPO for six months, just kind of helping build up the team and get them up and running.

00:13:09: And in the years after that, all credit to the team, not to me, went from kind of zero to an eight billion dollar.

00:13:16: back IPO, I think on the New York Stock Exchange.

00:13:20: That's what you refer to.

00:13:21: in the two years after that went back down to nearly zero again.

00:13:26: So yeah, lots of lessons to be learned from those kinds of examples, but yeah.

00:13:31: Yeah.

00:13:33: I see.

00:13:34: We'll touch ground on your career a bit later.

00:13:37: Before we do so, I use the following question as a segue into your past.

00:13:42: So you've moved around quite a bit from being, I hope, born and raised in Sweden to many years in London and some years in the US if my research was correct.

00:13:58: So what do you need to feel home?

00:14:01: Yeah, actually, so I was born in Sweden, but I left at eighteen months old.

00:14:06: My father was an electrical engineer working for ABB, the Swedish engineering giant.

00:14:12: And so we lived this kind of expat life that doesn't really exist anymore.

00:14:16: So I grew up in Indonesia, Kenya, Thailand, Iraq, and Turkey before ending up back in Sweden for university, worked for a couple of startups, and then London.

00:14:30: Back to Sweden for a bit, London, Boston for a couple of years, and then London.

00:14:34: So yeah, home is a strange concept for me.

00:14:37: I think I'm now both Swedish and British citizen.

00:14:41: I think home for me.

00:14:43: There's kind of two answers.

00:14:44: One is it's either wherever my parents are, not only my mom survives, but it's wherever my parents are is home or it's wherever my suitcase is.

00:14:53: So I'm the kind of person who says, I'm going home when I'm going to the hotel because that's where my suitcase is.

00:14:59: Okay,

00:14:59: so today you're going home in Hamburg.

00:15:02: So you live in Hamburg today.

00:15:04: Exactly.

00:15:05: Yeah, wonderful.

00:15:05: It's a great city to live in.

00:15:07: Absolutely.

00:15:09: I always say it's... the best city to live in.

00:15:12: But I've only visited Stockholm two years ago for the first time.

00:15:16: And I think there is a tough competition.

00:15:20: But yeah, that's not that deep into the topic of cities.

00:15:25: Different podcasts.

00:15:26: Yeah.

00:15:27: So before we dive into your career, I would love to rewind a bit more.

00:15:35: And I'd love to learn what shape the way you think and lead.

00:15:39: Long before my enter product.

00:15:40: So let's focus a bit on your early years on my script.

00:15:44: It says in Sweden, but it was not in Sweden as I just learned.

00:15:47: So what did your childhood look like basically?

00:15:51: Yeah, I mean, I think it has definitely shaped a lot of how I approach the world, right?

00:15:55: I think the number one thing you learn with that kind of life is adaptability, right?

00:16:00: Because you're moving country every three, four years.

00:16:03: be completely new schools, completely new friends, completely new everything around you, the culture around you, the food you're eating, like everything changes.

00:16:11: So you really learn adaptability.

00:16:14: But I think from that, I've also learned a lot of empathy and a lot of kind of cultural sensitivity to other people.

00:16:22: I think the saving grace of the growing up that way was definitely that everyone else was in the same kind of.

00:16:27: Scenario.

00:16:28: so I went to international schools.

00:16:29: hence the weird accent where most people think I'm American Or at least most Europeans think I'm American.

00:16:35: Americans think I'm Canadian.

00:16:36: Canadians are like where the fuck are you from?

00:16:39: but Yeah.

00:16:40: So I think in international schools, everyone's kind of in the same boat because whether they're diplomats or, you know, oil or energy or like engineering families like ours, everyone was moving around.

00:16:50: So there was no concept of like, oh my God, the new kid in school because everyone with a new kid in school.

00:16:54: So at least that was okay.

00:16:55: And everyone was accepting of that.

00:16:57: But yeah, I think you definitely learn a lot about Approaching a new environment and engaging with people differently than if you just go up in the same place for your whole life.

00:17:08: Sounds to me like the excellent preparation for a job and product.

00:17:11: Probably in many ways was.

00:17:12: I mean there's downsides like you said kind of referred to right.

00:17:15: where's home is a tough one.

00:17:17: There's nowhere to run back to and there's no kind of safe place to go home to.

00:17:21: You kind of have to make your home wherever you want to be.

00:17:23: but It has a lot of upsides.

00:17:25: like it's a pretty amazing way to grow up and be able to see a lot of the world and we've got to travel a lot as part of that and See even more than just the places we lived in.

00:17:33: so yeah an amazing way to grow up.

00:17:36: Learn a lot has some downsides, but yeah, generally an amazing thing.

00:17:39: and I think as you're alluding to Definitely a great preparation for products, which is all about you know working with other people.

00:17:48: a great introduction to I mean, I think what started the whole thing for me of designing product, right, is like, how do we empathize with the people who use this and how do we build something that makes sense for them?

00:17:58: I think that kind of empathy muscle was definitely triggered.

00:18:02: Yeah, and dealing with change, I guess, is also something very important, which you learn early in your life.

00:18:08: Where would you say, should a product manager feel home in a company?

00:18:14: I think, I mean, we have to be comfortable in the uncomfortable.

00:18:17: or I think, right?

00:18:17: That's the challenge.

00:18:18: So we have to figure out how to be comfortable with change.

00:18:21: And I think it's one of the hardest parts of the product job because that is not naturally comfortable for most of us.

00:18:27: And it can be challenging and especially bringing people along with us on that kind of change can be uncomfortable.

00:18:32: But I think whether you're going through a digital transformation or you're, you know, in a startup where everything's kind of being done in air quotes the right way, I think change is constant in what we're doing, right?

00:18:46: I mean, we just see the last few years of the impact of gen AI suddenly changed everything again, right?

00:18:51: And so we have to be, yeah, I think comfortable being uncomfortable.

00:18:56: Yeah, absolutely.

00:18:59: What were the well-used principles or lessons you learned from your family or from the people around you throughout your childhood?

00:19:07: And I would be particularly interested in what were those that you had to unlearn later on?

00:19:14: I think classic ones around Swedish Protestant values of hard work and focus and family, I think we're there from a very early age.

00:19:25: I think my parents were both very... culturally sensitive and curious.

00:19:30: So that kind of sense of curiosity and sensitivity to other cultures and other approaches.

00:19:35: There's no right way or wrong way to live your life or pursue your dreams.

00:19:39: And we have to be respectful of each other for that.

00:19:42: So I think a lot of those kind of positive lessons.

00:19:44: I'm learning.

00:19:48: That's a really good question.

00:19:49: What have I had to unlearn from my upbringing?

00:19:53: I think maybe there's a hesitancy to or there's a Chameleon effect of kind of moving around that much and you kind of you can be anything to anyone and sort of.

00:20:01: I've had to unlearn that a little bit of that and focus back in on who am I and what do I bring to the table?

00:20:07: and You've said that I was humble earlier.

00:20:11: I think a lot of that comes from that kind of sense of I shouldn't stand out and I shouldn't.

