The Intentional Product Manager Podcast

Fractional Product Management with Jason Knight

• Shobhit Chugh • Season 1 • Episode 7

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Join Shobhit from Intentional Product Manager in a deep dive discussion with Jason Knight, a seasoned product management consultant, coach, and podcaster. In this episode of the Intentional Product Manager podcast, Jason shares his extensive journey from a corporate lifer to running his own business and hosting the One Knight in Product podcast.

Learn about the challenges and benefits of fractional product management, the impact of AI on the product management landscape, and insights into building a successful product management career. Don't miss out on practical advice for standing out in your job search and maximizing your career impact.

00:00 Introduction to the Podcast

00:38 Jason Knight's Career Journey

03:44 Starting the One Night in Product Podcast

05:41 Challenges Facing Companies: Scaling up without losing efficiency, communicating value during growth, strategic growth, value proposition and what to focus on.

10:00 Why Companies Need Product People: selling value as a product manager.

11:23 Fractional Product Management: When would a company bring on a fractional product leader? How to engage and afford the support the company needs, getting to the right conversation and ensuring you are doing the work that will make the most impact

16:45 Biggest challenges during Fractional Product Management: making an impact as quickly as possible, finding patterns within companies to create confidence and deliver impact, communicating value and humility as a fractional product manager.

21:06 The Importance of Getting Things Done: When everyone is saying the same thing it might be worth listening to.

21:37 Standing Out In Your Product Management Career: The importance of end to end product work, demonstrating value to leadership, making data driven recommendations, when to stand your ground and when to back off, using evidence to move forward.

24:47 Building Credibility as a Product Manager: How much does positioning yourself as an expert help you get the next best role? Is it a resume or LinkedIn? Thought leadership? What can bring you joy as well as build your career? 

26:36 Resume Visibility: If your story doesn’t stand out on your resume then you won’t get the interview. Selling yourself on your resume. How to impress the hiring manager? 

27:36 The Role of AI in Product Management: Using AI to make your life as a product person easier. Why product managers can’t be replaced by AI.

30:50 What Jason Fears About AI: Enhancing thinking vs replacing thinking, the danger of offloading full responsibility to AI.

35:00 Practical Uses of AI: The best way to approach a problem, using AI as a second set of eyes. 

37:54 Future of Product Management Careers: Moving forward faster, Utilizing AI, Building bridges and embracing the business part of your role, Being seen as a business partner, not just a product person.

40:17 Conclusion and Final Thoughts


Learn more about Shobhit Chugh at intentionalproductmanager.com and connect on https://www.linkedin.com/in/shobhitchugh/

Learn more about Jason Knight and connect with him on https://www.linkedin.com/in/jason-knight/

Check out the One Knight In Product podcast here. 

www.intentionalproductmanager.com

 Ready to move to the next level in your product career? I'm Shobit from Intentional Product Manager. Join me as we discuss ways to help you stand out in your job search and your career, so you can have more impact and make more money. 

Everyone, welcome to the Intentional Product Manager podcast. Now today with me is Jason Knight, who's a product management consultant. Coach, fashion leader, and podcaster. I think running a podcast for four years called One Night and Product. Jason, welcome to the Intentional Product Manager Podcast.

Thanks for having me. It's great to be here. Awesome. I would love to dig in right away on your story. I know you were product director before, then you went into running your own business, walk us through the entire thing. Yeah, I think we might overestimate like how much of a business that actually was.

We can certainly talk about it. But, uh, it was very much a side project that we ran for a little bit and then decided to shut down. But, uh, you know, that's what happens. Was it nine out of 10 startups fail anyway? So like, I don't, you know, probably it was supposed to fail. But yeah, so I started out though, interestingly, before all of this started out basically as a, well, what became almost like a corporate lifer.

You know, I was working for one big multinational corporation. for basically 19 years, I mean, in a number of different roles and the company went through a couple of different acquisitions itself in that time, but still fundamentally working with the same people in the same industry, in the same type of company, in the same scale of company for basically 19 years.

And I look back on that now and I think, well, you know, I was pretty much in the gold watch brigade, you know, like, yeah, this is me. I'm done. I'm a lifer. I'll get put into upper middle management and then. One day I'll die and that'll be me done, like fine. But one of the things that I found towards maybe the end of my tenure there was that basically the firm got bought by a huge private equity firm called KKR, like one of the biggest.

And they kind of put the company through this big restructure, you know, digital transformation, you know, Oh my God, like what, what words are they like? That's the kind of the word to strike terror into the heart of anyone, especially a hundred year old corporate. And, you know, I started to realize that a lot of the things that I'd been doing, we never called them products in my time there, but I'd been building products for years, just under a different name.

Like we were still doing the same whole thing around, like trying to convert a services organization into using standardized products, building standardized tooling and working with AI before AI was cool, sort of doing facial analytics and voice analytics and all that stuff. So we're doing loads of cool stuff, but we never called it product.

But we started calling it product after the acquisition or the, you know, the, you know, the takeover and the digital transformation. And I started to realize that maybe working in a big digitally transforming company, like they were using safe and everything in certain parts of the organization, trying to roll it around the rest of the organization.

I'm like, yeah, you know, maybe this new world that I now know has a name, maybe there's a different place to go and do that. So I went out and got my first sort of scale up job and worked in a team there for a couple of years as a, you know, leading a team of like 5 PMs and then moved on to. A bunch of other scale ups and startups.

