Arguing Agile

AA233 - Building Your Own Product: Ultimate PM Hack or Career Sabotage?

• Brian Orlando • Season 1 • Episode 233

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Building products for yourself sounds like the perfect PM training ground!

At first glance, you get instant feedback, prioritize ruthlessly, and have no bureaucracy to whom you answer... but does it actually prepare you for professional product management, or does it create dangerous blind spots?

In this episode, Product Manager Brian Orlando and Enterprise Business Agility Consultant Om Patel explore several critical dimensions:

  1. Learning velocity and skill development
  2. User empathy paradoxes
  3. Resource management realities
  4. Technical vs. strategic balance
  5. Failure tolerance
  6. Career advancement
  7. Business model understanding

Our findings? Set artificial constraints, validate with real users, document your learnings, and use self-building as a supplement to professional experience, not a replacement.

Whether you're considering a side project or wondering if your solo work translates professionally, this episode offers practical frameworks for balancing the best of both worlds.

#ProductManagement #MVP #Solopreneur #ProductStrategy #CareerDevelopment

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Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/agile-podcast/id1568557596
Website: http://arguingagile.com

INTRO MUSIC
Toronto Is My Beat
By Whitewolf (Source: https://ccmixter.org/files/whitewolf225/60181)
CC BY 4.0 DEED (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.en)

Hey Om, step into my office. That was, was that like you were walking into a bar like the swingy door in the saloon. 18 hundreds. Like my office is a saloon in the 18 hundreds. I like it. That's where it is. A CPO walks into your sprint review Om, and they suggest adding a chat bot to the checkout flow because everybody needs to be doing agentic things now. Oh boy. And this is the third time they proposed this to you? Listen, just to get out of that particular meeting, you could tell'em it's on the backlog. Okay. Well there's only so many times you can say that until you're No, I understand. Until you're quote, not a team player. Understand not a team player. Listen, I think you need to evaluate what they're saying in the totality of the product and not just because everybody's doing it. Does it add value? Does it extend the value proposition for your customers, for your product? Or is it just one of those also and things? Right? Well that's what we're talking about today. We're talking about the million dollar question in product management. Is product sense an innate. Thing, something you're born with or can it be developed like any other skill? That's right. Go check our podcast on arguing Agile. Oh, arguing Agile 100 Mindset, Carol Dweck's mindset. Yeah. Yeah. It's, yeah. Somehow hundred episodes ago. Plus, somehow we flipped, we flipped the coin, we flipped a whole bunch of coins. We flipped all the coins. And I'm on the fixed mindset side of arguing this podcast. Don't ask if that's my personal belief or if I just got a bad coin flip. But all I'm gonna say is we flip more than once. I might be flipping something. We, we'd all be flipping something. So, because, because I will tell you if it can't be learned we're doomed. Yeah. Yeah. Doomed. Yes. That's the word. Doomed. Because like bad product leaders, I mean, they get promoted. So it's maybe you don't wanna learn it then if you can't learn. I mean, that's a whole different podcast if you haven't learned it by now. If you've made your way into the right circles and got to places before other people and got to opportunities before other people, and you've not learned product sense yet, maybe a follow up podcast is maybe helps those people. Yeah. I don't know. Maybe if they can't, or maybe it doesn't. Maybe it doesn't, but if it can't, if it can be taught. Yeah. Then like what explains why so many organizations are drowning in just terrible product management decisions? I really like this topic. I'm hoping it's gonna resonate with some of our viewers and listeners. the first category I have picked out here is the nature versus nurture category. Which is probably, look, we need to get this outta the way fast, right? Sure. Because everything's gonna build on top of this is product sense encompasses intuition about user needs, market timing, technical feasibility, business viability, all the illities that Marty Kagan wrote books about, and everyone, all, y'all bought 'em and then read 'em and then disregarded 'em any way to build what you want. Some argue it's innate cognitive ability or maybe like, well, I guess I'll stick to my coin flip on this one. While others claim it's purely experimental learning. Okay, so there are two fundamental sides here. I'm gonna just like I did last podcast, which actually what big side, which was actually two podcasts to go at this point. I'm gonna throw out the against to star us. And then we'll work our way backwards. That's, that's how we'll do this one. All right. So the four and against, I see here is on one side, product sense is fundamentally a learnable skillset. That's a, this is the fixed mindset category, right? Yeah. So you'll be on the side of a, not a fixed mindset. Sorry, what's the other one? Growth. Growth. Growth mindset. Yeah. Yeah. You'll be on the growth mindset side. I'll be on the fixed mindset side. Product sense is an innate cognitive ability. You either have it or you don't have it. Now everyone's, before everyone throws fruit at me, let me, let me actually try to support this. Believe it or not. Okay, go for it. First of all, some people naturally get you. Some people are people. People, person, people. People people. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Salespeople, I think. Okay. Absolutely. In fact, most companies I go to, the salespeople are more product people than the, than the product. People are product people, especially if they're one of these companies that the product people got relabeled as product people. Marketing people to it. Yeah. That's a good, yeah. Marketing people's a good one too. But the kind of my, the crux of my arguing point here is like, not necessarily it's a fixed mindset. I think the crux of my arguing point here in this one is gonna be the best product leaders often make decisions that contradict data and frameworks. Which suggests they have a deeper intuition and people can't do that just like are gonna make bad decisions or are gonna over fix on the data, which is another one that you'll see online. Actually the Brian Chesky episode that we did he talks about oh, I don't wanna see you doing AB testing. I want you to pick a pass that or I think a little nuance in his argument was, I don't wanna see you running a thousand ab tests. You know what I mean? Like, ab tests are okay, , use them after the initial intuition. Don't use 'em as the intuition of like, I'll just test literally everything in the world. Number one. Number two the speed of decision making that is required in modern development orgs, especially if everyone's using AI centric tools. And the amount of feedback that you can get back and forth real quick. Requires that you make some decisions quickly. Yeah, right. Product centric, product sense decisions. And if that skill's like not developed, it's only gonna accelerate the rate at which you make poor decisions. It's not necessarily going to improve, you know what I mean? There's no AI tool that is necessarily gonna improve your decision making. That's done through like talking to people and actually actively listening to what they're saying. And, and like, again, I'm, I gave you all those points to get you back to my main point. It's not necessarily that they don't have product sense, it's that they have a bunch of stuff stacked up, stopping them from developing and acting on a good product sense, whether it's inexperience or like a bad organization that's just like overloading them with garbage or slow decision making 'cause they're like consumed in. Analysis paralysis, that kind of stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Let's try to unpack some of that. So, I know that was, I kind of threw the truck at you to try to get Yeah, yeah. No, that's fine. I, I'm gonna unpack the truck. Yeah. Unload the truck. A dump truck. So we, we started talking about people that find themselves in a product role, right? Th they don't necessarily have the background in product or anything like that. I mentioned marketing, internal sales is another avenue, right? Yeah. People working with salespeople, but really not directly talking to customers. And now this is kinda like a natural thing for them to for the organization at least to say, Hey, we need you to be salespeople, but we'll just make you product people for now. Mm-hmm. So I guess where I'm heading with this is like, there's really not an origin, if you like, of where product people emanate from there's not really A path to product Sure. As such. So you don't, you don't go to college and say, I wanna become a product manager necessarily I think now maybe there's some classes or courses that people take the biggest of big schools are feeders for like Google and Amazon and those guys. They have product management programs. But academia doesn't necessarily though, right? Is there, I mean, there are programs like that at Stanford and those kind of schools around those faang companies or something like that. Maybe. But how many people can really take part in that, right. Only the generally the bold and the beautiful. Sorry. I was gonna say