00:20:15: there's a Swedish value there as well right if not not sticking out.

00:20:18: Yeah, so some of those things I'm trying to unlearn a little bit to be a bit more Confident in myself and what I bring to the world

00:20:27: And the world would deserve you to be a bit louder voice.

00:20:33: So I would really appreciate it.

00:20:36: So I think you shouldn't shy away from that.

00:20:41: I've got one picture with me.

00:20:44: You see the backside only.

00:20:46: I hand it to you.

00:20:47: You can turn it around.

00:20:48: I would want you to describe what you see.

00:20:51: And I hope that it shows.

00:20:53: the right one and it brings up some memories which you can share with us.

00:21:00: Ah, so we're looking at a photo of a school.

00:21:04: It's a series of sort of Swedish yellow buildings.

00:21:09: I don't know how better to describe the color.

00:21:11: It's a town called Sigtuna and the school is called SSHO.

00:21:15: And I went to boarding school there for the last five years at my kind of high school.

00:21:19: So from grade eight to grade twelve in the U.S.

00:21:23: system or kind of the end of the I.B.

00:21:25: program, which I did the end of the graduating high school basically, which is actually my thirtieth anniversary this year of graduating from the school.

00:21:36: Congratulations.

00:21:38: Is that a congratulations or is that a goddamn year old?

00:21:41: I don't know.

00:21:44: Emotion to have to that one depends

00:21:45: on your emotion with regards to that school.

00:21:49: if it's better that it's far away now or

00:21:51: no, I think it's again.

00:21:53: This is a probably a very formative experience right if it wasn't by choice necessarily because we were we lived in Iraq at the time.

00:21:59: so we at Nineteen ninety I started the school And those who remember your history know that in nineteen ninety Sam Hussein decided that he did not like his neighbors and invaded Kuwait.

00:22:11: And so

00:22:12: you've been in Iraq at that time.

00:22:13: We were living in Iraq at the time.

00:22:15: We were home for the summer.

00:22:17: My father had just gone back to Iraq to get back to work.

00:22:20: But we were home for the summer.

00:22:22: We're meant to go back.

00:22:23: Two or three weeks after the invasion, we had flights booked and obviously canceled those and stayed in Sweden.

00:22:30: And so I ended up in this boarding school as the best kind of schooling option to keep that going.

00:22:35: My father was actually stuck in Iraq for another six months.

00:22:38: That's the dark memories of this picture in this period.

00:22:42: But he was eventually allowed out before the war started.

00:22:47: And I stayed in the boarding school because it's one of the best schools in Sweden and we wanted to put me into the IB program there eventually anyway.

00:22:55: And so I stayed in the boarding school for another four years, but it's the journey started earlier because of circumstances outside of our control.

00:23:03: Yeah, yeah, I understand.

00:23:05: But at least it's a very nice surrounding.

00:23:07: It's a beautiful school.

00:23:08: Yeah, I'm at Sigtuna.

00:23:10: It's this beautiful town just outside Stockholm.

00:23:12: So it's about an hour outside Stockholm.

00:23:15: It used to be the capital of Sweden about a thousand years ago.

00:23:18: So there's a lot of history to it, but it's a beautiful little town.

00:23:21: And it's a great school.

00:23:22: I think I have a lot of great memories there.

00:23:24: A lot of my oldest friends are from there because I've kind of lost contact with the ones from before because of moving around so much.

00:23:30: So, but the kind of five years there was.

00:23:34: definitely formative.

00:23:34: And I think, again, you just learn a lot about independence, because, you know, moving away from home basically at thirteen to go to a boarding school.

00:23:43: And yes, I'd go home on weekends initially and then travel home several times a year.

00:23:48: But and you go home for the summer and things like that.

00:23:50: But you still, you know, take very much, take care of yourself, doing your own laundry and stuff at thirteen, which most people don't have to.

00:23:57: Yeah.

00:23:58: But it helps you grow up fast, right?

00:24:01: And take some responsibility, maybe

00:24:03: again

00:24:03: a recipe

00:24:04: for

00:24:04: becoming.

00:24:05: Maybe a product manager or making Korean product afterwards.

00:24:09: You started at Lin Chopping University and I read that you played rugby back then.

00:24:18: And you've also been the editorial in the editorial team for the school paper, which you've been in the school before as well.

00:24:28: So writing.

00:24:29: uh was a thing i guess and still is because we hopefully all know your book about product leadership and we are looking forward to the upcoming book about the decision stack.

00:24:40: um and you've been part of the student union uh looking back what mattered most for you during to you during these days.

00:24:50: I think the university, I mean, a lot of my engagement there was actually, I built the first student, well, helped build not just me, but helped build the first student union website, helped build the first school newspaper website, helped, you know, a lot of these things because I started uni in ninety five.

00:25:04: So just as the web was kind of blowing up.

00:25:07: And so really for me, a lot of that was just discovering the internet, discovering the web, being able to build things on it as a kind of designer developer back in the back then.

00:25:18: And honestly, that was probably where it went wrong as well because I spent more time in the computer lab building websites and doing those kind of things because that was much more fun than going to lectures and going to my classes.

00:25:29: And so I dropped out of college actually after two years and didn't finish my degree.

00:25:34: The idea was to come back at some point, but I never did.

00:25:39: So yeah, but again, it was, you know, all those kind of roads come together for the product thing, but that's kind of where I started building.

00:25:47: websites properly.

00:25:48: I built my own personal things before that.

00:25:51: I think I had my first website, personal one and kind of playing around with things.

00:25:57: But this is kind of, you know, doing it for someone else, building it properly, as much as we did anything properly back in.

00:26:04: I

00:26:04: started building

00:26:05: at the same

00:26:07: year, so I think I know roughly what you mean.

00:26:11: We called it programming, although we wrote just a bit HTML and barely new CSS.

00:26:18: Some CTI scripting and things, you know, a little bit.

00:26:20: Yeah,

00:26:20: a bit a little bit of JavaScript for the magic.

00:26:27: What kind of student have you been?

00:26:30: The light back party guy, the ambitious overachiever, the quiet nerd?

00:26:35: I guess so, because you just said you've been programming or writing websites or the school paper romantic.

00:26:44: Probably some a little bit of all of those.

00:26:47: I think I did better in high school, but it's probably, you know, the classic Kramer.

00:26:54: So basically I would spend most of the year not worrying too much and then holy shit, the exam's coming up and maybe I should read the book and then kind of cram everything into my brain and then do okay on the exam and move on.

00:27:07: So yeah, but not the party guy.

00:27:10: Somewhere in between the quiet nerd and the school paper romantic and the, but yeah, Kramer's probably the most apt description.

00:27:18: Okay.

00:27:21: What what came to my mind earlier when you say like you?

00:27:26: You finished University without a degree?

00:27:30: looking into at your career now, I guess it would have been a waste of time to spend more time in in university, but I guess it felt different back then.

00:27:41: Yeah, it was definitely a scary choice to make at the time.

00:27:45: I you know a lot of twenty twenty hindsight things that you can pull out of that.

00:27:50: I probably jumped too quickly into university.