And after a little while, I was like starting my own podcast as well, as you say, like four years ago, and as part of that really starting to want to see a few more things and not just work for one company at a time, I kind of had this childish urge to just see everything all the time. So at one point, you know, I kind of came out of one job, I was thinking about what to do next.

And I was just like. Yeah, you know, let's, let's try my hand at consulting and yeah, just before everyone else started to go and try and do that as well. So like I kind of got in there just before that was cool as well. And, uh, and started, you know, trying to do some fractional work, trying to get into coaching.

Didn't really know what I was doing at the time, but you know, you work as in from a running a business freelancing perspective, but kind of got up to speed quickly on that. And here I am now still. kicking and screaming. That's awesome. You've made quite a name for yourself. Yeah. For good or for bad. Yeah. 

Most of the people told me, Hey, like, you know, definitely talk to Jason. In fact, one of my coaches was like, yeah, I've been hearing a lot about Jason. So what inspired you to start the podcast? Well, I mean, I often refer to it as almost like a COVID baby. I mean, you know, four years ago. 2020, we're in between lockdowns.

I'd just gone on a family vacation, kind of switched off for the week. You know, work had been pretty stressful. There had been a torrid time, obviously for a lot of companies in the pandemic and with the kind of the furloughs and the layoffs and everything, contraction in markets and stuff. So work hadn't been the most straightforward or fun for a little bit.

And I'd kind of deliberately switched myself off a bit and I kind of sort of sat there. You know, on this windswept, horrible South British beach thinking, you know, I need to kind of get out there and do more things outside of work. Like I need a, like some kind of hobby where I can go out and just meet people and talk about stuff and have, you know, widen my perspective.

And one of the things that I then foolishly did was basically try and do something that was kind of just still related to work. Like I didn't go out and start, I didn't go, go and get a motorbike or, you know, go start mountain climbing or anything like that. I was like, Oh yeah. Okay, cool. Let's do a podcast and start talking to product people and find out what they want to talk.

about, but it was very much just almost like a network extender to start with. There was no ambition to idea. I didn't need to use it for lead generation. I didn't need to use it for, for anything. It was just very much. I want to go out and talk to people and have interesting discussions about stuff. And that was very much how it started.

It's kind of still how it remains today. Like I still don't directly use it for like a, a big monetization play or lead generation. It's there. I'm sure some people look at it or listen to it and go, Hey, yeah, yeah. That was interesting. Maybe I'll talk to that guy, but I still like to think that my. Kind of consulting and freelancing is something that I have to stand on my own, like I have to go out and get that work and prove myself through the work, not just because I happen to have an interesting conversation with some person that they like on a podcast platform or something like that, like I very much see them as all part of the kind of the overall thing.

package of me, I guess, but like, I very much see it as a very much like a conversation platform where I can just go out and have nice, interesting chats, meet new people, find interesting things to talk about. And obviously these days, just try and share that with a few people that might be inspired by it too.

That's pretty awesome. So let's come to today. So I know you work a lot with companies. When they come to you, what are the core challenges? that they're facing. Well, I sometimes flippantly say that like all companies have like one of the same seven problems or something like that. And I don't necessarily think that's a hundred percent true, but there are some very common problems that people, you know, like if I'm talking to someone, they'll probably have one of these and it'll either be that they, for example, don't really have a product management function at all, or like a particularly functional one, like they're sitting there and yeah, maybe they're struggling to even build it.

In the first place, like maybe the founders have been doing it to start with, or it's just been being done by the engineering team. And now they've realized that they need to kind of build an actual product management function at all. Or maybe they're moving from more of a service mindset to a product mindset, and they to do that.

They don't even know what type of person to hire to do that because they've never done it before. So those are quite common. I think also, though, even if you do have the teams, and if you've maybe been doing this for a little bit, another big problem that you see is. just general lack of alignment or kind of breakdown of working practices, which kind of sounds a bit doom and gloom.

But just this idea that as companies start to scale up and they start to build layers and layers of process and maybe start to come away from that initial vision or the initial kind of four or five people in a room doing doing the do like they start to build in accidental inefficiency that kind of combines and layers over time.

And then they get to a point You know, their software development process started to slow down. They're starting to lose, kind of, maybe slightly some of the, kind of, the sense of connection with their customers. They're starting to realize that maybe it's not quite so easy to sell the product anymore as it used to be.

Or people within the organization aren't aligned on what the product should be doing, or the direction it's going, or people don't know, or don't have visibility, or there's no transparency about what the product team are doing at all. So like those are all basically bucketed under either kind of alignment problems, as in, you know, someone, you walk into a company, you just know that someone that you talk to is going to have a very different idea about what the company is doing to someone else, but that's a big problem can really kill momentum, or it's a kind of a training and skills problem, or maybe the need for So, Strategic product leadership, which people don't have yet because they never kind of got to that point.

And but also, you know, trying to persuade, say, if you still got the founder there, for example, trying to persuade them that they need to let go a little bit so that others can come in and do that strategic leadership rather than being kind of second guessed by founders that still want to kind of have their hand on the reins.

Got it. A lot of the problems you described, is it mostly scale ups? We're also working with larger companies and they tend to maybe have a different flavor of similar problems. Obviously, I've worked for large companies before. I still am doing some work with larger companies on a kind of a more coaching or training kind of basis.

