AI Is Changing Product Leadership (Here’s How to Keep Up)

Blair, thank you so much for being on our podcast. I've gotten to know you over the last year. I've learned a lot from you in the few meetings that we've had and also just in kind of watching you, um, kind of grow into your role at LaunchDarkly and recent talks you've given to the product management community, which we'll get into. You have had such a cool career. You have been a founder, you've been an operator just out of college, spent a number of years in Austin before you founded your first company in 2012, which I think you ran for about a year. Before you founded Experiment Engine, which you'd run for 3 years before it was acquired by Optimizely. So I imagine there was a lot in that moment. And then nearly 4 years at Optimizely where you kind of, you ended up departing as the CPO. You went into healthcare at a company called Color, 3 years there. And then you came to launch Darkly earlier this year where you were the chief product officer. On the side, you're building such an incredible tool called ChatPRD. Tell us the journey in your own words.

That's, I mean, you told, told the journey in your words. So you did a, you did a good job for me. No, I, I think the general journey is I've had a pretty great run so far in my career in tech. And the way I got here, the kind of meta story to the story is I always opened my own doors and I was always sort of fearless about my ability to learn new things. And I think that's really, really served me. And so everything from when I was much younger, And then sort of the academic portion of my life, self-teaching how to write code and build websites and, you know, do computer science, all those things, even though I didn't have really great role models that felt accessible to me in that space. And then, you know, I did, and I spent a lot of time in Austin. I worked at a lot of startups there, and in the startup world, I think the way you have success is you just find problems and you go solve them, whether or not those problems are in your title or not, and whether or not you've studied those things or not. So everything I learned, I sort of learned on the job, everything from user experience to design to product management, which I guess now I'm a certified pro at, to, you know, writing Python, to writing JavaScript, you know, all those things I think have been sort of self-taught in the pursuit of actually doing something with the team. And so it's been been a really fun way to learn. It's given me a really broad base of skills. And then, as you said, the last 3 kind of roles— oh, I guess I've been a founder. That is sort of a through line in the Clairvaux story. So I like to tell people that I'm a 4th generation female founder, and that my mom owns her own business, my grandmother on both sides owned their own business, my great-grandmother owned her own business. So got a lot of female entrepreneurs in the family. I have founded very, very terrible startups that made no sense in hindsight, but haven't we all? Like, haven't we all just, you know, the field of broken dreams. And so, you know, did, did one startup, Experiment Engine, that had some legs to it. I actually ran that company about 3 years until it was acquired by Optimizely. Very positive experience for me as an acquired founder. I ultimately became Chief Product Officer at Optimizely and then decided to do healthcare and in particular, like, pandemic work during the pandemic. It was really interesting and quite fulfilling to be in healthcare for, you know, 2020 to 2024, which saw a lot of changes in healthcare. And I got to work with the public sector, which was really interesting, and, you know, bridge the gap between digital health experiences and in-person health experiences. So a lot of fun stuff there. And then, as you said, joined LaunchDarkly earlier this year, where I run the technology organization, so product, engineering, design, data, all those fun teams. And you know, the reason why I came to LaunchDarkly is I just love dev tools. So I'm sure we'll talk a little bit about building for developers and building for building teams, but I think that's some of the most fun product that you can build is products used by others that build products. It's very, very fun. And I guess that brings us to ChatGPT, which is coming up on her first birthday. We're very excited, which I made, I actually made, I remember on, you're like, when do you hang out with your kids? I was like, while I'm coding, we're just, we, we're a family that exists together. So I remember I made the first version of ChatPurity coding while my kids, you know, uh, chilled out and watched Bluey after skiing on our Thanksgiving break last year. And you know, you know that energy where like everybody's tired, everybody needs to just chill out. So you have like an hour or two where people can just watch TV. Cartoons, and I built ChatPurity, which is, I think, the number one AI copilot for product managers. I check my numbers and I look around, I think we're number one. And so, it's an AI tool for product managers to really accelerate their product work, get higher quality thinking, have an on-demand chief product officer that they can always rely on. And it's been really fun to build that tool in the new age of AI, which is very different from the last time I founded a company. And so, Enjoying that, keeping busy, and now here I am on your podcast, the pinnacle of all these, all this, all this work. I get to hang out and chat with you, but in all honesty, I'm really excited to be here and talk through stuff.

And for those listening, we're both in like very weird call rooms and coworking spaces. I'm under the staircase here.

I mean, not ideal lighting. It's like the whole situation is. Something else.

So much to get into. One of the things I love about the way you sort of self-describe, both with you and your partner, is that you work for the internet.