00:27:52: So I was already younger than most of my class, graduating class in high school, because I'd started in international school, not in the Swedish system.

00:27:58: So I was just a year younger than everyone.

00:28:01: And then most people in Sweden take a break, whether they, you know, a lot of most men back again now do.

00:28:08: military service at the time was kind of optional.

00:28:11: Or they just take a year abroad or, you know, go traveling before they start university.

00:28:14: So when I started uni and I did none of those things, I went straight from high school to university.

00:28:19: I was two years younger than everyone else.

00:28:21: I hadn't taken that break.

00:28:22: The school system was very different.

00:28:24: Suddenly jumping into Swedish university from kind of the international Buccalaureate program.

00:28:29: And so, yeah, lots of things like that that made it odd or challenging.

00:28:34: uh, transition for me.

00:28:36: And so dropping out, it was, it was a hard choice because you kind of don't know what you have ahead of you.

00:28:40: It's, it definitely feels career limiting at the time.

00:28:42: Um, but I knew I just kind of wanted to go build some stuff and work on this interesting web thing for a while.

00:28:49: And the plan at the time was, you know, I'll go do that for a couple of years and then I'll come back and I'll finish the degree and then, you know, I'll grow up.

00:28:56: Um, and as it happens, I never grew up.

00:28:58: Um, maybe not the best questions.

00:29:04: question for young people listening, but have you ever been asked for a degree throughout your career?

00:29:11: For sure.

00:29:12: I think in the early parts of my career, it was limiting for me, right?

00:29:15: So I would apply for things and I would not be able to get the job because I didn't have a degree.

00:29:19: And I was always honest about it, you know, I've never hidden that fact.

00:29:25: But I think it's, I think the more the more experience you put it, Put underneath you the more experience you have the less important what you did early on matters and even now.

00:29:35: When I craft a CV because I need a CV for different things now.

00:29:41: I don't even have to talk about the first five, ten years of my career, right?

00:29:43: Because like you kind of summarize it down and like it's just not that important.

00:29:47: So I think the more the more you put in the less important it becomes, but I think it is it's still sadly important in.

00:29:56: that kind of first or second job in your career to show that you've at least ticked that box.

00:30:01: I personally don't look for it when I'm hiring.

00:30:02: I don't think it's important.

00:30:04: Um, I think it's, it's, it's not a negative either.

00:30:07: Right.

00:30:07: Obviously, like if that's, uh, if people, you know, go into a good school and learn something, that's a good thing.

00:30:11: But if you have, if you show that you have not done that for good reason, like you've done something else, you've got some experience or you built something or, uh, you were doing something for your family, like whatever that is, if there's a good reason, then I don't think that's a negative either.

00:30:25: But I'm not the only one or they're not.

00:30:28: not everyone thinks that way, I guess, right?

00:30:30: There are definitely HR departments and things who still go like, oh, must have degree, right?

00:30:34: So it can be limiting.

00:30:35: At least I guess the number of rejections being sent out with the argument we don't hire you because you finished university.

00:30:46: Those are rare I guess.

00:30:48: So

00:30:49: staying in school kids.

00:30:51: Speaking about your career, it's really hard to summarize your impressive CV.

00:30:58: Worked your way up in many, many companies.

00:31:02: You advised more than one hundred fifty companies

00:31:06: like that.

00:31:06: Yeah.

00:31:08: And you've been working for the Financial Times, for Monster, for Huddle, for Kizoo and recently for EQT.

00:31:18: Is that the way you pronounce it?

00:31:20: Yeah.

00:31:21: OK, cool.

00:31:24: And so.

00:31:25: And you took on leadership responsibility early on in your career.

00:31:29: What would you say?

00:31:30: which company influenced your thinking

00:31:32: the most?

00:31:33: I think early days for sure.

00:31:36: Monster where I had that classic journey that we then see a lot of people coming to product tank and mind the product and product at heart have a similar journey of, you know, they have other titles.

00:31:47: I was before that I was a designer developer.

00:31:50: I had titles like website manager, webmaster, like all sorts of like weird titles because we didn't I kind of know what that role was.

00:31:56: And then I came to Monster and I was like, oh, product manager, this is what I do.

00:32:00: This is that, that intersection.

00:32:01: This kind of covers all those pieces.

00:32:03: This is kind of what makes sense for me.

00:32:05: And then that opened my eyes to like, oh, there's a whole world out there.

00:32:08: you know, books out there as people who talk about this, there's kind of information about how to do product management.

00:32:13: It was still early days.

00:32:14: This was nineteen ninety nine, two thousand when I started, but that was a real eye-opener for me of like, oh, this is the job and this is what it means and this is what I want to do as a career.

00:32:24: So that was transformational for me.

00:32:26: And then I had an amazing boss there towards the end of my time at Monster, who really, I think I learned a lot about leadership too.

00:32:35: And I actually dedicated partly in the book as well.

00:32:38: Um, who really kind of showed what good leadership looks like when it's, you know, that empowerment, um, but building trust and building, you know, building up your team and taking care of them and then empowering them to go and execute.

00:32:50: Um, so learning both those lessons, I think it monster made it one of the most impactful for me.

00:32:55: And again, that's one of these startups or scale-ups you work.

00:32:59: That was definitely, yeah, I mean, that's on the scale-up journey.

00:33:01: I joined the European team when there were about four countries in Europe.

00:33:07: And then through M&A and growth, we were eighteen countries by the time I left sort of five and a half, six years later.

00:33:14: I worked both on the kind of, yeah, on all parts of the product really.

00:33:18: And so, yeah, it was an incredibly formative part of my career for sure.

00:33:22: And when you drew the original product then, did you expect it to become such a foundational map for the entire profession?

00:33:33: No, I think it was misunderstood as I learned.

00:33:36: I probably would have drawn it better, maybe if I had thought that.

00:33:40: No, I think it's a very funny one, because there's definitely, again, going back to your point about how Marty and I are very much alike.

00:33:46: It's very much reflecting his, at the time, three product risks, right?

00:33:50: Just thinking about it, like, what is the role of product?

00:33:53: And it's really just then reflecting that back as this combination of skill sets.

00:33:57: And because I'm a visual thinker in many ways, that Venn diagram helped me think about it and explain it to people.

00:34:03: So it was part of a blog post I wrote, which is, I think by the time I left mind the product, it had over a million, you know, reads, which is insane.

00:34:13: And so it just became this thing that resonated with people, I think, and people kind of identified themselves with and then could use to explain this to others, right?

00:34:22: Because it's still a role that's hard to explain to others and that everyone doesn't fully understand.

00:34:28: And so having those simple mental models helps people do that, hopefully.

00:34:32: Yeah, I think it does.

00:34:33: So I use it quite often in my coachings as a mental model, as well as the decision stack.

00:34:43: Move between startups, scale ups and global companies.

00:34:46: What's something you could only learn in each of these environments and in which of them did you feel the most

00:34:54: you.

00:34:56: I think startups you learn very much.

00:35:00: I mean especially if any leadership role on a startup.

00:35:03: is basically an MBA, right?

00:35:05: I think if you, again, going back to the, do you need a university degree or not?

