Unlock the Secrets of Product Growth with Amplitude's Ibrahim Bashir

Driving product growth is like tending to a tree, constantly nurturing to ensure that it thrives. So features of branches and updates could be leaves and all part of a vibrant product ecosystem. With the right strategy and leadership, your product team can enjoy the fruits of success. And joining us today is Ibrahim Bashir, the VP of Product Management and a key figure behind behind a lot of Amplitude's groundbreaking data analytics products. And on this episode of Product Team Success, brought to you by our friends at Amplitude, he's going to be sharing valuable insights into product management innovation and how to drive product success crucial for your career. Coming up on this episode, the evolving product manager role strategy versus getting lost in tactics and tying product to business outcomes, how to foster innovation and reinvention and B2B product insights. Now, Ibrahim, I'm really excited to discuss all things product with you, but first, could you tell us a little bit about your background and your current role?

Yeah. So I'm on the product leadership team at Amplitude, which is a digital analytics software company that helps people understand what people are doing in their products and the journeys that users are taking. I've been here over three years. For most of those three years I led our flagship analytics product and also dabbled in a few things like helped build out the product led growth team work on our collaboration capabilities and I'd say for most of those three years, because for the last couple of months I've actually taken on a new role focused on our product strategy and thinking about sort of the edges of our platform and new and interesting ways that people might come into Amplitude and expand with amplitude. So really just pushing the boundaries of our product.

Now, the role of a product manager has evolved significantly over the years. Could you elaborate how the breadth of this role has changed and what key skills are now essential for success?

Yeah, I would say there is a tendency and it's a very understandable tendency within product management circles to really focus and specialize and figure out how am I going to traverse the career ladder. Right. I think more and more you'll see folks talking about, you know, the jump from APM to PM or PM to Senior or what does it take to be principal, what does it take to break into management? And then there's also this sideways trend of what are the different types of product managers, right? There's feature PMs, there's growth PM platform PMs. And I think that this is all sort of well intentioned. And if your focus is career growth, I understand why that tendency exists, but it kind of reminds me of the fact that the original reason why the role of product management, and even if you go back to the role of program management at Microsoft was created, was to give engineering and the business leverage. Right? You wanted somebody who had horizontal accountability of what was being built, why it was being built, what success looked like taken all the way through to customer value. And so I think the more and more we fixate on sort of particular dimensions of the job and particular competencies and really just start to narrow in on owning a metric or shipping a feature, you start to lose that really high value point of product management, which is just own the outcome for the business and the customer and the. And so there's this tension there of this desire to sort of have very structured career ladders that are very deep and domain specific and verticalized versus what the companies need, who really truly need. Product management is a very horizontal, freelancing, free flowing, go where the company needs you type role. And so I sit with that tension a lot. And the more senior you get in product management, I think the more obvious that tension becomes. Right. For example, as a senior PM at a large product organization, you might be perfectly fine and be a top performer, just shipping features and moving your metric quarter over quarter. But if you're on the product leadership team of any company that is fighting for survival or fighting for growth, it is existential that you think about not only the product, but technology, customer support, go to market positioning, pricing, packaging. And so the breadth of the role just gets wildly enormous.

That is really, really great. Now, could you share your thoughts on the challenges and misconceptions around the role of product managers in driving business impact?

Yeah. So I think two things jump out at me. So the first is I would say the vast majority of functions in a company and you know, we're not talking about a Silicon Valley or product led or engineering led company. Any company that has any kind of business, the vast majority of roles in that company are very linear roles. For example, you might say, well, I have a salesperson, if I add a second salesperson, I would like to double the output of customers that I get. If I have a marketing person and I add more marketing people, I would expect to get more pipeline. If I have a customer support person and I add more, I would expect the ticket volume to go down. And so most roles have this very clear quantified linear correlation of you add more people and you get more output. And so this idea of people equals output is very prevalent in most industries. And so product comes along saying, well, you know, you Add a product manager, you don't get more output. What you get is better products over a long enough time horizon. And that idea just kind of feels a little dissonant. And so people then are saying, okay, but is there an output metric that I can tag you with? And so that's why I think people get obsessed with the idea of shipping features and whatnot. So, so that's part of it. The other is I think there's just a disease of short term thinking going on in a lot of companies where the product managers and the product team is just not given enough cycle times and enough repetitions to actually prove out and execute their strategy. And so if you have a plan that requires, you know, 18 to 24 months to see gains, but you're being checked on in these bi weekly, monthly quarterly chunks, you're going to have to manufacture something that is an illusion of progress. And so I think shipping product is not a bad way to do that. But when you start saying shipping the product is equivalent to business impact, I think that's when you start fooling yourself and then it just becomes ritualized in parts of your practice. And so I think to your point about a scorecard forcing a conversation about better inputs, what are ideal outputs, what are the time horizons on which those outputs should be seen, and then what are leading indicators that you might be heading the right direction is a great way to build that product thinking culture.

