Melissa Perri welcomes Ben Foster - Chief Product Officer at Whoop and author of Building What Matters: Delivering Key Outcomes with Vision-Led Product Management - to this week’s Product Thinking Podcast. Ben is an experienced product leader who teaches the value of vision to help us craft the right strategy and achieve our desired outcomes. He joins Melissa to discuss the framework he details in his book and what makes a great vision.
Show Notes
Here are some key points you’ll hear Melissa and Ben talk about in this episode:
Ben and Melissa swap stories of how they “accidentally” got into product management.
Ben’s book describes what causes some companies to struggle with product management, as well as what makes other companies excel. It also features recommendations for product leaders.
Vision-led product management, Ben tells Melissa, is “being definitive about what the value of your product is going to be, for whom you're going to provide that value, where the differentiation is going to lie, ...all these major components of the product vision.”
Successful companies see their profits as a byproduct of the value they provide for their customers. Defining what success looks like to customers involves deep research into who your customers are, what motivates them, who else can solve their problem, and what would make them choose you and stay with you. “As you map that out,” Ben remarks, “then you can make sure that everybody on the product team is rowing in the same direction towards actually realizing that vision.”
Melissa asks Ben to talk about how he implemented his vision-led product management framework at Go Canvas.
Melissa and Ben talk about the steps in the customer journey.
“The reason that people actually buy is because of the performance things; the reason they continue to buy is because of the delight,” Ben emphasizes.
Melissa asks Ben, “What else do you see [as] the differentiators between companies that do product management well and companies that don't?” Ben responds, “One of the key elements for me is they understand the connectedness between value for their customers and value for their business.”
Ben and Melissa discuss how to convince the CEO that not every opportunity should be pursued.
Resources Ben Foster on LinkedIn Building What Matters: Delivering Key Outcomes with Vision-Led Product Management
Episode Transcript
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: Hey there, listeners. Welcome to another week of the Product Thinking Podcast. Right now I'm thinking all about visions. I've seen a lot of really poor visions out there for products and also for companies, things like just go make us some more money. And I wanted to dive deeper into what makes a great vision and how can it help us with our product strategy.
So this week I'm talking to Ben Foster. And Ben just wrote a book called Build What Matters, Delivering Key Outcomes with Vision-Led Product Management. And he's also a very experienced chief product officer. He's been at lots of companies so far implementing this framework and seeing how it helps them focus around what is the right strategy to go after and how great visions can help us achieve the outcomes that we actually wanna get to.
So this aligns really well, I think, with my thinking about strategy. And I'm excited for Ben to share some of his war stories and how he thinks about this framework and how he's implemented it in companies before too. Welcome Ben to the podcast. It's good to have you here.
Ben Foster: It's so great to be here. Thanks so much, Melissa.
Melissa Perri: Awesome. Can you explain to people what your role is? You're the chief product officer of Whoop. What does that mean?
Ben Foster: Yeah, exactly. So my role is the chief product officer of Whoop. Whoop is a company that is trying to unlock human performance by giving a lot more information about their bodies and about ways that they can try become more fit, more healthy, and so on. And so at Whoop, my charter as a chief product officer, and I think this is probably true for just about anybody who's in that role, is to really find a way of maximizing the customer value that you're delivering with your product. And in doing that, to ensure that the business is actually getting value for their shareholders as well.
Melissa Perri: Awesome. You're not a first-time CPO. Where else have you been?
Ben Foster: Yeah, this is my second time in a CPO position. Prior to that, I was a VP of product a couple of times as well. But in the chief product officer role, I was also at a company called GoCanvas. And I was there from 2018 to 2020.
Melissa Perri: Great. How did you get into product management? How did you start on this journey of a lengthy product career?
Ben Foster: Yeah, I think anytime you talk to somebody who has that really lengthy product career, that means that they've been doing it for a long time. And that means that it dates back to when product management barely existed. And so everybody kind of has these really funny stories for how they got into it.
And for me, I graduated in statistics from UC Berkeley back in 97. Just to kind of take us back in time for a moment. That was the Bay Area in the late 90s when everything was just kind of booming and going crazy and the bubble was sort of not yet burst. And so it was this really exciting time. You get hired in these companies just doing amazing types of work with basically no experience.
And that was totally me in a nutshell. And then we all got burned and laid off. And we had to go through that. But my first foray into it was actually kind of a bit accidental. And I think this is true for a lot of people who get into product. I was a statistics major and I didn't really know how to apply it.
And so I was working for this company called Bara was later acquired by Morgan Stanley. And it basically had this portfolio analytics software for Wall Street investor types. And I was responsible for answering these questions from irate customers who'd be like, why are your numbers? And I'm probably missing a lot of F-bombs in this.
Two basis points off of Bloomberg. And they wanted to figure out the answer to that. And so I was kind of like the support analyst trying to go figure that stuff out. But we had also acquired this other software technology from another company that was like at that point going bankrupt. And so we pulled that technology in and we were gonna sort of like cross promote it with the rest of our software suite.
And so when the phone wasn't ringing they asked me to kind of just step in and start doing some QA on it. And so I wasn't trained at all in software. I wasn't trained in QA, but I started filing bugs, right? And then you started filing bugs and those start to turn into enhancement requests. And those enhancement requests start to turn into feature ideas and kind of like directional guidance for where we can go.
And I remember this day vividly, which is some person at the company who I had literally never met just kind of like stopped by my desk one day and is like, do you want a job in product management? And I was like literally like, what is product management? I have no idea what this is. And so he proceeded to explain it to me and I was like, I don't know if I really want to do that.
And so I ended up moving on to some other company and joining as a business analyst, which to me made a lot more sense only to find out that when I joined that other company that was exactly the same thing that he was talking to me about in product management. And so that was sort of like my accidental entry into the profession.
