Product Management in the AI Era
In this episode of Product Thinking, Hubert Palan, Founder and CEO of Productboard, joins Melissa Perri to dive into the ever-changing role of product management and how it is influencing the technology industry. They also touch upon current events in the tech world, including AI, and how they may be shaping product management practices.
Episode Transcript
Hubert Palan: It's kind of the applicability of AI and how it's changing the product management profession, but learn how to use it like a tool, but it's not gonna make you Steve Jobs, with the unique insights.
Melissa Perri: 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 systems, 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 Perry.
Melissa Perri: Hello, and welcome to the Product Thinking Podcast. Today, we are going to talk all about product management, the evolution of product management, and how current events in the tech industries and the economies are affecting us as product managers. We're joined today by Hubert Pollen, who's a founder and CEO of Product Board. And Product Board is a customer-centric product management platform. It's a global company with over 6,000 companies as clients. Before launching Product Board in 2014, Hubert was the VP of product management at Good Data from 2010 to 2013. So welcome, thanks for joining us.
Hubert Palan: Thank you, Melissa, for having me.
Melissa Perri: So tell us a little bit about yourself. What drew you into product management and why did you decide to start such a great product for us, for product managers?
Hubert Palan: Well, first of all, thank you for saying it's a great product. I spent a lot of years in it. Look, I'm an engineer turned product manager. I got a master's in computer science and then later on went to get an MBA to kind of round up my skillset on the business side and got thrown in here in the Bay Area, where I live now for the last 16 years, into the tech Silicon Valley Mecca and really jumped the head first into product management and kind of fell in love with the art and science of understanding what people need and what are the biggest pain points and how to solve those with the best products and services.
Yeah, I've been doing it for many years now. And then to your second question about Product Board, look, I was a product manager and I had the pain point that I wanted to solve, which was I had all these great engineering tools like GitHub and Jira at my disposal. But when it came to consolidating the input and understanding which types of customers and customer segments need what and how that should be interpreted and represented in the roadmap, and making sure that everybody's aligned, not just the product teams, but the business stakeholders and the go-to-market people, there was really no system.
And so like, hey, let's build a product. This is gonna be like Jira or like Salesforce, but specifically designed for the needs of product teams. And that will have the information about who is the customer, what is it that they need, and then inform the prioritization process and help you decide what to build next.
And, as a result, build amazing products, help others like really build products that really satisfy the most pressing needs of customers.
Melissa Perri: That's a really nice mission. And I'm glad you did it because I'm tired of hacking Jira to fit our needs because every company is like, oh, let's just hack Jira and then we'll try to put roadmaps in it. And it just does not work. So glad that everybody is starting to focus on product management and the tools that we need to build better products.
Hubert Palan: Yeah, I mean, it's really, it's mind boggling. And everybody agrees that you need to be customer centric, right, that voice of the customer is important. And Steve Blank was my professor at Berkeley and the grandfather of Lean Startup. And the concept of a customer doesn't exist in any of the systems that we use on the R&D side traditionally. It's just like, what the heck?
Melissa Perri: Yeah, that's a fantastic point. None of them are set up well for that, but I've seen people just try to butcher them to get some kind of insights and it just doesn't work. So you've had this unique opportunity to see a bunch of companies, how they do product management. You work with over 6,000 companies through product board and you've also been in Silicon Valley for quite a while observing the tech scene.
We've had a lot of crazy stuff happen in tech, I feel like over from COVID until now. And during the COVID wave, it was like everybody was switching jobs. You can hire a product manager for your life. I was like helping these poor companies try to hire people and you were not getting anybody. And now we've had these massive layoffs in the economy with our big tech companies that everybody thought they had like a cushy secure job.
And you know, that's not true. So I feel like as a community, we've had a lot of whiplash going on in this economy. What have you been observing about how this economic motions and these movements have affected product management and product managers?
Hubert Palan: I mean, like you said, you know, it's kind of surprising, but it's not surprising if you think about what's happening from the macro perspective and the fact that we just came from the era of abundance and just plentiful dollars, frankly, right? Like flowing into tech and goes way before COVID, right? It goes coming out of the great recession 2008 and then just since then we were on this just like trajectory up and to the right as an industry.
And the difference is that in the time of abundance, you're just experimenting much more and you're kind of feel like, hey, business is going well and so I can make all these other bets and I can have a very heavy investment into the experimentation and the moonshots category. Whereas when times get tough, like you typically start refocusing on the core from the business perspective. If you look at it, not as a product manager, but as a CEO, like, okay, where am I actually generating returns and where is the biggest ROI?