Rich, but I didn't wanna say that on the podcast. I was trying to think of another way. Rich kids. Rich kids. That's who, yeah. They're not, they're not so poor. Alright. So I think that's one of the things to bear in mind is there, there's not a path to becoming a product manager from early on. I will give up that one. I'll seed that ground to you and you can win on that one if say like, yeah, there is no normal entry into product like I was listening to there, there is no normal entry into product. I was listening to Shohbit intentional Product Manager podcast. And he had a guest a guest or two actually. I think I listened to a couple. I love, I listen to like six or eight episodes in a day.'cause his episodes are like 12 minutes. Yeah. And a couple guests he, one of the first questions he asked him is like, well, what's your, what was your entry into product? And they're like, I didn't have a traditional entry into product. I did X, Y and Z and X, Y and Z. That is, that's everyone's traditional entry into product is you didn't have an entry into product. Because if you told me, well, I was a product manager at the beginning of my career in 1990, I'd be like, stop next episode, I'm not listening to this. Product doesn't fall into your lap in that sort of scenario. You fall into its lap. So you kind of just swim you go with it so that's part of the difficulty we have. I think the other thing is when you go into a company and you'll bestowed a title product, something you start to work on what you think is the right way to proceed with that product or maybe product line after a bit. What we don't have is you don't have any guardrails as to what you should be doing. What you don't have mentorship, you don't have all of these things that. Potentially could help mold your career into product. So what I'm hearing is, sorry, didn't mean I hear what you say is you, you're welcome, julie!, early on the podcast. It's early on the podcast. A couple points that I heard in there were, you don't have a quote traditional nobody has traditional, right? You don't have a traditional upbringing and product. what you do is you gain cross-functional experience either engineering, design, sales, marketing, wherever you came from, you get cross-functionality and that multi-disciplinary kind of perspective that you need to be a systems thinker and be effective in product. The other thing I heard was successful products. The successful product managers often cite mentorship. And I heard you talk about mentorship Yes. As a big one. And then and then you didn't exactly say this, but pattern recognition was another one that I, that came to my mind when you were talking about the examples. I think when you first get, get into the, into the foray of product management, you don't have that, right? Yes. You're, you're just being immersed into it. So you're learning things like financial skills right. Which you probably never had to do before. It's cross-functionality. Yeah. Cross makes. So it takes time to get to that point. Where you see something happen again and you go, wait and the patterns start to form but what is underneath that is really this. Wave of building on your own experiences but you're still flying solo. And that's, that's hard. It's very hard. So if you are a product manager on, let's say some sort of fm CG type of product, right? I don't know, detergent, laundry detergent, you learn a lot about that, right? But then you can't just move from there to something else maybe AI powered software or something like that. Different dynamics, right? Different products. So you have to learn more skills. You layering skills on top of skills you've acquired, and that takes time. That, that's really my point. It takes time. You can't just suddenly say I've arrived. I think the crux of your, it's a learnable skill is, it's a learnable skill, but. You need the right environment and you need time in that environment, and then you can learn the skills. If you never are given enough time with one team, if your teams are constantly shuffled, you know what I mean? If you're kind of moved around to other products, if you're not stuck in one domain or if you don't talk to the customers, you know what I mean? Right. You kept in the back of the house. That's a recipe for never learning product sense. So really, I mean, I think we could wrap it up by saying the learning, it's, it's learnable A Yeah. And B, the learning is through the school of hard docs. All right. And, and on my side, it, it is learnable and I will agree with you. With a whole bunch of stars next to it's learnable. Ah, I like it. There's a double star, I think, next to it's learnable. The takeaway here is whether it's an eight or learned create structured feedback loops in your organization to accelerate the pattern recognition, the understanding that like, there's something that needs to be learned here and you did learn it, you didn't learn it, whatever. And then make the development of product sense more intentional. Yeah. Not to leverage your sense of risk taking and risk managing as well with this because everyone has a different threshold for risk. Right, right. Alright, let's move on to point number two, which is the promotion problem. Organizations frequently promote high performing individual contributors or domain experts into product leadership roles without assessing their product. Intuition by product leadership role, by the way, om, I mean the people who hire product managers and then that creates the bad product sense. The, the, the Tower of power over here. The bad products. That's right. Obscure bands from the ni from the seventies. I'm pulling out, sorry, obscure bands from the nineties. That's, I don't think so. It's really a has of cards that's being set up here. It it, I it is, this is a lot of product places I've been at where like the people at the top in product they have very product sense. Absolutely agree. But, but they got there. They didn't get there from their product sense. That's right. They got there because they were domain experts. And listen, we need ohm, we need deep expertise running the business. We need excellent communicators in those spots. Ohm Ohm, we can't have you in those spots because sorry, sorry. I got, I got a whole bunch of reasons and they're not good. I think the difficulty is if you are actually looking to put somebody in a role like that, who would you pick? Somebody who's a great communicator, somebody who perhaps understands the domain as widely as possible amongst the other people? Or would you pick somebody who. You believe can learn this stuff, right? It's difficult. Well, we just gear shifted the conversation.'cause now we're talking about the person that hires our product manager. Well, yeah, exactly. But that, that's the person they hire though. That's will in turn hire more, right? But that's, that's dangerous for that person, not that product sense. Very much so. Because now it's not like the director of development, for example maybe it is and I'm wrong. Let's explore this for a minute. In the matrix organization, in a modern organization your director of development they have some say in architecture and design and stuff like that, you probably have an enterprise architect for that. You probably have a team lead or something like that, you know what I mean? Right. Like your director of development. They're probably only working on the most strategic of stuff. And also they're dealing with people issues because they're a supervisor, they're hiring manager, they're just an admin role. And in larger organizations, that takes up the majority of, I worked with a guy one time that constantly complained because I worked with him when he was a individual contributor, and they got promoted into a development team lead. And of course, as a development team lead, they expected it to be on all the teams. So every day he was the guy going to like five daily standup scrum sessions and, and hey, and you know, you and I are like, well that's, I mean, that's silly. Like you, you can't expect that guy to get work done. And he knew it. And he would tell people like, I'm not getting any work done. I'm just like being aware of everything because this is what leadership considers my job. Now they want me to know everything that's going on and be the one-stop shop. When they want to know something that's happening on one of the teams, that's my job. He's like, I just go to meetings. I don't code anymore. I hate it because I love coding. I'll tell you also that guy was a very good developer. So taking him off a team hurt. It hurt me.'cause he took, they took him off my team. Yeah. So from his own personal perspective though did he feel like this was a promotion or an emotion? Honestly, if you write like coding, I think he liked money, you know? Well, yeah. So this is the problem, right? People will take the role and then they'd have people working under them. Now you have to deal with people issues, right? So the administrator comes into play. You gotta do their reviews, right? You gotta make sure that they have skills and all of this stuff. Paperwork, basically. But now, but now we we're gonna hop out of the development environment Yes. And then hop back into product. Into product. So this is a person who was an excellent IC contributor. Developer. Yeah. And so then that's the promotion path is like you're a good IC developer with coding and now you manage people. And now like, go back to what we talk about a whole bunch on this podcast is like, at what point did the company invest skills so that you became better at managing people and working with people and now you have a big