You know, I don't, for example, I probably wouldn't go in as a fractional for like a large corporate or something like that. Like, I don't think that's my sweet spot, but I'm very happy to work with. large companies, for example, if they want to do some work with their head of product or their, you know, whoever's their most senior product person to kind of get them to be a bit more of a senior partner, a bit more of an executive partner, a bit more of a, you know, someone that they can actually consider like a business partner.

Because, you know, that's something that often happens is like the head of product or whoever that person is, whatever their role is, they kind of, certainly in a non ideal situation or non ideal organization, they'll Maybe just kind of retrench into a little kind of product bubble rather than kind of being a true business partner.

So like, as the company gets much larger, it tends to be more of a coaching thing. Most of the people that I get involved deeply on a kind of day to day level, if I do fractional work, for example, would be more of the kind of the scale up size, there's an additional point to that though, of course, pre scale up when you're kind of a, you know, pre pre.

product market fiat sort of seed type companies like really early. I do do some work with those as well. They tend not to have a lot of money to spend on things like that. And people like me, so I'm doing some kind of pro bono work for an accelerator at the moment to try and help with some of the really early companies.

They tend to have quite similar problems in the sense of, or not, not similar in the sense of like alignment and stuff, there's too few of them to be. misaligned. What they tend to have problems with is just value proposition and being able to actually concentrate on the thing that they need to focus on because there are just so many things that they could do.

So it's interesting because, and I chatted to someone else about this earlier, this idea that when you sort of start or when you're introduced to like an early stage founder and yeah, you, Oh, hello, how are you? Hello, how are you? And you start to talk about like the problems that they have and the support they need.

And they obviously ask you what you do and Oh yeah. Product management person or whatever. And you can almost. see them like, not physically, but you can almost see the internal eye roll. They don't think they need someone like that. I don't think they need a product person to come in at this point. I need a salesperson or marketing person or something like that.

But then you talk to them and you start to realize that the things, all of the things that are actually having problems with, they're all fundamental to product management, like the value proposition, the differentiation that you have, the. people that you're serving, the problems that they have and the solutions that can solve them in the best way and the sort of the path to scalability and stuff like that.

And I think that it's really interesting that many people these days consider product people as the kind of the pen pushers and the ticket monkeys and the people that just kind of just pass messages around. But if we kind of distill product management down to its core, I think there's a lot of product management support required in early companies, but it just doesn't feel like a thing that they need.

So yeah, scale ups is definitely the kind of my, if I had to define an ITP for myself, yeah, scale ups would be the ones. Anytime anybody says product managers are passing messages around, it reminds me of the office space. Yeah. What do you do here?  Yeah, it's a great scene. And it's one that I think it's almost another, yeah, just to kind of bookend that point.

There's this kind of just general concept of like product managers dreading to be asked what they do. And in fact, I was asked the other day. I was at a family party and I met like a new partner of one of my cousins or something and he's like, Oh, yeah. Yeah. Well, so what are you doing? I'm like, like, how do I even explain this?

You know, and it's like, it shouldn't be that complicated, but, uh, you know, it's, it's just one of those crosses that we product people have to bear. Totally. Now you mentioned something I'm going to go deeper into this. There's a lot of interest from folks I meet on fractional product management work. For you, what does a typical engagement look like?

And maybe just a part two of the question would be when would a company bring on a fractional product manager or leader? So I think for me, I mean, there's lots of different opinions about what fractional is and whether it's, you know, even a thing like, or if it's always been a thing and they've just given it a new name, like, you know, like a cool new label or something like that.

There's a strong argument that given the, or depending on your stage, obviously, but like if you have a need, so for example, if you go back to these kind of early stage companies, If you're an early stage company and you need kind of really top class support in an area that you don't have expertise in, for example, marketing or product, or maybe tech, you know, another fraction of CTOs out there as well.

So like, you know, that you need some strong senior leadership. You maybe don't need it all the time, or you maybe can't even afford to have it all the time, but at the same time, you need some kind of guidance. You need someone to come in, but not just guidance, you know, kind of sitting on a throne talking about, like, philosophical concepts, like you need someone to come in and get stuck in with the team, and you either don't need them all the time, or you can't afford them all the time, or the person that you could afford all the time is probably not the person that you need.

So therefore, you rather have less of a much better person's time to kind of steer the company and guide it and you know, help you make good decisions. Now, there's kind of an additional argument there around like, well, is this then something that's time limited or not? Like, is this something where it's like a six month, nine month, 12 month gig, or is it something that's just ongoing, but part time?

And I think, you know, there are both models out there and I've seen both of them. All of my fractional engagements so far have been effectively time limited. My task has very much been to go in. Sort out some kind of either problem or reboot or something like that, and then ultimately hire someone to replace me to take on, like, you know, effectively take the team on, get into the operational work and kind of build from the base that I've built.

So I went into one company and the task was very much like, well, we want to build a product management function. But we never had one before, we don't know how to do that. Could you come in and help us build a proper, you know, value stream aligned product management function, kind of help sell that to the rest of the organization, help with our ways of working, help just get everything set up for success, and then hire a head of product to come in, to come and just, just take that on.

And that's what we did. So that was, you know, that was a, that was good. Like it was a, it was a good kind of self contained sort of basically project, I guess, like from, yeah, sort of six to nine months. Whatever the ultimate runtime was, but some people would just say, well, that's not fractional. Now, fractional is just like a forever thing, but you just, you know, you're just part time and you do it for the long term.