And so as a result, the companies are focusing on efficiency and doubling down on the core segments that they know are profitable and where the needs are understood and kind of the pain points in the market proven, which leads to the narrowing down of portfolio and that leads to fewer people potentially there. So, from that perspective, it's unfortunately the reality that replicates during every downturn. If you look at companies, like the big public companies that we have data on like Adobe and Microsoft and Salesforce and Intuit, kind of like the darling tech companies during the Great Recession 2008, they all went down, the growth rate just went down to negative territory and then it came back up.
So, it's just like a natural reaction to the macro, unfortunately, and people lose jobs because you're just trimming down the bench as a CEO. You can talk more about what it means for the product managers that are now in charge because that has implications.
Melissa Perri: Yeah, let's talk about that. Let's talk about what that means for product management. You see all this trimming, as you said. It's true, like there were people not doing much or we were spending. I saw a lot of companies spend a lot of money on things that weren't important. In flush times, you can afford to spend money on things that don't matter, like you said with the experimentation, but now we're focusing. What's that mean for product managers, like for that role inside companies?
Hubert Palan: I would just say to what you said, the category of the moonshots, of the bats, it might matter, you just don't know. There's a higher uncertainty about that. And so, the uncertainty, business is all about three things. It's about revenue, it's about cost, and it's about risk. And so, if you have the higher risk and you have limited resources, you're just gonna be more sensitive to it.
So, that's what leads to the focus on the core business, which your question is about what the product managers like, what it means to them. It basically is a forcing function to be better as a product manager when it comes to focus and clarity about what is really moving the needle and where are the most important pain points and which use cases, jobs to be done, needs pick your favorite terminology, methodology are the key ones to go after and thinking about which segments in the market. Which intersections of vertical use cases, however you wanna define are the resilient ones and the ones that you should be investing in.
So, it really means that while you might be able to bring to the market products that were nice to have for, kind of like, not the painkillers, the vitamins, that has changed because people are not spending money on nice to haves and everything has to go through four layers of approvals. And unless there's like a hardcore ROI behind it, like it's difficult to get the customers to buy or try new software, which it sucks in general, it especially sucks for startups that are trying to prove something new, because there's no ROI case study necessarily behind it, because you don't have like a long history and you don't have the portfolio of customers that have been successful with you. Which again just means that you need to make sure that what you're building is really solving a tangible, specific measurable pain point if you wanna be able to get dollars out of the businesses.
So, long story short, you're gonna be better at the core of product management, which is: how big is the customer segment? How much value is there? Are people willing to pay those people in the segment? Second, how big is the pain point? It's correlated with the willingness to pay. And then third is, okay, how good of a product or service can you introduce to the market and how much better is it to the existing alternative in order for people to switch?
And so, that's just, you need to be extra good at that these days.
Melissa Perri: I really like how you're describing that too as the core of product management. And I think there's a lot of people out there that don't see how tied product management is to the business. Like if you run a SaaS company like you do, your product is your money, right? Like it's so directly tied to it and people forget that.
And I think the companies that do forget that in economies like this and aren't doing that work that you're talking about to actually say like, what is our opportunity here? How much revenue can we capture? What's our upside? They're gonna really struggle during the downturn because they're not gonna see that product is money.
And I've seen this happening too with larger companies like banks or companies that are becoming more software led, but they're still struggling to find the connection between software product management and their business and they keep it separate. And I think that's hindering some of their ability to actually move in newer technologies and be able to compete with newer technology companies all out there in the market. So I really love how you describe that where it's so tight, that's the core of product management because I definitely see that and I wish more people saw that too.
Hubert Palan: I just wanted to say that it's the feasibility or, as you mentioned, the business impact. It's kind of like what is gonna help drive and generate the dollars, and you really need to think of it. The impact on the profession has been that if you are not strategic and if you don't think about product management from the perspective of really understanding deeply the market before you make the product bets and decisions, you know, basically you don't have the luxury anymore to just like throw spaghetti on the wall and see what sticks, which is how product management is done or has been done in many companies.