00:35:09: I think MBA degrees can be amazing, but I think you can learn the same thing and by doing it, right?

00:35:14: And so I've been the first product leader four times in a row or something like that into startups.

00:35:21: And I think that definitely teaches you so much about kind of just general business, entrepreneurship.

00:35:27: you know, basically a mini MBA program in each of those, as well as all the product skills you need to learn and hone and think about.

00:35:35: I think scale-ups, it's much more about the same as in then enterprises, how do you build a team?

00:35:40: How do you build a big organization?

00:35:42: How do you design that to work well?

00:35:43: And how do you do all the cross-functional stuff, all the stakeholder management stuff?

00:35:48: I think enterprise generally where I've been involved, it's much more about change and transformation.

00:35:52: So it's, how do you manage change?

00:35:54: How do you help people through that?

00:35:55: How do you guide a process where you make change happen?

00:35:59: Cause as we know, bigger companies move slower, so it just takes time, but all change really takes time.

00:36:04: So I think those are the kind of the key lessons from each of those and why I like kind of moving between them.

00:36:10: I think I'm probably most at home at the kind of summer in the startup to scale up journey.

00:36:14: So still scrappy, you're still growing.

00:36:16: You're still trying to kind of build the business.

00:36:20: I think ultimately I'm probably more of a builder than a maintainer, so that's probably where I feel the most comfortable.

00:36:26: And when you say you started four times being the first one, so to say, in these startups, so very early stage startups, was it that you had to learn maybe the painful way that what worked before doesn't work again?

00:36:42: For sure.

00:36:43: And I learned a lot of lessons of like... Yeah, learn a lot of harsh lessons about strategy and how to build product and what doesn't work, I think.

00:36:56: I mean, if any of those four had been as successful as maybe you wanted to, obviously I wouldn't have had to move or leave or the company wouldn't have shut down, those sort of things.

00:37:05: So there's a lot of failure in there.

00:37:06: And I think that's the other reason you learn so much in a startup environment because ninety percent of them fail, right?

00:37:13: You do it a lot faster as well than you do in an enterprise environment.

00:37:16: So it's not a five or ten year cycle before you go, oh, it didn't work.

00:37:18: It's a one year or two year

00:37:20: cycle.

00:37:23: You're forced to quit then.

00:37:27: Was there ever a point where you thought, now I found the holy grail.

00:37:31: This is the process, how to build products.

00:37:35: And this is what i'm going to copy over and over and over again in other companies.

00:37:41: now i don't think i've ever had that again.

00:37:43: maybe it's the all that how i grew up and everything but i never kind of.

00:37:49: Never thought there's one right way to do anything and so i think again i always came back to and this is why i. continue to do this.

00:37:58: coming back to those first principles, right?

00:37:59: It's like, yes, there's some principles that are common.

00:38:01: I'm like, how do we focus?

00:38:02: How do we, you know, build the right team?

00:38:04: How do we empower the team?

00:38:05: How do we build iteratively?

00:38:06: How do we minimize it?

00:38:07: Like all those things that we talked about, but within that, there's a lot of scope for how you do that, right?

00:38:13: And how big is the team need to be?

00:38:14: How do we organize?

00:38:15: How do we focus?

00:38:16: How do we, you know, what tools do we use?

00:38:18: Do we, you know, do you use Scrum, Kanban?

00:38:21: Do we, you know, all those things don't matter.

00:38:23: I think that that's more for the team to work out together anyway.

00:38:27: Um, and that's where the again, number one answer in product comes in.

00:38:32: It depends right in that context of like, you're going to work very differently in a regulated environment.

00:38:36: I've worked in a fintech company and you have to work differently and you have a compliance team suddenly that you have to work together with and figure out what, what can you do?

00:38:43: What can't you do?

00:38:44: That's just as important as any other stakeholder.

00:38:47: And then.

00:38:48: the next time it's a BTC environment and compliance isn't a thing, right?

00:38:53: Yes, there's regulation, but it's much lighter and so you can move much faster, move differently.

00:38:57: And so those contexts matter hugely, right?

00:38:59: And how you do product and what you do.

00:39:02: But the first principles, I think, remain the same, but not, yeah.

00:39:05: There's no one thing that you can copy paste.

00:39:08: What are the first principles?

00:39:10: I think for me, first principles, off the top of my head again, Empirateam's number one for me.

00:39:15: It's a lot of what came out of the book that we wrote.

00:39:18: And really that was an excuse to go interview hundreds of product leaders to figure this stuff out, right?

00:39:23: And the common thread came back as Empirateam's, the people closest to the customer, closest to the problem should be the ones deciding how to solve that problem.

00:39:33: So that's number

00:39:34: one and I understand the team should be the ones who are the closest to the customer, which is not a given in every company.

00:39:42: Yeah, very good point.

00:39:43: And that's and again, that the team is a trio that product design and engineering own it together.

00:39:49: There's no one boss.

00:39:52: mess of titles in there.

00:39:52: But anyway, that we should work as iteratively as possible because that's a way to minimize risk, not kind of big waterfall things or big bang releases that we should do, you know, balancing discovery and delivery so that we make sure we're not just building the thing right, but building the right thing in the first place.

00:40:11: I think another big one for me is minimizing dependencies.

00:40:13: So how do we figure out how to organize our team so that We actually minimize or remove dependencies?

00:40:18: because as soon as you need to do stuff across teams, that's where things blow up and prioritization becomes a nightmare and you need spreadsheets and oversight and all this organizational overhead.

00:40:28: So yeah, those are some of the key first principles come to mind for me and those I will copy paste from every organization at every scale.

00:40:35: But then the context matters of how you actually do those things.

00:40:38: How you bring them to life.

00:40:40: From building digital products in the nineties to shaping global product communities, where along that journey did you realize, I'm not just building products, I'm shaping how others build them.

00:40:53: That was never the intent, right?

00:40:55: I think I started Product Tank in twenty ten.

00:40:59: which is when I was at Huddle, my first kind of back to startup job after years at Monster and Financial Times, kind of bigger organizations, largely because again, I was the first product person in the door.

00:41:10: I hadn't built my team yet.

00:41:11: So I was the only product person in the building.

00:41:15: And I didn't have anyone else to kind of talk to about these things and share challenges with.

00:41:18: And so I was like, let's see how I can meet other people.

00:41:21: And at the time there wasn't any other meetup.

00:41:23: So I started one.

00:41:25: And that's really all I wanted, right?

00:41:26: As you said, there were.

00:41:27: Twenty-five people in the back room of a pub in London.

00:41:31: That's kind of all I wanted it ever to be.

00:41:34: But I obviously wasn't the only one who felt that pain.

00:41:36: So we very quickly grew.

00:41:39: And within a couple of meetups, I'd met Jenna and Simon, my then co-founders and mine the product.

00:41:46: And we kind of decided to connect the dots between.

00:41:48: they were working a product camp event.

00:41:50: I'd been running product tank.

00:41:52: And then we wanted to figure out how do we connect the dots between the events, which is what led to mine the product.

00:41:56: And then the conference really came out of extending that thinking again of like, okay, well, we've been having these amazing meetups.