issue. So on the product side, the company, again, this is just what I've seen, this is not indicative of the career as a whole. In my career, it's actually, been quite the opposite usually the company will pick the product manager, who's the most eloquent, who's the most political, who's the best at presenting in front of people. And they'll say, okay, I don't care if you have product sense or not. I need a good presenter. I need a good speaker to represent. And then they'll throw them up there and usually that person does not have good product sense. So I can offer you real life examples from my own career, in the companies that I work for that should remain nameless, we have demonstrators that really know how to demo the product. Remember that's a different thing than being a good product person. What they're doing is showing off the best facets of the product. Yeah. And they can stand up in front of a crowd of 200 people and do this. It's great. These people progress in air quotes in their career by going from a demonstrator to a product marketing manager. That's their role, right? So now they're a product marketing manager. They've already inherited the word product in their title but also marketing, and they stay there for a bit. Essentially what they're doing is accompanying salespeople out on sales calls and conferences or whatever. But practically, they're really still doing demonstrations. I don't have a problem with that. I'll tell you, the problem is the next step. So then they get promoted into product managers, right? Because they've been around a, a while as a product marketing manager. So now it's an easy transition from there. Typically what happens, what I find is a company has. Very few marketing managers or directors or marketing of any kind, but compared to product, because they may have multiple products. Or even multiple product lines. So then more individuals. The thing that gets me fired up is like the, that, that promotion path that you're talking about, that like, oh, we need someone that's good at talking to go along with the sales team and connect what the sales team's doing back to our product teams or whatever. And it's like, it's not you, Mr. And Mrs. Like the, that that development track with the developer, right. Because they were a competent developer that launched them into the people side. This is the opposite of that. Yes. It doesn't matter if you're a competent product person or not. Yeah. You are getting shoved up anyway. Yeah. You're getting shoved up because of your other skills, your other soft skills, which should be for us in our podcast. It should be for our listeners in this podcast. It should be a wake up call to be like, oh, people around the business are grabbing people with all these skills that your typical scrum master, whoever would have maybe they don't have deep technical domain experience. But again that, we you started with your arguing point is like, that's us learnable. You need to spend time, get the right mentorship, stuff like that, right? The things that would help most businesses in this category are things that companies are undermining by not hiring new workers. They're undermining themselves. Promotion timelines when they spot somebody who's a good talker. Who's good in front of people who's kind of slick on the presentation, that kind of stuff. Who's a somebody who never complains. Look for a future podcast on that, right? The timeline that they wanna grab those people and move 'em up into like this sales quote more strategic role. You know, the timeline doesn't allow for them. If I'm taking pieces of your argument from section one. The timeline to get mentorship, to stay on teams, to build that cross functionality, that timeline is it doesn't work for this. I need that person. Never afforded that. Yeah. No, I need that person in this other part of the business to supplement my sales team or supplement my marketing team. Most companies are sorely lacking in marketing. Totally lacking in marketing and there are marketing people out there that can help you, but they're like, none of those marketing people have domain expertise or product management expertise. And something that you noted like, well maybe you have a product marketing manager, and they're like a mix of those skills, right? Or maybe you get somebody and you sort of treat them like a product marketing manager, but then you give them that director of product title. But really what you're looking for is a product marketing manager. Yeah. But when most small companies, they're not gonna hire a product marketing manager 'cause they don't know what is. Not only small, I'd say even some medium sized companies don't know how to get that. Yeah, and it makes total sense to me. But the timeline it's, I guess it's more than, I guess what I'm arguing is more than just the timeline, it's the timeline and also the expertise to know like, oh, what I really need is I need more marketing and positioning out of my product management team. And the product managers could do that if I asked them to develop that skill. Or I can hire a specialist in, or get some contract work or whatever, . Yeah. I'm sort of arguing twofold is , the domain expertise is there. You need more marketing out of them. They haven't spent the time to go deep with the development teams or the domain expertise and you're picking them up for the skills they do have and you're using them for different purpose other than product management. So the confidence that got someone promoted either that person's confidence or the company's confidence in them or whatever it creates these knowledge gaps. The more they get promoted, the higher they get promoted. The bigger the gala looks, the worse it becomes. Yes. The more wider that like, I almost wanna call it rot spreads. Like it's not rot, but it's like the, the wider that it's like, it's like it's, you don't even know that you have these gaps in your skillset. And as you hire people in, because now you're a director of product and you don't even know you have these gaps like the, the wider that expanse becomes to you realizing, oh, a lot of these issues I'm seeing they're not individual people's problems. They're my problems because I hired everyone that like, looks like me, talks like me, thinks like me you know? Right. So you end up with a bunch of mes. I think what you're saying is that the quicksand gets wider and wider and people don't see that if you are one of those people, you don't necessarily see this as a detractor because you're getting promoted at the end of the day. Well, I mean that's true. Like organizations rarely demote or move people out when you have a bad product leader with a bad product sense they're just gonna recycle product managers. Like they're not, again, going back to our m and a podcast. Like they, no one's ever gonna wash out the lead. I mean, at the point where that bad product leader gets washed out. I mean, your business has gotta be pretty bad. Oh yeah. A lot of damage. Damage at this point. So just like in that podcast, if you're in that situation, what should you do? Keep that resume updated. Have a drink, have a drink, and then keep that resume updated. Have a drink or two, and then update resume. The sorry, there was one other thing I wanted to hit in here. If we're gonna stay on dangerous side effects. Sure. I like the dangerous side, dangerous side effects. Take two and call me in the morning for these dangerous side. The arguing Agile podcast cannot ascribe medical it's advice. That's right. Advice of any kind. That's right. That's right. Or, or advice actually. Or any of any kind. That's right. What will happen in this case before this bad product leader gets washed out or Honestly, the people that supervise them probably will get washed out and then they'll go along with 'em anyway. There's tons of collateral damage, it's already taken place, it's, they will, before this happens, they will double down mm-hmm. On the failed approach. Because again, they don't have the typical product management if I try to do something as a product manager and it doesn't work, I just pivot, we do something else there's no pretext, there's thrashing or trying to make, you know what I mean? Trying to make a case or ego or whatever. we just run a test, against the market, and then we do something else. You're being data driven largely, and then you're saying let's learn from what we've just transpired as opposed to I'm not gonna appear to have failed. Well, so we spent most of this category. we must have spent. 