You basically kind of like have no idea about the market. You have all these, yeah, ideas, interesting ideas about technologies. Just fund them all and see what sticks. And the reality is like in this environment, that doesn't work because you don't have the resources to just try so many things. So you need to be much more thoughtful, which means that the insight really needs to come from a deep understanding of the market and then making fewer, more concentrated bets, which is why the stakes are higher and why you need to be better at the core discipline of product management.
So try things and like lean startups, great, right? Like you can go and you can try things and you can iterate quickly and so on. But like, what are you gonna try? That's much more important these days, because the resources and the time you have to prove yourself in the market and just to succeed just like got so much shorter.
You're not gonna get, if you're not gonna approve it, you're not gonna get the funding for the next, you know, another idea. It's like fewer bullets.
Melissa Perri: Yeah, I've seen too and tell me if you've observed this as well. I think some people misunderstand sometimes the lean startup concept. They're like inside companies. Let's put it that way too. Like if you're inside a company, you already have it established. Well, I'm not talking about like somebody who's never raised any money before or haven't grown just one person in a garage.
I'm talking about like a company trying to adopt that mentality. I see a lot of them try a bunch of stuff but they don't do any of that research that we're talking about for the market before they do that. And I find people sometimes don't even teach product managers that they should be doing that, right?
Like we focus so much on the concept of running the experiment and how to talk to customers but we don't teach them how to do market research. We're not teaching them to do a SAM analysis and figure out like what I can actually tackle. And that's the thing that I feel like is always missing when I look at these concepts.
I'm like, that's a great idea but how much money is that worth? Like, and then they struggle to connect what they're doing back to the financials but they're missing that market piece.
Hubert Palan: Totally. Like that, you know, if I look back at my, the value of the business education degree I got the MBA here at Berkeley. Like what you just described, like the marketing strategy class which was about market research and understanding where the dollars might be in the market and how to competitively position.
Like that was incredibly valuable exactly for the reasons that you're talking about. Because in lean startup in any of the methodologies it's all about the process that's super valuable. Iterate quickly, try things, like don't overbuild upfront, all that like super valuable. But it's still at the, before all of this you still need to narrow down the things that you want to go and invest after and that needs to be informed by what you just described like understanding of the market and, you know, you need to have some intuition that hopefully is not just like a guess it should be internalized experience but, you know, informed and narrowed down.
And that, by the way, it's not part of any of these methodologies. Kind of like the strategic framing and thinking about where to focus. Like that happens before you start reading lean startup or you start thinking about agile methodology or, you know, whatever. Like shape up, you know, framing, shaping, spiking, whatever frameworks you use, you know, it's like the strategic aspect.
That's what product managers need to be really good at these days.
Melissa Perri: Yeah, that's kind of what I've been teaching my CPOs and CPO accelerator. Cause I find that gap, like they're fantastic product leaders but they don't know how to evaluate like if you should go up market or down market, like what's the potential there, right? How should we get into it? So I've been, a couple of them do come with that mindset cause they did the MBA like you're talking about, right?
So those people you can see get it really fast and the other ones who haven't have been like, oh, wow, they pick it up really fast once they know that they should be doing it but it was just something that they were never taught. So for your company, your product managers, how do you help make sure they do that work, right? Like have you, how do you instill it in them that this is important?
Hubert Palan: Yeah, it's difficult in the first place. It's education, it's also a lot of kind of encouragement to trust your instincts. And again, like, you know, not just guesses, right? But it's like, you need to be exposed to the customers, talk to the market and then be bold to make a decision before you have everything tested and you ran like, you know, multiple experiments about everything, which is uncomfortable.
Just like, hey, you know, it's just like, it's easy to fall back on the process and the data and it's much harder to make the decision in the absence of data. And so, you know, I always talk about talking to customers is absolutely critical and it's the most precise way to go and you know, kind of first principles, go and test everything in the market with the customers. But guess what?
It's also the most expensive and slowest way to do it. And so where can you take the shortcuts? Where can you avoid going and doing like all the primary research? Can you find concentrated pockets of knowledge through people that have the experience concentrated through years of being in that market or, you know, working in that space or people who are on your team at the company, like sales, customer success, somebody who's on the frontline, whose job is to talk to people every day and understand that.
And can you take those shortcuts? So I'm encouraging that, you know, our customers, our product people to, you know, of course, if you're making a big bet and, you know, before you something as a one way door and you're completely repositioned and you're not part of the product, like do the, make sure that it's tested properly. But in many other cases, you know, it's relatively cheap to just like, let's try to build it quickly and then, you know, make educated guesses and then see how it works.
