Being product-led means “infusing the entire company with this idea that it's more efficient for everyone to really execute on a really great product that pulls itself forward. And if you can do that then your ability to make profit actually increases” - Oji Udezue
Show Notes
Oji Udezue is the Chief Product Officer at Parsible and was formerly the VP of Product at Calendly. Melissa Perri describes him as “one of the best product leaders I have ever met.” His extensive experience in both B2B and B2C companies, including Microsoft and Atlassian, has given him insight into how to set strategy, even in companies where there is none. He joins Melissa to talk about what it takes to implement a product-led strategy, and how to influence a culture shift in your organization.
Here are some key points from their discussion:
Oji defines being product-led as “increasing customer focus… It means infusing the entire company with this idea that it's more efficient for everyone… to really execute on a really great product that pulls itself forward. And if you can do that then your ability to make profit actually increases…”
The role of the CPO is to understand the company goals, vision, and mission and track an efficient product course to achieve that. The CPO’s biggest leverage is deciding what to invest in and what not to, Oji says.
A draft strategy is a lightning rod: it gets the discussion started. Oji uses the VMSO (vision, mission, strategies, objectives) framework to draft strategy. Melissa asks him to advise product leaders who want to start drafting a strategy. He urges them to write it down and then socialize it. He also emphasizes that your draft strategy should be good: people should see wisdom and truth in it.
Oji predicts that all enterprise companies will become B2C in 10 years.
Melissa asks what is product-led growth. Oji defines the term and explains what it takes: a good product with great market fit, a good brand, good word of mouth and virality.
You have to expand your addressable market constantly to stay in the game.
Oji and Melissa discuss how product leaders can help change their company culture.
Resources Oji Udezue on LinkedIn | Twitter | Medium
Episode Transcript
Voiceover: Creating great products isn't just about product managers and their day-to-day interactions with developers. It's about how an organization supports products as a whole. The system, the processes, and cultures in place that help companies deliver value to their customers. With the help of some boundary-pushing guests and inspiration from your most pressing product questions, we'll dive into this system from every angle and help you think like a great product leader. This is the Product Thinking Podcast. Here's your host, Melissa Perri.
Melissa Perri: Hello, this week on the Product Thinking podcast, we're going to talk all about strategy. I'm pretty excited to be joined by Oji Udezue, who's the CPO of Parse.ly and formerly the VP of Product at Calendly. I've known Oji for quite a while and I love the way that he thinks about strategy.
At Calendly, he really implemented a product-led strategy and at Parse.ly, he's doing some different things. And I think Oji's career as well, working at a variety of different places like Atlassian, Microsoft, leading products for consumer and also B2B products has given him a lot of insight into how to set strategy and especially how to come into an organization and figure out how to do it from scratch or how to pull it together when there isn't one. So, listen closely to what Oji's got to say.
Welcome, Oji. Thanks for being on the podcast.
Oji Udezue: Thanks, Melissa. Really, uh, excited to be here.
Melissa Perri: Me too. I have known you for a while and I think you're one of the best product leaders I have met. And I'm so excited to get your thoughts on product strategy today. And I know you just started a new job, right, in September?
Oji Udezue: Yes, I did. I started as a Chief Product Officer at Parse.ly, which is a software company, currently enterprise-focused, that tries to help the people who are not information workers manage workflows. And the way I think about it, actually, as I started to talk to different people, including the board about it, is that it's like the Jira for the rest of us.
Right? Jira is for tech workers, for information workers, as Atlassian expands. Well, Parse.ly wants to be Jira for the rest of the world. And that's 80% of the real workforce in the world. So that's the ambition. And to do that, you have to in many ways mirror some of the tactics of, you know, the original Jira, which has to be much more product-led, much more bottom-up adoption.
And so, part of the task, I think, at Parse.ly is to make that true.
Melissa Perri: Great. So when you, you're talking about being more product-led at Parse.ly, what do you mean by that?
