How Product Managers Can Become Master Influencers w/ Elad Simon, Co-Founder and CEO of Craft

Founder of Product Collective, and we are back for another industry interview. So I appreciate everybody joining us. I'm excited for today's session, but first, before we even get into the session and get into what all these are all about, I hope wherever in the world you are, you are— everything is good for you and your family. Hope everybody's safe. This has been a crazy, crazy past couple of weeks in particular. I mean, in all reality, past couple of months, but Really, the world has changed in the last couple of weeks, it feels like. So again, wherever you are, I hope that you are safely watching this from the comfort of your home and a very safe, you know, 6 to 10 feet away from anybody else. But in all seriousness, you know, we are happy to, you know, continue on. My mind is not on product and, you know, spreading the word about product. Product, then I will just go crazy myself. So I'm excited to be here. I hope you're excited to be here. The topic is a great one. So this topic is one that I've been thinking about for some time, and when our guests had brought this up as a potential topic, I thought this would be awesome. But before we get to our guest and the topic, kind of little housekeeping first. For those of you that haven't been on an industry interview before, these are really like virtual fireside chats. The, you know, we talk with product leaders from all around the world. We go for half an hour and I have questions here, but this is an opportunity for you to ask questions to our guests too. So I want to point out a couple of things. There are a couple of features at the bottom. There's a chat feature and that's just good for like, you know, if you want to make a comment about something that the guest is talking about or whatever, or just introduce yourself. In fact, do it right now. Maybe share where you're from and what kind of product you're working on. It's always fun to see. Where people are tuning in from. That's what the chat's all about. And then the Q&A section. Q&A, anytime you have a question for our guest, whether it is right when we're starting, whether it's towards the end, even right now, if there's something on your mind you want to make sure I can get to, load that Q&A section up because I'm sure your questions are better than my questions, and I'd rather, rather make sure that whatever's on your mind we're able to cover. So that is in the Q&A section at the bottom. Um, but yeah, these, these industry interviews, this is a part of, um, what we do at Product Collective. Product Collective is a community for product people, and we do a number of things. We have these, we have our newsletter that goes out every week to about 30,000 people throughout the world. We have our industry— or our Product Collective Slack channel, about 10,000 people in the Slack channel where every day people are trading ideas and best practices. Um, the nice thing is all those are things that you can enjoy from the comfort of your home. We do have our conferences called Industry, Industry, the product conference. That is not until September, so we don't even have to worry about that right now. But, but yeah, if you haven't had a chance to check out any of those before, maybe you just stumbled upon this particular session, definitely go to productcollective.com and check all of that out. I'd really appreciate that. But, but today, you know, the topic is influence. And how we can all be better influencers, be master influencers. And Ilad Simon from Kraft, the CEO of Kraft, he is our guest for today. And Ilad, I'm just really glad to have you with us.

I'm excited to be here, Mike. Excited to keep our audience's mind off the day-to-day events for a little while longer and talk a little bit about stuff that we really care and appreciate, which is product management and how to master the different skills various complicated skills around it and influencing specifically, which is one of my favorite topics.

Yeah, well, I think it's a great topic because I remember when I first was becoming a product person and they were explaining to me like everything that is involved with being a product person. It's like, oh yeah, you're going to have to be, you know, working really closely with customers, but also the designers and developers. Oh, but also, you know, your executive team. There's so many different people that, that we're dealing with yet. None of those people usually report to us, you know, so it's like influence is something that's super important. I'm just— maybe where we could start off though is in your mind, like, what exactly is influence? Like, how would you decide— how would you define it? Like, what does it really mean?

Well, I mean, I'm gonna ignore the, you know, the literal meaning of the word. I mean, because I think that everybody can— everybody can Google it themselves. But in the context of product management, the way I like to think about influencing is exactly in in the context you're describing it, which is you are basically owning and managing the most expensive muscle outside of sales and marketing in a company, which is the development arm of any software company. You are supposed to rally around the entire organization to take decisions around that. That's your job. I mean, I'm talking about the product team as a whole. If you're a VP product, then it's really your job, or CPO, that's really your job. If you're a product manager, it will be in your squad or in your team. And your job is without any authority, pretty much without any authority, to convince and without anybody reporting to you, to convince people that the direction that you're taking is the right direction. I always say that product managers are usually the least popular people in any company that I have been around. And it's exactly— I mean, it's eventually they're the people who decide what goes in and what goes out from the most critical muscle, which is this. And they need to keep everybody aligned to how they think about things. And they need to— and so that's for me, influencing is such a critical part because it requires people to— product managers to do exactly that, to really make people convince people that the direction that they're taking with that very, very precious resource is the right direction. So that for me is kind of influencing in product management land.

And I, I mean, it might be an obvious question, but I'm still going to ask it, um, so we can kind of play it out better for me. Like, why is that so important? Like, for, for people to have— like, if you were not a good influencer, um, what kind of an impact would that have on being a product person?

Well, to take an extreme version of that, I've seen people lose their job because of it. If you want— I mean, if you want to take an extreme— so I've seen in my lifetime, uh, a VP product lose their job because of being— because of being a bad influencer. And it's not just about the execution. In, in many, in many senses, VP product and product managers need to feel like they know what they're doing and that the direction that they're taking is the right direction. And that's kind of, I mean, that level of authority, if you don't hold that, you are at the genuine risk beyond just like getting the resources to do what you want and beyond maybe, you know, taking the decision you want to take, you're genuinely risking the way, you know, your, your job. So I don't want to take it to like, you know, I mean, we're in apocalyptic enough scenarios in our lives right now. I don't want to say like, you know, you're going to lose your job if you don't, if you're not a good influencer. But at the very least, you won't be able to do what you want to do, right? So, and I think, I mean, I've yet to have met a product person who is not very passionate about what they're doing. So, I mean, if you want to achieve something, you really have to push people in the direction. And if you can't do that, then you're