Again, though, like with the caveat that now we have fewer resources and so on. But it's one thing. The other is the importance of sharing the business context from the leadership and the executive team. And it's not just like a half page, one page summary of what your product strategy is. It just, you know, there's so much context.
And I always tell people, look like I've been thinking about what we're building as a company for the past nine years. And I'm no smarter than anyone else here. I just have the head start ahead of all of you because I've been thinking about it for nine years, like day and night. Like it's my baby. It's my focus of my professional effort for so long.
And so now how do I, though, translate that context to people and enable them as much as possible? And it's a struggle and it's been like difficult because as a founder, you're impatient and you kind of like, can't you see it? And there's like, wait a minute. Like, okay, so you've been here for three months or six months and it's easy to forget that I had literally thousands of conversations with people in the market.
And you know, this person had like, you know, whatever, 50. I don't know how to translate it to the audience here other than if you are in the leadership position, you should recognize that and make sure that you do spend time and translate that context. And now more than ever, take the time and do like workshop, talk through session, just like, you know, hey, I'm gonna talk through history, how we got here, what we tried, what we learned, what work didn't work and just like as much as the business market context as possible.
And then if you are not in the leadership position, like, you know, if you're on the receiving end of the context, don't be shy and go and talk to the leaders and explain them like this concept that's like, hey, I wanna learn, I wanna figure it out. I understand that you might have more context than I do. And if you tell your leader that you wanna take shortcuts and that, you know, you're eager and hungry to learn from them because they have the concentrated knowledge and that you don't wanna go and do all the primary research again, like relearning everything, like they're gonna love it.
I bet that, you know, like who wouldn't, you know, have that eager student who comes to the professor and gives like the hungriest person to learn from them. Again, like if you don't do this, you're in the position where you're throwing your product managers and your teams into the water and like go and swim. And it's kind of like taking a student at school who hasn't read any textbooks, hasn't done any of the lectures and just like go figure it out, like go and relearn the thousands years of architecture and figure out how to build this skyscraper.
So I hope you get the analogy.
Melissa Perri: No, that's fantastic. I think that's so important for leaders to remember. It's like, you have to take the time to tell people what's going on. Otherwise, how can you enable them to make decisions? So you mentioned too, like it does not cut it if you just do half a page, a full page little synopsis. You got to really deeply embed it. What do you do to make sure that people on your team have the same knowledge as you or that you're communicating your vision well or that you're communicating your strategy very well to them? What types of tools do you use?
Hubert Palan: I wrote down a very long document, not very long, I don't know, 10, 12, 15 pages. I don't know how long, but I basically tried to cover all the key pieces, right? Like, hey, describe the broader market. Like this is the ecosystem. This is how we think about the structure. These are the main flows or jobs and kind of the main personas, players, segments.
This is how we differentiate against competition. This is how we are thinking about where we build ourselves, where we partner, where we buy. This is how we think about the sequencing and prioritization, kind of like the strategic milestones outlined it for the next three years. And then said like, hey, this is what we might be doing beyond three years from now, but like what we're not gonna do right now and what we're gonna prioritize.
And it's a work in progress, by the way, right? It's like, you know, I wrote the latest version in November and I'm like already changing it again and like: rewrite this. But that's normal, right? Especially in this environment, because things are changing so fast, landscape wise, both in macro and then AI, and you know, how is it impacting your strategy?
And then, in terms of the rolling out, actually right now, making sure that, this is an interesting one. So that it's not just like a written document with words, but the more visual it can be. So I'm working with one of our OG original gangster all-time designer to kind of put mock-ups together that, you know, it's not like the final design, but just like put some material visualization of the vision so that people can see it.
Because, especially people outside of the R&D or EPD or, you know, general product design, it's just difficult to talk in the abstract strategic terms because they can't necessarily see how it translates into the product, like what it can actually look like, the capability or the functionality. So I'm working on that and then I'm gonna do a big road show. Just go across the company and I will 12 times tell the same story about the strategy and the focus and it's gonna be super repetitive, but any big, successful CEO I talked to in the past, they would say like, yeah, it takes time and you just need to keep repeating it again and again in a consistent message and, you know, make sure that every person hears it three times across the whole company and then hopefully it will stick and you will drive the change that you need to drive.
You know, to the direction you want.