Oji Udezue: You know, product-led is a concept that you know very well because you teach it. But really, it means increasing customer focus, you know, like making sure that every product investment or most of the product investment goes towards delighting the people who actually use the product every day. It means being sensitive to customers in terms of the buying journey, the conversion or payment journey.
It means being, hopefully, generous in terms of the pricing so that people find it psychologically easy to adopt the product. It means infusing the entire company with this idea that it's more efficient for everyone—sales, marketing, product, customer success, support—to really execute on a really great product that pulls itself forward. And if you can do that, then your ability to make profit actually increases and to drive margins actually increases because that's frankly the most efficient way to build software in 2021.
Melissa Perri: Great. So it's all starting, you're saying, with the customer. I'm curious, for you, what's the difference between product-led and customer-centric? Is it the same thing or do you see differences there?
Oji Udezue: They're very close, but I guess the easiest way to make a distinction is product-led is, in many ways, a bigger subset, a bigger pool than customer-centric. Like, you have to be customer-centric to be product-led. But the thing about people who say customer-centric is sometimes there's this misconception that you do everything customers say.
But what you do instead is you use customers to understand the right problems to solve and in what sequence to solve them. Customers don't have all the context, and they're also ignorant of a company's business goals and its strategy. And the act of product is to marry those things and to manage the tensions of those things with a huge, huge dollop of making sure the customer is really fairly or even pampered in that transaction.
At Atlassian, one of the values I loved is, "Don't F the customer." And so that has to be a huge part of product-led.
Melissa Perri: Yeah, I like that. I do see people when they think about customer-centricity, they're like, "Oh, we're just going to do everything they say," and they end up being that waiter that just adds everything to the backlog. And like, "Oh, well, our customers wanted it, so we're customer-centric." But I like, I like your distinction where, you know, it's not necessarily everything the customer wants.
It's what's in their best interest but still achieves business goals. And I think that's really important. So, I imagine that getting to a state of being truly product-led takes an enormous amount of good product strategy. So, when it comes to product-led, there probably has to be a product-led strategy on there too.
To you, what is product strategy? What does that mean? And as a Chief Product Officer, what is your responsibility for creating that? How do you create it?
Oji Udezue: Well, first of all, it's my responsibility. People literally look to you to say, "What will we do?" And I think product strategy, if we're going to define it, is what will you do and what will you not do, right? And, you know, a huge part of that, I guess, is just describing it to a company in an effective way.
I expect that this entire year, it will just be about communicating that and communicating layers of that. That's the entire job, I think. Aside from getting great people in and driving the right product operations, the most effective leverage that a CPO can do is what should we invest in and what should we not invest in.
And I think if you break down the layer, it's really understanding the company's goals and its vision and its mission and the direction that it wants to go commercially, whether it's the board's direction or the CEO's direction, and then charting a course in the product that helps achieve that as fast as possible.
Melissa Perri: Great. So you have this golden opportunity now with just starting in September. I guess it's, it's probably your first 90 days, right? Just right after your first 90 days. So I imagine a lot of work has gone into figuring out what is Parse.ly's product strategy. How did you get started? What did you look at when you were trying to figure out which way do we go?
Oji Udezue: Big question. I think there are two main ingredients. You know, think of product strategy as some kind of soup or cake or something like that. And there are two main ingredients, I think. One is, what do customers want? What is their pain? What are their problems? What are the main gaps?
Either the things that are preventing product-market fit or the things that make you become the market leader. And so this entails really listening. So some of the things that I will do when I get into a company is spend time with customer support, spend time with the smartest salespeople, spend time with customer success.
Who are the smartest PMs who know what the customer are listening for, the affinity and the empathy for the customer. And I'll spend a lot more time with those people than not. You have to be careful because sometimes you're getting vignettes and you have to sort of make sure that you see the whole picture, which can take some time.
And so you have to set expectations with your CEO or the board to give you some space to do that as much as possible. Which, by the way, is hard during a pandemic because you can't actually go visit people and so on and so forth.