And Ibrahim, what do you think are some of the challenges that you've encountered with product operations? You know, how do you ensure that the work aligns with broader business outcomes?

For example, I would say, you know, there's pros and cons to ProductOps and I think there's well implemented and poorly implemented product operations teams. But I think the ultimate, one of the major problems that ProductOps is trying to solve is it's not clear to leadership how the business outcomes are trying to drive, actually connect to the product work on the ground. And on the flip side, it's not clear to the average product manager in many companies how the work they're doing actually ladders up to business outcome. Product Ops is trying to do that translation and fill that gaps, sometimes through tools, sometimes through processes, sometimes through communication and forum building. So I think it's all very well intentioned and sometimes when it works, it works really well. And sometimes when it doesn't, people complain about process, but to me that latterly up is the critical concept. And so for me as a product leader, one of the quickest things I try to do is just constantly scan the teams that we've invested in and say, can I explain in plain English during an elevator ride with the CEO, how that work maps to a lever that ultimately leads to a business outcome? Right. And if I can't, either that team is off doing things that don't connect, or I need to spend some time figuring out what that correlation and causality might be.

Okay, let's move on to fostering a culture of innovation and reinvention. What key practices or mindsets have you implemented to encourage team innovation?

I worked for this pretty senior product leader once who, well, actually he was my skip level at Amazon and he's the CEO of Blue Origin now. But he explained it to me. He's like, there's really three kinds of product work. In his view, it was, I'm inventing something completely new in Greenfield, so I don't even know if I'm going to be successful. Two is I'm seeing signals of success, but it really is going to require some fuel to the fire to make it successful and scale it. And then three is this is a success and we just have to sort of keep the lights on and press the right buttons to make sure it sustains success. Right? So there is sort of establishing scaling and then sustaining, right. And then sometimes sunsetting comes in as well. And so he was like, these are the three types of product role. And so to answer your question about innovation, I think a lot of times companies are in one phase of growth and they forget that there should be other products in their portfolio that are at other phases of growth, right? So if you have a very successful product that you're just sustaining, it's like, remember it's going to come a time to sunset that. So you should have other irons in the fire that you are trying to scale or even establish at this point, right? And so when people say we don't have a culture of innovation, sometimes what they're talking about is we were a one trick pony and we never really invested in something else. And I think obviously it's very hard to take away from the thing you're sustaining to go try some wild ideas, especially if you have no guarantee of success. But the, the irony there is that is the thing that made you successful as a company to begin with, coming in not as an incumbent, but as an upstart and say, I'm going to change the status quo. So that's one is like culture is hard, right? The other thing I would say is sometimes within a product that's scaling People don't truly get to an established business because they pick one solution path and then they just really start micro optimizing, right? And I think that's because there's so many product managers whose understanding of product management comes from large companies that are in sustenance mode. And so when they come into a product whose lifecycle or journey is much earlier, they just start applying those tactics, right? And what they really need to be doing is saying, I is asking themselves, is the solution path I'm on even the right way to solve this problem? Or have I learned enough or has technology evolved enough that I might approach this in a fundamentally different way? Right? And so it's, I wouldn't call it like net new innovation, but it's almost like revisiting the problem to see if you should tackle it in a different way. And, and I would say this is the bigger problem in the industry because a lot of people have good solutions that haven't become dominant yet, and then they get disrupted before they even establish themselves. Because, because the technology is evolving so much faster. And obviously the, the most relevant recent example of that is AI. A bunch of companies are like, well, I, I was building a better mousetrap and AI came along and said, well, I've just got, you know, a machine that's going to eliminate the need for mousetraps. And so I think that kind. And if you had been revisiting the problem and doing your market research, you would have seen, oh, this technology is evolving to a point where that should be how I'm solving this problem, right? So I would say there's, there's two different things going on. One is it's hard to sort of run a portfolio approach to your investments. And then the other is sometimes people claim success before they've really, truly won the market, right? And then they get disrupted before they even really found it. I mean, you know, more than dominant companies, you see companies that were like, oh, remember that? Like, we really thought they had it and then they didn't.

