The essence of product management | Christian Idiodi (SVPG)

I try to explain to people that the real essence of this job is that you wake up on behalf of someone else to solve a problem for them. And you have to do it well enough that they give you something back in return. That's kind of the real essence of it. And that's the, I always call it like a certificate of appreciation, you know, and it can be in the form of revenue, engagement, loyalty, you know, reference, all of those things. And that's the real essence of this job. You know, if it's not fun, you're probably not doing it right. If it's not hard, you're probably also not doing it right.

Today my guest is Christian Ijadi-Oudeh. Christian is a partner at Silicon Valley Product Group alongside Marty Cagan who, when he introduced us, called Christian the most interesting man in the world. After meeting him, I tend to agree. After a long career in product, Christian now spends his time working closely with companies big and small. implementing and improving their discipline of product management. In our conversation, we discuss why the product management field is so often disliked and what you can do to avoid becoming a product manager people don't want on their team. We spent a lot of time on coaching, how to get better at coaching your reports, how to get better coaching from your manager, and some really clever tactics for building trust with leaders within your company. Also, Christian shares his one favorite go-to method out of all of the discovery methods out there for figuring out what to build. Also, we spent some time on the great work that he's doing in Africa to help product builders and founders build great companies. That and so much more, Christian is awesome. With that, I bring you Christian Idiotee after a short word from our sponsors. You fell in love with building products for a reason, but sometimes the day to day reality is a little different than you imagined. Instead of dreaming up big ideas, talking to customers, and crafting a strategy, you're drowning in spreadsheets and roadmap updates, and you're spending your days basically putting out fires. A better way is possible. Introducing Jira Product Discovery, the new prioritization and roadmapping tool built for product teams by Atlassian. With Jira Product Discovery, you can gather all your product ideas and insights in one place and prioritize confidently, finally replacing those endless spreadsheets. Create and share custom product roadmaps with any stakeholder in seconds. and it's all built on Jira, where your engineering team is already working, so true collaboration is finally possible. Great products are built by great teams, not just engineers. Sales, support, leadership, even Greg from finance. Anyone that you want can contribute ideas, feedback, and insights in Jira Product Discovery for free. No catch. And it's only $10 a month for you. Say goodbye to your spreadsheets and the never-ending alignment efforts. The old way of doing product management is over. Re-discover what's possible with Jira Product Discovery. Try it for free at atlassian.com/lenny. That's atlassian.com/lenny. This episode is brought to you by Vanta, helping you streamline your security compliance to accelerate your growth. Thousands of fast-growing companies like Gusto, Calm, Quora, and Modern Treasury trust Vanta to help build, scale, manage, and demonstrate their security and compliance programs and get ready for audits in weeks, not months. By offering the most in-demand security and privacy frameworks such as SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, HIPAA, and many more, Vanta helps companies obtain the reports they need to accelerate growth, build efficient compliance processes, mitigate risks to their businesses, and build trust with external stakeholders. Over 5,000 fast-growing companies use Vanta to automate up to 90% of the work involved with SOC 2 and these other frameworks. For a limited time, Lenny's podcast listeners get $1,000 off Vanta. Go to vanta.com/lenny. That's V-A-N-T-A.com/lenny to learn more and to claim your discounts. Get started today. Christian, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast. Thank you for having me, Lenny.

It's a joy to be here. It's a joy to have you here.

So Marty Kagan introduced us, a colleague of yours at Silicon Valley Product Group. And the way he described you is, He considers you the most interesting man in the world. Did you know that that's how he thinks about you?

I didn't. I mean, I consider him one of the most interesting people in the world, too.

You guys are so kind to each other. I wanted to start with this trend I've been noticing in product management and the perception of product management. It feels like, I don't know if this is new or it's always been around, but it feels like there's this trend of people just not liking product managers. There's a trend of founders feeling like they should wait a long time to hire their first product manager. There's a lot of teams that wish they didn't have a product manager in their team. They like, we could just, we don't have this person telling us what to do. I'm curious just why you think there's often this, this like of product managers. And then for PMs listening, do you have any advice for just how to not become a product manager people don't like and don't want on their team?

I think most people don't like product managers often because they haven't experienced good product managers. The core of product management is competency based, meaning there is someone in an organization that represents the customer the best, that has a deep knowledge of the customers and your users, that has a deep knowledge of your data, your industry, your business, and the product itself. And because of this competence, you kind of trust them. to make decisions because if you have a problem that says, say, we want more customers, it makes a lot of sense to go to the person that is an expert in customers to say, help me solve this problem. What you see happening in many organizations is that there is kind of this misplaced influence and mistrust because of the poor competency. Meaning, I feel I know more about the business or I know more about the customer or the data. And so why should I not tell you? what to do. And I think people fail to understand that this role is, it's a team sport. They are part of a team of people working together to discover a solution worth building and in a way that works for a company. And so I think when I think through the companies I've worked with, where I kind of see this discipline really eroded is where there is just not a competent level of product management. The way I describe it to a CEO, I'll ask him, tell me who you trust in your company to make a decision on what markets we go to, what things we do. And they always have some senior leader, some VP, some person, and I say, why? Oh, you know, Bob has been here a long time. He knows everybody. Everybody loves him and trusts him. He understands our business. And I often say to him, I say, well, Bob is a product manager. And it's often interesting to executives when I try to explain that way. I say, that's the competent level. that we're talking about here. Imagine if you had Bob's on every team. Imagine how much you can accomplish. So one, I don't really think it's a, you know, I often say it's not a hate for product management. It's a hate for the understanding of what they have experienced in product management, which are people that are not able to deliver results that help them meet the outcomes they want. So if I were advising product managers, I often say, look, When we see sales or executive driven product management, when we see these alternatives to product management, it's not a cultural knock or a leadership knock. It's really on the individual and the discipline has to elevate itself to a place that it earns the right to make a decision on what we do.

I have exactly the same perspective. When people say they don't like product managers, exactly what I tell them is you just haven't worked with a great product manager. Like a great PM makes everything easier for you. If you want to be a PM, people would hate to lose on their team. I would never want to lose Christian on my team as a PM. Is there something they could do maybe or change to become that person?

Well, I was just joking with someone earlier. I said I've only seen great product managers come out of two places. One, either a series of massive failure in their career or experiences that have been bad. or from learning from great product leaders. The reality of this kind of role, it's kind of like if you have all kinds of ways, maybe you're like on a spot, like a quarterback on a team, you need to practice product management to be good at product management. You're not going to get mastery by avoiding some of these elements. And we've kind of clearly defined what you need to represent to a company for them to trust you. So there is this period of humility that I challenge all product managers to have. This period of learning, recognizing what you do not know, and what you do not have is the trust of an organization or even in yourself that you know the customer, the business, or the data better than anybody else. What you need to do is quickly try to accelerate that. You're going to find the loudest, most influential person in your organization the person that, you know, everybody knows, knows everything is in every meeting and stuff. And you're going to ask them to teach you. You're going to challenge them. And if they don't have the time to teach you, you're going to volunteer to help them. You know, I'm going to inter for you. You're going to get permission from your manager and say, look, I want to spend time with Lenny. He's the head of sales, he's the head of operations and stuff. I just want to learn from him. Now, what you're doing is you're extending that person's trust to yourself. you're also building a relationship with that person. But more importantly, you're learning what is driving that person's influence, which is their competence in the business or the customer. After you've done that, you have to keep doing discovery. Because what's going to be different now is that person knows they've taught you everything that they know, but everybody now sees you learning every single day. So at some point, people will recognize that you might have more insights and more data than anybody else. And they will only know this because they've seen you learn from the best and they've seen you continuing to learn. So I always practically advise product managers in this kind of scenario, build relationships with people. You end the trust by asking them to do two things. One, you're either going to teach me or I'm going to help you, right? And you're going to build relationships there, gain experience with them. You've got to immerse yourself in the deep understanding of the business and the data.

Wow, there's a lot there. Let me try to, because this is awesome. This is exactly, I think, what people want to hear is how do you become better and how do you become more trusted and respected? So things you're recommending to PMs that want to become better, less disliked, more successful. One is, I just took some notes as you were talking. One is there's a sense of becoming more full stack in the company. Like understand the business, not just there's your one product and here's your one goal. And then this idea of just be always learning which is both you are learning things and also people see that you're learning and see that you really care about a lot of the parts of the business that maybe you wouldn't naturally be inclined to understand. And that also helps you build relationships and also just this really important point of if you know more than anyone else, people will innately trust you and respect you and want you on their team because you happen to have a lot of answers.

Yes.

Awesome. Kind of on a similar thread, something that Silicon Valley Product Group has is a really good definition of what a product manager's job is. And I thought it'd be cool just to spend a little time here. kind of these four attributes you guys like to share. Can you just talk about that as a little foundational?