The second part of product strategy, I think, is what are the ambitions of the company? What does it want to do? But not only its ambitions, but what is it good at? What is its DNA? Who's staffed? And what are the skill sets of the people who are staffed? There are people who can come up with a strategy and it cannot be executed because you missed, you missed on what we could actually do, right?
So product strategy has to be cognizant of what the company can actually execute on, otherwise it doesn't matter as well. So I think those are the two big forces that I think about for product strategy. And then it's really like building and prioritizing which lever will have the most impact. And looking for activities that are already happening that are not actually helpful, or practices already happening that are not actually helpful, and being fairly ruthless at pruning them or ending them so you can experience the dividends of focus.
Melissa Perri: That's great. And you mentioned too, you have to convince the CEO and the leadership team to give you space to do that. What's practical for actually developing a product strategy, right? Like how much time do you need to be able to sift through that? I imagine it's not something you come up with overnight.
Oji Udezue: You know, I'd say ballpark, you need a quarter or two, depending on the company and depending on the space and the complexity and the size of the organization. You probably need a quarter or two to wrap your mind around it. I think that's fair. I think that's what you should communicate.
And of course, you know, you can exceed that. But, you know, I've always, I've gotten into trouble a lot where I think I can turn on brilliance in the first month, and it's never the case. You have to sort of respect the learning curve. And in one-on-ones, you have to sort of talk about that. And you know, one of the sort of X-factor is, who are the people around you?
What's your team? Sometimes if you don't have a team and you have to hire, you're going to spend more time. But sometimes you need more people to craft a really great strategy. And so you might have to take a detour in hiring and so on and so forth.
Melissa Perri: Yeah. So you're bringing your team into set this product strategy too. You just talked about, what's their role? Like where do you rely on them and what do you get them to do?
Oji Udezue: Right. I think it's just depth. It's confidence. If you draft up a product strategy, how confident are you that you're right about this? Well, you can be confident because you've talked to some customers. You can be confident because you understand the business environment you're in.
You can be confident because you understand the ambitions of the company. But how much is that? Is that 50%? Is that 60%? You need people sometimes to go deep and say, "Okay, yes, we really, really know this." And so on and so forth. So is your team capable of that? Do you need more people? I think having more people is really engaging other people's intelligence to fill in your blind spots, to fill in the things you don't know.
Product strategy is not precious. I think you start sharing it as soon as you have a draft. And you start listening for wisdom so that you can build something really, really solid.
Melissa Perri: Great. And when your team's going deep, are they digging up certain data? Like what types of information are they bringing back to you?
Oji Udezue: Well, first of all, you have two teams, right? You have an executive team. So people are looking at this from a commercial perspective, a marketing perspective, an engineering perspective, and you're getting perspective on it. You don't spring product strategy on people fully formed. So hopefully you have a receptive executive team. And then your team is double-clicking on customers and making sure it's numeric and it's actual data versus intuition, double-clicking on competition, right? They're double-clicking on, you know, use cases that maybe you weren't as detailed in, those kinds of things.
Melissa Perri: Great. And so when you're working with your executive team, a lot of that is probably pulling out what is the company vision and what are the business goals. How often do you find that those are really well-fleshed out? And then how much do you have to contribute to them too to get that information out of executives? I hear this complaint all the time from product leaders like, "There is no business goal, it's just make money." So what do you do to figure out where is the business supposed to go and how often do you walk into it where it's all fully formed?
Oji Udezue: That's super rare. That's a really good question because I think you have to employ different tactics. Like, just assume that 80% of the time it's not there, or even if it is there, it's a little fuzzy, or it's stale. And occasionally it'll be really good. So what I do with the executive team is sort of introduce the need for it and for it to be well-articulated.
Sometimes I'll do a draft, right? A draft is a good forcing function because, you know, everyone, sometimes people don't perceive it as a problem. But when you have a draft, you have, it's a lightning rod, it's something to discuss. And so I often find that, you know, I use this framework called VMSO, which is Vision, Mission, Strategies, and Objectives.