Melissa Perri: That's so funny. I had a similar entry. Like I was studying operations research in school and all the statistics, all the math. And I was like, what can I do with this? I don't even know. Like I didn't even know what the major was honestly when I got into it. I had been studying like chemical engineering and when I absolutely do not want to do this.
And I was like, what can I do that's not chemical engineering? My friend said, oh, I'm doing operations research over here. It's kind of like the businessy engineering. And I was like, okay, that sounds fine. Like that was my choice in choosing that major, which is awful, but that's how I ended up there.
And I didn't know what to do. I got hired into a capital IQ as a business analyst as well. And I didn't know anything about product management at the time, but I got called a business analyst and ended up doing very purely product work there. And I think it's interesting like nowadays though, when I see business analysts they don't do pure product work.
Do you see that out there in the market too? Like some of the business analysts aren't purely product managers anymore.
Ben Foster: Yeah, for sure. I think it's just because product management has carved out its own space, right? And so, like what you're doing when you're a business analyst, when there also is a role called a product manager, it's gonna be sort of like pushed off to the side to some extent, to be kind of like, okay, you're gonna go do the research on the market and the industry, or you're gonna like run the numbers on what the impact of this particular feature might be. Things like that versus like actually making the decisions around where is this product actually headed and why. That ends up getting kind of like compartmentalized between the two roles.
Melissa Perri: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. We get a lot of questions from people who are like, I'm a business analyst, how can I transition into product management? But I think what you're pointing out there is really one of the biggest fundamental shifts that I've seen too is just that we don't smash it all together anymore.
It's not like, oh, BA, product falls under BA, but that seems to make sense. So on this extensive run of product management, you've learned so much that you've actually written a book on it. It's called Build What Matters, Delivering Key Outcomes with Vision-led Product Management. Can you tell us a little bit about the book and what you can expect to learn from it?
Ben Foster: Yeah, sure. So myself and my partner, Rajesh Nirulikar, had worked together on compiling this book. And it was really sort of like based on the experiences that we had had as advisors working with sort of like several dozen product companies. And so these were all kind of like tech companies, many of them being kind of like startups, some of them really kind of like large scale companies as well, public organizations.
So it's sort of like a really broad range of different types of companies. But the thing that was common across all of them was that they were all looking for help when it came to things related to product. And so sometimes, on the smaller side, it might be like a founder who's saying, hey, when do I hire my first product person?
Or it might be somebody else in a larger organization who's saying, hey, as I'm kind of like building out my product org, how should I think about the kinds of people that I hire? Or how should I think about pushing down KPIs and business outcomes that I wanna like, you know, drive people to have responsibility for, while still, at the same time, myself as the leader, maintaining accountability. And so it was just sort of like problem after problem after problem that all these kind of like different companies were facing working with product.
And it was because I think there's a lot of ambiguity out there about what product is really about. So we kind of thought, you know, should we try to go write a book that's about explaining what the role of product management really is? And we're kind of like, well, there's a lot of books that are already written, that are kind of like out there.
And I think they do a really good job of explaining what the function is. But what we identified as we were working with so many of these companies as advisors and consultants is that we sort of like found that there was this real gap that had emerged in product leadership. And that gap was really one in which they're saying, well, how do I do all the like kind of forward thinking stuff that I wanna do when I'm faced on a day-to-day basis with all these kind of like mundane kind of like challenges or these frustrating kind of like issues of, you know, you're trying to stuff 10 pounds of stuff into a five pound bag and it won't fit.
You know, the kind of like typical product road mapping problem. They're kind of like, well, if I've got all these like technical issues and debt items that I need to deal with and bugs that are out there and customers breathing down my neck, how do I sort of like take a step out of that and think forward about the kind of like future direction of where the product is, you know, how do those best companies really do that? And so what we tried to do is connect the dots, because we had so many different case studies, I think, that we can point to.
And when you see that many sort of like, you know, connections, you can say, well, I'm starting to see the pattern that emerges here. And we were able to decipher, I think, in a lot of ways, here are the things that are making some companies really struggle with product management. And here are the other things that are really making some other companies really excel on this front.
So we try to kind of like figure out what that is, put that into a book, and then try to encapsulate that into like a set of recommendations around how you yourself, as a product leader, can be really successful in sort of resolving all these kinds of like day-to-day issues that are kind of like constant frustrations, by taking this more, less defensive and this more sort of like offensive approach towards how you go about setting the stage for where your product is gonna be and what kind of value you're gonna deliver for your customers.
Melissa Perri: Yeah, that's a big part I see with the product management organizations that struggle too. It's just like reactive versus proactive approach to product management. Are you gonna just listen to everybody, give you the features, put them on the backlog and just build it, or are you gonna think about where are we going and what's that strategy for it? You call that something called vision-led product management, right? Like figuring out what that strategy is, having that forward thinking approach. Can you tell us a little bit more about what that actually means?
Ben Foster: Yeah, absolutely. What it really means is really being definitive about what the value of your product is gonna be, for whom you're gonna provide that value, where the differentiation is gonna lie, et cetera. Kind of like all these major components of a product vision. I think we talk about mission statements, we talk about visions, we talk about strategies, but there's not a lot of books out there, I think, that really try to articulate what the differentiation is between each of those things.
And that mission statement is just that high level one sentence, here's the kind of like worldwide problem that we're trying to solve. Like this is why we exist in business at all. And that's great to have. Like I'm not precluding that in the sliders, but it's not a vision for the product, right? And I think that what that means is there's a lot of space for a product leader to say the vision that I sort of like have for our product in three, five years timeframe is that we're gonna solve the following problems for our customers.
Here's who our customers are gonna be. We're gonna solve them in the following kind of like way. And it doesn't mean you have to get really detailed and sort of like anti-agile in some sort of a way by having all the UX mockups and things like that ready to go. It's more like you just need to kind of like provide a concept for what it's gonna look like.