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Melissa Perri: Repetition, repetition, repetition, that's key. That's great, I like it's like a three-prong message. Let's write it out, let's visualize it and then I'm gonna go talk about it over and over and over again, which I think is really critical for getting strategy out there. So that's awesome that you're doing that.
When you're working with, you know, your head of product to look at this, how are they kind of, how are you making sure that you're on the same page? I think it's interesting because you're a product person, but you're also the CEO, right? So everybody is always like CEO, product person. How do you define the boundaries between you and the head of product?
Because you're very large now, like as a company. And how do you communicate with them about strategy?
Hubert Palan: I think that you need to have alignment and it's a lot of conversations that need to happen. In general, always follow, like if you wanna get a really good buy-in from people, this is not just in this use case, like in any kind of approach, right? Like you need to talk about the problem or the space that you wanna cover as the first step.
And it's like, hey, this is what we need to figure out. Then you go as the second and you share with people the different options and you have a conversation about, okay, these are the options, the different solutions that we could consider and so on. And finally third, you roll out, okay, this is the decision.
And if you had a very strong bias towards one of the options at the beginning, just like getting people through it, it will make them bought into it. So like remember these three steps, right? And so, you know, and I make mistakes and sometimes we're just like, so sure it's like, this is what we're gonna do.
And like, I just did this, like Hubert showed up as a cannonball with this like EPD leadership meetings, like without any context, like this is what we're gonna do. And like, wait, why? What are we trying to solve? And like, and it was like, wait, okay, okay, okay. And then I like, I apologize in such context.
So it's like, you know, to your point, like being the founder and CEO, it's just like, you have so much urgent and urgency and like the intuition feels so strong in you because you have all the context that sometimes it's difficult. So like, I need to catch myself and kind of follow the same process. The same thing with the head of product.
Bring the people along the ride and the more tenure, the more time you have together, the easier it should be, right? Because hopefully you're more aligned and you just share more of the context. And so you have the opportunity to talk things through and then, you know, you achieve the alignment. I remember I talked to a guy who was the head of product.
Doesn't matter the name of the company, but basically the way he was on boarded in the early days was that he moved into the, and it was an already sizable company. It was like a couple hundred employees, but he literally moved next door to the founder CEO and they just spent every day together talking and making sure that they have as much context. Just like to maximize that, yeah.
Melissa Perri: I mean, startup stories are crazy. So I get a lot of questions from product managers or product leaders who do talk about their founder CEO coming in like a cannonball, right? And they like do not know how to handle it. What do you wish they did with you? If you were to give them advice, right? Having done that before to your team of how they should handle it or how they should talk to the founder CEO, I feel like they get scared, right?
They're like, oh no, I can't tell them no, or I can't like dash those ideas or I got to listen to it and people react and then they just run off and build things. How do you want people to work with you in those situations? Like what advice would you give them?
Hubert Palan: It's great, it's a little like a therapy session. I mean, maybe a little bit of what I said earlier, like give the context or ask for the context. Like, hey, remind that this is, like be positive about the energy that's flowing, but remind like, hey, we need the context. So this is, we don't know where it's coming from and like don't take it as like disagreement or like, hey, we are not bought into it.
It's more like the context is important, right? And we don't have the information in order to be supportive of what you're trying to do and why is this important and so on and so on. And so I feel like that, if you help the person communicating that needs to be covered, like I feel like I would appreciate like, oh yeah, you're right.
Like, sorry, I didn't get it. They didn't understand and so on and so on. The other thing I feel like is the closer relationship you have with the people and they know you and they kind of don't have this outside respect for this like, oh, it's the CEO and I can't like ask questions and they just need to listen and so on.
So like chat, chat up, like kind of the CEO and the head of product, whatever it is, right? But like, you know, build the relationship and the personal relationship because at the end of the day, we are people and you know, I have kids and I have family and I have interests. I don't have any time for the interests.
I don't have the kids in the startup, but it just really helps because you're warmer, you're kind of like established, you know, trust in the relationship as human beings. Like I pointed out, kind of like you could say like, hey, Hubert's again doing the thing. Like if there's somebody who knows me well, who can like point out like, you know, sometimes people have these bad habits and then they set up trigger words that somebody reminds them, hey, you know, this is it again, like you could probably apply that as well.
I can see that totally that this would work in our context that like, if people started saying like, hey, you're doing the cannonball again, like I was like, oh yeah, okay. I get it, you're right. Let's backtrack a little bit. I don't know if this is helpful.