00:42:02: We have those interesting content happening.

00:42:05: How do we get like basically, how do we get Marty Kagan to come to us?

00:42:09: Well, we probably have to pay for his flights.

00:42:11: Okay.

00:42:11: Well, then we have to sell tickets.

00:42:13: All right.

00:42:13: I guess we're running a conference.

00:42:14: And so it was really about creating a space for these conversations to happen rather than trying to shape products.

00:42:21: And then I think we, we started shaping product as we went, but that wasn't the intent necessarily.

00:42:28: Speaking of this pub fifteen years ago Today there was one person in the room we both know.

00:42:38: His picture is behind you on the wall and luckily I had an answering machine that recorded questions which I can play back to my guests.

00:42:50: and he was a guest in my first season.

00:42:54: and one of the repetitive elements in the second season is that guests from the first season.

00:43:01: and ask questions to those in the second season.

00:43:05: And now let's see if that old answering machine still works.

00:43:12: Hi, I'm Mark Hadesch.

00:43:14: And my question to you is, how should we provide clarity and guidance to our team in a time of ambiguity?

00:43:21: For example, when data is not available or when key boundaries are about to change, but it's not clear in which way.

00:43:29: For example, upcoming regulation.

00:43:32: Good question.

00:43:32: I think it's one of the core skills or jobs for a product to do, right?

00:43:38: And I think our product leadership, especially, and I think it goes back to, and not to touch on this too much, but it goes back to kind of the decision stack that I've been working on recently.

00:43:47: I think it's providing the context for your team within which they make decisions, right?

00:43:50: And I think it's providing the clarity of strategic direction and what's important to the business and how we make impact for the business.

00:43:58: that then allows teams to be more uh empowered and i think that's the context within which we can also create a safer space for change.

00:44:05: that's happening right because we are being much more clear about.

00:44:08: Where we're going as business what's important to the business.

00:44:11: this is what we've all agreed or committed to that we're building together and where we're going there's a mission or vision that we believe in.

00:44:18: there's a strategy that we believe in.

00:44:20: And so as changes come we understand.

00:44:23: Why those changes happen right and why they might have an impact on our role on how we do work on what's important right now.

00:44:31: Whether it's you know interest rate changing and suddenly money isn't free and we have to focus on different things.

00:44:36: I've seen teams go from.

00:44:39: you know, growth at any cost, we just need users, we just need usage to, holy shit, actually, we need to make money now.

00:44:44: How do we flip that switch?

00:44:47: And that's a really tough conversation to have.

00:44:49: if you've never had that context conversation, if you've never talked about why are we focused on user growth?

00:44:52: Well, because we think this is our strategy.

00:44:55: And we've talked about this with our board.

00:44:57: And so that's why this is important.

00:44:59: And then suddenly like Flipping the switch it's much more easier if you provided that context like.

00:45:04: well actually now that the environments change our investors need something different.

00:45:08: Therefore this is the focus.

00:45:09: it's still the same strategy but we have to focus on different things to get there.

00:45:12: That makes it much more understandable.

00:45:14: so I think the job is there to always create that context of like why we do what we do what's important.

00:45:21: Always bringing it back to that first principle again of like being customer centric.

00:45:24: and what do we?

00:45:26: why are we trying to do this for the customer.

00:45:29: And I think.

00:45:30: The more you can provide that context up front, the more resilient you make your organization and your team as well when changes have to happen or AI suddenly comes along and changes how we do everything.

00:45:40: Again, you can just go back into the stack and go, right?

00:45:43: Well, our strategy still makes sense.

00:45:46: So actually AI doesn't change what we're doing.

00:45:48: It's going to change how we work and therefore we're going to do XYZ or actually hang on a minute.

00:45:52: This changes everything.

00:45:53: We have to throw the strategy out the window, start from scratch.

00:45:57: if the team's been with you on that journey, that's going to be less jarring than if it's just directive and top down and feature factor where it's like, go build X and then next week to come back actually scrap X, go build Y. I think that's actually more jarring.

00:46:11: The way I understood Mark was more about like, how do I come up with the proper strategy being the responsible leader when I could imagine situations?

00:46:21: data doesn't tell me stuff and we agree we should be data informed and driven.

00:46:30: Data might tell me different stories.

00:46:32: qualitative and quantitative data might have complete different stories that I cannot compile in the end.

00:46:40: or what Mark referred to is there is upcoming regulation and I'm in a highly regulated market.

00:46:45: I just can't foresee what the politics are going to decide.

00:46:50: And what I was hoping for is to understand is their room for intuition in our jobs.

00:46:57: Yes.

00:46:59: So the short answer is yes, I think there is.

00:47:02: but so I think strict good strategy is always an intuitive leap, right?

00:47:06: It is it's a creative endeavor It's a problem-solving endeavor, which is why product people and again designers engineers and product managers Should be excellent at strategy because it's a problem-solving exercise at the end of the day.

00:47:20: And it is it requires intuitive leaps, but just like any intuitive leap That means we're coming up with a hypothesis, right?

00:47:26: And then we have to go test that hypothesis and we have to minimize the risk of the hypothesis.

00:47:30: So I think the challenge is, yes, we should use our intuition to like, I think this is the direction, but then we have to do the work, right?

00:47:37: Of unpacking.

00:47:38: What does that mean?

00:47:39: So what are the assumptions that go into that?

00:47:40: How can I go test those assumptions?

00:47:43: Are there low risk things that we can go do or test or do more research or look at more data to.

00:47:49: de-risk this assumption or this intuitive leap rather than just, yep, this is the intuitive leap.

00:47:55: Let's do this for the next eighteen months and hope for the best, right?

00:47:58: Yeah.

00:47:59: So I think for sure, a hundred percent there's room for intuition.

00:48:04: And I think the more experience you have, the more kind of you can listen to your gut because you've seen a lot of different scenarios.

00:48:10: You've seen a lot of things working.

00:48:13: But the core job is still then de-risking that, right?

00:48:17: figuring out how can you test it.

00:48:19: I would say the other thing that I really recommend to people when I talk about strategies to think through different scenarios, right?

00:48:25: So for that regulated example, for example, you can definitely paint a picture like this is our overarching strategy.

00:48:32: We have this regulated.

00:48:33: regulatory thing coming up and we can imagine two scenarios or three scenarios.

00:48:37: So if this party wins and this comes in, then this is going to happen and this is what we would have to do.

00:48:43: If this party comes in and they vote completely in a different way, then this is what we might have to do.

00:48:47: And I think you can leave that ambiguity there, but you still have some clarity of like, these are the choices we're trying to make.

00:48:52: This is why those are important.

00:48:53: And you give yourself some time to do some of that de-risking up front and some testing, maybe, you know, doing more research, looking at more data.

00:49:01: And then when that regulation comes down, you go, okay, well, it's choice A. We've already done a lot of the work with DRIST that we kind of know what we have to do.

00:49:07: And

00:49:08: I hope we one day get back to times where politics can be as predictable as you just described and we just have two or three different options.

00:49:16: And the options are, you know, sane.

00:49:18: That would be nice.