Oh yeah, we also met— I, I tell people we met at the internet because we met working at the same startup, and they're like, you met on the internet, like, like a dating app? And I'm like, no, no, no, no, we met at the internet.

Can you go back to maybe college or before college? I mean, you're, you're a liberal arts major. When did— was there a moment when you started to go, I'm really interested in technology? Was there like a moment or was it sort of this slow evolution?

Yeah, there's this picture of me at like 18 months old just banging on a computer this big. That is the moment at which I became interested in technology. I mean, truly through my entire childhood, I was the one like on the computer in the terminal trying to figure out like, what can I do with this thing? Or I was 100% legally, wink wink, you know, doing like Photoshop tutorials and trying to figure out how to make website, you know, just all that kind of stuff. It was all just very naturally inclined towards trying to use computers to create something. And so I had self-taught to code when I was not even in middle school, actually. Um, I like would print out tutorials from the internet. It was a very weird time, but taught myself to code and then kind of pushed myself into computer science. And there's a kind of funny story about that and being in an all-girls school and me having to demand that they carry AP Computer Science, which they didn't. For us. And then there's, there's all that. And then I got to college and got into all the— like, I can't even say the computer science schools that I got into because in hindsight I was such an idiot to not go to them. So I'm not even gonna say which ones, the good ones. And I went to them and I was like, there's literally no one like me here. Not a single person that looks like me here. I have never felt so different than when I walked through the halls of those schools. And I was like, nope, there is not a single human that's of the Clairvaux mold in these schools.. And so, and I was— I am also a very like highly practical person. So I was like, look, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna get a state school education, which I still stand by, um, in something I find interesting, which American Studies is like sort of an American cultural history degree. And I have actually a psychology— I'm like one credit away from a psychology double major, and I just feel like I should do it, but no one cares. And I graduated in 3 years with zero debt. And started working. So, I, you know, and I think the kind of two— there's two morals of the story. One is I really did not feel included in an industry that by all accounts, two decades later, is my true calling. So, it was really interesting to reflect on that as an adult. And then the second thing that's really interesting is joke is on all of you because you think your computer science degree is going to be great, but what are we coding with these days? Natural language. And people always ask me, they're like, Claire, how can you get such good stuff out of ChatPurity? Or how can you get such good stuff out of Cursor? How did you figure out how to prompt this thing to do that? And I'm like, dude, I studied writing. I wrote in college and I'm really good with the English language. And that's what all these LLMs are trained with. And so, you know, I think I actually ended up on top academically.

So good. Tell us a little bit about what it was like to be a founder and a venture-backed founder at that. And this was Experiment Engine. And so I'm curious when you look back on this experience, how do you, I mean, this was a 3, 4-year experience before the acquisition. How have you reflected on the key learnings from that experience?

One, being a founder is both very fun and very not fun. And I think you can, can appreciate it. You know, I think people romanticize what it's like to be an early-stage founder, like, oh, you raise venture capital or oh, you're NYC or blah, blah, blah. You don't have a boss. You're like on your own. And I'm like, man, I have a boss. People gave me like a million dollars. I got a boss. I'm like, don't, don't you worry about it. And so I think it's this combination of being this very fun situation in which you get to take your ideas and manifest in the world and try to bang your head against product market fit and, you know, hire people you really love to work with and do all those things. And like you're paying your buds salaries. Like when you, when you think about it, you're, you're trying to build something so you can create opportunity and wealth for a very small group of people that have committed, you know, years of their life to you. And that can also be really challenging. It's fun in some ways, and it's challenging in some ways. So, I think from the people side, you know, one of the things I tell folks is I have real founder empathy for what that experience is like, because it's just very much unlike anything else you could experience. And then, you know, from a business learning perspective, I think the thing that I learned about doing, doing my own startup is like, product does not matter if you can't sell it. Hmm. It doesn't matter. And, and it's in the early stages, it's rarely if we just solve this tiny problem or one more feature, um, all of a sudden like magic will happen. It's really like, have I nailed a problem people really care about and that enough people care about? And so I think it really tuned my product market fit muscle in a way that working at companies never has because you're sort of on the bare metal of customer demand and there's no like faking around that. It's, it's just very interesting.

It's like a, a commercial instinct develops.

Yeah, totally, totally commercial instinct. And I think great founders like hone that commercial instinct and listen to it. And sometimes inexperienced founders rationalize their way out of having real commercial instincts. By relying on a different strength they have, like design instincts or product instincts. And I think at the end of the day, I mean, at least in B2B, you really can't overdo it with the commercial instincts.