I believe that if you cannot articulate a company's product strategy or company strategy in like a couple of pages, then you don't know what the strategy is really. It's all a PowerPoint obfuscation. So I try to draft that and just say, "Look, this is a confidence level," and use that to drive conversation.
And often, if it doesn't exist, then you've, maybe you peel off a couple of people to focus on a piece. Like, you know, I think I did this at Calendly, did this at Parse.ly, where CEO and a couple of execs, "Okay, look, we, I own the division and mission, so here's what we have." And I'm like, "I love it. Let's tighten it up." And then match those to the strategies we want to invest in and the key objectives and metrics.
So a huge part of that is just fill the vacuum and have something that people can debate. That's been pretty effective. But be humble. Don't pretend that you're coming up with it unless it's truly, truly absent. Usually in a company, it's not, it's very, mostly not ever absent. But you can tap into what exists, make it better, share the responsibility because it's not just yours, it has to be collective.
Melissa Perri: I like that a lot where you're saying just fill in the gaps because I've met so many people who complain that we don't have a company vision or we don't have a product strategy. And sometimes they are product leaders or they're their product managers, but they're not really doing much to fill in the gap. Like they're not putting anything down where anybody can react to it.
They're like, "We have lots of ideas, but you're not sharing them." So what's your advice for somebody who wants to get started there, writing that draft? How should they go about like making sure they're humble, making sure they're presenting it in the right way to their leadership team? What kind of conversations do you have?
Oji Udezue: You know, the VMSO is a framework, there are many, OGSM and so on and so forth. I've been using VMSO, I understand what the framework is. And so I will draft it. I will listen hard to the company, listen hard to the customers and say, "This is our vision. This is really what we're doing." And you know, vision is hard.
It's not, sometimes it needs to be aspirational. But so you can just craft a mission, right? And say, "Oh, we need a vision," and here are like three different ideas. But write it down. It's really that simple. Sorry, I keep saying that because sometimes I, I've done things so many times, I think it's simple.
And so people are like, "What do you mean it's simple?" No, but write it down. Write it down and then socialize it. You know, start small in one-on-ones. Say, "Hey, I did this, and this is what I use it for, and we should discuss it." And then the next meeting, you just, you put it up, you know, zoom, and you discuss it.
Like, "Okay, who needs to be part of this? Let's talk about it. Let's refine it." And you know, it really is like, "Oh, second week, you're like, boom." Just, you don't know as much as you think you know. But at the end of a quarter, you know a ton. You have intuition. You're using your pattern recognition.
And you can start to have these conversations in a very thoughtful way. So just get started. In many cases, in many parts of, not just product, but in a company, there are many vacuums. And opportunity looks like filling them and moving forward, even with a draft. Not enough people do that.
Melissa Perri: Yeah, this is a bias to action that I feel like really helps people move up in the leadership positions too and helps get them recognized at companies. Like being able to to do something to move things along. And one thing I, I like that you just said too is it doesn't sound like you're saying, "Hey, just make up a company strategy from scratch," right? You're, you're listening to these executives and you're translating back what they're saying to you in a way that reflects what you think the company vision is and the strategy. Is that correct?
Oji Udezue: That is true. You're not the CEO. Most of this is inductive. And frankly, there are probably a couple of, you know, maybe not well-worded drafts. And so your function is to listen to the company, listen to its customers, listen for the goals, synthesize it. And synthesize it well. Your first draft should be good.
The first draft people see should have been your 30th draft, right, for yourself. And so articulate it. When people see it, they see truth in it. Because if people don't see truth and thoughtfulness and wisdom in it, then they reject it instantly. They're like, "You missed it. This is bullshit. We're not even going to do the entire process." Right?
But if there is wisdom and truth in it, they're like, "Huh, that's amazing." And then they want to lean in to make it good.