I think both could work, but my general MO and the thing that I kind of prefer is getting in there, helping them to reach like a stage gate or something like that. And then You know, get someone else in that doesn't want to be fractional, that is set up for success, that can come and work with them full time.

And again, sort of take that basis or the kind of the groundwork that I've done and move on and hopefully be more successful. Yeah, once I've gone and hopefully I'll be remembered, but not as much as the person that replaced me. Yep. I love that aspect of it, that you're building practices, you're there for some time and then you have a replacement.

Yeah. So yeah, you're there almost like really to shoot yourself in the head, uh, just to kind of, you know, get out of the way. But, uh, you know, it's, it's harder because when you go into a company that maybe doesn't know, like, you know, isn't particularly strong a product yet, they may be bringing you into to try and make them stronger product.

Obviously, it depends on the state, the state within the company as to like how receptive they are to certain things. And also, like, even if you get brought in by, you know, for example, the CEO or COO or whoever brings you in, not everyone in the company is going to get. Why you're there or understand what fractional means or understand kind of the bounds of your responsibility.

So I try and be quite specific in my contracts to say, look, these are the types of things that I'm going to work on for you. Like this is what success looks like. These are the kind of areas and obviously, yeah, we'll be flexible where we can, but ultimately I should be focusing in these places. What can happen is where you just get dragged into day to day operations, because, of course, everyone else sees you there and you're invisible and you're working with the team and they start not really understanding that you're not there all the time.

So you have to be kind of. a little bit flexible, but also a little bit firm to make sure that you're not getting dragged into stuff that you really shouldn't be like, because, you know, people that are working there all the time should be or, you know, someone else needs to do that thing. But also that you're definitely getting involved in the stuff that you should be.

So for example, not getting excluded from certain types of conversations on the more strategic level, more organizational level. I sometimes joke that, you know, the danger of fractional work is that you get invited to loads of stuff that you shouldn't and not invited to loads of stuff that you should.

So you have to be kind of as best as possible. You need to kind of manage that idea of like, look, I'm here to help the company on an overall strategic level to make good decisions and set out for future success. I'm not here to run, you know, stand ups or, you know, do day to day work with, you know, like very operational tasks.

Like I could obviously do that if I wanted to, but that's not why I got into this game. But you know, you want to try and say that in a way that doesn't sound incredibly lazy because, you know, people are sitting there saying, well, what did you mean? You don't want to do any work. So no, no, no, I do want to do some work, but I want to do this type of work.

That's what you brought me in for. I want to do this type of work that you didn't know how to do before and that you need support in, not just be some kind of Swiss army knife for all the things that you, you know, want to get done. So it's interesting trying to sort of strike that balance of being available, being flexible, but not being dragged into tasks and initiatives and, you know, basically conversations that you don't need to be in.

Yeah. Let me ask from a perspective of challenges, you know, when you go into fractional, like I'm guessing one big challenge is like getting that trust of everyone to be strategic. Like, is that the biggest challenge? And what are the challenges you run into in such situations? Well, I think the thing is that with, you know, fractional and indeed any consulting work, like.

a big part of your working model is you need to get up to speed really, really quickly. Because if you're only going to be there for a few months, you don't have your 30, 60, 90 days to kind of get interested in sort of into everything like you need to be able to make an impact sooner. Now I've had fractional contracts that have lasted four months, you know, like that's just past 90 days, right?

Like there's, there's no, there's no kind of, um, you know, there's no leeway. So you need to be able to make an impact and demonstrate an impact really fast. Now that does mean that you have to kind of come in and rely on, for example, past patterns that you've seen in other organizations and sort of try and pattern match those as much as possible to the organization that's in front of you.

Most of the time, they're going to be a good starting point because, you know, no matter how much people like to think that. All companies are different, precious little snowflakes. Most of them kind of have very similar characteristics. If you're working in the same style of company, like, you know, a scale up in B2B space, selling to the enterprise, they all basically have the same fundamental problems.

It's just the way that they look is different. So like you can start to pattern match as best you can get up to speed really quickly, but also give confidence that this person that they brought in, isn't just some idiot that's trying to come and fleece the company for a bit of easy money, but they're actually here to be an expert.

And to deliver impact. So that then goes on to the trust that you just talked about. Like, obviously, depending on who you ask, like there are various people out there that have a pretty dim kind of expectation or, or feeling about consultants in general, or coaches or anyone that they see as kind of not a, not a builder, you know, whatever that. 

And it's like, well, I get that like, it's easy to sit there and sort of go to find stories about like, how such and such a coach or such and such a consultant or yeah, like McKinsey came in and fired some people and wrote a report. And that was it. It's like, I get that. And I understand where that feeling comes from.

You need to basically demonstrate that you're actually here to deliver something, not just to be kind of talking and flapping your lips and, you know, just taking big paycheck home at the end of every month or whatever. It's, it's an interesting one, because again, not everyone's going to understand why you were brought in in the first place.

There may even be some level of, you know, even kind of bad blood against you being brought in, especially if there's other people in the organization that think, well, why is this person coming in? I'm saying all of the same things that he's saying. Why, why is he even here? And I think that's an interesting, but you know, I've been in that situation before.