I'm curious. So Optimizely acquires you about 3 years into founding Experiment Engine. What did Optimizely teach you about experimentation in the context of B2B SaaS businesses? And, and maybe to go a little bit more precisely into maybe the spirit of the question, what did you learn about how experimentation can become something that's truly a muscle within a business rather than an aspiration?

Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. It's really experimentation's very hard in B2B because experimentation's all about statistical significance, and it's just hard to get to in some, you know, B2B context. It just really is. And so, I think specifically experimentation around B2B, in B2B, I think you have to find the right use cases. I think that's the key to experimentation culture is like, what's the right use case for you? And there were two experimentation use cases that I think are underutilized by B2B companies that are very powerful. One is demand testing, which is testing whether or not exposing the potential for a feature drives demand for that feature. So we used to call these in vitro experiments, like before they were even born, we would run an experiment on them. And I think that's a really underutilized tactic to figure out what people will use. And the second thing is, are you sure it worked experiments, which is we invest all this time and energy in features that we all pretend as product managers are gonna like increment these KPIs and make a difference. And at the end of the day, does anybody really check their work? And so, I think this practice of like experimentation as a BS barometer for did your product actually do the thing that you said it was going to do, not to blame anybody or create a culture where people can't fail, but actually create a real culture of, you know, learning, I think is, is very, very important.

Yeah, it's cool. I've, I've kind of. The reason I asked that question is because we're inundated with these ideas that you must iterate quickly, that you must be experimental, that you must sort of always be listening and adjusting. And yet when you get to brass tacks, many companies, especially those companies that have achieved some degree of product market fit, it's really hard to be experimental. And it does become sort of this aspiration that nobody ever really achieves all that well. Yeah.

Sure.

It resonates. Yeah.

I mean, there's a couple things. One, the number of egos in large organizations. That you have to navigate to do anything that is aspirational or experimentation— experimental is really hard. And so I have, you know, true empathy for folks that have to navigate much more complex political environments than I do, especially around who I— whose idea is right and whose idea will work. I think that's very, very complicated. I think experimentation is two things. It's either operational or it's cultural. If it's operational, you're probably in a consumer business where you don't release stuff without testing it, and you don't win without driving up your 0.01 increase in ad revenue per— like, you know, it just becomes operational. So it becomes part of your system, both your system of how you release software, your system of how you build software, your system of how you hire, how you promote, how you fire, just is operational. And it's one mode of experimentation. The second mode is cultural. Which is much harder to create. You have to sort of either lead by individual or a set of individuals or build from the beginning, which is you have a culture that's egoless. You have a culture who, that seeks the truth of outcomes. You have a culture that can look at failures and you have a culture that is risk tolerant. That can, whether or not the volume of your A/B tests are high, that is a real experimental culture. Or experimentation culture. And I think that's something you could have in any business, but it's, I think, more rare, unfortunately.

Yeah. So you enter Optimizely as this acquired founder. Yeah. And eventually you, you become the chief product officer of the company. And this is, this is, I believe, your first CPO role. Mm-hmm. Yeah. You're managing a relatively large business. What do you take away from that experience, that first CPO role?

So a couple things. One, if any founder needs to have like a great acquisition story, I have a great one. I have a great one. I feel like Founders always call me in the doldrums, like, we're considering being acquired and they're so sad. And I'm like, I had the best acquisition experience ever. It was like great, great for the team, great for me, great for my career, great for the product, great for customers. Like I will just sing the praises of a good right-timed acquisition for all parties. I think, you know, I think it took relatively good care of my investors. Like I think it was great. 10 outta 10, would acquire again. So one, I think that that's one thing that I learned from that process, but what, you know, what that first CPO job taught me about leading product. You know, I think there were good things and bad things, or maybe things I did well and maybe things I have done better since then. What do I talk about? One thing it taught me is like raw talent matters. Raw talent really matters. And the talent at Optimizely was just exceptional.

Across the entire business or across product?