15 minutes. Talking just about the against in this category. Just about the against in the category of like the bad folks are getting promoted and no one's doing anything about it. Probably because that's true. And there's just nothing happening. There's nothing but like on, on the other organizations can develop product sense into people. So like everybody has self included, ha came from outside of product management, got promoted into product management and developed a product sense. So there's gotta be a four side here. There's gotta be, intentional leadership pressure to help people learn product thinking, learn technical slash business expertise. So maybe if they came from the business, they gotta learn technical, they came from technically learn the business, right? That kind of thing. You can get coaching from outside of your organization if you're like, oh, okay, we got no product managers here. Or maybe like I'm the CEOI know I've promoted, a product person well over their head 'cause they don't have good product knowledge or whatever. Like get coaching for them, buy it for a certain amount of time, help them develop that product sense maybe. Yeah. I mean, a long time ago there was some attempt at doing that with people that just joined the company out of maybe business school or whatever it was. You know, by having this rotation program in place where you go through a couple of months in every area Yeah. Every domain area to learn. It wasn't necessarily at that time it wasn't necessarily focused on product. Sure. But I'm thinking if you're coming in as a potential product person that you're just being hired into a company, you could do a lot worse than sending that person on rotations for a couple of months, whatever duration might be. Across different domains. So they learn a bit about marketing, they learn a bit about finance. Foundational things can help synthesize their background. And they can learn in a safe environment. They're not the ones making the decisions that potentially could be catastrophic. Because they don't have the experience, but they're building on what they're learning every single time. Maybe that's an option, I don't know. But as regular listeners of the podcast know, I'm a big, big fan of making sure that people are taken under more experienced people's wings. Right. So the journeyman type of situation, which does not exist in product as far as I know I don't think that exists anywhere where you can join a company and say some experienced product manager is gonna take me under, under their auspices and and teach me stuff, and I'm learning as I go. Yeah. Well that, I mean, that's the job of product leadership. I mean, even in the Transformed book. Yeah. Where we're Marty Cagan kind of pivots in the product leader. Like that's their job. I mean, that's their only job. Going back to what you said is like, well, if you're maybe your product leadership is like they're in charge of, if they're the equivalent of the engineering leadership where like they're the resource managers, they're the hiring managers for the department. Like your main job as a hiring manager is the development of your people, and then you have all this stuff, skills development. That's the number one thing development of your people. Making sure you have the right talent for the right things. When people ask your team to get done, We should probably have a podcast specifically on, hey, you've been promoted to a manager for the first time because there's a change that happens. you're a great individual contributor and now you're a people manager. Your job changes I don't care how good you can code, that's not your job anymore. Your job is to enable the five people, eight people, whatever the work for you Yeah. To code really good. And I don't care how good you can code anymore.'cause none of your, none of your scoring is based on how well you can code. And obviously the company's not putting any effort into helping you figure that transition out, but that's a real transition that has to happen. And in product, if you were never good at product before, I don't know how you bridge that gap. Yeah, I agree. You know, it's sort of like, I mean, get help, that's how Yeah. You get help. Right, right, right, right. This is sort of like you say you learn enough to. You know, pilot a small boat. Mm-hmm. And then suddenly you're promoted to be a captain of a large vessel, right? Yeah. Now you got other people, right? So your responsibility changes your success is vested in your team Success. In the case of commercial, you see organizations. Yeah. See my experience is more like you've learned to fly a small aircraft like a little Cessna. And now you're like, I know how to fly a small Cessna like put like 300 people on the 7 47. This is where these newbie captains go. What does this button do? And I wonder what this button does. Yeah. Very dangerous. Let's see. Yeah. The only other thing in the four category that we didn't cover here is cross industry experience actually helps leaders with their pattern recognition. Yeah. The internet is like a big sign wave. It just goes up and down and up and down. Sure. And now LinkedIn is starting it like with AI slowly on the decline. Oh no, Brian, is that true? Can he just say that? Yes. With Aon on the decline people realizing that like the models are like not really getting much better there. Like actually Claude's getting like a lot worse as they try to like keep up with growth in the scale. The internet slash LinkedIn, 'cause it's mainly LinkedIn. It's starting to like, go back to, ooh everyone needs specialty product managers. My little special niche like that's fine. And then like that, that's the LinkedIn sine wave of like up and down and up and down. But cross industry experience and exposure to d the way different people do things is very good to help you rec because the patterns that happen in, you know natural gas, electric delivery and the patterns that happen in SaaS software and the patterns that happen in B2C software okay, they're not that different at the end, end of the day they're not. Yeah, it's, it's honestly, if you talk to the people that matter. You really find out and learn how to show them progress quickly. You can really succeed in any of those places. Agree. Absolutely agree. So what is being done though, right? To, to kind of nurture this? I, I mean the what you started with get help. If you really are in over your head, there's some self-awareness here that really needs to be taken into account. Yeah. Stop trying to blame people. Accept some responsibility. Go listen to our podcast on extreme ownership.'cause that helps a lot. You were pretty tempered in the podcast on extreme ownership. Yeah. that book has a lot to teach you about accepting that you have some gaps. I understand leadership seems like they're pressing you to do everything. You don't have to do everything That's right. Except where you're not good at everything. Go get some help. You know? If you've gotten some help and. It's not punching your head, go get some different help. But again, there's only so many times you can be like, oh, nobody else can help me break through. before. You have to start introspecting a little bit to say that maybe my opinions and beliefs are the problem, but implement product sense like the product sense assessments. So really think about like before promo, if, if you run a business before promoting anyone into product leadership, you need to think about the assessment of their product, sense of how successful they've been because again most of the people that I've seen that got promoted to this point they're willing to do what leadership tells them. That's right. And, that's what they're really looking for in many cases. But I guess if somebody actually would listen to this and they're actually listening with their listening ears on, they'll hear like, oh, yeah. Yes, I do wanna be successful. Yes, I do want it to be a long term thing. And although these people are really great sales and marketing people I need to help them develop their product. Sense. Indeed. Yes. And then that means getting help for them and obviously also making them aware that like, hey, they need it, and yeah, you need to be helping. Yeah. Cool. We're back on section three, the feedback loop dilemma. Product decisions often have delayed consequences, making it difficult to connect actions with outcomes. This creates challenges for both learning product sense and recognizes it when someone lacks it. Which is a big problem for me, is like, you don't know someone's terrible until they're on the job. 6, 8, 12 months. And then by that time, a lot of, I didn't know if, whether I wanted to accuse millennials right now. Like, I don't know, I don't want to target one group, , by that point, a lot of millennials are looking for their exit 12 months yes. Ooh, boy. I'm gonna throw out the against just to keep this podcast moving quickly. Product complexity makes meaningful learning like this impossible. How long does it take just to learn the product and that's if I'm getting someone who's a subject matter expert to come in, how long does it take to learn the product and the subject? Right? At the same time. And then make meaningful product decisions, impactful product decisions. Oh boy. Like the deck is just stacked against most folks right now. I fully agree with this because in product, more so than I guess in most other fields, there's a delay in, this equation if you like, right? Yeah. So you make a decision, you don't know how well that's gonna go for many months. Yeah. And to your point, yeah, I mean, the younger generation, they move a lot in jobs. This is a real issue. So I think it comes down to are you really serious about working in product? Are you really interested in the product and the company that you are working for right now? If you are. Invest in yourself, and don't just jump because it's gonna take a while before you can become a product expert. Perhaps not even have to be a domain expert. If you have those people at your company, you can leverage their knowledge and expertise. But it's gonna take a while. So that's one thing. The other thing I want point out is you've just been entrusted to lead a product, right? How are you gonna demonstrate success not just for your own self, but to your organization? If it takes months, if you're not willing to invest the time that it takes to see the results and everything we've talked about so far, get help, all of that, For a successful outcome in the end, then what good is that? Yeah you can leave before this happens, go somewhere else, and now you're just simply trying to convince the next employer to trust you. Yeah. That you can do it. I don't think that's a good idea. If