I've sat there in meetings in the past before I went consulting thinking, what the hell is this person doing? They're saying all the same things as me. And I get it can be really frustrating. You can take that one or two ways. Either you sit there and complain and grumble about it and say, well, look, this is unacceptable.

Why are they paying this person? Not that it makes a difference to you, of course, because you know, they're not paying them out of your salary, but or you can take it the positive way and say, well, look. They've got this person in and yes, he's saying some of the same things that I was already trying to say.

Maybe he's found a different way to say them or maybe just by very, you know, the virtue of the fact that, you know, someone comes in and, and has more experience or a different way of saying it, or they just have more credibility from wherever they came from, but they're saying the same thing as me. So that backs me up like this, you know, the imaginary person that's complaining, it makes them look better by association because the person that, you know, the CEO or whatever sitting there saying, Oh, well, you know, the consultant saying this.

Which is the same as what my team is saying. So now maybe I should trust my team more. So I think it is easy to kind of slip into this idea that like, you know, consultants are just, you know, snake oil people. But, you know, I think it's a big part of the consultant or the fractional's job to kind of go in and demonstrate value and also humility with these people.

Because, you know, that's another thing, like no one wants to walk in to work one day and just see this new consultant coming in, sort of waving their baseball bat around and saying that they're, you know, the second coming of Christ or anything like that. No, it's like they, yeah, they need someone that can kind of balance these two ideas of like, yes, this person is an expert in their trade, but you people here are the experts in your company.

So let's bring those two things together and then we'll try and deliver some good results. I love it. My favorite example of that doesn't come from work situations. It's when I heard something from a mentor and I went and told my wife and she was like, Oh yeah, I've been saying that for three years.

Suddenly you want to do it.  But okay, now, you know, it all adds up. Multiple people are telling me the same thing. Well, the most important thing is it gets done, right? Like who cares? Like if. You know, Bob, Susan or whoever had the, had the idea that actually then, or said the thing that got it done. As long as it gets done and you're in a position now where you can move forward from wherever you were before.

Again, yeah, I understand that there's a need for a psychological need for people to, to take credit for things or to be given credit for things. And they think that it's going to come up in their next performance review or something like that. These are all valid concerns, but ultimately the most important thing really is that the thing gets done.

And, uh, if it takes one additional voice to come and get it done, and they get you the result that you want, then you should still be happy. Now let's switch gears a bit. I'd be remiss if I didn't talk about product management careers, since that's a big, big part of this podcast. So when you look at product managers with successful careers in today's market, like what are the things that they're doing that helps them succeed?

I mean, I can't obviously speak for every single company out there, but I'd say that certainly when I've been looking to help hire people or when I have hired people and also speaking to others out there and, you know, when they're looking to hire people, I think like the ones that are making the biggest waves are the ones or the ones that are most appreciated by, you know, companies that are trying to do product well are the ones that actually do.

Have some kind of end to end ownership of product rather than seeing product as a kind of, I don't know, internal facing function that's just there to pass tickets around. Like, you know, we kind of talked about earlier, like a team that cares about, you know, going out and speaking to the customers or users, but also cares about speaking to the business, building bridges across the functions so that they can be seen as a partner and someone that wants to work with these people rather than just someone that's again retrenched into their little bubble because they think that product management should own everything.

Yeah, people that can actually be. Come to the leadership team with a kind of a combination of opinion and flexibility. Like, yeah, so they're not just going up there and saying, Oh, well, complaining about everything, but, you know, or complaining that the boss has said to do something or they want you to investigate something, but trying to find pragmatic and quick ways to demonstrate that whether that is, or isn't a good idea, but also someone that when they come to the, you know, the boss or whoever it is that I need to present to.

And I'll just come into them with like a plate of options that come into them with a plate of options, but also a recommendation and a kind of a preferred way ahead based on some data that they've actually some evidence that they're actually, you know, that they've pulled together. So, like, I don't think many CEOs want to be like,  most CEOs that I speak to.

And I've seen out and about like even in quite non product first companies, they still want the product team, or they at least say they want the product team to deliver certain types of impact. I think what happens is that in many cases, the product teams may be kind of going half cocked. They don't have necessarily all of the information or they there's a bit of opinion in there, or they don't have a better plan or alternative to the thing that they've been asked to look at because they didn't do that work yet.

And then there starts to be this kind of erosion of trust between the leadership team and the product team, because it's just. They just don't see them making any real progress, and they start to feel that they need to sort of override them and give them things to do. So I think, you know, the PMs that are making the biggest impact are the ones that can actually go out there, stand their ground when they need to, but also give way when it makes sense.

And just have a really solid opinion about, and evidence to back that opinion about where the best way to go is. I think that, uh, it's really easy to get demotivated as product managers when you're sort of in a company that, where it doesn't feel like that's appreciated and where they, where you feel they do just want you to type up tickets and templates and keep pushing work through and basically be that message passer.

I mean, look, I'm not going to sit there and blame these people for being in a situations because of course, you know, most of these people don't want to be doing that. But at the same time, yeah. One of the things that those PMs, even in those sorts of situations can do and. If I look back at points in my career, it's just try something.

Yeah. Try to move it a little bit in the direction that you think is better. And so I prove evidence and show impact because if you're just going to sit there and, and yeah, kind of give up and accept it, that's also fine if that's what you need to do, but like, you shouldn't complain about it at that point.