I mean, sure, but in the, in the product team in particular, like the product team was just super, super smart. Knew everything about the product. You could put them in any room, intellectually honest, fun, hardworking, technical, like all those things. We just had a really good product team and not every team has a good product team. And so I think what it taught me at Optimizely is like talent really, really matters. And those PMs all became turned to become founders and do all sorts of crazy exciting stuff. And so I just think it set my bar for product talent. And in fact, I still work with a couple folks that were on the Optimizely team now here at LaunchDarkly. So that's really exciting. I think the thing that it also hammered home for me is people think that the CPO job is a— it's gonna sound really funny. They think it's a strategic job. They think it's like, I sit in my fancy office, which now, you know, I don't have a fancy office. I have an ottoman in a coworking phone booth. You see this fancy office and you like just think really hard about strategy and you have these like really intellectually interesting debates at the executive level and you go to fancy dinners and, and what I realized is like, that is not actually the job. The job is to invest in product in a way that drives enterprise value. It is like a sales job in B2B. And I just don't think folks, folks, when they look up to my career, I do not think they appreciate that you're functionally becoming like an enterprise sales rep. And that is great. I love it. Let's do it all day. But what I'm trying to do is not sell an individual deal. What I'm trying to do is build a product and a product vision that our customers want to invest in, and they have money to invest in this product vision. So it really is like, there's a lot of commercial aspects to it. There's a lot of customer-facing aspects to it. And then I don't know if I learned this at Optimizely or if I learned this after Optimizely. Certainly learned it at Color, which is there's no job so fancy or a title so high you don't have to care about the details. Like I think people think as you get higher up in the organization, you sort of like let responsibility go through the org and you sort of like diffuse accountability down and you like quote unquote empower these teams and you don't have to look at the work. And I actually think great CPOs and great technical leaders or CTOs, you know, CTOs that have this like CPTO role, they look at the code, they look at the product, they touch the work, they have opinions. And so I spend a lot of time in our product. I spent a lot of time critiquing our designs. I spent a lot of time looking at our SDK code because you cannot do a good product leadership job if you don't like touch the product every day.

You know, I've spent a lot of my career talking to founders, SaaS executives, and venture capitalists, and you are amongst a very small handful who've used that term enterprise value. As sort of the north star of what you kind of consider your mandate to be. And I think it's a term that's like maybe not used often enough is like, am I impacting enterprise value?

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, do PMs even know what that means? It's like the value of the company and the equity held in the company. My job is not revenue. Revenue is a way to drive enterprise value. My job is not product. Like my job is not customer is literally like, I think at LaunchDarkly, the CPTO role, how do I invest R&D enterprise value? And I do that through like the true passion of, I love our products, I love our problem space, I love our customers, I love developer tools. I think it's fun to build. I think they're interesting problems to solve. And I'm an owner like everybody else in a privately held startup is by equity. And that value is driven up through kind of a portfolio of metrics that accrue to what a market will value a company at. And that is at the end of the day, the job. And so I think it's surprising, you know, I think it's surprising to me when more chief product officers don't understand that concept and then don't understand the financial metrics that go into driving that number, whether it's growth, whether it's free cash flow, you know, what, you know, whether it's the value of the actual market you're operating in, which was really, really interesting learning from being in the healthcare market versus the software market. Market. You know, all those things are levers you have to pull in order to create value, which is what you're doing, especially as a company that's taken venture capital.

Take us into LaunchDarkly a little bit. So you joined the company about 8 or 9 months ago, 10 months ago, earlier this year.

Yeah.

And, you know, LaunchDarkly is— tell me if you think this is wrong, but I think, I think, I think of LaunchDarkly as a category creator. It created the feature management category. It founded— it was founded by Edith 10 years ago. And so you, you've joined the company to lead product sort of into its, its next 10 years, its next 5 years. How do you think about where this company that has created this category is going over the next 5 to 10 years? And, and then it's just so much change.

I think what I love about LaunchDarkly is it is a beloved brand and just such a useful, high-impact product that serves the people that I hang out with every day, which are software engineers. And so LaunchDarkly is, as you said, a feature management experimentation platform, really to help teams, you know, release, measure, and optimize software in production. That's what I say. I mean, I say that LaunchDarkly is like the ultimate test and production company because it gives you the tools you need to take your code and not just deploy it, but actually release it to users and then know if it worked or not. And, you know, one of the reasons why I think there's just such a great opportunity at LaunchDarkly is, are we gonna release less code? No. Are we gonna care less about the effectiveness of our features and products? No. Are those products gonna become harder to, you know, harder to maintain, build, know, work correctly if all of them are non-deterministic? Yes. And so I just think there's really interesting problems to be solved here. And so when I think about the vision, I think, how can we do more to serve our customers in that broader space of, you know, release, monitor, optimize software and production? And we do great jobs at a lot of those things, and I think we can do even more jobs for more of our customers in the future. So, I think there's a lot more that we can do for software engineers, teams, and their leaders. Everything from how do we make, you know, we have this joke inside, like, bring back boring releases. Like, how can we make code releases super boring as opposed to like, we're gonna deploy on Friday, everybody hold onto their butts. Like, so, you know, it's this sort of like bring back boring releases concept. There's this idea of like, how do you do it? Experimentation, and certainly I have a point of view there. And then I think there's a lot of this that applies to AI in a pretty natural but different way. And I think there's a lot of fun, fun things we can explore there.