And most importantly, how your own customers would measure success themselves. And I think this is one of those kind of like points that I've found along the way was that the companies that were really successful weren't just able to define success in their own terms to say we're successful when we hit a certain growth rate or when we hit a certain kind of like level of annual recurring revenue. But instead to say our annual recurring revenue is a byproduct of the value that we provide to our customer base, right?
And what it's all about is kind of like driving value for them. And here's what value for them actually looks like. And that forces you to then go do the research and understand who your customers are gonna be, what makes them tick, what their alternative solutions could potentially look like, why they're gonna retain with you over time and so on.
And as you map that out, then you can sort of like make sure that everybody on the product team is rowing in the same direction towards actually realizing that vision. And I think that by doing a really good job of laying that out and communicating that within your company, it gives you the ability to be able to push back on all these kind of like inbound requests that are coming in. And so it's kind of like that notion of the best defense.
And if you find yourself playing defense a lot, the best defense is a good offense. The more you can get people excited about this vision that you're gonna go towards, the more they're willing to kind of like run alongside you with that and not distract you with all these sort of like random inbound requests.
Melissa Perri: That makes a lot of sense. It's like forward thinking, moving towards that vision. Now, one of the biggest questions I get from people as well, and what I hear with like a lot of my clients and people that we're working with is they'll look at that customer value side that you were just talking about to really figure out, how do we define it?
And they don't know how to define it. They get very confused. They're like, well, maybe we're building internal products or our product is a platform that serves the business internally. How do I create a vision around that? How do I talk about user value? Because they just have to use my product. What is the metrics that we actually measure for that?
Or well, user value, they could achieve it in six months or a year afterwards. Like, how do we actually measure that? How do you make sure that people aren't putting just like dumb metrics into the vision led strategy part for the user value? Like, how do you get people to quantify that or think through how you might be quantifying that?
Ben Foster: Well, I think it happens for a lot of customer research and that comes from a lot of like customer discovery, right? Like that's a really important part of the process and something that you can't sort of take lightly. So ideally what would happen is as soon as you document and you actually get it right, you'd be able to share that back with your customers and they would say, oh yeah, exactly.
That's the way that I sort of like think about it. And it should make sense in their terms, not in yours as the product person. Now, if you play this internal product situation where let's say you're building like customer support capabilities for a support team, that's fine, your customer is the support team.
But what are the metrics that they care about? What are the things that they're trying to do in a far superior way? It's not just about sort of like reducing the amount of time that they have to use a particular kind of like feature or improving their NPS on using your sort of like particular product that you've developed for them.
At the end of the day, the reason that they exist and then the reason that they sort of like care about their work is because they're trying to delight the customers that they're serving. And so if you can empower them to do that kind of thing, then that's the kind of like metric that you might want to focus on instead. And I think the same thing I think is true in a B2B to C context versus like an internal product.
It's just that that B that's in the middle, is that an internal group or is that an external group? Like either way, they're effectively the client and you got to figure out what actually matters to that client. And the kind of thing that we think is really important within the book that we really try to like emphasize is that it's not just about making some sort of a minor improvement to those metrics.
This is about what we call a 10X outcome. Like we want it to be far superior to anything else that they have before and hopefully your customers will look at that and say, yes, that would be totally game-changing. Because if you're not trying to think of something that's gonna be truly game-changing, my argument would be, you're not thinking boldly enough.
And I think that would be something that I've sort of like read. If you check out the book, inspired by Marty Kagan, he's got this great quote in there that's exactly saying that. It's kind of like, if you can share your sort of like vision and it's sort of like something that somebody says, yeah, that's kind of like interesting or you can validate it with direct kind of like one-on-one conversation going on right now, it's probably an indication that you're just not really being bold enough.
And we think it's really important to have that kind of like strength of position to say, here's the future that we could potentially be unlocking if we go build this. Because otherwise it's not actually as inspiring as it really needs to be.
Melissa Perri: Yeah, I agree with that. I like that the vision is so different than what it is now or it's so bold that you can actually see some change. And I see some visions that are just like, go make more money or be better at that. And I think those don't tell you how, right? It doesn't give you enough context there.
But I'm curious what your perspective is on this. A lot of companies right now are going through product transformations, right? Like they've never done product management before, you've got your big insurance companies, you got your big banks. They're building basically like a small software company inside them.
And now they have to build a portfolio vision and a software vision for the inside of it, not just like a company vision. And while the company vision might be lofty, I see like a lot of really stagnant product visions on the backend, right? Portfolio visions that are just like, we'll make our workflows work, right?
It's so uninspiring. Like, do you think that these companies can do bold visions like this with product management? Do you think this vision led product management can apply to them as well?
Ben Foster: Well, I think it absolutely can. I mean, again, it's just a matter of like challenging yourself to kind of think about what the future could potentially be. Now that said, it's not to say that these kinds of like projects, these kinds of initiatives don't make sense that we shouldn't be working on that or there's somehow like a waste of time.
They're absolutely essential. And as we sort of like move from talking about product vision to the strategy that you then use to execute that vision, the reality is you are faced with like running a business today, and you do need to show a combination of sort of like long-term results, but also short-term and medium-term results along the way. And some of the ways that you'll build up to the realization of this vision is by kind of like building baseline capabilities and improving workflows and things like that.
So it's not that those things are necessarily bad, but what I think is really awful is when I see teams that are sort of like so focused on those kinds of things that they haven't taken the time to think about, what they're even kind of like taking these as stepping stones towards, right? Like they need to be stepping stones in a particular direction. You know, there's this sort of like old adage, right?
Of course, from like Steve Jobs or whatever, that like innovation is saying no to a thousand things. And that's all like fine. But the question is like, what's the mechanism by which you have confidence in saying no to this and yes to that, right? Like the whole point of saying no to these things is so that you can say yes to something else.