Yeah. And if I may ask one more question on that, how are these people like building that credibility that they have had internet ownership? Is it their resume? Is it something they're posting on LinkedIn? Just curious to hear about that. Well, you don't have to look too far these days to find sort of thought pieces and posts saying that, you know, product managers need to be posting their stuff all over LinkedIn and starting podcasts and yeah, doing their content game.

And I get relatively frequent questions from, you know, people on LinkedIn or whatever saying, Oh yeah, how do I get started? Should I get started on all this stuff? And it's like, well, first of all, absolutely you should get started. Like go and do that. If it brings you joy. Like I started doing a podcast four years ago, four and a bit years ago now.

I had no idea if it was going to bring me joy. I thought I'd try it and it eventually did. And that was, you know, that was great. So I carried on doing it, but I've tried other things in the past that didn't work out so well for me. So I stopped doing them. But again, I don't believe, and I'm prepared to be proven wrong, but I don't believe that many product people are out there.

Starting to post a bit more on LinkedIn and getting loads of big promotions on new jobs. I just don't believe that that happens regularly enough for it to be a valid kind of, you know, gambling strategy. Like, yeah, sure, yeah, you can get a royal flush in poker, but you're gonna be waiting quite a while for that to happen.

So I don't think that happens as much as some people might think. But at the same time, it's never a bad idea to Try and position yourself as an expert in, in those ways, but also even if you don't position yourself as an expert, the very kind of process of writing this stuff up and talking about it and doing whatever it is you do, kind of helps you get your own story straight.

So yeah, like it helps you to communicate the value of this stuff more. It helps you to become a more effective communicator, helps you kind of stress test your ideas and stuff like that. But yeah, I do. I think that many CEOs or hiring managers are out there kind of trawling through people's LinkedIn posts to see if they're the ones that they should hire.

I don't think so. I think people are still going quite old fashioned to CVs and resumes just to, you know, try to, uh, you know, try to find them that way. And I, you know, I think, to be fair, having reviewed a rather large number of resumes over the last sort of six months or so for different roles, plus also some stuff that I've been doing on the side, you know, as a kind of a little hobby project, there's a lot of not great resumes out there.

And, like, I'm not saying that the people are bad, like, they're, they still, you can, you can look. You've got to look in there and you can see that there's a good story trying to get out, but it's told in such a way that you have to either hunt for it or it's just not there at all. So like, that's one of the most important things for me.

It's like, yeah, sure. It's a brutal market out there. We all know that the job market is not great at the moment, but if you're sitting there as a hiring manager and you've got 150 CVs on your desk, like you need, you're only going to look at, or you're only really going to seriously entertain the ones that really impress you.

And that's what people I don't think do enough when they're actually trying to sell themselves is, you know, they just list out a bunch of things that they did in chronological order from start to finish, and some very generic, I did product management blurb at the top. So yeah, I mean, again, sure these people did a great job, but this resume is not showing that.

And they need to show it. Looking forward, actually first let's explore the impact of AI. There's a few people who are like, Oh, it's the worst thing ever. It's going to take over product management. AI is the new product manager. Of course we heard that, but what do you think is really happening? How is AI affecting product management, the work of VMs and their careers?

I mean, look, I think AI, and again, I said earlier that I was working on AI before it was called, and it's definitely cool now. It's definitely way better than it was when I was working on it in anger. But like the most interesting thing about AI is that it's absolutely amazing. It's incredible. I can't believe the things that I can do on a day to day basis now that I could never do before, either with regards to, you know, if I still want like for side projects and stuff, like crank out code or anything like that.

You know, I used to be a developer, so I could. Write it by hand, but it's much quicker to do it through chat GPT or copilot or whatever, if I want to use it to summarize documents or sort of extract things from documents, if I want to use it to provide like templates of things or to, you know, to maybe spitball ideas with, or kind of extract insights and from my own thinking and stuff like that.

Like these are all like, I can't believe that we could do these things, but it's also frankly, not anywhere near as good as some people think it is, even as amazing as it is, like the amazingness that some people think is, is like way over the top. Like, I don't think, for example. That there's any credibility to anyone saying that, for example, uh, generative AI, LLMs are going to somehow replace strategy.

Like, I don't see that. Like, I've done lots of experiments with strategy work in LLMs, just to see what it comes out with. And it's always very disappointing. Like, and then you sit there and say, okay, well, you know, fine. What about things like writing PRDs and specs and tickets and user stories and stuff like that?

Now, again, look, sure. Now I've seen tools that do that. There are obviously some quite popular ones out there and I have nothing against any of them. Like I think they're all doing useful, interesting spins on work that is. Frankly, boring for product managers to have to do like, no one wants to sit there cranking out page after page of PRD that's barely ever going to get read.

And so many of the things in it are fairly standard things that anyone could have written. But like, do I believe that you can just take that and give it to your engineering team or give it to your, sell it to the executive team or something? No, of course not. You still need to go through and do the work.

And this for me is still the biggest and most interesting thing with LLMs and output some LLMs. I sometimes use the phrase, like, uh, LLMs should be inputs, not outputs. I, you should use them to start, but you still need to do the work. And I think if people are using it in that way, I think it's fantastic.

They have, you know, great accelerator tools. If you're expecting to be able to, for example, crank out a strategy, or crank out some copy, or crank out some, some tickets or user stories or whatever, and just, you know, book it and go. Like, no, I, I think that's a recipe for disaster. And I think also the, the kind of the paradox of LLM output.

is that obviously we all know about hallucinations and the fact that these things don't always get it right and that's fine, like, if you know what you're doing, then you can spot those and you can fix them, tidy it up, knock the edges off, all of that stuff, but if you know what you're doing, you could have done it yourself anyway, would have just been able to just take a little bit longer.