Awesome. You know, one thing that you've said, and I think this has been sort of something that's probably been very important to you, is go pay attention to the details and go really get to know the customer. And I'm curious if you could just talk for a second about literally and tactically how you go learn from customers. I mean, is it full story sessions? Is it call recordings? Is it calls?

Oh no, I spend like 20 to 30% of my time with customers and Prospects. Like if you—

Tell us about that. Like tell us about how that like really, like how you focus, how you, how you, how you go build that type of customer time.

Yeah. So I have a channel, it's called Sivo Rev Asks. It's open to the entire revenue team and they just ask for my time and then I say yes. So I've just made it very clear, like I'm the best, you know, I'm the super SE in the company, right? So call me in, put me in coach if you have something and it can be prospects, it can be customers, it can be whatever, but I just have a very, I've I've operationalized access to my time.

I see.

On behalf of customers. And I've prioritized access to my time on behalf of customers. And then I've forced, not forced, they were very open to it, but I have supported my team in becoming much more available to customers. I just think it's like job number one. So I just literally spend time with customers on the phone listening to what they say. So I think that's thing one. Thing two is we are lucky enough to be able to dogfood our own product. So we are power users of our own product. The internal joke I have, and I don't know if the team likes it, is we're the top dogs. We don't just dogfood our product, we like top dog our product and we use it better than anybody else. And so, we have all these Slack channels that we're like, feature management, top dog, experimentation, top dogs, AI, top dogs. And we're like just ruthless about dogfooding. And so, you know, we released a bunch of new features. It was our last, it's our launch week this week. We released a bunch of features. And I sat down on every single one of them and I opened up my IDE and I said, if I were going to use this dang thing, how would it feel? What would I do? How does the SDK work? And I write these delightful, as you can probably guess, like diaries of this is what I think. And it's everything from the spacing on this table is bananas to I felt sparks of joy here, give me more of this to like the type on this one object is incomplete. So my IDE didn't like recognize the object type. Like it's everything from that. And I, I just, and then I also, for the last 2 or 3 months have spent 3 hours every Friday with the design team, looking at everything that they're designing end to end and making it better. So like, I just think you, you, you vote with where you spend your time and I spend my time on a lot of things. Is, you know, talking to customers, planning, hiring, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, all that stuff. But I also carve off intentional time to use the product and have an opinion on it. And I think that's where a lot of new product leaders go wrong, is they think having an opinion is in opposition to having an empowered team. And the reality is you have a lot of experience, you have a lot of context, you need to move fast, and opinions are a good way to move fast.

So, That's maybe a good title for this episode. So, you've written that as folks become more senior in their careers, they're hired to fix things. I'm curious how you think about the thing to fix or the opportunity to go after.

I mean, what I think is, I think it's so funny, like, people think that the higher in your career, like, the easier things go and you just get access to chiller things and you push work down. And in fact, I think like, you know, the higher up you go, the more time you spend on things that are going wrong versus things that are going right. I actually think when you're like earlier in your career, you get to spend a lot more time on like the things that are going well. And so I do think that folks sort of need to have the right mindset in terms of like what's the job to be done, and it's running towards problems and fixing them even if it's, it's painful. So that's one thing that I think about. The other thing that I think about is You know, I was talking to somebody else about this and they were like, they were asking, somebody had asked them, how, how are you always in the room? Like, how do you always get in the room with the CEO? Or how do you always ask to join these meetings? And their response was really interesting. It wasn't, oh, I'm so strategic, so they really value my strategic opinion. It was like, I have shown time and time again, I will pick up a task that somebody else won't do, and now they rely on me, and now I'm trusted to be in these strategic conversations. And so it's this combination of like, it's not always glamorous work, And sometimes the tactical pieces are what gets you access to context, which gets you access to influence.

That's cool. I'm kind of drawn back to the idea that if there are problems that constrain enterprise value, if I can isolate on those problems and attack them, I can raise enterprise value.

Yeah. Yeah. And there's like only a few things that go into enterprise value at the market level. And so make sure you have a good sense of. What those things are. And to me, they're like, take growth, efficiency, like, and then ability, I think, to, and then proven ability to, like, expand, which is a kind of a function of growth, but expand the product perspective.