Melissa Perri: No, it totally is. I see a lot of people just get really scared of like their boss or the CEO. And they also, a big thing that you said I wanted to point out for the people listening too, because I see this completely killer relationship between a product manager and a CEO is when you poo poo all the ideas coming out of the CEO.
Like, and you said it, you said be enthusiastic, ride that wave of energy, but just be like, hey, this is really cool, but let's go back a little bit because I just, I don't know how you got there. So just fill me in and like, let's check it out. Like, let's dive in. And I think some product managers kind of got this connotation of, you know, I come up with all the ideas and if the CEO comes up with an idea, they're just throwing it down to me.
And that means I have to go build it. When in reality, most CEOs that I've worked with, like you're saying is just like, I have an idea, but let's go explore it just like you would any other idea. And I think people miss that. They think like, oh, the CEO is coming and I'm going to just be like, no, that's a bad idea off the bat because, you know, we didn't come up with it.
It wasn't bottom up, but that's not how companies work at the end of the day.
Hubert Palan: I mean, totally. I want to highlight one more thing that especially with the founder CEOs or it doesn't have to be a CEO, right? It can be like a founding CTO or, you know, head of product, like whatever. You typically need to have the ability to create this reality distortion field in order to get other people excited about what you want to do because you had to go through the fire of like being the lunatic, trying to get people excited, like join this startup that doesn't have anything.
And so you're kind of trained in selling your ideas. And I feel like people should understand that it might feel like really strongly held or like strongly communicated opinion, but it might be weakly held. And it's just like, you have all this enthusiasm, but if you have the conversation along the lines of like, okay, this is great, this is great.
Like help me understand how important is it to these other 27 great ideas that you have. Like then you can have like, oh yeah, you're right. Like, so, you know, if you compare it to this, like, yeah, it's super excited, but like, you know, let's put it on ice right now. Just like want you to understand this is an opportunity.
But you know, put it in the perspective. I don't take it like it happened to me so many times that I just like do something brainstorming wise, like, oh, this is what we could do and so on. And people take it as like, oh, this is what we should drop everything else and go do this right now. And that's absolutely not what I meant.
Like I still in my mind of priorities are set the way they were set. It just like, you know, this was a great idea to brainstorm about. So like, I did it because it's fun. But yeah, so put that in the perspective and just remind or clarify. Hey, clarify, do we need to go and do everything, stop everything now or not?
And you know, I'm gonna tell you as I have the best interest of the company in my mind and I will tell you like, okay, we should drop everything and just like put 100% of resources on AI like right now versus let's do a more targeted like a smaller experimentation. Like, you know, at the end of day, I need to manage the resources as the CEO, right? Like make the portfolio investments decisions.
Melissa Perri: Yeah, love where you're going with that. And for the product managers listening to, you know, definitely use those techniques. Like you can, you're supposed to be managing stakeholders or communicating with stakeholders, but I think they forget that you could do the same thing with the CEO, it's about trade-offs, it's about what we're gonna look at.
But at the end of the day, like the CEO runs a company so it's their direction of what you're gonna do. So if they say, hey, this is the way we're going and they firmly believe it, that's the way you gotta go. But if it's just an idea, like you said, it could be weekly held and I've seen that happen a lot.
So I hope everybody listening to this does take a chance to go talk to their CEO and you know, get a little bit more comfortable with communicating like that and talking about trade-offs. So one thing that you just said too, you brought up AI and I do think that's very relevant to what we've been talking about in the economy and with product managers. How are you thinking about AI and how are you seeing it kind of affect product management?
Hubert Palan: Yeah, it's interesting because, you know, we talked about the macro pressures and that's, on one hand, right? It's like economies going down the flames. I mean, depending on what your outlook is, depending on the industry, right? Of course, it's like, it's different. But, and that means that you need to be like we just discussed and established really great at product management, product strategy in the first place.
And AI, ironically, like it's the opposite. It's like super cool new technology, right? Invention, innovation that happened. That is kind of like up and to the right on the boom, on the rise. But guess what? There, the product management is so critical as well, because the race here is about how to apply that innovation and the same questions like, okay, which segment, which pain points, which jobs, use cases.