I'm gonna give you the rest of my points in the against category here, just quickly so I can get them outta the way long product development cycles mean bad decisions compound before feedback arrives. That's basically the crux of the category. and then if you're in a market that changes very, very rapidly or you have competitors that are segmenting and resegmenting the market Very quickly. your historical feedback. Could get outdated very quickly if a competitor comes in the agents need to be built to use all the tools now. you need MCP servers, building all the tools yourself and having 80 tools is, that's ridiculous. Nobody does that anymore. you need to build MCP servers and put domains around all your MCP servers and have them use the tools and you don't even need to know okay, okay. Yeah. Okay. Alright. I think part of this is also on the product people themselves. you're not just simply getting binocular vision and working on your product alone. you have to have that sense of what else is out there, right. You should know that this is a thing coming up. You know, in your rear view mirror that Yeah. Everybody's talking about it. So get get familiar with that it shouldn't blindside you. Well, I got a couple more for you. Here is political dynamics often override product feedback in organizational settings. And, and, and you know what, this one compounds because the people that are good at politics usually get promoted over the other more technical product managers that are not good at politics that are like, oh, I just, I just told you what it did. I told you clearly like the, the API is doing this and if you don't refactor your blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And like leadership hears that. And I'm like, yeah, but this other product manager says like, you're just not working hard enough. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. No, I agree. So those technical project make your boss, regardless of how proficient they are, they can get overlooked by and overshadowed, by those people that know how to. Navigate those political waters. Mm-hmm. What does that mean for those people that are you know, just simply, well, I'm a product manager. I don't want to get involved in politics. it means keep that resume updated is what it means. the faster feedback loops should be accelerating your product sense and your product learning. So the people that are faking it or the people that are just making it up and like trying to ride their coattails of like their manager because they're favored or whatever those people should out themselves. If the organization is an actual product management organization, right? Then those people should be outing themselves very quickly to say the rest of the product managers are doing this rapid experimentation, rapid feedback, building MVPs actually talking to customers, and you're gonna start separating the. People that are talking to leadership and trying to align of like, I should be leading the organization. Meanwhile, everyone is out there traveling, meeting with customers, talking to people, finding what people really want. But if your organization has no, this is why I hate OKRs. I hate metrics. Ok. R All the things, all the things, all the performative metrics that corporations make up. Yeah, because this one thing that we're talking about if the company had baked into their metrics of like, how, how many customers have you met with? How many insights came back, turned into products, turned around, got successful adoption? What are the adoption numbers? Usually these are not the things that people are incented on. You know, it's who, who, who made what decision and where did it end up? Like we, we don't do those kinds of after action retrospective is. In product. We have vanity numbers and number of applications clicked or things like that. So I like, post-mortem type of retrospectives after action, kind of like what I was talking about. Peer reviews there's a lot of things that you could be doing in this ab testing could fit in this category. I know that Brian Chesky was kind of deriding it earlier in the podcast I was pointing out, but an AB test, because somebody has an idea no matter who that person is, could be very valuable later. Come review time at the end of the year. Brian, you don't, you're not a team player because every time I tell you, we should put in a new agentic chat bot at the end of the checkout experience, you tell me nobody is asking for agentic chat bot, and it won't bring us any money. It'll just cost a bajillion dollars. You're not a team player. You're not a team player. Exactly. But, but you've done your research and you've figured it out. Nobody really is asking for it. If the against is, hey, it doesn't really matter what your feedback loop is because like the feedback loop is so long because of your whatever waterfall ish company that's trying to do product, right. It really doesn't matter about how long your pro the, the people are getting away by kind of ducking it and avoiding and changing their language and not actually doing. Customer centric type of activities and then getting promoted because of it. Because that's the way leadership, leadership always expected the product stuff to be a flash in the pan. Well, that's not the right organization for you if you're a product person at heart so we fall back to our normal advice here for you. Well, as at the point we're saying, keep that resume updated, that that triggers the end of the category. That's it. Like an auto, I've got an auto scaling rule set up where I immediately trigger the end of the category. A lambda kicks off and fires off and says, that's the end of the category. So here, what can you do? What you can do is you can start tracking product sense by building leading indicators of good product thinking, not just lagging business metrics. Now that's, that's a big heady idea that I just threw out. How are we gonna do that? I don't know, because it's, it's very difficult to do when the rest of your organization is built on like. All these lagging indicators, but it's gotta be, you gotta be incented on it. It's gotta be some kind of scoring or something built into the framework. Otherwise when your leadership sits down, they're gonna pick the person that's with the slickest presentation so I, I think what, well, practically speaking, what can you do here? What, what you could do is this, make small bets and lead with evidence. I mean, you're not necessarily gonna hit every single thing you shoot for. But the ones you do and the ones you don't hit. Come back out of it with some sort of learning, right? And just say, this is what's happening. Look, even the best of product people Need to be at least mindful of the politics that they're Working in so it wouldn't be a bad idea to at least familiarize yourself what kind of politically, what kind of company are you working for? But for yourself, you can make smaller bets that way the damage isn't too big when something doesn't work out. So, I don't know. I mean, that's just one of those things that I think about right now. I'm just worried about like the typical OKRs and stuff like that. The company if this stuff isn't baked in. It's all gonna get lost and then it's gonna be perception. You know what I mean? Yes. And then like, now your product managers are like back in the Hunger Games where it's yeah. Oh, I don't know who is doing what. Like just make 'em, fight it out and like pick one of 'em, give them a certain percent. I was at a company once where the manager only had a certain number of percentage points to give out for people, for raises or whatever. So it was like the Hunger Games every year. Yeah. Some people got 2% or some people got 6% and then some people got 0%, that kind of thing. Which is essentially a demotion, right. It also reveals, why I don't like the way that companies do incentives and stuff like that. A lot of time because you could say like, well, what are our bets? You can keep a scorecard. What were your bet? Sure. For the product manager, what were your bets through the year? And if you can't outline cleanly, outline your bets in business speak, and then put 'em in a column for a quarter. You should be able to do that. I could easily gimme your biggest bet, your most risky or biggest impact or whatever bet, throw it on a scorecard for the quarter, throw it in your column with your name. At the end we'll have all the product managers and all the bets. Hopefully all the product managers and all the bets will not be completely exclusive of each other. Right, right. Yeah, that wouldn't be good. I mean, no, I mean other at that point where like you've got like, oh, I've got four product managers and four different bet columns. At that point, I'm not looking at the product managers to be like, what are you guys doing? I'm looking at the director, our VP of product to be like, what are you doing? Right? That all these product managers are betting on completely different things. Why is corporate doesn't have a strategy that aligns us to be like, I wanna bet on this category and all four, my product managers and product lines are gonna double down on trying to impact this category. Whether it's onboarding easing, onboarding experience or trying to get retention up or whatever. Anyway, yeah. Poor, poor leadership. Anyway, there's a lot in that and maybe we should consider a separate podcast on just the fallout of poor leadership. So I guess I'd be depressed in that podcast. I indeed, yeah. Point number four. The mentorship and environment factor of product management. The best product leaders often emerge from environments with strong