I kind of mentioned before, a product manager is in a team spot. So they work as part of a team to uncover a solution worth building. And every time you solve a problem, there's inherent risk involved. There's the risk of, will people buy this? Or will they choose it? Or will they choose to use it? which is all a value type of risk. There's the risk of can they use it, which is a usability type of risk, the risk that we can build it or have the skills to build it or the time to build this, that's a feasibility risk. And the risk of it working for our business, which is a viability risk. I kind of call out the product managers competency is really to try to drive the first and the last one, which is value and viability. Right? A solution worth building, something people will buy, choose or use, and one that works for our business, which is at the core of what product teams do. Solve a problem in a way customers will love and in a way that works for our business. It's why the product manager gets all the wrap of if everything goes great, a great team effort, if everything goes wrong, they blame the product manager. It's because people hold them accountable to results. You know, it's kind of, Nobody wants to work on something nobody wanted in the first place. And your job is to ensure that we are working on something people want in the first place. And it is such an amazing role. I try to explain to people that the real essence of this job is that you wake up on behalf of someone else to solve a problem for them. And what an amazing job. There's just no greater, you know, I cannot think of a better discipline. Research inherent permission to solve problems on behalf of someone. And you have to do it well enough that they give you something back in return. That's kind of the real essence of it. And that's, I always call like a certificate of appreciation. And it could be in the form of revenue, engagement, loyalty, reference, all of those things. And that's the real essence of this job. If it's not fun, you're probably not doing it right. If it's not hard, you're probably also not doing it right.

Wow, I love that frame of reference of you're giving something to customers and your success is measured by do they give something back in return, which is basically do they pay for your product? Such a beautiful way to think about that. Oh man. Okay, so just to summarize these four elements, there's value, usability, viability, feasibility to understand if the product they're building hits all these attributes.

That's right. It is, it is, you're trying to uncover a solution and you know you've solved the problem when you get those two things, something customers love, they give you something back and our business can support it in some ways. And I'm calling out like these are the different risks in our kind of taxonomy, how we call the things you have to tackle. And it's a team sport and so there are these four risks of should we build it, you know, will people use it, will people buy it, Will our customers support it? Will our business support it? And you're trying to answer those questions with a designer and a product engineer.

Of these four, so value, usability, viability, feasibility, where do you think most new PMs fail most or should spend more time?

Oh my goodness. Value. Value is probably, it is the most important and the most overlooked. And the big driver for that is often because of the operating model of teams. Teams are often given roadmaps of projects and features to go build and deliver. If that's the case, you actually really don't need a product manager because they are going to assume value. If the boss told me to build this, I cannot say, should we build this? Is this the right thing to build? Is there a better option? Is this what people will buy? You just assume it's valuable. And so often when people ask me, why does the product manager seem to play a call leadership role on a team? like almost like the quarterback. It's not that they are most special in solving the problem that the designer or the engineer, but they are answering a question that determines if we should be working on this in the first place. So value is often the hardest thing to solve and must be overlooked. We often see bad patterns where companies say, yes, we ran a test and, you know, with 300 users and they all got into 84% or 90% they love it in that way. I said, well, just because somebody can use your product doesn't mean that they will buy it. Just because they can use it doesn't mean they will choose it. Just because they can use it doesn't mean that they will actually use it. And what people say is often different from what they do. And our job is to actually solve the problem, which is what core value is. in a meaningful way and often overlooked because, you know, we check the box on a Roadmap item. So the most important, because that's the, to the point of the certificate of appreciation, what you get in return, that's the ultimate outcome. Really? Value.

You once gave a talk along these lines around discovery, and it was this talk of like, here's all of the things you can do to help understand what to build to make something valuable. There's like a billion frameworks for every step of the discovery process, press releases, story mapping, opportunity solution trees, fake door tests, all these things. And you're like, if we had to pick one thing, if there's one process or approach that you recommend most, your answer was essentially finding some number of reference customers to work with and helping them and working with them to design the product. Do you still see that as the one, if you had to pick one approach to figure out what to build, and if so, You just talk about how you recommend going about that.

The holy grail of product work is really a reference customer. This is somebody that has used your solution or your product, loves it enough to tell people about it. You know, I kind of describe the work of the product team is to solve problems in a way that customers love and a way that works for our business. The ultimate definition for me today of the love that somebody has for our product is they are willing to put their reputation on the line by telling people about it. And for me, if we think about you do a lot of interviews with founders and entrepreneurs and you know, you're going to have people that, you know, they find a market with an idea and they jump in. But if you think at the core of some of these founder inspired businesses where the founders say, well, I had a problem, you know, and it was their problem, and they focus on solving the problem, and then they got their friends on it. And so it's almost like this idea that if they were their own first reference customer, they, they were so close to the problem, immersed in the environment of the problem, solved it in a compelling way enough. I was like, there are more people like me. And, you know, it's like if I said to you, like, Lenny, let's go to a steakhouse, you know, find me a new steakhouse around you. You might go online and Google and you see a steakhouse with one review. You know, how you feel about that? I don't know. What kind of, maybe other people don't want to try to see. You see two reviews. You're like, maybe it's the chef and your spouse or something. You know, the question is, how many positive reviews would you have to see to jump and say, let's go try this one. There are some things inherent in kind of if you look at Jeffrey Moore's adoption curve and those kinds of models in here, most people don't want to be the first to try things, but you're likely to try things if other people that look like you have accepted it or define it as good.

Right?

And so the whole essence for me of this technique is to create those first people, those reference customers. You know, if you think about how companies make the shift to becoming like sales-led or operations-led, almost all companies start product-led. The product is first. You know, you kind of build something and then it's like, yeah, let's go and let's hire sales people and marketing people and operations people to do it. What's really happening is that the product team created the first customers.

Right?

And now a group of people have to capture the value that was created. So what's happening here is that it is constantly the job of product teams. The reason they lose influence is because sales people are having to sell a product. You see? So they are like forcing back, I need this and I need this. But if you came to me and said, you know, I want to buy steak and I say, let me show you 20 people that look like you that recommend this steak. My job as a salesperson is very easy. you know, I'm just like, hey, you should eat here. Everybody that is like you, that loves steak, they all eat here. So product teams fail at this contract to an organization when they don't create powerful reference customers. So it's by far my favorite technique. And the way this technique works is you want to discover and deliver and develop who has the problem, the customer. I want to discover who has the problem. At the same time, discover and deliver a solution to this problem. The idea here is that if you really want to solve a problem, you need to get out of your building. Go spend time with someone that has the problem and don't leave until you solve the problem. You know, people talk about why we had such a record time to the COVID vaccine. Sure, technology has improved, our research has improved. But if you think about it, we had the highest number of volunteers for vaccination in the history of any vaccine in the history of time. Why did we have to look for someone with COVID Like, no, they were literally all around us. Like, we were all, like, the research was immersed in the environment of the problem. They could start. And so this is often what I call it's almost like a pressure-cooked discovery in some ways. If you truly, truly want to solve a problem, Get out of your building. Get out of the assumptions. Get out of the opinions. Immerse yourself. Find someone who has the problem. Stick with them until you discover a solution for this problem. And you're going to do that. The part of why I love this technique, the two biggest reasons I think the first is if I cannot find a certain number of people that have this problem, My goodness, it might not be a problem worth solving. I have never had a product failure using this technique. If I were to create it, I think a last count, I'm up to like 205 products I have worked on or participated in creating in my career. And I tried to build a new product every year from scratch. It's kind of a crazy thing about me. My friends know what I want for my bed day is a problem worth solving. and I like to go from idea to revenue, you know, in a certain point. And I test all of these techniques in this way. And everybody knows my favorite technique is if we find a problem worth solving, we need to uncover a solution for B2B. I want six to eight references for B2C. I want, you know, maybe 15 to 25 references as an indication that we've achieved product Market fit.

Just to be clear, you said you still work like you build products yourself and you practice this. Okay. And you've built. Okay. What's like every single product that you built? I didn't know this.

So I I I do a lot of work in Africa now. Work. Nigeria is like a job board that helps people. We do kind of a job. What? HR replacement and advisory to as well. I'm actually even working on another app around the NDA and. protecting high assets individuals in some ways. So, you know, kind of every year I find a problem like that worth solving and I, you know, practice doing the work of discovery with a team of people.

That's amazing. I see this unraveling of the most interesting man in the world is happening a little bit by bit. We learn more and more about you. Okay, amazing. So just to kind of summarize some of these points, which are really great, and I've never heard it described this way before, So basically a really effective way to understand how to build something people actually want and solve real problems is this idea of pick reference customers. And I really like this word reference, which is not just they're going to help you build a thing, but they're also become a reference to future customers because they end up loving it because you built it for them and they love it. Your advice is find 6 to 8 in B2B space, 15 to 25 in B2C, and The reason there's a number here is if you find just one or two, you never know. They might be just the one or two that have this really weird problem no one else has. And I think that's usually the flaw in this approach is like you end up building for small number of people and nobody else really wants it. And sounds like in your experience, this is a good kind of number where like probably a lot of more people will have this problem.