I should be going after and prioritizing very honestly and brutally the resources, because there's just so many use cases and there's so many people trying to apply the technology that, you know, it's super competitive and there's a lot of kind of like low hanging fruits and it's just difficult to win because, you know, if you wanna build a really successful company, not just like a cool feature or, you know, cool product. But like actually viable business, you need to think about the differentiation and the longevity of it. And so that's kind of, it means that the investments that you're gonna make need to be informed.
And it goes back to the same product strategy, because there's, I don't know, 50, 100 companies trying to apply AI to interpret customer feedback or, you know, it's just like so easy or, you know, help you write better. And so think of it, it's almost like, what is it that's not gonna change over the next five, 10 years? Advisors from Sequoia mentioned that, that you can bet your company and differentiation on and, you know, can you see a company that's gonna be here five, 10 years from now, you know, doing what you're doing?
Or is it gonna be? The big players are just gonna adopt technology and you're not gonna be differentiated and they outcompete you, and so on. So both answers are macro down, AI up. At the end of the day, if you are not good at product strategy, you're not gonna survive or you're not gonna ride the wave of the upside either.
Melissa Perri: So with the AI that's coming out here too, what are you seeing as the change in the product management function, trying to utilize that? Like, how do you have to adapt, I guess, what you've been doing to start to utilize AI or start to plug it in?
Hubert Palan: Yeah, I would say that a lot of product management's job is what we discuss is understanding the market and customers and segments and, you know, differentiated and so on. And that's, AI is an incredible tool to help you process large volumes of data and, you know, connect the dots in a much shorter period of time in areas where you haven't been able to do it before. It's just like super easily.
It just like, you know, you have to read as much volume, like you can rely on summaries and so on. And so it's like, to the extent you can learn how to most efficiently use AI to get the information out. And so it's knowing what are the right questions. And it's kind of like a prompt engineering, like, you know, what is it that you can get at what level of reliability and certainty from the tools that can help you guide the decisions.
So I think that's what we need to figure out as product managers. But you need to have the critical thinking, right? Because the hallucinations are happening or, you know, it's not necessarily right. And it's, you know, the unique insights. Like, you know, if you think about fundamentally like how would the structure of the models is, it's all about probabilities of the large language models.
It's all about probability of the next word, right? That comes based on all the corpuses of the training data. And so if you have a unique insight as a product manager, like it's not likely that it is the highest probability insight that comes out of the corpus of information, because by definition, unique is the most common.
And so it's kind of like, how do you distill out of a large volumes, like the biggest signals, but then how do you connect the signals, you know, in the right unique way? And how do you find your opportunities? Like you still need to do that job of product management. So I don't can get the simple example is like, if you're gonna look at your support tickets and you're gonna read all the support conversations, like if you apply a large language model, it's gonna help you understand what is the highest frequency pain point, right?
That people are complaining about the most. But is it the most valuable one? Is it the one that unlocks, you know, there might be amongst the million support tickets. There might be this one conversation which is like, oh, wow, like I haven't heard this before. This is incredible. Let me go and drill into it.
It's like, oh, wow, it could be so, you know, big. So, you know, what I'm trying to say is that I think that in terms of the innovation, it's not gonna help us that much to discover these whole new unmet needs in the market. It's gonna help us progressively, iteratively, kind of incrementally improve the products and services that we have because you can just like, based on the user and the information, like listen to the suggestions.
I don't know if I answered the question because like, it's kind of the applicability of AI and how it's changing the product management profession, but learn how to use it like a tool, but it's not gonna make you Steve Jobs, you know, with the unique insights.
Melissa Perri: Yeah, I see that. I think like product management is becoming more and more important actually, because you need to do all what you were talking about, the strategy pieces, figure out what questions to ask and some of the actually getting the data, right? Like, you know, doing that analysis on it, it's getting, those things are starting to become easier with AI, right?
And a lot of that was so manual before. We've done like a million data dumps out of systems and like try to piece it together so that we can inform our strategy. And then I could just ask a question. Like, it's amazing to me that you could just do that in those systems. So I do see that trend, which I'm very excited for, people to actually have access to data faster, to be able to ask their questions and get the answers faster.
So I think it's gonna make it better for product managers and faster for them to make decisions, but I agree with you where we're just gonna need more people that can ask the right questions, because if you can't, then you're stuck.
Hubert Palan: Totally.
Melissa Perri: So interesting times ahead. To close us out too, I'm curious, what do you think about the next five to 10 years for product management? Where do you see things that we need to concentrate on? We were just talking about a little bit with prompt engineering and noticing that you have to ask the right questions. What do you think is gonna happen and what are the trends that you expect to see? So what would your advice be for product managers?