And I think a lot of companies sort of say, well, we're not gonna work on that right now. We're not gonna work on that right now. But in order to like make a really smart decision about what it is that you are gonna work on and what you're not gonna work on, you have to have some sort of like a foundational sense as to like where you're actually headed to say this is a sidestep from that, or this is sometimes even a backwards step from that.
It may seem on the surface like it's something that we're gonna do that's gonna enable the business because let's say we're gonna take this process and we're gonna like sort of streamline this process. But there's a question of should that process even exist in this future state? So rather than investing in sort of like, you know, making that process more and more streamlined, you should be thinking about ways of kind of like circumventing that process entirely.
And those are the kinds of things that I often see in those insurance companies and banks and things like that. But they're not kind of thinking about that future state. They're just kind of saying, well, here's what things look like today. How do we kind of like optimize what we have? And that's a very different approach than thinking about where can we potentially go.
And that's why a lot of those companies ended up being leapfrogged. I mean, you look at what's happened in FinTech and you look at what's happened, you know, look at the taxi industry, right? Versus like Uber and Lyft, right? I mean, the kinds of things that they did in the taxi industry, just kind of like upending them was just like completely different point of view about the way of solving that problem.
Look at what Google did, you know, with collaboration tools and things like that online versus Microsoft kind of like, you know, investing in the next button that could be added to Microsoft Word. And it's like, that's great, you know, but Google docs kind of like come along and have a very different approach to it. So companies get leapfrogged when they don't think forward enough about the direction that they can potentially go.
And so they get in this kind of like myopic focus on like what they can do to optimize their existing systems rather than to think sort of in this bold and innovative manner about what they can provide to their customers in the long-term.
Melissa Perri: I love that. I think it's so spot on too. And the other part that I see with these companies is that you don't realize how powerful software could be, right? Like they think about it as the old IT infrastructure where it was like, oh, you go fix our laptops if they break, or you build some databases to store some data, but there's so much power that you're describing in the software that you could apply to an insurance business or a bank or anything that's like that, if you just get out of your mindset and think about what could be rather than what is today.
So I cannot agree more with that. So it sounds like this vision led product management would be very useful in all cases. Can you tell us a little bit about how you implemented that at GoCanvas?
Ben Foster: Yeah, absolutely. There's actually a really interesting story about how I joined GoCanvas and this is kind of that story as well. So when I was working with GoCanvas as initially a consultant and an advisor, I had been working with them for a couple of different years and we had been working on kind of like building out the product organization and I'd been working with the CTO there for some time.
And then we started to work on the product vision and where we could sort of like head. And I didn't have at the time this framework. So this framework was kind of like built in many ways off of my experience from GoCanvas and the kinds of documentation that we pulled together and the kind of research that we did to piece this together.
And the thing that I realized as I was going through this process as an advisor I was trying to ask all the right kinds of questions. What would your customers actually have to say about this? And why would a customer buy your product as opposed to something else? When it comes time for them to renew a contract, this is like a B2B product and when it comes time for them to renew their contract, what metric would they look to to decide whether to make that decision, yes or no?
And so as we started piecing this together, we started to realize there's actually a real story here that makes sense from the customer advantage point. And rather than thinking about, as you had said earlier on this, that a vision is like, oh yeah, I have a vision of making $200 million next year. That's not a vision.
Again, that's kind of like a by-product of you actually solving something for a customer. And so I think it's so important that when people think about the vision for their product and they apply this vision-led product framework that they orient it around what's the customer value that's gonna be delivered. And then there's a subsequent question, which is how are we gonna use the value that we're delivering to our customers as a means of extracting value for ourselves as a business in a way that's totally sustainable, right?
Where I can just keep doing that and the customer is gonna be happy with that relationship and I'm gonna be happy with that relationship and we're both gonna grow with this together. Those are all the companies that are the most successful is where they have that orientation. And so in piecing this together, I started to, I don't know, as product managers, we always abstract the things that we're working on one level.
And so I did that with this establishment of this vision as well. And I started to realize that as I was piecing together this kind of like customer journey, this idealized customer journey of the future that we would wanna create. That was like the vision, but I started to realize that there are these different kind of like steps in that journey and those steps are pretty common across just about any given kind of company.
So it wasn't something that was specific to Go Canvas. The reality is it was something that was kind of like generically applicable. And so that's what we kind of like, you know, ended up writing about in the book was this. And those steps ended up being like, what's the trigger event that makes somebody actually wanna change what tool they're using or to realize that there's some better or new way of solving a problem that they care about?
Or what's the trigger event that even creates the problem that your product even solves, right? So it kind of actually starts there. And it's not even about you. They may not even know that you exist at this stage, but there's gotta be some sort of a problem out there that ends up becoming a priority that they need to solve.
And that's where your product kind of like fits. And so identify what that looks like. Then take notes to the next step, which is discovery. Like how do they learn about your existence of your brand, of your product, you know, et cetera. Then you get into like trial and evaluation and things like that.
I like to kind of always explain things in product management, using the analogy of like buying a car. Because I think it was like a really like, we're all familiar with it. And it's all like very simple kind of like new process. So if you think about the trigger, it's like my existing car broke down.
Like, okay, I need to go buy a new car. Or, you know, I turned 16 and it's time to go buy a new car. I don't know. There's a few different triggers that are out there. That's great. But then the next step is like, what makes me decide to go to one dealership versus another? Well, that's where the marketing and stuff comes into play.
And the brand identity and all the work that you've done to make sure that your car has high resale value, you know, whatever. Like these are the reasons that you decide to go after like a Jeep versus a Ferrari versus a Ford versus a Honda, you know? And so you look at like that discovery element. Then there's like that part where you like actually show up and you're, you know, you're showing up at the, at the car lot.