Related to enterprise value and near and dear to this podcast's heart, pricing, packaging, monetization. So maybe a segue for a second. Um, I'm curious, you know, the extent to which you've developed any type of philosophy or framework for thinking about pricing and packaging in B2B SaaS. And I'd love for you to riff on that. And, you know, kind of questions that swirl for me that I'm so curious to get your take on are like, how do you think about building pricing as a function within a company? How do you think about ownership and where pricing fits given its cross-functional nature? How do you think about the relationship between the product roadmap and the pricing and packaging roadmap?

Yeah.

Anywhere you want to go with that.

Yeah. I mean, okay. So my joke was going to be my general philosophy on B2B pricing and packaging is that you will move from seats to usage-based in an infinite loop and then you will die. Okay. That's the real deal. And that you will charge a platform fee for an arbitrary set of features. And one of those arbitrary sets of features will be SSO. That is true pricing and packaging strategy for B2B. Very niche joke, but I think this is the audience for it. Yep.

That's the right place for it. For that joke.

It's just really funny. Like I advise companies, I do, and they're always, every company is like, oh, we used to be usage-based, but it was so dumb. So we moved to seat-based. And then somebody else is like, oh, we did seat-based. It was so dumb. So we're moving to usage-based. I find it very, very funny. But let's talk about actually how you operationalize this. So pricing and packaging is in my organization in technology under product. So under our VP of product, which I think is the right place for it to go.

Was it there? Was it there before you joined the company?

It was in finance before.

Why? Can you talk about why the shift was made?

I wasn't there, so I don't know. I don't know.

Okay.

Um, but you know what, actually it's been in finance. It was in, in finance at other companies I've been at. I think because probably like the modeling skill sets sit in like Strat and Finance, kind of like the FP&A function really fits nicely with how you might test different pricing models. So I think it makes sense from like a skill set that perspective. I like it better in product because I actually think the pricing piece is not the hardest part of it. It is the packaging piece is the hardest part of it. It is actually how do you throw a rope around the right set of features to capture the right kind of value? How do you price different segments that may assign different values to a meter you want to keep consistent but ultimately get the same ROI? Like, I just think there's a lot of like packaging problems that people underappreciate. What's the right metric? Not from a COGS perspective, but what's the right metric from a value perspective? Can we measure it? Does it apply across products? All that kind of stuff. And I think a product thinker can be quite good, good at that. But I actually think it's most important to have a great pricing person, then that pricing person sits somewhere specific. And then, you know, I think it's good in product because every time you introduce a product, especially I think our stage or in a B2B company, if a product manager is like, oh, I think it would be nice to build this feature, that's fine. But if a product manager's like, I think it would be nice to build this product, which I think, I think of as a broader thing, and their immediate next thought in a B2B context is because I think this is the budget we can capture and this is the value I think people will assign to it. And so I think we can drive up ASPs or net new ARR or retention or whatever. They're like, why are you doing it? Why am I spending R&D on this? You know, you don't get a participation trophy for like shipping buttons into the website. It has to have exchange of value. And so I think coming to B2B product management with a really strong packaging lens to it really forces you to confront the commercial reality of the products you're building.

Yeah.

And so I think it's nice to have it in product management.

Yeah, makes a ton of sense. And so can you go maybe a level deeper into how it looks Darkly, you seek to sort of align the two roadmaps, or if that's even a—

Yeah, I mean, they're like one and the same. There, there aren't two roadmaps. There are certainly like strategic pricing initiatives that we may want to do that are not driven by a particular product, but they are driven by a commercial need or a go-to-market opportunity. And those we get done, and they're, you know, they're a function of both building the technical capability to bill as well as the enabling the field and stuff to figure out how to sell this stuff. I think that gets done, but then I don't, we don't think of pricing and packaging our products as a separate exercise from building our products.

Yeah, that's great. Do you think it's true that a lot of companies do, or that they sort of have a separation there that creates a weakness?

Yeah, I think a lot of product managers have zero idea how to think about packaging and pricing. I think we just train them to be, um, a different shape than kind of commercially driven. And so I think it's a little bit of like a hard skill set on product and then a process. You know, I think people think of— I mean, I think maybe some companies think of billing more of it as billing as opposed to pricing.

Say more.

In that like it's a function of how do we— it's like sales' job or marketing's job or finance's job to figure out the like messy business of how we actually get paid for this. It's my job just to build good stuff that people use. And I don't think that's true in B2B.

What would you say to young and career product managers around how they can accelerate their commercial skillset around this specific area?