If you don't know what you're doing, then this is an incredible accelerant, but you also don't know how to shape it or smooth it or polish it or anything, and therefore, you're either going to look at it, go, hey, well, that looks cool to me, and just send it off, and God knows what will happen then, Or you'll have to pass it on to someone that does know what they're doing.

In which case you're reducing some of the time saving. So I think in the right hands, these tools are incredibly powerful. The fear that I have is that people use that power not to accelerate their thinking and buy time for the sort of the stuff that they're still the best at, but they start to use it to try to replace thinking.

In which case, you know, I think we're all going to, you know, we're going to basically have a bunch of very disappointing products and companies coming up in the future. I love the word you use, the exhilarant. Basically, if you're going in the right direction, it can get you there faster. If you're going in the wrong direction, it definitely gets you there faster as well.

I don't want my company to be tanked by the fact that I didn't spot a hallucination or as you know, some people are out there. talking. I know Roger Martin, the strategist has been talking about this on social media as well. So I want to get him on my podcast one day. If you're listening to this, Roger, come and get me.

But like this, he's been talking or having lots of conversations with people about like this idea of like AI generating strategy. And of course it can generate a strategy. I could go into chat GPT now or Claude or whatever. And I could say, give me a strategy for whatever. And it would write out a very detailed strategy.

It would pull my strengths and weaknesses and I fill out all my seven powers and everything. They would do everything for me. But do I believe that that will be the best strategy. Who knows? And, and LLM definitely doesn't know, because of course, the way that all this stuff works is that it's kind of building it out of the combined knowledge base and all the corpus of materials that's been put in there, basically consuming the entire internet, which of course had lots of documents about strategy.

And however it's worked out what to put on the screen, when you ask it, it's not validating that in any way. So yeah, so you could sit there and say, okay, well, fine, maybe I can get an LLM to generate me 50 different strategies and then I can go and start testing them or something like that. And then, yeah, cool.

But that sounds like a lot of work. I think that it goes back to that point around like, yeah, exactly as you said, if you're already going in a good direction, use these tools to make you get there faster. But I probably would be reluctant to get it to choose the direction for me. I'd want to do that thinking myself, myself still.

I did a quick experiment. I was like, Hey, just explain Google's strategy to me. I asked you at GPD. It was the biggest nonsensical thing I've ever read. It's like they're innovative. They're this, they're that. They leverage the power of AI. I'm like, okay, cool. But it's the, it's the same thing, right? Like the biggest proponents of these things, and there are many out there.

I don't think any of them can really make the argument that these tools know what they're saying. Because they don't, and that's fine. Like someone, I had someone on my podcast a few weeks, months ago now. And I kind of raised this question with him and he was like, well, even if it's kind of randomly picking the next words or the next sentence or whatever, if it's the right next sentence, next word or sentence, then the result is still a good result.

It's like, well, yeah, that's true. But how do you know it's right? And that's, that's, you know, cause because the LLM. doesn't know that it's right. And due to the architecture of these things, can't know that it's right. And that's fine. Like, again, I'm not expecting these tools to know if they're right, but then I'm also then not expecting people who do know whether they're right or not to just offload that responsibility.

They still need to take responsibility. It's like with the, um, The self driving cars, the Teslas and the full self driving that isn't full self driving, but this idea that they kind of disconnect the or disengage the full self driving, uh, just before a crash, for example, so that they weren't technically in control at that point.

And the fact that you still need to have a fully engaged driver behind the wheel that can still take control if they need to. So yeah, this is great. That's probably how I'd want this stuff to work. I don't want, I don't think I'm currently trust a fully self driving car to fully self drive, but it's the same, then the same kind of.

philosophical concept, at least with the, with the kind of the decisions that we make off of generative AI outputs, like, do I really trust them? Or do I still need to check? So far, I've always needed to check. And to your point, there's always been something that you think, well, yeah, no, that's not quite right.

So as long as we're not removing that from the equation, and again, using these things to accelerate around that, then I think that there's a lot that could be done. And PMs, you There's this whole kind of cliche. Oh, it's not PMs that are going to get put out of work by AI. They're going to get put out of work by PMs using AI.

I think there's probably a lot more to that because, you know, these people would be able to get through a lot more work and hopefully a lot of the work that they're getting through will be the drudge work that we probably didn't really want PMs doing in the first place. Buying time for them to think about how they can actually make a bigger impact with their product.

I think that's going to be the best kind of mixture of the two. Love it. One more question about AI. How do you, given all your work in podcasting.  Fractional PM, coaching. What are the top users for you for AI? So I still very much use, uh, AI transcriptions, for example, either for recordings of calls or, um, for, you know, for, for podcasts and, you know, podcast transcriptions.

I use AI tools to clean up audio. a lot more these days. I still don't use things like the script for the full editing experience because I think they make too many mistakes. You can kind of hear the glitches from time to time. And, um, you know, obviously images and stuff like that for background removal and, you know, kind of making, making pictures for PowerPoint slides and stuff like that for presentations, which is, you know, probably still my hero use case.