And you're like, you know, looking around the different cars, like what makes you choose like one model versus another? Then you have the test run. And those are the places where you're like, these are the key kind of like criteria that I care about the most. And then finally, at the end, it's like, why do I actually buy the car?
What does the value actually look like? Are there enough delighters to make me really excited about this? And I think as you sort of like apply that same kind of like framework towards software products and what the buying process looks like and what the retention sort of like motivations and things like that look like along the way, you start to realize, hey, wait, this is exactly the way that I can sort of like, you know, tell the story in a compelling manner that people internally will understand.
And in doing that, then we'll have like kind of like painted the picture of this vision. Once you have that, you're in a great position to then set a strategy as sort of like the course that you're gonna take to go from point A where you are today to point B where that vision is gonna take you down the road.
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Melissa Perri: So when you were looking at GoCanvas, how did you decide like what were gonna be the delighters in that product vision? How did you really craft that? What's the difference between like, I solved a problem and I delighted somebody, right? Like, how do you know which one's gonna fall on either side of that?
Ben Foster: So I look at this, if you're familiar with this already, great. I really highly recommend using the Kano model. And if you're not familiar with the Kano model, I definitely recommend checking it out. And it's a very simple kind of like matter of effectively breaking features of your product into like three different kind of like buckets.
And this initial step is sort of like fine on its own. It's pretty easy to do. It's kind of like the first step is what are the must haves? So like, if you go back to that car analogy, a must have is like a seatbelt, okay? These are the things that if you ask somebody, why are you buying a car? They will never in a million years tell you that these are the reasons that they're doing it.
But I swear, you take that thing away and that car will not be bought, right? Like I will not go buy a car without seatbelts, even though seatbelts are nothing like near the top of my list is like what I'm looking for, right? So it's a must have. Then there's sort of like the performance features that are in the middle.
And those are the kinds of things that you describe to the salesperson while you're test driving the car. I care about performance or I care about safety or I care about trunk space or I care about acceleration, whatever it is. Like, you know, for you, like there can be different answers to that for different kind of like target markets.
But the deal here is you have to be better than all the other alternatives for some class of customers that you're trying to serve, right? And I think that's the part that sometimes gets left off is like, that's the key. It doesn't mean you have to be perfect across all of them, but you have to be the best for the target market that you're actually trying to go after, right?
And if you're not the best, then maybe you need to think in a smaller target market, start there and really be effective in that regard. And then you can sort of expand your market from that point forward. And then the delighters are those things that the customers wouldn't mention on their own, but once they see them, they're like, oh my God, those things are incredibly like valuable, right?
And so I went through the process a couple of years ago of like, you know, buying a Tesla. And at the time I was like, oh my God, all these features of the Tesla are like brand new and sort of like surprising and exciting and things like that. And they're the things that I would then tell my friends about when they say, oh, so how's the car?
And I wouldn't talk about the things that were the must haves. I wouldn't be like, oh, the seat belts are phenomenal. Like that would be, you know, I get kicked out of the room, right? But I also wouldn't even talk about like the reasons that I wanted to buy the car in the first place. And be like, oh yeah, the seats are really comfortable.
Like, yeah, that's a major thing for me, but it's like not a thing that's worth talking about. The reason that I'm really excited about it and the reason that I've become an evangelist for the product and the reason that I decided that, like, you know, in the case of software where I might need to renew time and time again, like let's say renew a lease on a car or whatever. The reason I would continue to do that is because I get so much enjoyment from these things that were sort of like unexpected.
And I think that that's kind of like how I define a lot of ways these delighters. So touchscreen, the fact that it has a trunk in the front and in the back, it's like nobody else has that. And these are the things that are like not the reasons that I kind of came in for, but now that I have them, don't you dare strip them away from me, right?
And those are the kinds of things that I think really kind of excite customers. And for what it's worth, this applies, a lot of people think of this in the B2C context. This applies equally in the B2B context. Do not be sort of like fooled into thinking that these kinds of things don't matter or that a minimum viable product means that you kind of just focus on the must haves.
No, the reason that people actually buy it is because of the performance things. The reason they continue to buy it is because of the delighters.
Melissa Perri: Yeah, I can't agree more. And I think a lot of people start to think that these principles don't apply with internal tools or with B2B software, but they do, right? They make a really big difference. I've seen healthcare companies like EHRs where like nurses will quit if it's hard to use, if it's things that they can't use, and they see that there's better electronic health record systems out there in other hospitals.
They're like, I'm gonna go to the other hospital and use it. Like that's a retention issue caused by things like not having delighters, not having good usability workflows. Like just because somebody has to use it doesn't mean that you shouldn't be using the types of principles that you are talking about to actually build these products.
So I can't agree with that more. I love that concept and I love the Kano model as well.
Ben Foster: I would totally agree with that. And I'll pinpoint one really important point on this, which is like, sometimes companies rely on this fact that the end users are forced into using the product. It's like, yeah, I'm just gonna sell it to the buyer and that's fine. And the end user is gonna be forced to use it.
Well, every time you do that, you're creating an opportunity and sort of like a reason for a competitor to establish themselves to go solve that problem better than you are, right? Like you've created that opportunity for somebody else to kind of like succeed where you're actually failing. And it may seem like it's not a big deal because these are like captive audience in some regard, but that's never gonna be the case permanently.
It's always a temporary matter. And if you don't sort of like, I don't know, another common like Steve Jobs adage, right? Which is like, I'd rather cannibalize myself than have somebody else do it for me. And you just gotta realize that you're kind of like putting yourself in that state. This is the state that the taxi industry was in, right?
They were like, they were focused on doing all the kinds of things that they could do, like dumping money into stupid stuff, like ensuring that they maintain this kind of like stronghold or this kind of like monopoly on a particular market that nobody else was allowed in. And that was their focus. And it was like, instead, why don't you just make a product that like customers actually wanna use?