Yeah. There've been studies to validate some of these numbers. I think Ellie IBM kind of struggles selling those super computers. And, you know, if you're buying a, you know, million dollar computer, someone says, hey, do you want to buy me? You're like, I don't know. I mean, do I build it? Is there anybody else that has bought it? Should I be the first? And there was this common question of, like, what would it take for you to buy it? And someone says, hey, if I see five or six people that look like me already have this, then I feel confident making the argument to my company. We should jump on it. And it's like, so how do I create the first five to six? and you can see a lot of the validation on B2C in some of the things you might see in the App Store or like Yelp or those places. My idea here is if you found a steakhouse with 25 five star reviews, you're likely to adopt this. So in every app I have ever put on the App Store, on the day I launched the app in the App Store, they are 25 five star reviews. I will never launch an app and be like, let's hope Lenny loves it. Let's see who the first person to down on the very first day. of launching the app. They are 25. And that's then. So I. I will know I am not ready until I have achieved 25 people that have told me, walked with me and said, I am now ready to put my reputation in the line. Sometimes I may need to work with 30 people or 50 people because, you know, the output is 25 reference customers, you know, because if Lenny's like, I don't love it enough or I don't feel comfortable, you know, I'm not gonna customize for Lenny. I'm going to find my single target market, talk to more people. If I get 25, I have achieved product market fit.

So interesting. It basically kicks in this word of mouth flywheel that everyone's always looking for is how do I get people to talk about it? Build it for them, solve their problems, tell them that exists. So you mentioned a bit about how you understand if it's actually, let's call it product market fit. If you have product market fit with these people that you ask them if they're going to leave you a five star review, for example, I guess what do you consider? This is good. I got one more person that's really happy. what tells you it's got product market fit with a person?

If I were thinking about how I will do this, so I mean, pick the problem to solve, first of all, I have to know who I'm solving the problem for and in some indication. And I want to validate that this is actually a problem you do have. And I'm looking for a certain type of person. You know, these early adopters in our world are broken up to technologists and early evangelists, you know? you know, technologies could be, you know, I love the new iPhone 16 is coming out and it's gonna have five cameras and I write an article and sub tech review board, super fast, super slick, all the design, that's, you just love new technology, you always jump on new technology. An early evangelist could be someone that says, oh my, I look great with the iPhone 15, it has three cameras. I will look phenomenal with the iPhone 16. So I'm going to go stand in line at the Apple Store for three hours or overnight because I just can't wait to get my hands on the Apple 16. They may feel a little irrational, but those are the kind of people you're looking for. People that believe they have a problem. So it's like you would try any steakhouse. In my example, you're just like, I love steak. I don't care if there are reviews or not. I'll try it. And what I'm trying to do here is I'm saying, okay, Lenny loves steak. He wants to try steakhouse. and I'm going to say, Lenny, I'm trying to build the best steakhouse here. If I create a menu that you absolutely love, are you willing to tell people about it? That could be, you know, video testimonial, write a review, stuff like that. And, you know, it's okay, Lenny, if you don't love the first iteration of it and stuff like that, I want to hear your feedback. I want you to work with me in ensuring that I build the best steakhouse here. Right. And that's kind of the idea. So I'm gonna. you know, walk with 25 people that look like you, and I'm gonna keep tweaking in this sense, either reading on the product and the menu until then it's like, my goodness, this is the best steakhouse in the world. You know, it's like, I'm just gonna write about it, you know, and I'm gonna get, when I get 25 people that have all, it's not the steakhouse, they love it enough because this is where you really get the shift in value. Because if I say, Lenny, go write me a review, a five star review, like, I don't know if I feel comfortable about You said, why not? You see, I'm really going to get deeper feedback because people will say or do anything just to avoid hurting our feelings or for us to get out of your face. So yeah, yeah, yeah, I'll give you a five-star review. But when I say do it, you're like, well, you know, I have this hesitation. Why? That's really where great discovery comes. But it's hard to do in a silo. You know, you have to be immersed with the person that has the problem. so product market fit is when you've kind of iterated in this discovery, you've discovered and delivered something so meaningful that these customers that are your target customers are willing to put their reputation on the line and be a reference. That's my indication.

I imagine though, Christian so charismatic comes to me and says, Hey, Lenny, would you leave me a five star review for this product? I'm working on this. I'm trying to figure out if people want it. I would be like, yeah, of course, I'll leave you a five star review. What do you do to kind of avoid that? Just like, I just want to be nice.

Like, I don't care. I'll leave a five star review. It's part of why I need 25 in B2C, you know? And don't get me wrong, if I can convince 25 people in there, I may have a marketing product and a charismatic marketing product. If that's all I needed to do was a good message and charisma to get people on it. The good benefit of this is that you can tackle risk very early because you can involve many other parts of your organization, marketing selves, you know, legal, finance, you know, people often ask me like, how do I come up with the marketing spiel or the description? I'm like, I don't make that up. You know, if I actually, what do you feel about this product? And he says, well, it's cool and it's, you know, very Sleek and very nice. The marketing department says, ah, we don't like those terms. You know, those are too. We want to call it a comprehensive and you know, and when you go out to sell your product, people are going to be disappointed because the expectations are created by what's on the box. I only market exactly what customers tell me. I have never been surprised about what customers will say when I release a product, because in this technique, I already get their feedback. And so I'm going to put exactly what Lenny said on the box. Hey, this product's cool and sleek and easy to use. I've only launched a product that says super fast but difficult to read. Because the technology team said there was no way to change the font on something and it was just going to be difficult to read. And you know what everybody did when.

They got the product?

Oh my goodness, it is super fast. All right, it is also difficult to read. It matched their expectations in some ways. So what I do here is I learn how to sell the product. with this technique, I learn how to market the product because I have real people that at the time, we're not making assumptions. What's the best way to market this? I want to learn. How would you find this? Does this language resonate with you? Does this properly describe the menu? See, so that's kind of what you're doing when you use a technique like this. It feels heavy to people, but that's kind of part of the practice of it. You know, if you do this a whole lot, you get really comfortable. at involving your working with your customers to solve it. But for me, the fact that I have, you will not have a product failure because you have a natural pivot out, meaning if I can find 25 people that love steak, why in the world am I building a steak house? You know? So if you don't find enough people that love this problem and are willing to help, you just be like, this is not a problem worth solving. But more importantly, you, you really start to get, it's a fastest patch of product market fit, the clearest definition for me. because I know when my product is ready, you know, I, I, when I've dotted those eyes and crossed those T's in that way.

I think your point there of recruiting is itself a huge signal is really important. Like, can you find people that have this problem and care enough about this problem that they're going to talk to you and spend time exploring this thing that doesn't exist yet? I think that's super interesting. And then I think another key part of this is it's one solution that solves many people's problems, that it can't be like a bunch of different things for a bunch of different people, right?

That'S right. That's right. If, if two, if one person says, I don't want this, one is this, another person wants this, you don't do it. That's how, you know, you do the minimum, right? All 25 have to want the same thing. If one person's out, you just don't do it at all. And the reason that's powerful is because if I come to you and I say, hey, it's missing this feature, I say, well, yeah, 25 people that look like you that are very happy without it. You see, that's how, if you think about what you do in a review, you see the five stars and you instantly, like, oh, that's good enough. But if you have a question, what do you do? You cannot double click on the review to read. And that's how people get convinced. There's this social influence of like, well, you know, I mean, when he's cool, he likes the steakhouse. I should like, you know, he's fine with this not being there, so I should be fine with it. So your references are super powerful in more than any company in influencing consumers. on what they should choose or not choose.

Basically, Stripe builds new products exactly this way. They find new customers that have a problem and they work with a very small number of customers to build a product for them. And that's how a lot of their new product. I think Rippling works like this too. So I think this is a really good lesson for everyone listening. If they're trying to build something new, is there an example that comes to mind that would be, I don't know, interesting to talk through of something you built that you worked through this process?