00:49:20: It's when we have the insanity option and that somehow wins.

00:49:23: I don't understand.

00:49:25: Me neither.

00:49:26: It feels like mankind has more data than ever and becomes less data informed than ever.

00:49:37: It's crazy, but let's maybe not touch ground there, because then we might record for another two hours.

00:49:41: Yeah, I mean, I think technology, people, all of us have to look a little hard at ourselves as well, right?

00:49:48: We have some responsibility to play there.

00:49:49: of the platforms that we built and enable some of this kind of echo chamber behavior and tribal thinking is on us, right?

00:49:58: Yeah,

00:49:59: and also I feel the tech industry and its leaders played a bit of a disappointing role, let's say in the recent developments, at least from my perspective.

00:50:14: So can you think of a moment where your intuition went completely against the data and you were glad you trusted your intuition over data?

00:50:27: I think I can definitely tell you an example where my intuition went horribly wrong.

00:50:32: Okay,

00:50:34: interested in that one too.

00:50:35: Maybe

00:50:35: start there.

00:50:36: I think at Huddle, this was a, you know, when at the same time as I started Product Tank, the founders and I was, you know, an early employee, but not one of the founders, but we all kind of believed and had this intuition that we needed a full suite of collaboration software, basically, that's what we were building.

00:50:53: And that meant that we needed all the tools and we needed to build all of them and it was only by providing a full suite in one place That collaboration online kind of made sense And I think we didn't de-risk that enough we didn't test those assumptions enough and most importantly because we were a small UK startup and not a well-funded US startup We couldn't build all of those things as well as we should have and therefore we built, you know, five core collaboration tools Okay, instead of one amazing tool and built on that sort of thing.

00:51:25: So to put that to life, our competition at the time was Dropbox and Box on file sharing and we had a file sharing tool that was.

00:51:33: Okay, but not as good as Dropbox or Box.

00:51:36: But we also had four other tools, like we had chat and we had whiteboard, like all these other tools around collaboration.

00:51:41: If we had instead focused all of our efforts on file sharing, we might have been able to compete more with Box and Dropbox, be as successful as them, and then build the rest of it.

00:51:50: So that's probably a really good lesson.

00:51:53: I mean, that has been an amazing lesson for me and that I bring to life to all of the people I have advised since.

00:52:00: of making hard choices earlier, like what do you focus on and how do you do one thing really well instead of trying to do two or three things half well.

00:52:09: And so that's probably one where, or that is a lesson where the intuition went the wrong way.

00:52:14: And most importantly, I think the intuition was probably right long-term that like to build a really good collaboration tool, you need all those things.

00:52:23: But we didn't de-risk it by either thinking of that kind of incremental approach.

00:52:28: or by testing, you know, any of those individual assumptions.

00:52:31: So definitely learned a lot about that and would have approached that very differently now than I did fifteen years ago.

00:52:38: For those not familiar with the story of Huddle, how did it end?

00:52:42: So Huddle's still going, but it never kind of got that trajectory, right?

00:52:46: The VC back startup is expected to or wanting to hit.

00:52:50: So it can continue to grow.

00:52:52: It very much went into kind of the regulated and gov tech space.

00:52:55: So it still exists being used by big enterprises and kind of governments.

00:53:01: But again, it just never hit that growth curve.

00:53:03: And so it was kind of never hit the outcome that we wanted or our investors wanted.

00:53:08: I ended up leaving in about two and a half years in because we were running out of money as we were doing some of this transformation work and refocusing.

00:53:15: But yeah, I think, you know, just a lesson learned for everyone of how important it is to focus and how important good strategy is, which again is why I harp on about that these days.

00:53:27: So yeah, I think intuition is important, but it can also go wrong if you then don't do the work to de-risk it and unpack the assumptions and test your business ideas and things like that.

00:53:36: And I realize I should have asked how did it

00:53:38: continue, not how did it

00:53:40: go wrong.

00:53:42: So I have another guest from season one who left a message on my old fashioned answering machine.

00:53:49: Maybe we'll listen into that one.

00:53:54: My name is Tony Kios

00:53:55: and my question to you is

00:53:57: if AI starts making more product decisions, what will be the last domain where human intuition

00:54:02: remains irreplaceable?

00:54:05: I think that's the big question right now.

00:54:06: I think I believe And I think it's very hard to predict the future, so this is definitely a belief right now.

00:54:14: That the last thing will probably be around strategy, right?

00:54:18: I think it's making good choices and it's doing those intuitive leaps and not connecting the dots.

00:54:25: You know, as you work with chat GPT or Claude or anything today, uh, you can get a lot of amazing answers and have an amazing conversation.

00:54:32: I have an amazing sparring partner in, in your thinking and in strategy development.

00:54:36: But if you ask you for a strategy, you get kind of cookie cutter ones back, right?

00:54:39: You get kind of very standard ones back and it will get better with time for sure.

00:54:44: Um, but I think there is something if you look at all the good strategies and all the most successful companies the last decade, two decades in technology, there's been an intuitive leap and a risky.

00:54:54: thing, right?

00:54:55: I think there's a risk element that good entrepreneurs and good product people take of like, no, I think this is like, this is slightly weird, but this is the thing to do.

00:55:05: And this is the thing to focus on.

00:55:07: And we're going to do it this way, we're going to go after this market, we're going to go this way, whatever it is, that I think AI will struggle with for a long time.

00:55:16: If we actually ever get an AGI, obviously, it will think as humans do and have it, you know, it will be able to do that.

00:55:23: But I do think that's the last one.

00:55:25: And so I think product people should be focusing on with AI is almost for me still thinking about as an opportunity.

00:55:34: I know there's a lot of scary stuff out there, but I think there's an opportunity and like all this boring work that we have to do of like writing documents and documentation and like.

00:55:41: Let's automate that.

00:55:42: That's great.

00:55:43: Let's let the AI do that because then we can focus on talking to our customers.

00:55:47: We can focus on strategy.

00:55:49: We can focus on really understanding.

00:55:51: how do we solve the customer problem better and in a different way and bring that intuition to bear, right?

00:55:56: And then use AI as a partner to do it.

00:55:59: But I'm hoping and thinking and believing that that's probably the last thing that AI will take job wise at least.

00:56:06: Or it will just give different companies different risky strategies and one of them will win.

00:56:12: Yeah.

00:56:13: I mean, ultimately,

00:56:15: I mean, that's what we're doing for the kids, right?

00:56:17: There's so many companies who don't win and in with the survivor bias, we think it had been smart leaders.

00:56:25: Maybe they've just been lucky.

00:56:27: That's a very good.

00:56:28: I say that quite often.

00:56:29: I don't think we talk enough about luck and how much impact that has on.

00:56:34: Any of our success, right?

00:56:35: I've definitely had a lot of luck in my career.

00:56:38: And without it, I wouldn't be where I am.

00:56:43: If you were to rebuild Mind the Product today, knowing what you know now and with the tools AI is offering, what would you do differently?

00:56:56: I think the context is so different, right?

00:56:57: I think when we started, there wasn't as much out there.

00:57:00: There wasn't as much content.