And so they weren't solving problems that customers cared about, like wanting to know whether my taxi was actually gonna show up four in the morning when they're supposed to. And how long do I wait until I have to actually call? And to be able to see them on a map and all these other kinds of things that were like kind of obvious opportunities.
If they just talked to customers and said, what do you want? They would have said these things. We all knew what those things were. You don't go build them and you kind of think that you have this monopoly and nobody else can really touch you. It is very much untrue. And you are in a position where you're likely to be leapfrogged down the road.
And I think it's just such an important point, especially in B2B, you see this kind of thing happen. Yeah.
Melissa Perri: And some of the organizations like I've talked to, they look at that cannibalization, especially the product leaders or the product managers. They get scared about that, but you're exactly right. Like you'd rather cannibalize yourself than have somebody else cannibalize you. But I've had so many conversations, especially with leaders over the last couple of years where they're like, well, if we do that, we'll be eating into our revenue on this side of the business. And you're like, well, wouldn't you rather do that and survive rather than have somebody else eat into that part of the revenue on your business?
Ben Foster: Yeah, it's a matter of time before someone's gonna do it. Would you rather have it be you or somebody else? And by you doing it, don't you create more opportunities for yourself by being the kind of thought leader within the market, by being the kind of new feature and a new kind of capability. You can go use that to then go win over business that you've never previously been able to win over.
If you think about all the delighters and the UX and features of a B2B system, you might say, well, our existing customers don't really care about it. And maybe the reality is the buyer doesn't, but the end user absolutely does. And if you can do a better job on that front, then you're preventing, not only are you preventing somebody else from coming in and stealing your business, you're also creating an opportunity for you to then go to somebody else where they were perfectly happy with their other solution.
But now that they see yours, they're like, oh my gosh, that's just so much better. Again, it's like now that I see it, I don't want to have it taken away. And that allows you to kind of like grow your business in a lot of ways as well.
Melissa Perri: Yeah, it seems to me that it's also like job security for a product leader. Like I've literally had conversations with product leaders where they go, if I do this, I might put myself out of a job. You're like, how? You're basically creating another part of the business for you to go run. That thing needs to be grown just like a baby, right?
Like it needs to be there. So I can't see how that would put somebody out of a job. It would only make it better, right? For the whole organization to thrive. So that makes total sense to me at least, but good lesson, I think, out there for our listeners as well. Try to cannibalize yourself. So we talked about vision-led product management being a key part that you see companies thrive with.
Companies that do product management well, they do a lot of vision-led product management. What else do you see be the differentiators between companies that do product management well and companies that don't?
Ben Foster: One of the key elements for me is they understand the connectedness between value for their customers and value for their business. I think that there's a lot of companies that, for example, they say, hey, we want to improve retention. And they immediately jump into things like, well, how do we make it harder for people to cancel?
How do we make it so that like, we'll lock them in with like a longer contracts, right? Like, how do we make those kinds of things happen? And I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa. Like you can do those things as like minor optimizations as well, but there's a far superior approach to doing this. It's like, why do you make it so that somebody never would want to cancel with you in the first place?
Like, why don't you go solve the root issue? And I think those companies that really take a lot of steps, they take a lot of time to go figure out what the sort of like real underlying drivers of the sort of like business levers that they care about, like retention, churn numbers, LTV, CAC, et cetera, all these kind of like SaaS terms and things like that that are out there. Why are they what they are?
And if you sort of like really unpack it, you get down to like the root kind of like cause at a customer level. And those companies that really kind of like understand the connectedness between those things, and they actually even have those diagrams and they'll say, here's how many customers went from this phase to this phase. Here's how many customers went from this phase backwards to that phase.
Here's how many customers went from this to this, right? Like when you can actually map that out, then you start to like really kind of like, I don't know, see the matrix, if you will, right? Of like what actually drives value for your customers and how your business value that you're driving for your shareholders is a function of that value that you're delivering for customers.
And that way it doesn't sort of like take you down that path of doing these things that may seem like in the short run, like they're like really good ideas, but in the long run are actually preventing you from being innovative, right? Like you're not innovating when you're just kind of like rounding the corners on buttons and doing A-B tests to try to see if you can like optimize a conversion funnel, right? Like you should do some of that kind of stuff as well because it's not a bad idea to get more people to convert.
Like there's nothing wrong with that. But if that's all you ever do, then you're not gonna be actually innovating, right? And I see a lot of companies doing this in so many different ways, whether it's optimizations of conversion funnels, making it harder for customers to do the things that they just don't want them to do versus making it so that those customers don't want to do that kind of thing.
You know, I think it's just a matter of like, you know, taking the time to really understand that and sort of disseminate that across the organization so that everybody's really clear and they don't kind of like take these purely kind of like hacky approaches to kind of like growing the business. You certainly see this a lot with a lot of companies that are more like service driven and they're going through that product transformation that you're talking about because historically what happens is they find a customer or at least a potential customer first. They hear what that customer is looking for from technology and then they say, oh, let's go build all the things that we need to build to go win this business, right?
It's kind of like there's a contract hanging in balance. Like, can we say yes to all these things that are sitting in an RFP? And they think that they're being innovative and they think that they're being customer driven because they're building the things that the customer is actually asking for. And in fact, what's actually happening, they're not really being product driven in the slightest.
They're really being a service driven company. And there's a reason that service driven companies have more like one to two X multiples on their revenue for their valuation as opposed to the 10 to 15 X that you tend to see with like SaaS companies that are like really truly product driven. And the reason is it doesn't really scale.
So like you go build those things for that one customer but then the next time that the next customer comes along you haven't built anything that you can actually take and sort of like stamp out for the next customer and the next customer and the next customer. You think you're kind of like focusing on the right things when you're doing all these like optimizations whether it's saying yes to feature requests or optimizing some sort of a funnel. The reality is you've got to really unpack where that value actually lies for the customer and then go build those things.