Oh boy, I tell the example of kind of solving a problem when I was at the staffing company, Snag a Job, they do hourly jobs and help people find kind of their first job or an hourly job. And I actually get a call here from the head of global staffing at Starbucks. Now he calls me, you can see the benefit of this technique because, you know, I'm the person he calls when he has problems. I've used this technique with him at a previous company. He didn't even know I was at a new company, you know? And he calls me up and he says, you know, Christian, I have a problem. I said, well, don't we all have problems? You know, I said, well, you know, we just bought a bakery in the San Francisco Bay Area. And as we're doing the paper work to kind of take over this company or this acquisition, we realized that close to 800 of the employees may be undocumented workers, you know? And I said, wow, that does sound like a problem. It's like, yeah, imagine if this breaks out in the news and all of that, but more importantly, We still need to get all your paperwork. So all these people are gonna quit and we will have a new bakery without employees. And I, you know, my first question to him as a product guy is like, wow, would you give me a million dollars to solve this problem? You know, and it's like, no, seriously, I have like 300,000, I'm throwing out numbers. He's like, maybe. I said, wow, you have my attention. I kind of go to my CEO, I tell him to call, I grab a designer, and an engineer and just say, hey, look, I love to work on a little project with you all. If you have some time, I kind of debrief them on the call. Now, the first thing I have to do is to try to define the problem, identify problems. What really is the problem going on? Yeah, we're breaking it down. We're talking through this. We say, well, at the end of the day, Starbucks needs to hire like 800 people quickly because, you know, I mean, we can't fix getting everybody's paperwork, but you're gonna lose these people and they need to hire those quickly. I said, well, who else has this problem? You know, we're trying to throw out, get some like, what are we talking about? Let's go out. Everybody jumps in my car and we start driving around. And this is where we're doing our product work from. You know, we're talking in the car, just out of the building. We see a new construction site for a new McDonald's kind of coming soon. And we know we are curious. We're like, well, let's go find out. We start talking to people on sites. Fortunately, the operations director He's on site and we asked him, we say, Tell us about opening up a new McDonald's. He says, well, do you know we need like 120 people on opening day? We're like, Whoa, for McDonald's, I mean, really 120 people? He's like, yeah, do you know that most of the people in this industry don't show up to work on the very first day? And every day we're in construction, we're losing money. So the second the bathrooms, restrooms are done, we want to open up. We're like, wow, we didn't think about this new construction, a new store opening. They need to hire a lot of people quickly. So I said, thank you very much. I give you my business card. He gave me his. We jumped back in the car. We just kept driving. We went to the mall. We started talking to people there. We talked to a manager at Macy's. And she said, oh, look, we hired 20,000 people in the holiday season. We're like, Macy's? Yeah, it's like nights, weekends, she paid, stuff like this. We started hiring in the summer because of how painful it is. Now all we're doing here is just validating that this is a real problem. You know, like other people will have the problem. So we go back to the office, we bring some like, how will someone even go about solving this problem? We're thinking this was like, we're not really sure, but like, that McDonald's guy was very desperate. I said, have his business guy, you know, we start throwing some ideas. So I call up the McDonald's person and I say, look, we just met with us. He's like, yeah, we would love to help you solve the problem. He said, well, what do you have in mind? You know, well, he said, we've been talking, what if we just sent you some people to interview? You know, and if you like them, you will hire them. So that seems fairly easy. It's like, how do I pay for this? You know, and we took a swag, like maybe you pay us for everybody that you hire. I was like, oh, I don't see much risk to that. This is great. I'm like, oh, okay. I mean, we have no sense of what to do. We are literally Googling, how do people find a job at McDonald's? You know, like we go to colleges, we are sticking up flyers, we are putting ads in the newspaper back then. We are looking at different techniques to try to get people into a funnel and interest by posting on Craigslist or things like that. You know, at the end of the week, we get about 40 people that are interested to come to the interview. We're like, that feels good for our first try. You know, we call the manager up and we say, look, on Monday we will send you 40 people to interview. You know, it's like, oh, this is great. You know, Monday I take my designer, my engineer, We are on site with the manager. 9 o'clock, we expect like three people to show up for interviews. Nobody shows up. You know, 10 o'clock, another three, like one person shows up. I mean, we got to the end of the day, less than 20 people show up. This man only has like four or five people. We're like, we suck at this. This is terrible. You know, we go to the manager, like, let's go and apologize for wasting your day and stuff. He starts to laugh. We're like, what's going on? He said, look, I forgot to tell you folks in this industry don't often show up to interviews. This is like we are McDonald's. We pay minimum wage. People will leave us for 25 more cents an hour. They will leave us for a job that is one block closer to their house or like less than a mile closer to their home. Now we, you know, the engineer is with us and he's thinking about it's like this is really interesting. About half of the people showed up. He hired like one in five. if you really want to solve this problem, like playing the laws of averages, we probably need to send this man, like, close to 200 people. I mean, we need to go bigger. So, yeah, we're storming the office. You know, we called the McDonald's guy again. It's like, can we try again next Monday? And he's like, do I only pay for the people I hire? They're like, sure. It's like, oh, go ahead and kill yourself on this. I mean, it's a pain. We've been trying all kinds of things for years now. We start. doubling down on efforts. We start calling back all the people that didn't show up for interviews. Like, what's going on? You know, did you get lost? Don't you want a job? I mean, what's wrong with you? We start figuring out what funnels worked well for us the last time. You know, what was wasted our money? How about what was the cost to acquire a person? And, you know, we spend a week doubling our efforts on those channels. We probably have about 120, 130 people on the list. The Sunday beforehand, we start calling them up. You know, like, please show up. Don't embarrass us. Don't you want a job? Do you need that address? Should I call you? Reminder set to your alarm. I mean, We tried all the techniques to try to get more people there. We go the next day and at the end of the day, he hires about 45 to 50 people. He comes to us, he shakes our hand. He's like, whoa, the quality was excellent. All my recruiters were engaged. The day was smooth. I look at how successful we are. It's like, I want to use you for every new McDonald's I open in the area. Now, I don't know I have a product. I just know I was able to help. one person at McDonald's, but I feel like I have enough letting. So I called up my friend at Starbucks and I said, Hey man, I remember the problem we talked about. He's like, yeah. I said, I would love to help you solve it. He said, oh, okay. What do you have in mind? I said, well, I think we need to send you about 3,000 people to interview. He said, 3,000 people? I told you I only need 800. I said, you know, in this industry, most people don't show up for interviews, right? Is that oh my goodness, you know our industry well. I like this. I'm going to take this up. I think we'll give you this contract. I take my designer, my engineer, we go to San Francisco. We're out there recruiting because this way it was based. I mean, we have to get a whole hotel, hire people. We are walking all the channels we knew, walked in here. Remember, we don't have any software, no technology. The designer, we're doing this manually, Excel spreadsheets, phones, emails in that way in one week. Starbucks hires 784 people. I get an email the next Monday morning from the contact at Starbucks. He copied Howard Schultz, then CEO of Starbucks. The email read, this guy's just saved our butts. I sent it to my CEO, but then I said, you know what? I only know now I can help on McDonald's and Starbucks, but that doesn't mean I have a product, you know? But I now have enough of Problem definition, I reached out to the head of marketing, the head of sales. I said, tell us who has this problem you've come across because we need to work with more people to try to uncover a solution that is scalable, maintainable, reliable, or works for our business. You know, weirdly enough, the next opportunity we had was the Los Angeles International Airport. They were opening up a new terminal, you know, and they said, we need like 200 people to manage all the stores in the new terminal. and we're like 200 people. We just hired close to 800. We got this. You know, we, we go to La for the briefing with the Staffing Group, and they tell us the people that work at an international airport have to match the demographics of the Travelers. We say, say what? Yeah. We have 13 Chinese speaking Travelers. We need 13 Chinese speaking employees. We say, sorry, you know, we got five percent Korean speaking. I mean, my team is in. L.A. we're in Chinatown, we are speaking about trying to recruit people to come and work at an airport. If we expect like 10 people to show up, only one person shows up. We start calling job seekers up, like what's going on? They say, do you know what it means to work at an airport? First I wake up at five o'clock, I drive to the employee parking lot, I get into a boss, then I go through security. There was not like TSA pre-check back then, you know, then I, if I want to break, I go through security again and then you pay me minimum wage. You know, it took us close to three months to staff this. We had to negotiate with the union to raise the price to like $15 an hour to attract people. When we come back from that, you know, we're saying, that is not our customer. Never again. We are never doing airports. That's a pain. You know, around this time was the holiday season, so we reached out to the person at Macy's. We told them about our work with McDonald's. We said, oh, we'll try this. We started working with them. You can imagine through this, the engineer is thinking, how can I use technology to improve this? I always tell this to people like, I never wrote the requirements documents. I never wrote a story. I never, so the designer is thinking, how can we improve the end-to-end experience? Okay, we need a recruiter experience, a job seeker experience, we need a funnel. Oh, we need to build a scheduling tool so that they can scale the interview. Oh, what about notification? Maybe text message. Oh, we can send them a map. so that they can know how to get to the, I mean, all of these things because they were involved from the very beginning in defining the problem. They were immersed in the solution to the problem. It takes us about eight and a half, almost nine months to build this. When we launched this product in its first 90 days, it booked $32 million in sales. Why? Because, you know, you got McDonald's. probably till today, using this product to open up every new store. We will Starbucks went to the global contract. We say, well, we've only done Discover in the US, so I only know where it works in this market, you know, and we started finally. If you look at, if you look at NASCAR, some of these big sporting events, they have to bring a lot of people together very quickly for a short amount of time, you know, and this is the same kind of product they use to do that high volume hiring in a short amount of time. if you think about it, I was discovering who had the problem and developing the customers that have the problem. At the same time, I was discovering and delivering a solution to that problem.

That's insane. You said you made 30 something million dollars the first year of launching this thing.

Yeah.

That's unreal. I love the how this is the epitome of doing things that don't scale. You going hiring McDonald's employees and then Starbucks employees.

That's right.

Employees.

Wow.

You do things that do scale, and.