00:57:02: There wasn't as many events.

00:57:03: There weren't podcasts.

00:57:04: barely existed as a concept, let alone the product podcast.

00:57:07: So I think the biggest thing is really assessing the context of today and what would actually help product people be more successful.

00:57:18: But I think fundamentally, and why I'm here in Hamburg, I still fundamentally believe in good conferences and the ability for good events to bring people together and that that's one of the best ways that any craft can kind of better themselves.

00:57:34: And it's still one of the things I'm most proud of is.

00:57:36: as a team we came up with our mission at mind.

00:57:38: the product was to make product people more successful, right?

00:57:41: And then we really by.

00:57:42: we did that uniquely by bringing people together And I think that core would probably still be true for me.

00:57:51: Whether that would be as excess as successful starting today as it was fifteen years ago.

00:57:55: I don't know because there's more options out there today, but that was the core for me.

00:58:01: and Again, just starting from a point of authenticity and learning, right?

00:58:07: I think we all did this because we were wanting to learn and we wanted to figure out how to do product better and we wanted to create a space where we could learn from other people and bring people together to do that.

00:58:16: So I think that core would still be true.

00:58:19: Yeah, that reminded me a bit of this one episode from Black Mirror.

00:58:25: And I was wondering if one day we see conferences where the larger language models meet to learn from each other.

00:58:32: Let's see if AI is going to organize that.

00:58:36: And

00:58:37: if there will be nice badges as well and good swag.

00:58:43: Gotta have the coffee.

00:58:45: Gotta have good coffee too.

00:58:46: Yeah, definitely.

00:58:49: You can't trust AI as long as it cannot differentiate bad from good coffee.

00:58:56: One last question on the topic of AI is coming from a good friend of the two of us and one of the two hearts and minds behind Product at Heart.

00:59:13: Hello, my name is Anna Kittler and my question is, How can we help future generations of product people develop the intuition for their role when AI reduces many of the entry level tasks that people like us learn from initially?

00:59:27: Yeah, I think it's a great question.

00:59:28: I think that's the biggest challenge going forward is where we see AI kind of reducing jobs or taking jobs.

00:59:35: It is at the more junior end now and it will go up in the scale as well.

00:59:39: But I think at some point we have to realize that we need the balance.

00:59:43: So we need both human and AI in our teams.

00:59:47: And I think that's true at the junior level as well.

00:59:50: And I think the biggest thing is to change how we approach what we get out of the AI tools today.

00:59:56: And again, it's hard to predict the future.

00:59:58: This might change in five years, ten years, twenty years.

01:00:01: But for the moment, at least, I think it's less about just letting AI do the work and taking it.

01:00:08: Just taking that answer sort of thing and using it as a sparring partner, right?

01:00:12: I think we should still have.

01:00:13: we still need junior product managers.

01:00:15: We need to think about how do we build resilience into our teams in the long term?

01:00:19: How do we you know hire people who can then become product managers and senior and become directors etc?

01:00:24: We still need that kind of flow of talent in our organizations.

01:00:28: And so how do we think about AI as a tool that helps coach that instead of just provide the answer?

01:00:32: so maybe you know rather than go query chat sheet BT and then copy paste that into your PRD or copy paste that into your ticketing system and just go build it.

01:00:45: Can we use it as a sparring partner instead of like, what are the different options?

01:00:48: How would we approach this?

01:00:49: What are the best ways to solve this customer problem?

01:00:51: And like coach our juniors, just like our job has always been to coach our juniors to use these tools to learn as opposed to just kind of copy paste the answer.

01:01:02: So yeah, I think it's, it's about challenging AI and using it as a partner and still instilling that curiosity and that scientific method really in our juniors and our teams of.

01:01:16: we shouldn't just take everything that comes out of AI at face value.

01:01:18: We have to kind of continue to query it.

01:01:20: It is a fantastic tool to help you work on definitions, documents, emails, strategy, everything, right?

01:01:27: I use it all the time as well.

01:01:29: But you have to learn how to challenge it.

01:01:32: You have to learn how to think about it.

01:01:33: Um, you have to learn how to have a back and forth and be actually.

01:01:37: that doesn't make sense to me.

01:01:38: What about this aspect?

01:01:39: or what about this piece of data?

01:01:40: or to your point?

01:01:41: Um, you know, what are our options if x, y or z happens like?

01:01:45: use it to to learn some of those skills as well.

01:01:48: I guess, and that's particularly hard for junior product managers because from my experience as.

01:01:53: At the time we are recording and might be different tomorrow because I changes.

01:01:59: Literally daily, but right now it needs a lot of expertise to understand which of the answers you can take for granted.

01:02:10: So you should, for example, better know your guest in the podcast before you ask AI to write a questionnaire.

01:02:20: because it might end up making up some work experiences the guest never had worked at.

01:02:29: I can't remember who wrote about this on LinkedIn, but I saw this week that the core skill going forward is probably Reading right?

01:02:42: It's kind of really reading and understanding the responses you get out of AI to really sense check of like.

01:02:47: does this make sense?

01:02:47: Does this not?

01:02:49: Do I need to follow up?

01:02:50: Do I actually need more data for this conversation?

01:02:53: And I think I think that the really challenging thing for me with junior product managers right now or junior anyone is it's not just a I write.

01:03:00: it's also that we've gone more remote.

01:03:02: so you don't even get that face time right here with your with your senior team or with your juniors if you're in leadership.

01:03:08: And so I think that combination is is really dangerous because I think in the short term.

01:03:14: You know juniors are always.

01:03:15: People and I've been that right like we weren't necessarily the most productive member of the team, but we're there to learn and we're there to build and help the team be more effective.

01:03:25: But we're also there to learn in order that in a year or two years time, we're a product manager or a senior project manager, we get more responsibility and we take over.

01:03:33: And if we're not building up that resilience in our organization, like in two years time, there's not going to be people to take these jobs that we still do need to have done, right?

01:03:41: So I think all leadership needs to think really carefully about how do we How do we teach our organizations?

01:03:46: How do we bring up that talent internally?

01:03:49: And how do we still maintain that in a very changed world for sure with AI?

01:03:54: But we need to bring people along on that, I think.

01:03:57: Yeah, definitely, definitely.

01:03:59: And I guess one of the questions I'd have is

01:04:04: would.

01:04:05: Like when I look into the future, where are we going to end?

01:04:08: Will it be AI augmented humans or human augmented AIs?

01:04:14: I guess that's a question if you're more the positive or more the negative guy.

01:04:18: I'm

01:04:20: generally a techno-optimist and it's a struggle sometimes to be, to maintain that optimism.

01:04:26: But I'm generally a techno-optimist.

01:04:29: I'm definitely kind of star trekky more than anything else.

01:04:32: I believe in a future where technology and AI can be a very force for good.

01:04:37: But I think it's up to all of us in the tech industry to make that happen.

01:04:40: And there's a risk that it goes the other way, as we see with social media, started as a very beautiful idea of democratizing content creation and access to content.

01:04:51: And has definitely got a dark side to it that it makes some people a lot of money.

01:04:55: And that tends to be what wins out.