I don't have to go to ups. Yeah. Was unsplash wherever like the, the, uh, the online picture places anymore. I don't need to go to any of those places anymore. If I want a picture for my slide for a Talk or something, I can just go and get it and it's fine. Um, probably not what the people that were making these things really imagined would be the hero use case for me.

But, you know, it's, it is all good. But also, again, like I very much like using things like Claude to kind of explore spaces. So like, you know, if I'm not sure. about the best way to approach a problem, or if I'm not sure whether certain combinations of things work. Like, obviously, again, it doesn't know, I'm not, don't think for a second it knows, but what it'll do, but you know, based on it, the way that it works is it will at least kind of look at the different things that I put in and try and point out inconsistencies or maybe just like point out things that were missed and stuff like that.

I think it can be helpful for that type of thing, but I think if I think about it. If I think about, like, all of my use of AI, like, I could have done all of the things. There's not a single thing that's come out of AI that I've sat there and thought, wow, I never would have known how to do that before.

Like, yeah, maybe I would have had to have read a blog post instead of asking Chad GPT. But like, it's not, yeah, I don't sit there and say, this has changed my life. All it does is do it quicker, which is in itself good, you know, as a fractional, as a consultant, as a contractor, you You know, probably juggling quite a lot of tasks.

So it's definitely good to be able to do stuff quicker. But a lot of the stuff that gets, that comes out of these things, you're still looking at manually yourself and then sort of making a final decision. So again, big excellent for me, especially when working across multiple, you know, clients and projects.

Another interesting thing that you can use it for, actually when you're Maybe evaluating a client is, and this is something more with tools like perplexity and stuff like that, which have internet access where you can basically go in and get it to basically build a report based on a client's or potential client's website.

Like, Oh, hey, I'm speaking to whomever. Okay, cool. Uh, go to their website and basically do like a business model canvas for, for their company. Now, obviously I don't know if it's going to be right or wrong because nor does perplexity or any of the LLMs that power perplexity.  But it's a good start, and I can sit there and I can say, Okay, so these are the things that's dug out in a fairly structured format.

So now I can start thinking about those things and ask them about that when I speak to them. So again, there's still this asking layer, but it's at least pulling together some of the information and formatting it for me and kind of enabling me to get to the point quicker. Love it. Now, last question, Jason, from looking forward, what do you expect as far as product management careers to happen in 2025 and beyond?

And what advice would you have for PMs as they move forward? Well, the other interesting point about AI, but in kind of the context of that question is that Obviously, on the one hand, yeah, I think all product managers are going to need to get much more comfortable with using AI tools to accelerate themselves because otherwise people are going to start to say, well, why are you taking so long to do everything?

And especially with all these startups, you know, come along and able to do things themselves very quickly. Like it enables PMs in larger organizations to sort of speed up enough that they can maybe not get completely outcompeted. Well, obviously there's still other barriers there, but I think. Another thing though, is just getting really comfortable with what AI can and can't do with regards to their own product.

Because every PM I'm pretty sure is in a position now where they're being pressured to kind of come up with an AI strategy for their product. Like, what are you going to put in your product that, you know, what AI features are you going to put in there? How are we going to AI ify our stuff? And, you know, obviously part of that's to kind of keep up with the hype.

Part of that's because the competitor's doing it. Part of that's probably because you have investors that are pressuring the board. To do the question, the executive team to do that, have an answer to that question. Like, you know, what can AI legitimately and genuinely do to improve your experience rather than being just kind of wallpaper that you're stuck on the side.

I think PMs are going to have to get comfortable with that. And I still then just go back to this whole idea of sort of product management as a business function. I think that across 2025, whether it happens in all companies or not, I think the best PMs will be out there building bridges, not just with their customers, but with their stakeholders, with the people that they work with, all of the people around the organization that are involved in getting that product out to people.

And managing those relationships and making sure that they understand their perspectives and that they can sort of step out of this product management bubble and see that it's not just about building something for the, you know, a valuable product for, for users. That's critically important, but it also has to work for the business and it has to work with the business as well.

Like it has to make sense to the entire business. And I think that the best PMs across the next year, 12 months, it'll be ones that can embrace the. business parts of their role, not just get sort of drawn into product management, dogma and frameworks and stuff like use those what you can. But ultimately your biggest kind of accelerant I think will be to be seen as that business partner and kind of lead product from a business perspective, as well as just a customer and a user perspective.

I love it. Jason, thank you so much for being in the podcast. I learned a lot. I'm sure all the listeners would learn a lot from your various experience in careers and fractional PM and podcasting. I like to be as useful as I can, or at least interesting or sometimes mildly amusing. So whatever I can do, you know, I'm always happy to connect up with people in chat or.

If anyone's got any questions, I'm always happy to try to answer. And where do people find out more about you, your work? How do they connect with you? So sadly, LinkedIn is still one of the places, even though it's like, uh, throwing like a coins down a wishing well these days as to whether anyone gets to read your content or not.

So yeah, you can obviously find me on LinkedIn, got the podcast on one night in product. com. Also links to my newsletter, which I sporadically write. If I have things to talk about and, uh, there's also my consulting website as well, one night consulting. com. You can see what I did with the name there, but again, LinkedIn is probably if you want like an instant response, LinkedIn is probably the place to go.

Awesome. Thank you so much, Jason. Appreciate it. Thanks for having me. Hey, be sure to check out our website at intentionalproductmanager.  com to see how you can level up in your career.