They do things that do scale. Right. And that's, and it's, it's so powerful when you discover how to do things that don't scale, when you actually know. Right. Because it's the power of Technologies. I think just the beauty of what it can do at scale. And to that point, it's easier said.

Like a lot of people talk about doing things that don't scale. Many people don't actually do anything like that. They're like, nah, let that, let someone else figure that out or. Let's just actually think about the future of this versus just doing it and solving and finding problems. I love that also, you didn't do any of these other things we talked about. There's no fake door test, there's no opportunity solution trees, there's no user interview. You're talking to people, it wasn't like.

A user research interview, come sit down, I have questions. I said there's nothing better in learning how to solve a problem than trying to solve the problem. You will get all the answers, the research, the failure, the mistakes, all the evidence. You know the difference between what people say versus what they do. you validate and test. I mean, because at the end of the day, you know, what is statistically relevant? Like, you know, what solving the problem is the clearest indication that we've solved the problem and that we know how to solve the problem then. Yeah. And so, yeah, very powerful technique. And I love that you didn't really.

Know exactly where this was going to lead. It was just kind of this exploratory. Let's see if there's something here. And. And you just kept following this, like, huh, there's a problem. It looks like we found a way to solve it. Let's just see where else this can take us. Yes. Amazing. This time of year is prime for career reflection and setting goals for professional growth. I always like to spend this time reflecting on what I accomplished the previous year, what I hope to accomplish the next year, and whether this is the year I look for a new opportunity. That's where today's sponsor, Teal, comes in. Teal provides you with the tools to run an amazing job search with an AI-powered resume builder, job tracker, Letter Generator and Chrome extension that integrates with over 40 job boards, Teal is the all-in-one platform you need to run a more streamlined and efficient job search and stand out in this competitive market. There's a reason nearly 1 million people have trusted Teal to run their job search. If you're thinking of making a change in the new year, leverage Teal to grow your career on your own terms. Get started for free at tlhq.com/lenny. That's Tealhq.com/lenny. / Lenny. I want to shift to a different topic. You spent a lot of time helping product leaders get better at coaching, get better at building relationships, get better at building trust with their teammates. Marty Cagan actually shared this quote with me when we find it. He said that you can build trust with executives and product leaders faster than anyone else he knows. And the people you coach adore him like some kind of rock star. He is literally on speed dial for several of the CEOs of the largest companies in the world. Okay, so let me just ask you, what's your secret to coaching, to being a great coach, and how can people listening become better coaches to their reports, maybe colleagues?

This topic is probably near and dear to my heart because, I mean, there are many ways that I think our corporate structures have failed in creating high performance and stability in people. And I think one of them is actually in role of leadership. And by leadership, the key component I often point to is coaching. This idea of what truly is the job of a leader. And I tell people, yeah, it's context and culture at the highest level. Like where are we, why are we here, where are we going, how do we organize ourselves to get there, what's important, those kinds of things, and the environment in which we do it. but there's a people element because you recognize that you want an outcome and you need people working together to that outcome. So I now have to staff those people, and I have to, you know, hire and train them and equip them, and then I point them to what those things are. But many of those things are one-off like, meaning, you know, I create a vision, I create a strategy, I create, you know, there are some things, you know, I hire a person. There's something that is every day. And that's coaching. That's like the day job of managers. Like, I mean, and if I think about high performing teams in the world, and you can pick sports is one of those artists, I mean, they have coaches and managers like this, an everyday thing. And the idea is that, you know, when I explain this to people, I say, you know, like doing product management is a product manager's job, but getting better. Product management is the manager's job. It's the coach's job. And people tend to misunderstand how that dynamic works. You see, if you're playing a game, you're in the game. The coaches are on the sideline watching you play the game and getting you better at playing the game. Your job may be to kick or pass the ball and get, you need a competence level, but somebody's job is every day looking for ways for you to be better. better at your job. The number one reason most people don't give good coaching is because they've never experienced good coaching themselves. And most people can only give to other people what has been given to them, what experiences they've seen. What if you have, you know, I was in an executive meeting with a CEO and he gets up in the meeting and he just starts screaming and cursing at everybody just like throwing up. And I said, Whoa, whoa. I said, you know, can we talk outside? You know, they take him outside. I was like, first of all, I don't even think I can't work with you anymore, given this environment you're creating. But I need to understand why you were talking to your team like that. And he says to me, he says, Christian, well, you know, my boss used to scream at me like this. And look at me, I'm now a CEO. I got it. I understand it. Yeah, grown-ups, they can understand it too. And I said, well, tell me what you're trying to communicate. And he explains it to me and stuff, and I said, Is it okay if I show you an alternative way of communicating that? He says, what do you mean? I said, well, you know, is it first of all safe for me to do this with the team? So I go back to the team and I say, look, I'm going to try to see what the CEO was trying to say again. He's giving me permission for you to speak freely and candidly. I want your honest opinion as to what was more effective and why. And I took a stab at kind of representing what he was trying to say. And I asked him and it's like, yeah, it's the same thing kind of message. But, you know, when he tells us this stuff, we just go do it. We get it. We go do it. But the way you described it right now to us, I can think of four other things I need to do. I even understand some other things that may be missing that we need to now go tackle. And, you know, the CEO is kind of, like, really taken aback, and it's kind of in some ways he has never seen. an alternative. And it's never seen if an alternative be effective. Most people need to see something. They need to do it before they can even teach it in some ways. The, the biggest examples. Now, I'm seeing this all because I, I need to make a very strong argument for people understanding coaching. And, and in some ways, I probably did not know, you know, that I was probably good at coaching. I, I coached my kids in soccer. for like eight years and we always like won the championship, my boys team and I had like long waiting list of people and I thought I had a fundamental flaw in understanding it, you know, because when my kids were all like four years old, you know, when you have the kids run around the soccer field just kicking the ball anyway, my team always had like plays, they all have strategy. I mean, so, you know, yeah, winning games like 10 to 0, you know, other kids and I thought, you know, I'm like, ah, maybe I was born in another country, I didn't know you were just meant to let them play. and I was like really coaching kids. And I was treating four-year-olds like adults, you know, we're watching video, watching tape, having real, you know, I'm like, yeah, but it was so funny when you see them execute on the field. But I've kind of always had this mentality about the truest form. It's like companies cannot care for people. People care for people. And the representation of what is acceptable in an environment or what we do is by the leaders. Now, there's some different dynamic to why that's not happening with how we promote people and, and hope for structure around that. But fundamentally, trust is a key part of doing this. And I think, like, when I tell these people, I say, look, most people don't know that you know something until they test you. We do it a whole lot in our environment. I ask you a question, I see how you answer, and it's like, I might ask you, what's one plus one? Be like, it's two. Now I know that, you know, one plus one is two. I don't care when you lent it. I just, I need you to know that it's two to do my work. So, you know, so it happens in everyday environments. And what people fail to do is to do the learning. So they get the question wrong and they lose trust. So people don't, you know, and trust is based on competence and character, there are other values like communication and concern and care, but most corporate environments is a competency thing. That's why you see so many companies accept, you know, people with bad communication, bad care, bad because they are very good at their job. So, you know, if you can demonstrate competence, you will earn some trust and list the trust of competence from people. So I kind of explained to people a whole lot that the real core of their job at first is to learn, to seek to understand before they are understood, to know what you don't know. That humility and ego only last a small minute. The most powerful way I have found to get trust with many people is to have them accountable for an outcome of mine which is to so if I went to accelerate trust with Lenny, I will ask Lenny to teach me now, you know, and I see this, I see it like an emotional intelligence black belt technique here. But, you know, many environments, this, they, you know, if you get into environment, it's very quickly for you to identify the power in an environment, you know, who is influential, who has allowed this voice and all. and there's something behind why they are powerful. Yes, it is title. But if you think about why someone is called a CEO is because there is some competence that made someone give them the title. You know, they are great at growing businesses, they have a good strategy, whatever it is. So what you do to build trust is you want that person to trust you. Okay, but the only way that person will know that they trust you is if they test you. And unfortunately, many environments, they do that publicly. I'm in a meeting, I ask Lenny a question, he bumps a presentation like, oh, product managers are useless. That person doesn't know anything. So here's what I do when I want to build trust. If Lenny is a new hire in my company, I take Lenny to the loudest, most influential person in the company and I say, look, I just hired Lenny, super rockstar, did all of this. But he knows nothing about that business, nothing about how we work. and stuff, I would love for you to teach him some things. Now you may be like, I'm super busy, I'm involved, I say, look, Lenny should just hang with you. I've cleared his calendar for the whole week. He's just going to sit in meetings you are quiet, observe, just by observing you, he will be your rockstar. No stress, nothing to give. Now, it's impossible for this leader to sit with you for a whole week without saying things like, so, Lenny, where are you from? What do you do? Tell me about yourself. What have I now done? I forced a relationship between a very powerful, trustworthy, influential person and somebody else that doesn't have it. If you are walking around the company with this person, what is everybody going to say? Oh my goodness, you're friends with that person. Yo, I want to know Lenny because we can never get him to agree on it. So if I know Lenny, I'll be close with it. Lenny is more accessible, he's new, but how did Lenny break in? I'm extending somebody else's trust to you. Now, by also making that person share in the accountability of training you or teaching you in some ways, I am not making them accountable for your growth. It's impossible two months from now for that person to say, oh, Lenny doesn't do anything. Why? Because he makes them a bad teacher. So they are always going to defend him. Be like, oh, yeah, Lenny, let's have a conversation. don't do it like this in this way. They will prep you because it makes them look bad if you're not competent. Now, this. This. This technique accelerates relationships and Trust. It's the help me teach me type of technique. It also allows them to observe the Dynamics within the company, but it accelerates relationships because it's impossible for you to be in a meeting with a leader all the time without the person saying something like, oh, yeah. Hey, folks, let me introduce you to Lenny. Now, that person is now the one introducing you to more connections within the company. Fastest way to build this now feels like it's expensive. This is the job of a coach. You are designing a very specific playbook to help people achieve the outcomes we want. And that's by getting them competent at their job and then their potential where they need to go next.