product, cultures and mentorship, suggesting that the environmental factors play a crucial role in the development of product sense. So we talked about this a little bit in 0.1. You need mentorship and if you don't have mentorship, because there's no product people that can give you mentorship at your current business, you need to get help. Yeah, yeah. This is a whole section kind of, maybe we won't spend much time here. But I want to, throw out the against early here because I think it is a pretty easy category for me to see the little ground on, which is great environments like, because you had a great environment, you attract great. And, and I, I've said this on different podcasts before there are some companies here in Tampa, they have to pay top dollar because they're known as like not great cultures. So the people who already have strong intuition will get attracted to the best environments. And then that snowball will just keep rolling. And if you don't have that to start with, I don't know how you get it. I guess a trade off to this is, well, you manufacture it. you either hire the best people and are willing to pay for the best people. Pay top dollar. Or you build a, again, every one of my references for some strange reason on the last two podcasts, every one of my references goes back to boiler room. Series? What is the, what's the license? Series seven. Yeah. Series seven. Yeah. Who has a series seven license? We don't, we don't hire, we don't hire you. Yeah. We don't hire you. That's right. We don't hire brokers. Brokers, yeah. We don't hire brokers. We make 'em. That's this category. We make brokers because I'm super suspect of anyone who throws their Porsche keys on the table and is like, we don't, we don't hire product managers. We make product managers. I'm gonna try to look at this from the perspective of your, so you wanna get, you wanna get help, but your organization doesn't really have this culture of mentorship, et cetera. Yeah. Where, where do you, what can you do? Right? I, I know we often say keep the resume updated, but what can you do if you're serious? Maybe reach out within the product community, local to you. Go join a few meetups, perhaps. That's true. Yeah. Seek mentorship in forums. You'll be surprised. I've, I've always found people to be very helpful if you, if you approach them with a mindset of, I'll tell, I'll take a little bit of your time as little as possible. Mm-hmm but I would like you to coach me ask for that. And you'd be surprised. So there is that avenue. Exposure to diverse product challenges. The more different and unique challenges that you're exposed to, the more you will start to absorb, so much stuff in product management comes down to mentorship where have you been? Who have you been there with? You know, is it people that are just like, listen, just do what I say get outta my kid office. Get outta my office kid. That was, that was weird. Like those type of people that just do what I say I'm Brian, enough of your AB tests and your, and your thoughtful approaches to testing the market and your, and enough of your Eric Reese Lean Startup. Brian I'm sick of hearing it. My against wasn't even really great on this one because my, my against is like, first you get the great product people from other places and you get 'em all in the same place. And that's what builds the talent pool. That attracts other people. But that's not even true. Anyway. exposure to diverse product challenges like that accelerates your the pattern recognition I talked about at the beginning of the podcast accelerates that it accelerates the creation of a strong product culture. Meaning like the, all your product managers together have a vocabulary about like, we're gonna test that idea. We're gonna test it against the market. We're gonna do lean startup. Like the more, the stuff that snowballs, the more the, the harder it is for these like imposters to creep Yeah. Under the radar and secretly get promoted over everyone and then destroy everything. Yeah. I think to that point if you have other people, maybe they're your peers, maybe they're not as product people, and you have this. Sense of like a product guild forming where people can share from one another. Compared to the competitive thing where everybody's in that corner and they just look at the they're looking out to stab one another. That, that's a horrible environment. Yeah. That's a good call. That's more like a product toxic environment that I've seen in small organizations where you have maybe two or three people and there's just no time. Everyone's gotta just deliver, deliver, deliver. Well that is the kryptonite of forming actual organizational learnings is everyone's just slammed every minute of every day. you're basically up to working 60 hours if you want to get anything done on your own time that's organizational kryptonite. You're not, you're, you're not gonna punch ahead anyway I don't know if anybody if I was still doing scoring, I would call this category a draw because I think we. The pro and like the for and against here. I don't know. I'm kind of on the fence here. All like, I think if I had a takeaway here, I would say all your organization's, product sense development structure or environment or how much effort they're putting into developing the product, sense of the other product managers and take, take that offline. Like, take whatever you oh, they don't care about my product sense development or my skills of any kind. Are you creating conditions for learning or are you just hoping that learning happens through osmosis? Is there an intentional right learning happening? Are they getting you mentorship and is that mentorship effective? And are you getting the time from the takeaways from that mentorship to implement things and try things and, and,, are you tracking them? I think of the typical agile coach write them down on a board and we'll have your your learnings and what your experiments will just document them somewhere and help you stay accountable to yourself. Like they're, they're not, you're not accountable to anyone. No one's yelling at you for not doing this. Yep., You know that you need to improve. Let me help you be accountable to yourself. To make sure that you're doing the best thing for you in this organization. And that's just like if you're not doing any of that in your organization now how do you think you're gonna get better at this? Yeah. Yeah. I agree. I, it's very rare to see just organically have that, what I call yearning for learning, right? You've gotta make people aware that that's what's needed. A and then B, have them, you can't really make them do it, but if they're aware that that's what they need, maybe they'll make space deliberately. Right? And, and say we set aside time, we set aside resources, money, et cetera. Yeah. To, to learn for us as an organization, to mature along the, the product spectrum, right? Yeah. If they're not doing that, you're right. It is gonna stagnate. You will stagnate, and your competitors will leapfrog you. Speaking of Frogger, speaking of Frogger, we're gonna jump ahead and maybe get run over by a truck because the next category is data versus intuition. Mm-hmm. And this is, we, we had a whole podcast, which I will, I will actually stop and look up because it's important. We had arguing Agile 1 54 Intuition versus Evidence with Alex on the podcast. And in that podcast we talked a lot about something that overlaps with this, which is modern product, modern product management emphasizes data driven decision making. But the most celebrated product leaders, entrepreneurs, those type of folks, they, they're often the ones that have made bold bets that have contradicted available data. So even when I throw out earlier with the Brian Chesky like, oh, AB test nobody needs to do that. Why would you ever do that? There's an intuition versus evidence category here, where the pushback is like, true product sense transcends the data driven approach. And you can't systemize that. That's just a muscle. You need to build that, intuitive muscle you need to build. And also, I know your pushback. When I lay out the best pushback, which is like. I can't quite put my finger on how you do that, because if I could, I'd put it in a bottle and I'd sell it for a bajillion dollars and I'd be i'd You'd never, none of all like a subscribe.'cause you'd never see me again. That's what I'm saying. Yeah. All right. So intuition. Intuition is sometimes acquired or learned over time, having made, for the most part the right bets. Sure. But sometimes not the right beds. And then you learn, right. So you know what doesn't work, what works, and you make the right decisions in the future. And you call that intuition in some cases. Yeah. I'm not saying that's the only way. Mm-hmm. So that is one. And then the other is just. Pure luck, right? That happens now as luck would have it sometimes you do hit the jackpot most times you don't. The role of luck in product management oh boy, if I could do a podcast that had no entertainment value but had therapeutic value for me, it would be the role of luck in corporate America, specifically product management. Like I could talk for a full hour back and forth on just how to get lucky. How I've seen poor decision makers stumble into one lucky move that basically made their whole career. Yeah. absolutely. It's a great topic. I think so too. I think we should maybe consider that podcast. I don't think that's possible. No. We should do it at some point. The rule of luck. I don't think anyone wants to hear like. No, you're successful business to Mr. And Mrs. A corporate person. It's because you got super lucky the right place, right Time is a real thing. I mean, absolutely. what percentage of that factors in the product management? I don't know. There is, it does factor. It's a finite percentage though. It does factor, but also I would say your product sense needs to include luck into the product sense. I've been at the point where I've built a product where I've been so far ahead of the market. Yeah. Because I anticipate what the market wants, but my timing has been off 'cause we were talking about luck, right? My timing has been off where I didn't know that I built something. It totally was the right product, but it was way too early in the technology adoption curve, right? Yeah. Timing is critical and just like luck, you really. Don't have control over it so I can share an anecdote about this. Yeah. And you can guess, but you might not be yeah, exactly. So that's the thing, right? You're guessing based on what, nothing. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So again, it then, then it goes back to luck again. Sure. I'm gonna share an anecdote with you about this luck and timing. Step into my office. Step into my office, right? So years and years ago when I was working in publishing back before we had. Laptops and all of this stuff. Yeah. I mean, . So people were, we, we basically had green screen dumb terminals. Yeah. Connected to a mainframe or mini computer. All the work was being done on the mainframe or mini computer. So the dump terminal was just basically an IO device. That's all it was back in those days. A thought occurred to us right in, in, in, in newspapers and magazine publishing, you basically have to paginate and do a lot of hyphenation and justification on the fly. Love penetration, it's beautiful, but every time you're writing a sentence, it's hyphenating the thing and it's spell checking all of those things. But what it's doing is the crude version of that was at the end of every whatever, second, five seconds or period when it sees a sentence. It'll shoot it off to the mainframe to do this comeback. Well, the thought occurred to us, what if we can keep all of that local in the dumb terminal, but it's a dumb terminal. So we came up with this idea that we can write code and blow EPROMs and put them in the dumb terminals to give it intelligence, I guess. I don't know. So all the work's done there, that means if you have 50 people simultaneously doing this work, instead of bogging down the mainframe, mainframe sees nothing. It's just cruising along yeah. It sees nothing. So we came up with this idea and we bought a whole bunch of a proms blowing machines, all this stuff. Tested it out, it worked, put 'em in dumb terminals, except for one thing. Nobody understood this, right? and nobody bought this stuff. So again, was it luck? No, not so much luck. But the timing sucked for the company. Yeah. Fast forward three years later. And now everybody became aware of this stuff. And they patented the technology and bought it from us. Mm-hmm. As a technology piece. So everybody who had shares in the company that were paper millionaires still remained paper millionaires. Oh boy. But obviously the owners cashed out. So I wanted to share that story because luck is important here. And nobody Did they, did they, did they cash in sell out, bro, down? I, I already messed up I stuff. Yeah. I can't remember. It was a four point plan. I don't remember what it was. I, I forget what it was. It was so good too. I, I remember like I, I don't know is there a this was, this was the category of tangents, but also tangents. Tangents. I don't, I don't care. Like the, the tangents were all like, they were all real good, even the ones that got cut out. Yeah. Jeepers. Ah, so if there's a takeaway here, develop your data intuition by regularly predicting experiment outcomes before seeing the results. Like you do that by like actual trial, trial, trial and error. Yeah. You do, you do that by like writing down what your expectation is and then doing the scorecard of this is what happened. Yeah. You analyze your prediction accuracy patterns at scale for all your product managers. Like if you're a product leader, you can do this for all the people that work for you and then kind of, it becomes a learning tool individually more than it becomes like, hold me accountable type of thing. I wanna know that I'm betting on the right things. I want to be able to say, I'm the guy that can make good bets and then deliver on them. I'm the guy that can read data and then deliver on it. I, that, that's a career thing for me. That's a point of pride for me. Yeah. So I wanna get better at it. I would like you to measure me on it. So the takeaway in this category is like, learn how to measure yourself on, these are the bets that I, these are the bets that I placed. Look, we're at the horse track. These are the bets that I placed and these are the results of those bets. And again, this is not black and white you won or you didn't win. So like, yeah, there might be a little kind of gray area or whatever that might murky this up a little bit. Life is like that, but still most corporate most OKRs or whatever they don't measure this at all. They're very black and white. They don't, you're right. So when you say I would like you to measure me on it, most organizations won't, you'll have to do this for yourself. Yeah, do it for yourself. Yeah. Yeah. So I, instead of being at the, at the horse race, maybe we're at the casino, at the, at the roulette table and you're seeing the board, how many how many reds and, and blacks take that for what it is because it's still luck for the next spin, right? Yeah. But you can at least see that and then make of it what you will. so the last category today is the scale and context challenges. Product sense requirements vary dramatically across company stages. Industries and the types of products. So what works for B2B SaaS startups might completely fail for like B2C, consumer mobile or like enterprise hardware type of product management, right? So the, the, there are two sides to this that I see the against side is like context switching reveals who has genuine versus learned product experience. Genuine versus learned context switching reveals who has the the genuine product experience? Like the, the, the product sense or the fakers or the Oh, the fakers. And then the other side is like, well the product sense frameworks they, they, they will deliver across any context or business or whatever. Like stick with a framework, stick with a if you just apply the same kind of principles, you'll be successful tho. Those are the two sides for me. Yeah, there's probably more sides than that and that's probably a little too. Generalize, but let, let me, let me throw out some against here. Sure. Okay. I think what I'm really arguing is like if you've not spent enough time in just product management, you can say traditional product manager or whatever, whatever words you wanna throwout it. If you've just not spent enough, if you've not done enough reps in the gym, that's what I'm saying, basic product management. This category I think is, it's going to me, it's just going to me on the checkbox by default. No arguing against it. I think if you just don't do the ref, because what I see is like the best product leaders intuitively. Can understand new business domains very quickly. This is analogous to really agile coaching even, right? So if you haven't spent time across different domains in different situations, coaching situations, then what are you doing? Honestly, to co-opt what you just said. I think it's the difference between a team coach and an enterprise coach is actually what we're talking about here. So, yeah, you've gotta do the reps first. I think I like that analogy though. I think that's what we're talking about is like, hey, you are a team coach and you're coming in claiming you can coach. All of the team coaches and their teams, and there's like two dozen teams in the program. There's 300 people in the program. And you're saying, because I coached one team successfully in the past I automatically should be able to say that I can coach, At an enterprise level when you know that I don't think that's true. I don't think that's true. I think that there needs to be reps put in, there needs to be some mentorship. There needs to be some shadowing. Yeah. There needs to be some buildup to that point. Yeah, I agree. I think just it, product coaching, whatever, it doesn't matter. Everyone has. Strengths and weaknesses. So when you talk about scaling, you can scale your strengths, but you're also automatically going to scale your weaknesses as well. Ooh. So it's gonna be like the good, the bad, and the ugly all scale up together. Ooh, scaling your weaknesses. Oh boy. You just, that's another podcast I want to do right now. Scaling your weaknesses the four like, product sense transfers across context, , like I do it with one team, I can do it at scale I mean like let's take that person that we really went hard on at the early, early part of this podcast. The person who like leadership grabs him. They're like, Hey, you, you got kind of weak product sense, but you present well. You look good. If you were like hanging on by a thread in one domain or with like a few teams or whatever when you scale everything goes out the window at that point. Sure you know this as a team coach when you scale something no matter how successful it is, everything goes outta the window when you scale. If you are the director of product, you have five, six product managers under you. If you're a single product manager making bets with your team and then cashing those checks, that's