Hubert Palan: I would say that one, maybe a little practical and execution focus is that we are going to see much more standardization of the product management process, especially at large teams and companies. If you look at sales, if you look at customer success, if you look at engineering, there's very defined and well understood methodologies that everybody follows. Your sales team, every sales rep has the same set of pipeline stages to push the opportunities through and they need to follow the same methodology in order to, on the overall company level, for the head of sales to have a reliable forecast.
If you look at engineering and you wanna measure whatever backlog, burn down charts, velocity and so on, you need to have consistency in how people define the stories and the story points. Again, whatever methodology. And we've been somehow in this world where the product managers and the product teams historically have lived in this, don't dictate the way you're so working and let everybody use their own tools and kind of don't interfere with the genie, innovation, bottle the magic that can happen in the teams.
And if you look at it from the perspective of a head of product who has 20, 50, 100, product teams at large companies, it's just a complete craziness because there's no consistency in how the prioritization decisions are made. How to look at the portfolio of, you have these teams that you're investing, it's an investment portfolio, and how do you decide what efforts to put where? You have no visibility, you have no consistency, and so on.
And so we're seeing that does the rise of product operations function, right? Does the rise of the need for more rigorous approach to product management as a process. And that doesn't mean that the individual product teams or product managers can have their own criteria, but it needs to be like a centralized, standardized thing.
And so I do believe that we will see more of that because of the need for predictability and kind of leadership of the product organization as a whole, which I hope is good for us as a system of record, by the way, but it happened in any other profession, right? Or the line of business or the function. And so that will rhyme well or contribute well to the overall efficiency and productivity, which is what the companies are looking at right now.
Like, right now, if you are the head of product and you show up in front of a CFO and you ask for more head count, it's a very different conversation than you had 12 months ago, because they're gonna ask you like, what's the ROI? What are you gonna build? How is it gonna drive engagement? Like, show me, show me the impact.
Like, where is the leading indicator, hopefully as early indicators that you are actually making? Like you're gonna get the team, but first show me the last six months of stuff that you built, like, how did it move the needle? And if you cannot show me that, I'm not gonna give you the new team unless you go and are able to quantify it.
Like that's happening every day now. I think that it's gonna stay, even while we get out of this immediate recession. Like I think that just the realization and kind of the scars that we're carrying as an industry from this, like being super high on dollars that were cheap, you know, the CFOs are not gonna tolerate it.
Of course, like, yeah, 10 years from now, people are gonna forget, and there's gonna be a different generation of leaders. And like, it's right now. It's like, who remembers 2008, really? Like I wasn't a CEO and I wasn't making decisions back then. I was graduating out of business school, couldn't get a job, but it's a different kind of experience.
The visionary stuff, yeah, AI, absolutely. Like how do you understand the market? How do you apply it? How do you, what kind of products we are creating? And there's so much more to talk about, by the way, structured unstructured systems, how they're gonna converge, how AI is gonna change the UI and the interface, how we interact with the data, how we make the decision based on top of the data, how we explore the data, because suddenly you don't necessarily need to have the structured interfaces on top of everything.
Because you can have the conversation and then figure out like, you know, business insights. It could be a whole different podcast about it gonna change. But invest into the skills that we talked about. That's never gonna go away, business understanding, understanding of the customers. I've argued that is more important than the tech knowledge.
I mean, obviously you need to understand technology in order to understand feasibility of something, but I've always argued that the primary job of product managers is to understand the market, the people, their needs and their pain points. So you can partner with engineers, you can partner with designers, but if you have the vacuum around the pain points and markets, like, who's gonna do the job?
Melissa Perri: Definitely good words to leave us with. Well, thank you so much for being on the podcast. If people wanna learn more about Product Board, where can they go?
Hubert Palan: Regboard.com, surprise, surprise. Sign up, hit trial.
Melissa Perri: And where can they learn more about you too?
Hubert Palan: Hubert Pond, you can find me on Twitter on LinkedIn. H Pond, Twitter handle, LinkedIn.
Melissa Perri: Well, thank you again for being with us on the Product Thinking Podcast and thank you for listening to the Product Thinking Podcast. Remember that next week we'll have another Dear Melissa. So if you have any questions for me about product management, I answer them every two week. Please go to DearMelissa.com and let me know what you're thinking. We'll see you next time.