Melissa Perri: That's great. So you've worked at a variety of companies now, setting strategy across the board. And I think what's really interesting about your background is you haven't just done B2B, right? At Atlassian and now Parse.ly. You've also done B2C at Calendly. And I've met a lot of executives and board members who think that product people have to really fall in one bucket, right?
Like either B2C or B2B. Thou shalt not cross, like cross those lines. That's one thing is very different than the other. And I agree there are some differences, but I think you're a prime example of somebody who could do both. So how does moving from one to the other affect the way that you do product strategy?
Like what stays the same? What's different?
Oji Udezue: That's a big question. So I'll try to answer it in, in multiple perspectives on this. So I think, you know, when I was in business school, I had multiple classes on strategy. So there's this sort of classic company strategy strain of thought, which is you can break strategy down into component elements, not just at the product level, but at the business level.
And I think that's really useful for me. I took a course at Columbia called Napoleon's Glance, which was about how to come up with intuitively great strategy. And it worked by sort of looking at people in history who had come up with really transformative strategy and tactics and how they did it. And you know, the classic example is Napoleon and how he won 99% of all the battles in Europe.
And there was a lot of them. And how did he do that? How did he have the flash of insight to do that? And then I took another one with Reza Moghaddam, who was at Berkeley. I did a joint MBA with Berkeley and Columbia, got me two MBAs, but that's a whole other story. But Reza taught, you know, strategy for telecommunications, media, and telecom companies.
And he broke it down into component elements. What makes a good strategy? What pieces? What gives an economic advantage? And so those classical elements of, you know, frameworks of strategy helps me think about product strategy in a detailed way. So I actually feel like I can come up with a company strategy.
And because I feel able to do that, I feel like I can come up with a product strategy regardless of the company. If you put me in a healthcare software company, I should be able to come up with strategy. That's what I think and that's what I believe. And that's what my classical training has offered for me.
But here's another perspective. I'm planning to write about this a little more, but I think that software companies have gone through three eras. I think there was an era of technology where we, really customers were hobbyists and it was very early. So 40 years ago. And there's an era of utility where this became a way to yield efficiency in the world.
And we were selling to CIOs, right, mostly. And we were full of, you know, this is sort of the era that I grew up in initially at Microsoft. We're selling utility. They're like, "Okay, we've built some cool stuff. Here's how it works in the enterprise. And by the way, here's our licensing and we're going to make a lot of money off of you." And this is where companies became, all the billionaires that exist were made.
But I think we're in a third age of convenience. People don't care about technology so much. They want their workflow to be optimized. They want their life to work. I think the ethos in software across the board, B2B, B2C, and of course consumer, is we have to be so simple. We have to be like the people who make the Swiffer, the Swiffer WetJet.
No one cares how the Swiffer works. Is it a really good mop? That's it. I actually think that that, it sounds terrible because, you know, in, I come from a world that I have like 14, 15 patents and, you know, I've always prided myself in being clever about how to build clever, technologically deep things, you know.
And, you know, the first decade of product management was all about that. But consumers want to be satisfied. That's ultimately it. We solve problems. We solve it in clever ways, in beautifully designed ways. And so what that means is that every enterprise company, and this is maybe a bet with your audience, will become essentially B2C in 10 years.
So that's clarifying for CPOs. It's converging on that kind of ease of use. And in fact, you can do a lot as an enterprise company by extending your total addressable market by going not from the high end, but extending it to the mid-market as well. And if you can do both things, it's hard to do both things well, but if you can, you have a much bigger market to address.
So I think product strategy is converging. Now, in practice, B2B enterprise product strategy just has to be much more cognizant of the go-to-market, the people, the salespeople, the marketing people, and sometimes the lack of systems. So it has to, when I say learn about the DNA of your company, you craft strategy that takes that into account.
You also craft strategy that takes the conflicts that come with transitioning from just enterprise to much more consumer ethos into account as part of your like,