So the number one interview question I ask everybody, spoiler alert for anybody that interviews with me, is what do you think of our business model? Because most people don't think about it. They think, what do I think about your product? Or what do I think about your website? Or what do I think about your market? But they never think like, How do you go to market? What does that cost you? How do you charge your customers? Oh, what are your costs of development? What are your COGS? And then how does that net out in current market environment or some future hypothetical market environment to enterprise value? Like, I don't think people go through that exercise of actually walking, walking through the steps of how enterprise value is created from product to IPO. And I think if you just did that exercise, you could start asking really interesting questions.

Is there an answer that stands out for its quality amongst all the interviews you've done?

Somebody who can actually step through a couple steps of that. It's like, okay, what do I think a business model is? It's, you know, how do I build product and what does it cost me? How do I sell product and what does it cost me? What do customers pay and why? What is the difference between what customers pay and what it costs us? How do we, do we have any unique methods of building more product or generating more customers? And then like, how is that valued? You know, I think somebody who can actually step through and understand there's multiple steps steps of a business model as opposed to you have a product that you sell to engineers or you have, you know, I think that, or your revenue is generated through ads. Like if you can think through it in a multi-step perspective and understand that you have levers along the way, I think you stand out beyond most people because most people zero in on only one piece of that process.

Can you spend a minute on how product interfaces with other stakeholders in the context of pricing and packaging at LaunchDarkly? Or is it so closely related to the product roadmap that that's happening sort of almost implicitly?

Yeah, it happens as part of like product planning and prep. We all, we definitely solicit feedback and work really closely with revenue and product marketing and finance. So I, we just keep a really tight loop on it and we're pretty strategic about how we think about pricing, which is pricing always has a purpose.

I've gotta pick my questions wisely here cuz I know we're running up against time. I think where I want to go is is a little bit towards your evolution as a product leader. You talked earlier about things that you felt like you did well, things that you got better at over time. You're now several CPO gigs into this. How do you think you've grown as a product leader?

I'm faster. I'm faster and I'm more opinionated, which is that like I'm the ultimate rate limiter of the organization because everybody at some point is waiting for like Claire to go. Not like functionally, like I'm micromanaging, but just The organizational psychology is like, is this directionally correct? Is this the right investment? Are we doing this? Can I do this? Can I spend this money? Blah, blah, blah, blah. And if I'm not fast, the rest of the organization cannot be fast. And if I am not, it's really not if I'm like a normal person fast, I have to be insanely fast in order to unlock the rest of the organization because of the dependency tree. And so I've just built a muscle to make decisions quickly. And share opinions quickly and drive to action that I think is a meaningful difference maybe over the last, you know, 10 years or whatever of my career. And so that is one thing that I would say. You know, my last two jobs have been CPTO roles. And so I run product and engineering, which is very fun to me as somebody who has built a lot of products and written a lot of code and run, you know, run alongside really fabulous technical organizations. I strongly believe that you cannot break apart product and engineering, and it's super self-serving, but I was even thinking about it today where I am actually the person that people come to and they say there's some sort of, you know, there's a misbalance in the force. People can talk to me openly about the push and pull between product, engineering, design, all these teams in a way that they know I'm playing for the company and the best outcome for the team, as opposed to like, I want my team to win or their team to win, or there's that tension. C definitely don't have the time for that and sometimes don't have the skill for that. And so, I've just become a much more believer of the single technology team as the R&D investment and this structure I think works really well. So, that's maybe something else that I've learned.

It's really cool. You know, you've given, I think of it as now a famous talk recently with Um, not a hot take, you know, product management is dead. But, you know, to your comment on speed, right? I think a lot of what I took away from that talk was sort of the speed at which technologists and their roles and their expected outcomes is changing in the wake of AI. I think you, you, you kind of honed in on like the role of the product manager is changing and it's changing really quickly. Is, is the main idea that you want people to take away from that? We're moving towards a world where a single opinionated individual can move even faster than a really small, you know, tiger team or lack of, you know, yeah.