01:04:57: And so we have a lesson to be learned there for... AI in our future.

01:05:01: of which side do we want to go on?

01:05:04: And then I think there's, you know, it's really way too hard to predict the future.

01:05:08: I don't know if we'll actually ever get to that kind of artificial general intelligence or we'll just have ever increasingly smart machines.

01:05:15: But then the techno optimist in me also thinks that we're not thinking big enough.

01:05:19: I don't think, you know, it's not just about, you know, twiddling our thumbs and umming and eyeing about what's going to happen with AI in our software companies that at some point maybe we actually that frees us up to do much more interesting things.

01:05:32: So there's a startup I was talking to this week who are doing incredibly cool stuff around making engineering more agile, right?

01:05:39: So literally rocket science, rocket engineering, how do we make that faster?

01:05:43: and using AI tools to kind of connect the dots and test stuff and build ever smarter, cheaper, better machinery and things.

01:05:52: I think we can think bigger and actually imagine a world where AI helps us do so much more around engineering challenges that we have, the sustainability kind of climate change challenges we have in the head of us, medical, bio challenges that we have.

01:06:07: So I always go back to the optimism piece.

01:06:12: Maybe that's the only way I maintain my sanity right now.

01:06:15: But I think we can also think bigger of like, okay, so maybe we need less product managers building e-commerce websites, because I can kind of do a lot of that for us.

01:06:23: But maybe that frees us up to go do some much more interesting challenges instead, hopefully.

01:06:28: Let's hope so.

01:06:29: And if you've scratched it already, let's hope that from this tremendous increase of productivity, we benefit as a society.

01:06:40: Yeah, there's a lot of risk.

01:06:41: We won't, but we have to try and we have to hope that we can pull it in that direction.

01:06:46: Yeah, and hopefully we take good use of this additional time we then get and maybe not only spend it doom-scrolling in whatever app.

01:06:59: So I said a few questions ago that Arne is asking the last question on AI, but one that interests me really Very much is one that I'm probably going to ask every guest in this season and that is when you observe the development rise of AI and.

01:07:25: We just heard that you do that very closely.

01:07:28: Do you ever feel a bit jealous of the tools and capabilities young product managers have at their fingertips today or do you rather feel relieved that you don't have to start your career in times like these?

01:07:42: I'm definitely probably feeling more relieved that I don't have to be a junior right now.

01:07:46: It is a tough world and it's moving so fast and you kind of have to stay on top of A lot of new developments just to have the right tooling.

01:07:54: little on stay on top of how we do this craft of product.

01:07:57: And so I'm probably happy I don't have to.

01:08:00: but then that makes me think of how can I. Contribute to a world where we are making that a little easier for them.

01:08:08: I'm probably more relieved.

01:08:12: I can relate to that.

01:08:14: to close and unfortunately I have to close I would love to spend.

01:08:18: a couple of more hours in that conversation, but we are already more than an hour into that recording.

01:08:27: So, to close, I have a few final questions

01:08:33: around

01:08:34: our conversation.

01:08:36: And the first one is, what's one thing about the human side of product leadership that you wish more people took seriously?

01:08:46: I think we talk a lot about empathy, but I think we can do So much more with it.

01:08:50: I think it's not just empathy for our customers and users.

01:08:53: It's empathy for our team members.

01:08:55: It's bringing in lots of different perspectives and then having empathy and understanding for those perspectives and experiences.

01:09:00: And I think that's what makes the best product teams that I've seen out there in the world is the ones who are.

01:09:08: Open and embracing of those kind of different ideas, different opinions, different backgrounds, different experiences, because that generates not just more empathy for each other in the team, but then also generates better empathy for our end users.

01:09:21: And I'd have one tough question and then an easy one to end.

01:09:28: So the tough one is how well did you know yourself throughout your life so far and what has helped you to get to know yourself better?

01:09:41: I'm still on that journey, I think, honestly.

01:09:44: As I said, I think I can be a bit of a chameleon and so I can be a lot of things to a lot of people and I'm still learning to figure out exactly what the core of that is.

01:09:54: I think... I've always had a fairly strong sense of kind of those morals and what those principles for me of like how to how to be a person and how to work with people and how to lead a team.

01:10:06: But I think figuring out at the core of who I am is it's still a journey that I'm on.

01:10:10: I think a lot of that clarity has come from Others.

01:10:14: I am I'm very kind of responsive to other people as opposed to from an internal strength, which is not necessarily a good thing.

01:10:23: and so when I get feedback from other people, when I hear the feedback of these things are helping, whether it's the Venn diagram back in the day or the decision stack today, that really helps reinforce the, okay, I'm on the right track, I'm doing the right things.

01:10:37: And so I think just hearing that feedback and knowing that what I'm building and what I'm putting out in the world helps people, that gives me the strength to kind of keep focusing on it and put that work back in.

01:10:48: As someone who's using the decision stack as a mental model in nearly all his coaching sessions I can say yes, you really do help us with the work you do in a tremendous way.

01:11:00: So thanks very much for putting all that effort into sharing your thinking and your mental models with the entire product community.

01:11:11: One last question and German listeners will know which podcast I steal that from because it's the question that gets asked at the end at one of my favorite podcast, which is hotel nuts.

01:11:24: What do you want to learn

01:11:25: next?

01:11:27: It's a great question.

01:11:29: I want to learn more about AI.

01:11:33: I think it's still something that is moving so fast.

01:11:37: And as you said, changing every single day and I do believe it's.

01:11:41: going to be revolutionary for not just our business but for the world.

01:11:45: And so I want to figure out how I can learn more about it, how I can use it better, but also how maybe I can help be a very small part of shaping it to be a force for good in the world and not a force for bad.

01:11:59: But I think it's still something I'm learning a lot about and need to learn more about.

01:12:04: Thank you so much Martin for being on the show today and I hope you enjoy the rest of your birthday at this rainy Hamburg

01:12:14: summer day.

01:12:16: It's at least an authentic experience.

01:12:17: Yes.

01:12:18: Thank you very much for

01:12:19: having me and I love Hamburg, so we'll have fun.

01:12:30: That was episode two of this season.

01:12:32: I hope you enjoyed it just as much as I did enjoy speaking to Martin and I hope you could hear that I enjoyed

01:12:40: speaking

01:12:40: to him a lot.

01:12:43: You can help this tiny little podcast by spreading the word among your friends and colleagues, post about it on social media, subscribe to it in your favorite podcast app, leave a five star rating and review also in your favorite podcast app.

01:12:58: That would really mean the world to me and it would motivate me to continue with this little pet project.

01:13:07: You're also heavily invited to subscribe to the newsletter on produktmenschen.de.

01:13:12: There you'll get some background information about each episode and you can always send me positive or negative feedback or ideas to feedback@produktmenschen.de.

01:13:25: And in two weeks time we're going to meet again for the next episode where I'm going to meet a woman who got very energetic about the question of whether pizza Hawaii is actually pizza.

01:13:38: So I hope you'll tune in again in two weeks time.

01:13:42: Bye bye and see you then.

01:14:05: Find out how we can help you at hay-clarity.com.