So that's the thing that I kind of like see it's probably like somewhat related to the other topic that we had previously. But I think that that's the thing that you should really just sort of be introspective about with the rationale for the kind of like decisions that you're making for what you're putting onto the roadmap.
Melissa Perri: Yeah, I've seen a lot of smaller companies or companies that are getting started in the growth phase especially turn into almost service companies as well because they're looking at those one customers or that big bank that's there like 70% of their revenue or whatever that they get per year. And they're just reacting and reacting and reacting to everything that they send them instead of really strategically thinking it through. Like what's your advice for companies that are in that position?
Because it's kind of hard to be like, oh, I'm gonna say no to the person who's been 70% of our paychecks each month. Like what do they do to start to shift into this way of thinking?
Ben Foster: Yeah, so here's the crazy thing, right? People say, oh, you shouldn't get your requirements from like a one-off individual customer. You should like listen to the market. And like we all say that a lot within product but like here's the dirty like secret that nobody really wants to say. There's no such thing as the market.
Like who are you gonna go talk to when you just try to go like get information from the market? You're just gonna go talk to either prospective customers or actual customers or lost customers, right? But you're gonna talk to people who are in your target market, but like they're all customers. So the key here is that there's like an art form, I think for product management to be able to separate two kinds of things that they're gonna hear from them.
Those sorts of things that if you build it, it only helps them. And those things that if you build it actually helps likely the next customer who you haven't yet met, right? Like that's at the end of the day what's really trying to happen is that there's a theoretical customer that you're trying to close, let's say six months from now, 12 months from now, et cetera.
And if you can identify what that type of customer looks like, and then you can decipher from your existing customers what they're telling you, they kind of like want from the product and you can say, well, this thing you're asking me for because this is related to some bizarro integration that you happened to do with SAP 30 years ago. Like if I go build that for you, maybe what I really should do is not go build that thing they're asking for. But what I should build is the ability for us to be able to say yes, that those kinds of things will be supported by producing the EPIs that will make it possible for that kind of integration to exist through some sort of an ETL that gets built later, right?
Like by some other party. And so what you're trying to find a way of doing is kind of like saying, I hear what you're saying in terms of the solution that you're looking for, but again, we have to ask, this kind of goes back to some fundamentals, right? Ask why enough times until you understand the problem that it is that they're trying to solve.
And if you can sort of say, this is a problem that's very customer specific, but if there is enough different kinds of customers that all have different variations on that, then you start to ask the question of how would they build this for any given customer? And you kind of have to like force yourself to think about things that way and don't fall into the trap of saying, well, it's half as much work for engineering if we just do it this like one way for this one customer right now. Because yes, it's only half as much work to serve this one customer, but that was never the point.
The point was to go win the market. It's product market fit that you're going for, not customer solution fit that you're going for. And if you think about it as customer solution fit, you're going to turn into that services driven company. But if you want to be a product driven company, you have to sort of like separate those two things out.
So it's important to be able to do that. And I think a lot of that comes down to understanding who your target market is. And I think this actually is a big issue as well. So I've got this sort of like theory that I'm kind of like playing with and I'll share it with you here, which is that there's like, imagine like a target shape for your target market, okay?
And so the people that are like really, really, you know, squarely in your target market, like they're in the center of it. They're like the bullseye. And then you have a ring around that. And these are the people for whom they totally are in your target market, but there's something wrong about your product that's not actually addressing their particular needs.
So the people in the center, they love your product. They're part of your target market, it's great. The people in that next ring are people who are totally part of your target market, but the product's not exactly resonating for them. And maybe they're like not staying with you long-term or they're not buying the product in the first place and they're going with a competitor.
And then there's like the outer ring beyond that. And these are people that are outside of your target market, but some of them still buy your product anyway, right? And we all have that kind of, you know, situation where the salesperson has closed and sort of like a, you know, major deal, even though they were sort of like outside of the target market.
And everybody's applauding the salesperson for that. And that's great. They should be applauding because they sold a deal that's like really hard to sell. But then you gotta remember that when they ask you for one-off kind of like weird stuff with the product, they're not part of the target market, right?
So like, if you kind of look at this, this sort of like concentric circles of this target, there's actually one group in that that you really wanna pay attention to and two groups that you almost like wanna ignore to some extent. Certainly the people that are outside of your target market, you can kind of like pull your product in a direction that's like very contrary to what you wanna build for yourselves, right? Like for the target market that you're trying to serve.
And in fact, they can actually make your product worse if you go build those kinds of like things for them. So you gotta decide, yeah, these people that we're actually like really trying to serve, are we gonna sort of like ignore their requests? Hey, I'll take your money if you wanna pay me for it, but like this isn't really what we're trying to exactly do.
Then there's those people that are in the very center and they're gonna still have a gazillion requests for your product. If you're perfectly satisfied with the product, right? So they're gonna ask for change in their colors and things, et cetera. You could go do all that stuff, but here's the thing, they love your product so much, they're gonna stick with you either way.
So it's kind of like you have no leverage in the business by working on those things for people that are outside of your target market, but you also have very little leverage on improving those kinds of things for the specific people who are already like in love with your product. Now you wanna create the light and everything else, but the group that I really wanna focus on are those ones where we are gonna get that business leverage. These are the people that are in that middle ring.
They're the people that are like in my target market, I shouldn't be serving them, but the product's kind of like missing something for them. And so I really try to focus my attention and kind of like researching and talking to customers and hearing what they're looking for for people who identify in that category. So these are the people who maybe bought the product and then we learned about them that they're totally perfectly the right kind of customers for us, and then they left.