That has some Jedi ninja tricks right there. I love that. I've never heard this advice before. Makes so much sense and it's so easy to implement.

Yeah.

Amazing. For someone that maybe doesn't have a Christian around as a coach or a manager that isn't at this level, what advice to give people that are looking for a coach or someone that could help them along these lines to learn to build trust and learn to, you know, just generally improve.

Boy, you know, I, I, like I said, everything you don't get mastery. by avoidance. And one of the things that good coaches do that, you know, most, when I say corporations fail companies, is they don't create space for practice. You know, I see people complain to me about people all the time. Oh, this person is not good. You know, they presented this. It was terrible. And I asked them, what did they do at practice? They said, what do you mean? I said, when they were practicing this, what did they do? So They didn't practice. I told them to prepare this. I said, think about what happens at practice. Any practice of any sport, any game, any... You can stop. You can make corrections. You can give feedback. What you do at practice, you do in the game. Product management is a what time, game time kind of role. Every day is what... So when do people practice? And so what I tell people, like in the absence of getting good coaching, you need to find practice arenas. you know, it's kind of like if, if you don't, you know, you're learning a new sport of basketball, you kind of go to the gym. It's a practice Arena. You can play and shoot around and let maybe some people have pickup games that you join and stuff like this in some ways. And I, I. So I always advise, put up managers like, you need to join a lot of pickup games, which are kind of, you know, they are low, low barriers to entry, low evaluation reward, loan risk type of thing. Go volunteer at a non-profit, working with the team. Go volunteer in your community events or church or whatever you go to. Go party. Now, what am I trying to do with these things? Find places where people do collaborative problem solving. Where they do product. That is what you're doing as a product team. It's more likely in a high performance environment, you'll find a good coach. You will find like somebody out there. But what you're also doing is you're observing other people play. Most people learn a lot of skills by, you know, you watch TV like, oh, I like that move. And then you go to the gym and you practice that move. You see what you did? So it's like you're seeing, then you're doing it in some ways. So you need to see good product work so that you can do good product work, so that you can teach good product work. So if you don't have the benefit of having a good coach directly, you've got to find environments where you see good coaching happening. A good indication of good coaching is actually good outcomes over and over again. Winning teams, you know, winning performances, great products. Great products come from great product teams. They probably have good leaders or a good leader within a bad culture. Yeah.

So essentially it's get a bunch of reps in is a big part of this advice. Just get reps in. And I think what you just said is such an important part of it is collaborative problem solving. is the key thing to look for. I was going to ask you how you recommend people get into product management. Imagine this is a very similar answer. It's just find opportunities to collaboratively problem solve.

That's right. And I differentiate that because, you know, there are all those guys that are the, I know I'd like to change a light bulb or they can walk individually or tinker and stuff. And I kind of differentiate that problem solving from the people that are very good at working with other people to solve problem. And there are so many of those buckets. You're getting reps in. You know, when you're talking to, when you're, you've heard those people that just tell you stories of their working with a problem, and you can, I can see how they will help me. Okay. They know how to use data. They know how to use insights. They're not afraid of talking to people. How are you gonna get those reps? Because you come into my company, I ask you a question like, oh, I really don't know. Where do I find? But if you've done the problem solving a team, sometimes you may not even know. how to get the answer, but you know who to go to to get the answer. That's a gift too.

I love that so much of your advice comes back to being the person that knows the most or has learned the most or even looking like they are spending the time to learn the most, which makes so much sense. The people you want to entrust are the people that happen to have the answers and the answers will know. Yeah, it just makes sense. Something else you talk about is people getting promoted too early. Leaders getting promoted too early, not doing well, then blaming others when really they were not actually ready for this new position. Can you talk about why you think that happens? And then just how maybe as that person that might be in that position right now feeling like, oh, maybe it's not my fault.

I don't know how to make an appeal to corporations on this one. It's probably the, it's a similar appeal in the light of coaching too as well. you know, most people are promoted to a point of incompetency or stuff. But, but I kind of describe the dynamic this way. It's kind of like, you know, Lenny is a fantastic engineer. You know, he, he, if you think about it, he wins engineer of the Year Awards. If you go to the office, his picture is on the wall. Everybody knows him. He high five. He's feeling good. But it's like one year, two years, maybe eight years in, Lenny's feel like, am I really growing in my career? Am I really challenging my career? he looks at the engineering career ladder. The next role, you know, from his senior engineer role is engineering manager. You know, the leadership team, HR, they look at the same thing. That's true. We love Lenny. We don't want to lose Lenny. We need to promote him. And the next step is engineering manager or product manager manager, however I want to use the role here. And so we do what we promote Lenny. He feels good at the moment. Congratulations on your promotion. He posts a nice post. We're like, yeah. we're going to keep Lenny there for a long time now because he's promoted. No, Lenny has never been a manager in his whole life. He's never interviewed people, fired people, even coached people or done any of those things directly. You know, after a couple of months, Lenny starts to recognize an interesting pattern. Nobody is clapping for him at company meetings anymore. In short, they've taken down his picture from the wall because he's no longer an engineer, he's a manager, so he's now Somebody else is now the engineer of the year. People for him in the meetings, he's like, you know, he doesn't feel recognized or seen anymore. He's just the guy now behind the scenes, you know, that kind of thing. Then, you know, a couple of weeks go by, then they have a big engineering problem. I know what Lenny does. He jumps in and he solves the problem. Lenny did not recognize that his job has changed. His job is no longer to solve the problem directly, but to get a team of other people good at solving problems. this is because you're a great engineer but not a good manager. This story or this dynamic I've told you is probably the most common origin story of what people see or deem as micromanagement. In many cases here, this individual knows how to do engineering. They don't know how to do engineering management. They don't see the shift in their dynamic being changed. We see bad patterns where it's like the second you become a manager or a leader, you cannot say things like, I don't know, I'm not sure, I need help. Are you saying, who told us those things? But it's like such an expectation that our leaders must have the answers, must know the right things, must do the right things. And so what do we see people do? Rather than Lenny asks for help, he goes to Google and searches how to do an interview. how to write a review. Are you seeing? He reads different articles like this one looks cool and then he does it and nobody dies, nothing breaks. So he thinks it is a good framework and a good pattern. And you know, we have this dysfunctional culture of everybody doing different things, whatever works for anybody, and you know, and that is the cycle that repeats itself. Now, a person that works for Lenny sees that he used this framework and thinks it must be a good framework. My boss didn't and you see how that cycle repeats itself because Lenny didn't actually get coached to be a manager. You know, if you ask any boy that works for me, they come to me and say, oh, I need to get promoted to be a director. You know what I say? I say, go be a director. You don't need a title. Let me tell you what a director does. You know, and you're going to work with me over the next couple of months to do those things. because I am promoting you to do the job, not to learn the job. You see where it falls apart in promotions? We promote people and it's like, you're now a VP, do VP things. And you're like, I have never done VP things before. But I cannot tell people I've never done VP things because it makes me look incompetent. But I see the job description, I should do some VP things. What did my last VP do? Those things, are you saying, to learn how to be a VP is when you're not a VP. Because this is, that's where you practice being a VP. That's where you get feedback on because then when you become a VP, you have done those things before. It's like, why is the first time you've done an interview when you're now a VP? Come in and do an interview with me, observe me, do an interview, ask questions, see what works, get feedback. You know, that's why I love those group product manager roles or group because those are actually meant to be designed as ways for people to make a decision if they want to be a manager or they want to just stay in the discipline, but people use them as, why would you give somebody four direct reports if they have proven there's no evidence they can manage one? So what I do is I give you one. You might tell me, I hate people. That's okay. We can talk about that. But it's like, let me give you four and you're just going to practice the bad behavior at four. you know, so this is what often happens in company. We promote them into incompetence. It's not their fault because we are not coaching them. What we need to do is create a safe environment for people to practice leadership before they become leaders, before we promote them. We have to have good coaching programs for leaders to say, you know, if there's a succession plan, I want Lenny to be a new manager. I don't wait till it's time to promote him. Then I teach him management because then apparently he cannot see things like I don't know. I have to teach him leadership and management before he becomes a leader or a manager.