I mean, yeah, you, you picked my favorite, actually my favorite part of the talk, which maybe I'll give a separate talk on, which is we've sort of all bought into the idea that small teams can move faster than big teams, but everybody's afraid to admit an individual can move faster than a small team. And it's because of this, like, kind of increasingly false idea that an individual cannot have enough hard skills to execute across the entire product. You can't possibly be good at design and good at coding and think about the customer and talk to customers because simply developing those hard skills or having the time to execute those hard skills is, is physically impossible in the limitations of the space-time continuum. Like, and I just think that's changing. And then I am seeing examples of people that can do it. And, you know, maybe they're rare and maybe they're unicorns and maybe I'm over-indexing on them, but the leverage those folks have in organizations is pretty transformational. And people really think I'm like joking when I say this product role is going to change. And, you know, joke's on me because I'm going to give this big fancy talk and then 10 years when we're all still ZERP PMs, people are gonna be like, Claire was wrong. She was just being a rabble-rouser. But I really do think things are gonna change. I've been building software for a very long time, a very, very long time, and it is so different now. It is not 2 times more efficient, it's not 10 times more efficient, it's not 100, it is 1,000 times more efficient. I think about my last startup and one of my, you know, funny hypotheses is I'm pretty sure I could rebuild the whole thing in a weekend., and it took us a gajillion years, maybe not a gajillion years, but it took us months and months and months and, you know, software engineers and this and that. And I'm pretty sure like maybe in 90 minutes I could have it deployed, like the full functionality of it, including all the integrations because it's just not that hard anymore. And I think of that level of acceleration, and I just think if that holds to be true in any reasonable amount of how we build software, stuff's going to change. And I think people are joking, like, I think they're kidding themselves that they don't think that's just an inevitability. But that's, this is my strongly held opinion that triggers people.

I've had the very same thought on my own first startup. You're right, it is triggering. And I've had a couple people that I've talked to about your talk kind of give their own sort of responses. But one question that I think has been really interesting that's fallen out most consistently for the people that have watched that I've talked to is sort of, I feel like there's a distinguishing that I'm hearing from people It's Claire's talk is so powerful and so relevant in the context of larger growth stage organizations. How does what she's talking about apply to a zero to one environment? Can you talk a little bit about that? I mean, you're building ChatPRD. That's, that's zero to one.

Zero to one. I mean, I'm building ChatPRD to a happy to me level of revenue. I wrote, I was the only person that wrote code in my, like I call it after school hours, like after school hours for 7 months. I have 2 part-time remote software engineers and I'm running an enterprise software company. Like if that doesn't change how we think about funding startups, we think about staffing startups, who you hire for startups, how you make money in startups. I just think it's very different. And you know, I'll even talk about how does it change? How does it differ from growth to late stage to zero to one startups? So one, if you're a good growth to late stage company, you have a bunch of zero to one startups inside your company. You're just not calling 'em that. Their new business lines, their, yeah, like I, so we have Zero to One at LaunchDarkly purposefully on a bunch of stuff. So I think it still applies. And then if I think about startups, let's just talk about my Monday. Monday I had the day off from capital W work. So I did a ChatPRT day. And what did I do Monday? I deployed a Slack bot. Redeployed our CMS on a different hosting service. I auto-generated a bunch of Open Graph images for some of our SEO content. So when it was shared, it looked really good. I automated ingestion of all of our testimonials from Intercom and Slack into our CMS so we could show them on the, the reviews page. I redesigned the hero images on all our major landing pages. I added new features. To our pricing page. I probably did a good job. I'm sure I added some features. Like, I did like 8 million things on a Monday between the hours of 8 and 5 because my kids were in school. That's, you know, if you— startups, that should be your bar for every single person that's working at your startup if they're using tools correctly. And so I just think startups, just like larger companies, should demand more from their teams because your team can do more.

I think that's an amazing place.

Very fun to work for me.

Well, it is also very fun to talk to you. Thank you so much for doing this, the closing question I like to ask is, you've had a lot— I always like to ask about formative moments, but you have had a lot of formative moments. Is there one in particular that you view as like, this was a real moment of inflection for me in my career, a really specific moment in time?

Yeah, there was somebody at my job that, um, at a company that I worked with that had resigned and took another job, and I was running product and they were running marketing, and my boss was all atizzy of who's going to run marketing. And so I marched into his office with an org chart with my name at the top of it and said, "I think I can run marketing and product. What do you think?" And he said, "That is a pretty good idea." And like, I think that made me realize that no one's going to give you anything you don't ask for. And again, this like fearlessness of, I had been close enough to marketing, I knew what they were doing, I knew the team was talented, I was sure I can learn, I think I did a good job. And so, that probably is the thing that sticks out the most to me is Building skills and then showing you have value, you can add value and making it very clear and making that very easy for the people around you can inflict your growth, but you cannot do it unless you've earned it. People like, people take the wrong lesson from that story, which is like, I've gotta advocate for myself to my boss to get a promotion. It's not actually that. It is be so fearless in learning and be such a sponge and participate so broadly that when you ask for that thing, the answer is an obvious yes.

It's been such a fun conversation, so useful to many people. Thank you for doing it.

Yeah, thank you. It was fun.