Like let's go interview them and find out what it would have taken for them to want to just say. Because I know that if I go build those kinds of things going forward, then I'll go win customers who look just like them down the room.
Melissa Perri: I love this visual. Like I've got it going in my head and I can see like deploying it out into teams and explaining it. So you work with a lot of CEOs over time, right? I have met so many CEOs though that would look at that and be like, well, that outer ring, that's an opportunity for us for growth. Let's go there now. How do you convince them? No, not yet. Like pull them back into reality.
Ben Foster: You know, I try to just bring it back to some clear examples that they would understand. You know, let's all ring true with my word earlier and come back to cars. You know, there are kinds of people for whom, like a Jeep is a really good product and there are kinds of people for whom, you know, a sports car is a really good product and it's exactly what they're looking for.
But try to combine a Jeep and a sports car together and like no one's gonna buy that at all, right? That's a horrible automobile. And so I think that it's really important to kind of recognize that in order to get a really good product for some group of customers, that product may have to be differentiated from a lot of other products that are out there.
And I think where CEOs kind of like fail is they sort of see the opportunity and they're like, oh, this is really exciting. And it's like, yes, there's a lot of things that we could go do right now, but let's focus on, we have to be very explicit. Either we're trying to do a better job of delivering product market fit within a market that we've already defined and we just need to do that.
And let's not focus on sort of expanding our market or let's actively decide that we're gonna go expand our market or we're gonna go after this particular market, but don't just say it's everybody. Choose the specific kind of market that it actually is. Draw a circle around that one and say, okay, what's the exact kind of like right product that we need there, but don't just sort of like chase after it because it potentially exists or it happens to kind of like come across your path.
You know, it's the same kind of like, you know, Steve Jobs thing, innovation is saying no to a thousand things. It's also saying no to a thousand customers. And I think that that's okay, right? Like you don't want to win every single customer because it's an indication that you're trying to be kind of too broad with what it is.
The degree to which you're solving any individual customer's problem when you cast too wide of a net is like you're too far off, right? Versus if you have a concentrated group of customers that are all kind of like clustered together and kind of like looking for roughly the same thing, then you can build a product that is very closely matching the specific things that they would look for if they could have a custom built solution. So when you cast that really wide net, the issue that you run into is unless you want to build a ton of product and have a lot of complexity that could sort of like really weigh you down and make it so that the ROI on future development just isn't really there.
And you run into that kind of like innovators dilemma. You can take that approach, but like you're casting so wide of a net that you're just not actually solving any of Britain's problem really well. And what you're kind of running the risk of is that you're going to get picked apart by a thousand different competitors who are coming in with a very specific kind of like niche requirements and specific kind of like solutions that are better in each individual context than the broad one that you can create.
Melissa Perri: How much do you think your role as a chief product officer is like bringing your CEO down to reality or creating these structures? Like, is this something that you spend a lot of your time doing? I know me as a consultant, I usually get hired in to tell people no so that they can get mad at me and then I can leave and they don't get mad at the people internally. But you're stuck there. So like how do you navigate that? How much is that part of your role?
Ben Foster: I love that, that's funny. You know, to be honest, this is one of the major criteria that I've used as I've sought roles in product leadership is I make sure that I don't run into that situation in the first place. You know, I have had less and less interest in fighting the fight of trying to explain what the role of product is to a CEO and having that be like sort of like my job function, I would rather go work for the companies where the CEO really understands what product is all about, understands the importance of saying no, understands the importance of having like.
You know, dedicated focus towards a particular kind of like target market and it can even articulate that, you know, for what it's worth. If you're a product leader out there and thinking about where you should kind of like go next and you're kind of like wondering what interview questions you should be the one asking. That's a really, you know, critical one is like, you know, you're having that interview with the CEO and ask them, hey, who's our target market?
Tell me an example of a customer that you would never want to like, you know, serve with this particular product. Tell me about a time in which, you know, you would want us to kind of like, you know, reject a particular product direction, even though a customer is asking for it. And if they're not able to articulate those kinds of things, I think my concern is going to be that you, as a product leader, will be spending your time explaining to them the role that you're supposed to be, you know, fulfilling, and kind of like coaching them in this regard, rather than actually just fulfilling the role of being a, you know, a CPO.
So I think that that's an important kind of thing. And I think it's an important thing for CEOs, you know, who may be listening to this as well, to go get coaching around for themselves. You know, hopefully you're not kind of like relying on people to tell, you know, when you don't really want to hear that, but you're kind of like getting the executive coaching that you need to understand, sort of like the differentiation between, here's the market that we're trying to serve and here's the market that's actually a distraction from the rest of our business.
And those companies that really do the best job of understanding exactly what they're all about and exactly what they're not about, and they can like be definitive about that, those are the companies that are most successful.
Melissa Perri: I hope if any CEOs are listening to this too, that they get this takeaway, that if you don't understand product, you're not going to get an awesome CPO no matter how much you want one. So if you do want to hire a great chief product officer, somebody like Ben, I'd recommend if you could hire Ben tomorrow, you should hire Ben tomorrow, but you can't because he's at whoop doing awesome stuff. But if you're a CEO who wants a chief product officer, make sure you understand product.
Try to go out, learn what they do, learn what they're about and how they're going to help you. I think that's absolutely critical. Thank you so much, Ben, for being on the podcast. Where can people go read your book? Tell us about how to get in touch with you.
Ben Foster: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the answer for any book these days is go to amazon.com and type in build what matters. So yeah, look for the book there on Amazon. The consultancy that Rajesh Nirulikar, my co-author runs is called prodify.group. And you can go speak with him as well. He's got some great ideas around the book. And then you can always find me on LinkedIn. It's probably like the best way to find me specifically. And it's really easy. My handle is just Ben Foster.
Melissa Perri: Great, thanks so much for being here.
Ben Foster: All right, great. Thanks so much for having me.