I love this idea of just doing VP things. I just picture someone walking around and doing VP things.

I'm doing VP things all the time. I see it all live. But what will VP thing?

I'm doing VP things. I think another added benefit of doing these things before you say your VP is that is the best way to get promoted to a VP is you are already doing the job.

That's right. and nobody fights you on it. You see that? And you're not even surprised by it. And it's very safe because when you're not in the job, you can make mistakes and nobody blames you. He's not a VP. Look at him trying to do VP things. You see? But the second you're a VP, it is such a... There's so much leverage in the role that your mistake is serious because it impacts everybody. But when you're not, it's like some... you get coverage, you get protection, you know, nobody's as mad at you. It's like, yeah, he was just trying to take a stab at it. Let's coach him on that. But that, what is the best time to know those things? It's before you're in it. Before you're in it.

To give companies and leaders something to do with this advice, you talk about helping them train and practice before they do this. How do you do that? Does it bring on, like, I don't know, does it work with Silicon Valley Product Group to help train and coach?

There are many great product coaches out there. There are many leadership coaches out there. I think there's some recognition with Yeah, people have to have the humility and the self-awareness to recognize that there are opportunities for them to get better as a leader. And like product management, you know, you need to see your experience, good leadership, right? You need to, you know, you need the reps of good leadership. And yes, we do it in every way. You probably talk to people about strategy. And what did they do? They outsource it all the time. Tell somebody else to do it. And that cycle feeds itself because you never do it. You only know how to outsource it. You never learn how to do it.

You see?

And so it's kind of many people outsource, oh, go get a mentor, go take a training class, you know, and they'll think that they are outsourcing coaching in that way. It's like, go take a communication class. I'm like, okay, if they come back from the class and they punch you in the face, they're like, why did you punch me? The class taught me to punch you in the face. You paid money for me to learn how to punch you in the face. I said, go to the communication class with the employee because they are going to need to practice the communication. so you learned what they are learning. Both of you now will practice it together so that they can get better at communication. A communication class doesn't get you better at communication. Communicating better is an indication that you're better at communication. You need to practice it. And I need to create a safe place for you to practice. I need to give you feedback that you're communicating better. These are all patterns in coaching that many leaders have just don't have. these tools and techniques to do it. So I do teach a lot of leaders how to coach. I do a lot of people work with leaders. There's not a singular product problem. You know, people hear me say all problems are people problems. There's not a singular product problem that I have not seen coaching address.

Yeah. So what I hear is essentially the biggest burden is on the manager to be a great coach to their reports and for a manager to get good at this. Essentially a coach is a really good method putting someone in that could work with you one-on-one on a lot of these things. Awesome. That's very actionable, very solvable. Everyone's always gonna ask, how do I find an awesome coach? Difficult, I guess. I don't know, what do you tell people to go find a coach?

Is there anything you could recommend? Just like how to go find a coach? You know, you've got to find people that have generated good outcomes. I don't know how, you know, people like how you find a good consultant. I get people teaching people a lot. that haven't done the job. Don't get me wrong, if you look at American football teams, there are some coaches that have played the game before and you feel good that they can coach you. And there are also some coaches that have not played the game. But if you look at the pedigree, they've learned from good coaches. They've walked under good coaches. So, yeah, like same thing with product. I said there are only two parts. A good coach is someone that has played the game before and has generated good outcomes. But, and the second is that they've learned from good product coaches. So you want to find, you know, people with a strong pedigree. You see them, you know, oh, you worked at, you know, Amazon this year. You worked at this company. You worked at Stripe. They yield good results. How did you do that? Oh, my environment was great. The culture was great. Who taught you? Who coached you? Do pickup games with the people that they coached. They will tell you what patterns their coach told them. So how do you do that? My coach told me to do this. Are you gonna learn from them? I say, oh, you know, important things.

Amazing. Okay, final area I want to spend a little time on is the work you do in Africa. Marty said that you're the foremost expert in introducing product and technology into world's developing countries. I know you spend a lot of time in Africa specifically. Could you just talk about the work you do there and also just maybe the opportunities and challenges you run into when you're working with folks there?

Yeah, I mean, I have an African background and my family is there and I used to have this false notion that the things we've done in North America or Europe or Asia, like the problems we've solved have been solved in these markets. You know, I remember, you know, talking to someone in Africa years ago and he said to me, oh, I said, we just got a new job. Where did you find the job? He's like, oh, I found it in the newspaper. I said, the newspaper? What do you mean, find the job? I was like, I used, I remember participating in solving that exact problem in like, 1998, so I was working with the team to solve that. And I had this false assumption that because I solved it here, of course it solved everywhere. And I started to see patterns like this in Africa, where they're just two things were trending. One, so many, the poor use of technology and enabling technologies to solve problems, and two, the difficulty in actually solving problems. in these markets, in these emerging markets. And one of the things we take for granted, you know, I always tell people the government is probably the biggest public private product platform in the world. In all countries, they all have this public because they provide the infrastructure and the architecture that is enabling for people. You know, imagine if you were trying to code and you didn't have power. You know, now you're thinking there are markets where you have to solve the problem of getting power. before you, you know, and then getting access to a computer and then getting access to the right type of software to be able to code something. I mean, look at all the different things. So you have to solve many problems just before you can start to solve the problem in a meaningful way. And it's a very big reflection of the dynamic in Africa. The, the second pattern of what we see is because of this challenge, which we, I see two things. One, people make a lot of money. on a problem than from solving the problem. You know, this is whole society that people are very good at walking around problems. You know, we've got an, you know, electricity problem. We'll just buy generators. We've got a road problem. We're gonna buy bigger cars. You know, I mean, I. I was doing a talk at a conference, and I was driving that. And I saw a Tesla with a portable generator at the back of it, you know, like, they will stop and, you know, charge the Tesla, and they keep going on the road. in some ways that that's a whole society, but it's never been a society that didn't have creative people. Just an amazing, tremendous amount of talent in those and it's a very young population. I talk to people all the time. I say, look, someone told me, well, Africa, you know, seven of the eight most underdeveloped places in Africa in the world are in Africa. And I said, well, you know, they were talking about the discovery of the internet. It's like less than 30% of Africa has discovered the internet. And I tell them, wow. And we created seven unicorns from that. Imagine if 50%, 75% discovered the internet. Like we need to understand the opportunities, the youngest population, the fastest growing, some of the fastest growing economies in these markets. Some of the problems are so basic, you know, and the opportunities are so huge. And so I had to kill all these assumptions. One that I needed permission to come into to solve problems there, you know, and two that we didn't have the means to equip and educate people. So we don't have a talent problem or a resource problem. What the biggest opportunity I found is to really empower a continent with enabling technology and the mindset and the skills to be able to leverage technology in solving problems. this led to me starting a non-profit in Africa, the Innovate Africa Foundation. And we are kind of committed to this education of people on the continent, this enablement with technology. We did our first conference last year. The Inspire Africa Conference. It just blew my mind. I'm so humbled when I could see a thousand people from 31 different countries in Africa come with a hunger. and an eagerness to learn how to do product work, to learn how to do that. I mean, and it's not cheap by any means for them to do that, you know? And what moved me the most is looking at the future generation. We had a 13 year old and an 11 year old in the workshop. You know, the 11 year old was a robotics engineer. The 13 year old was a CEO of a small startup that keeps Healthcare records or a leader. and I'm like, if I can help these people learn how to do product well, this is the whole generation for Africa. This is the future of people that want to leverage technology in a meaningful way. So I spent a lot of my time in Africa coaching, advising, and teaching teams how to use technology, how to do product, how to organize themselves as product teams, how to solve problems, and really to kind of create a boldness within the continent for them to go after problems and solve them, then you know, walk around the problems, make money on them.

If people want to learn more about this, maybe support the work you're doing, what's the best way to find out more?

You can visit the nonprofit website. It's innovateafricafoundation.org you can follow our work on SVPG or the inspireafricaconference.com I know I will be doing a lot more next year. In January, I am going to be launching a fund the, you know, paid Africa fund. And I want it to be a fund funded by the product community for Africa. It's an angel investment fund. One of the problems I recognize is that so many of the startups, they are not ready for institutional investment and they are forced into it in some ways. They say, you know, people are giving up a lot of equity when they just need cash flow, you know. And so I really want to focus on a fund for the community to enable people to get product market fit. in those markets. So that'll be launching in January. I will probably do an announcement about it. I'm super excited about that work and to really try to promote more of product centric thinking on the continent.

Amazing. You should call this one reference customers or something along those lines. Yeah. The goal is to help them find product marketing.

That's right. They'll be lending a lot of that.

Christian, is there anything else you wanted to share or leave listeners with before we get to our very exciting lightning round?