As we wrap up today, and for the last question, what insights could you share about the differences in managing B2B products and how product managers should approach these challenges?

When you think about a consumer product, at the simplest level, you're trying to connect with one user, one human being, right? You're like, you know, I built a thing. Unless you do a thing. And if you can just convince that one person you're, you're good, if that one person changes the way they operate, there's nobody else they need to communicate with or coordinate, right? So for example, if Costco starts home delivery, right, I can just be like, okay, I'm going to stop going to Costco and I'm just going to do home delivery. I don't need to communicate with my neighbors, with anybody else. It's just between me and Costco, right? But when you think about a B2B product or an enterprise product, you as an individual, on a team, whether you're a product manager, engineer, designer, whatever, you can't just go rogue and say, you know what, I like the way this software handles this problem. So I'm just going to start using that. Because your teammates are going to say, well no, we all, either we all use it or none of us use it, right? You can't just be like, guys, I'm using Slack, right? Find me. And it's like, well, no, we as a company have to agree or at least at a meaningful part of our company has to agree, right? And so I'll get to the point about B2B in a second, which is that problem of multiplayer mode is the default mode in B2B products. And too many product managers think they're talking to one user. And by the way, like that is one way to start out on the problem is I have one ideal user that I'm solving for. But then they forget that user is part of a team and a department and organization and doesn't get to make an independent purchase decision. In fact, to connect it back to the beginning of the conversation about how product managers want to narrow their focus and the job requires them to widen their focus is you can build, quote, unquote, the right product and it never gets aware of, it never gets discovered, it never gets used, it never gets bought because you need so many other people on the chain. And so what happens in B2B product management is PMs rely on sales solution consulting to demo marketing to raise awareness, customer success, to do the deployment, sometimes professional service to do various things. And they think that's not the product, right? They're like, once all those things are check, check, check, check, check, and the user is in my pixels, then I'm in the product. And I'm like, all of that is the product, all of that is the product. So if people aren't aware of your product, if they can't try your product, if they don't understand the value of your product, if they can't implement your product without handholding from the rest of your go to market team, your product is incomplete. And so that's what I would say in B2B is you have to really think about the entire customer experience, from discovery to renewal and expansion, versus just in the product portfolio. And what does that mean in practice? It means you need to think about the marketing copy. It means you need to think about the developer docs, Right? It means you need to think about the help center, even though it's adding scope to your role. Right. I have a friend who has a very, very unique job. He works for Product Executives as their Chief Escalation Officer. And that's not his official title, but that's essentially what he does, is he's the face of any and all customer escalations and he figures them out, he summarizes the issues, he preps the CPO and then, you know, they're able to tackle these. And one of the funniest things he's ever told me is he's like, I work with so many product managers because I have to figure out the issues and what we're doing about them. And he's like, and they all think their feature is going to solve the problem. And he's like, and I wish half of them understood if they just fix their documentation and their website and their demos, it would solve half the problems. But nobody's going to get credit for what did you do this quarter? Well, I fixed all our documentation and our demo, right? And it's like, well, that, that doesn't seem like it's worth our time. And it's like. But it actually drastically reduced support tickets and accelerated time to value and did all these things. And so going back to our entire conversation of like, laddering up to metrics and focusing on leverage and what actually matters, I think people get distracted and say, I have to ship a shiny object because clearly the solution is a silver bullet, right? It can't be something as simple as fixing my broken help desk, right? But it is that simple sometimes. And so that's what I would say is very, very important in B2B is your. That stuff can matter a lot more than you realize.

So now that you've listened, you're ready to nurture your product tree and enjoy the fruits of success. And to stay updated with Ibrahim Bashir's latest insights, follow him on LinkedIn, where he shares a lot of great information and find his writing on Substack via his Run the Business newsletter. And if you're ready to enhance your product management skills, don't miss our interview with Maria Mitlo Nova on unlocking the secrets to product management. Success, especially with growing teams. This episode has been brought to you in partnership with our friends at Amplitude. So from me, Ross Webb, until next time, bye for now.