one thing. But if you have five people that you're advising and coaching and you are that coach, now you are the product sense coach, right? Telling and double checking people's bets and stuff like that. Now you're in that role. Now you scaled that your suggestions and your coaching advice now have an impact. The whole crew of people and a whole program or maybe multiple programs. Now what you say makes a huge financial impact. Now you're riding that 7 47 really, you're piloting it. So you are insecurities and weaknesses do scale just like your strengths do. Mm-hmm. And that's often misunderstood. People focus on the strengths mainly, but it's those insecurities that you have to be mindful of because they will come back and bite you. Yeah. When they do, it's too late, so would you say that frameworks like the Lean Startup or system thinking like the Deming system thinking that they transfer across industries, product environments, that kind of thing? Absolutely. Those fundamentals are solid. Yeah. Right. But oftentimes people either. Don't have them or learn them they've heard of them. Not really having practiced them at all that's what we're talking about is scaling the inadequate, I guess trying to be kind well in inadequate. so the way that I read an inadequate on my arguing against side is like the people with the industry specific knowledge I think about this in the government space, the people with the industry specific knowledge they can't transfer the, that product management skill to other areas easily because their niche is so deep that it's hard to pick up those learnings and transfer them to another industry Here is like if you're light on the I feel people beat up product management in LinkedIn all the time about this. One of you, you like the, your. You come into product management, either through technical know-how or through subject matter expertise know-how. So if you came in through subject matter expertise, know-how, and you never were the technical side. And now you move from your subject matter expertise, super deep subject matter expertise to another business domain because you've got a different job now. You now you don't have any technical skill. And now your subject matter expertise has been invalidated or it's been so long since you've been a product manager and not doing the job day to day that the subject matter expertise has like evolved and passed you. Yeah. Pass you. So now, your subject matter expertise is also outdated. So your product management skills outdated and your subject matter expertise is outdated and now you're in real trouble. You have no ACEs in your head, right? And, and, and the more I would before you start, I know where you're going. I know where you're going. I just wanna make that minefield even more dangerous for you. A daylight charge across a minefield. They'll never expect that. And now you are in charge of a whole crew of other product managers and with outdated knowledge.'cause the market moved on with no real product sense because you never had to develop it. Right? Now you're super dangerous. I agree. You are very dangerous. But the thing about this is, if you are that person, right, what do you do? But before you can answer even that question, are you aware that this is really what's going on? So if you're not aware, that's the most dangerous situation you are here. You don't even know what the dangers are and that's a problem. Let's say you have some idea, the technical side for me is easier to deal with because you can always lean on other people. Yeah. To help you and kind of underscore the technology side of it. Bring them along with you. That's fine. Right. The domain side. Yeah. You've gotta learn when you're changing domains or industries even. So I say, if you're a excellent product manager in fast moving consumer goods, now you're getting into some other industry altogether maybe it's software, whatever it is, the fundamentals don't change, but you've gotta learn the nuances of your new industry. How do you do that? Well, that's a great question I think part of it is being open to testing product sense, transferability, doing that scorecard that we talked about earlier. Yes. And then like rotating product people across different contexts in your organization. Like keeping in the back of your mind or in the side of your eye or whatever, their ability to adapt to the speed of decision making, decision, quality, that kind of stuff. There's some things that don't cleanly lend themselves that I would wanna be watching out for as I'm looking directly at how they're doing the job, I'd be looking at like, hmm, how is their decision quality and how's their speed to decision? And like how is there like a data, data decisions being made and what is the, what is the intuition versus data waiting when it comes to their decision process? Like, how is that working? There'd be a few things that I would look at. Yeah. That when, when you, when you in the traditional OKRs of the organization they are gonna get lost in like they're just, they're not cleanly measured, so they're not gonna go into the OKRs. That'd be what I would be looking at as a product leader. Yep. From the perspective of I want to develop the people into the. Best product folks that they can be. So may, whether it weighs into the company's way of doing things or not, I don't know, maybe that's a fight you lose strategically just so you can like, move on to green your pastures or whatever., I'd be looking at those things. Yeah, I agree with that. I'd add one more to that, which is how are these people that are in your peripheral vision that you're looking at all of these things? How are they reacting? How are they reacting to things that, the bets that don't pay off to, to the failures, right. To use that f word. How, how are they reacting to that? Yeah. How are they, are they simply taking that and blaming somebody else for it, right? Or are they owning up to it and are they learning from it and all of that? Listen, if you're, if you're, I would say if you're blaming somebody else and you're like going through this if you're going through this decision making process or this thought process that we were talking about, and you blame people. You're already like, you're already losing at this point. I agree. It does happen. Oh, it absolutely happens. Especially when the person that got promoted way too early starts washing out other product managers. Yeah yeah. You're already back to keeping that resume updated. Like that, that's the level we're back to. Yeah. And when we're back to like, the only thing you can do at that point is keep that resume updated. I think we're done. I think we're done. I think the conclusion here is like, whether product sense is innate or learnable either one, I'm not gonna say who won this category or not. Yeah. Maybe we should also be asking like, how do we identify faster? Should we be developing this more intentionally? Yeah, absolutely. Get the right question like prevent people from moving forward decisions that. Tank their product. And, and then by right of that, the organization. So like, is there a scorecard we can apply? Can we be looking at the, the decisions that people not, not people. I don't wanna be judging people, but I'm talking about the work. Yes. I'm talking about talking about the, basically the walk the board method mm-hmm. Of product management. Can we be judging the decisions that come out of, because that gives you a, a hook to examine the after action of what made you make this decision. Yeah. Because if we examine the evidence that went into it and it's ego, that's pretty easy when you say, oh, oh, you keep making these ego-driven decisions. Yep. You need to get better at identifying that your ego's in the way, and we can help you as a person. Okay. We can make a real impact. Okay. Yeah. Or you can say, well, oh, you keep making these decisions. They're based on evidence. You make the wrong decisions. Maybe you need to do a little more intuition based exploration to identify other avenues. Yeah. Before you make these like there's something there, but in the traditional like, oh, oh, you just need to get like 20% more. No, no. User activation or whatever. Those are not numbers that help you. Audit, audit, a product decision that your organization made recently. Okay. Yeah. Track it backward to who made it, what information they had, how they processed it, and what outcome happened because of it. And then ask yourself, was it good product, sense in action, or was it just like they got lucky? Sure, sure. So share your findings comment on this video and say, Hey it was, it was luck. Or like, somebody made an intentional based on evidence, made an intentional decision. Again, we have another podcast on this topic that we referenced earlier. And and let us know you know, let us know where you, where you land with this one. So like, we kind of talked all back and forth about things that you can do, takeaways, each category. I don't know if if you have a strong feeling or takeaway out of this. I, I, I, I will tell you even if we take product management out of the equation the business leadership is gonna make decisions. Yeah. And like, I don't know, if I really changed and felt one way or another in this podcast. No, I'm with you on that. I think that at the end of the day, I'd summarize it like this. Product sense. Is it innate or a product of your own environment? You know, your corporate environment? Yeah. And experiences. I think the answer is yes or maybe well, so with that, as long as the answer is not keep their resume updated. Yeah. Let us know what you think and like, and subscribe.