I, I've always made an appeal to the product Community to really on, to really have a sense of what they do beyond the job of a product team or product manager. And I always try to encourage people to, to see that, like, at the very core of what you do is really solving a problem. And, and that's creating, you know, when you do that, create value in the world, you're making a dent in the like people that participate in trying to make things better or trying to solve problems. And we should not shy from that definition of our job. You know, it might feel like a fluffy one, it might feel like too lightweight, it's not like meaningful, but I think when people think to heart that that's really what the essence of product is or product work is, they bring to work a different passion, they bring to work a different sense of empathy, They bring to work a different sense of customer centricity, and all of those things lead to good outcomes. So I always make that appeal to put up people as like, yeah, all the frameworks, techniques, all the stuff, just think truly about what you're trying to do. You're trying to care enough about a problem to solve it on someone's behalf and do it so well that it gives us something in return.

I really love that last point of just, that's how, you know, if you build something People care about, they give you something certain. One of those things could be actually telling other people about it.

That's right.

That's our point. That's our reference customers.

Yes.

Amazing. Well, with that, we reached our very exciting lightning round. Are you ready?

I don't have a choice.

Nope. What are two or three books that you've recommended most to other people?

Oh, boy. In this discipline, probably all of our books inspired, empowered, and we're coming up with one in March transformed.

I see that t-shirt there. I see the promo happening.

Yes, it's happening. It's happening. But it's really a reflection of so many decades of love and passion for product work. And I have not found, I always told Maddie that you write the books after I've gone through the failure. Like, you know, it's like, I failed that leadership. Now there's a book on it. You know, I failed that product. Now there's a book on it. And it reflects really the heart of good product work. So I love Ben said, had thing about had things. I love, I mean, there are some books that really describe the mindset and culture that good product work is done in, I always recommend those to people.

Just on this topic of Transform or around it, when is it coming out? And can you give just like an elevator pitch for the book just so people know what it'll be about?

Transform is coming out March next year. Oh, God, just three months. Some people should have gotten shipping dates on their books if you pre-ordered it now. But it really talks about how to move to the product model, the product operating model, which is really this set of beliefs and principles that the best companies work in. We share stories of companies that have transformed into this that are not your traditional bond, digital or bond tech companies that have made this transition. We tell stories of what companies can do. If it's anything, it's an appeal that there is a better way of working and solving problems and that companies can work in this way regardless of where you are on the journey.

All right, we'll have to have you back once the book comes out to get more people aware of what is happening. Amazing. Okay, I'll keep going. Favorite recent movie or TV show that you've really enjoyed?

I jumped on the Succession bandwagon and I enjoyed that. I used to love billions too, as well. I love good writing, kind of really just intellectual video writing kind of those business. And so probably Succession and billions would be two.

Do you have a favorite interview question that you like to ask when you're interviewing candidates?

Well, I, I always give them a problem to solve. That is probably my favorite question. And it's not a traditional problem. I probably will say something like, you know, hey, Lenny, I, I have a friend. He's been legally there for hearing impaired his whole life, and he just got a new job that requires him to wake up significantly earlier than he normally does. And as you can imagine, traditional alarm clocks. will not do it, will not solve the problem. And I would love to give that problem to you, you know, walk me through how you go about tackling this or solving this. And for me, I like that question because I, it gives me a sense of how you think. It gives me a sense of how you solve problems. It gives me a sense of how you know what you do not know and how you go about knowing the things you need to know, what you need to solve a problem and. It's no magical right or wrong answer. I do have a lot of people that say, I have no clue what to do. I'm more curious and because I want to now know what you do when you don't have a clue, you know, or people that jump straight to solutions are more engineering centric. People that jump straight to me, I can kind of get a sense of who you are when I give you a problem that requires you to do some thinking, you know?

And you're doing this live in an interview. It's not like go home and think about this and then, oh, I'm doing this live in an interview. Live. Okay. and then what's a sign that they're on the right track? Like what is it? What do you look for?

That's like, yes, this is what I want to see. Well, remember, I think about when I think about what makes a good product manager, I look about collaborative problem solving. You know, there are people that feel like, I'm just going to solve the whole thing myself. This is what we should do. We should do it like no evidence, no data, no kind of stuff in there. It's very interesting. But people that are saying, you know what? I would need probably work on an engineer and designer. We might need to put up that. I look for intellectual curiosity in some ways, you know, people that have proven questions in their head, people that are very quick to see things that are, I would talk to 20 of them. I said, how are you gonna do that? Do you know sign language? They're like, oh, how am I gonna talk to them? But there are people that are like, I'm gonna need a lot of help to try to figure this out. I don't know a lot about your friend, but I know community. There are people that kind of, some people have frameworks they run to. It exposes that, you know, if they are married to one way of walking, or, you know, it's more about knowing what you can't know. I'm looking for empathy, humility in some sense. It is a competence thing because most of I can teach, I can coach a lot of things. But, you know, that arrogance, that ego, those kinds of things, those, you know, I walk alone, look, like, those things are very, very challenging and disruptive to a team culture.

You have a favorite product that you've recently discovered that you really like either. an app or something physical, anything that's like, oh, this is really cool.

My eldest son is into sports. He loves all kinds of sports stuff, sports apps, all those kinds of things. And he got me on this app called Real, like Real Sports. And it's really cool. It shows scores of different games, but it's really driven by social influence. So all of your Twitter posts will get there like, oh my God, cool touchdown. It's almost like real time, more than real time. And you're getting real time with reactions of people around you and your communities. And it's a very different way of checking on a score than I've ever seen. And I thought it was just really, really thoughtful in how, you know, I want to share reaction to touchdown with 50 people around the world that care about my favorite team just going to touchdown. And you're all sharing reactions at the same time. and the first person that saw it, you can see that stuff. So it's very simple, like it's like a scores for games, but these days I don't check my scores anywhere else. But on it.

Do you have a favorite life motto that you often repeat to yourself, share with friends, either in work or in life that you find useful?

Wow, boy, I've said a lot in this talk about people don't care about, you know, companies don't care about you, people care about you, it's never too late to be what you want to be. But, you know, earlier on, my father always tell me, you know, show up, you know, show up and you're ahead of, like, you know, 80 of the people in the free world show up on time. And you're ahead of 85 of the people in the free world show up on time with a plan. And you're ahead of 90 of the people in the free world. And if somehow you have the guts to put that plan to action with a smile, then you probably will have a great chance of success. And if you do that over and over again, every aspect of your life, it can at least lead to successful outcomes. And I think that's a lot of some mental definition for me every day.

Amazing. I love that. Final question, as maybe the most interesting man in the world, is there anything people may not know about you or would be surprised to hear about?

Wow. I hope there are no more surprises about me in that kind of case in that way, but I I went to a gifted and talented school. I was out of my house at 12 and I went to kind of boarding school. And I've kind of never been back home since then, so I've kind of been on my own. But we were kind of in the middle of nowhere, probably eight miles from any form of civilization and stuff in the middle of the jungle. No water, no potable water, no electricity. So you kind of had to get water yourself. generate your own power. Probably the most interesting time in my life to shape my worldview, kind of surviving at 12 to 16 on my own in the middle of the jungle. So very intriguing parts of my life.

Very different from your life these days. Actually, one more question. I think you're the fourth. You're from Nigeria, right? Your family's from Nigeria?

Yes.

You're the fourth Nigerian guest on this podcast, I realized. and I always like to ask, what's your favorite Nigerian food slash which food should people seek out if they were to try to find some good Nigerian food?

And my favorite Nigerian meal is super duper cultural and native. It's like starch and ogbono soup. You know, you can't really find that anywhere. It's like you gotta come from mom's cooking. Maddy Kagan has tried it. He came to my hometown, my parents' house and had it. But if you are discovering Nigerian food, you know, start with a variation of like rice, which everybody has. Jollof rice. And yes, people, I'm gonna say this. Jollof rice, Nigerian jollof is better than Ghanaian jollof. It's a war, but it's okay. We already claimed victory and we will move on. But establishment of rice is elementary, but then you have to try and swallow like a pounded yam with a soup. You know, there are many different variations of that. And you get a pounded yam or pounded cassava. And you eat that with a soup.

And you will love it. Some controversy over here, competition.

That's right.

For who's got the best rice. Amazing. Christian, I am now a huge fan of yours. I'm so happy we did this. Thank you so much for making time for this. Two final questions. Where can folks find you online if.

They want to reach out? And how can listeners be useful to you? You can find me on LinkedIn as well. You can reach out to us on our website, svpg.com. I tell people the best way to be useful to us is to do good work using these principles and all the things we teach people over and over again. We care about outcomes, we care about good product work in the world. I would love your support with the work I'm doing in Africa. I've always reached out to the product community around the world to help developing countries and communities. So please follow our work, please support our work in Africa in building a product community.

And what is the website for that again, specifically the nonprofit you started?

Innovateafricafoundation.org amazing.

Christian, thank you so much for being here.

Thank you for having me, Lenny.

It's such a pleasure. Bye, everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lenniespodcast.com See you in the next episode.