Product Management with John Cutler

You started off talking about the fact that you were a video game developer. And then you talked about the breadth of experience and roles and skills that you got very quickly. And then you talked about product managers being more around coaching, not delivery. And then you said, what will happen if that role didn’t exist for a product manager? Who’s going to figure out whether there’s a viable business in this product. You’ll end up the team building what the customer told sales they needed. So sales can close it. You won’t have a, why. You won’t have a roadmap or a strategy that says in three months we’ll look at this; in six months we think this; and five years, these are the things we think will be important. So as long as you happy that you don’t need any of those things, then don’t have a product manager. But we all know that each one of those things have value. So you probably need it. 

You then talked about the difference between physical products, where typically the product manager owns the P& L. They are accountable for spending money and making money. Yet when we go into a digital world, somehow we lose that. And then you talked about the distance between a decision and the dollars. How much time’s involved between that decision and the dollars turning up to justify that decision. 

Then we went and talked about Northstar. And we have a bunch of measures that are leading and lagging. The key thing that came out is the measure is valuable, but actually it’s the discussion we have on how we model value. The conversations give us a shared language for that value and then we’re just looking for leading indicators of future value. So measures that tell us we’re going to achieve that long term value or we’re not and we probably want to change something. So coming back to that key theme of don’t worry about how to measure it. You said it’s the conversation around the idea that’s the most important thing . And that you would always take powerful, qualitative inputs over weak quantitative measures. Once people have an idea of what it might be, does it pass muster across the organization? Do people just nod and go, yeah, it makes sense. Let’s go see if it’s right. Or do they start arguing because then we don’t have a shared language, or we don’t have a shared value, or we don’t have the right thing. So it’s the learning we get from those conversations that’s more valuable than the final measurement we may end up with. 

You talked about products that have 50 personas that it serves badly. Lots of people are using it again, the job done, but they don’t like it. Maybe that’s something we should think about and then how do we know whether we’re being additive and things need to die? Really, it’s conviction that matters. You talked about people, if they can have a high level conviction around their product, they will go remove stuff that they know needs to go.

And then the idea of a killer feature day, as in kill a feature day, not create a killer feature. I like that idea. Just go and kill some stuff and see what happens. 

And then we talked about the moving of product to become a method. We talked a little bit about product manager versus product owner. The W’s. We’ve had a guest on before that talked about mission command. Tell them the goal, get feedback on what they think they’re going to do. Figure out that they don’t understand the goal. Reiterate the goal. They’ll then reiterate what they’re going to do. And the conversation loops. 

And then often people that go Ex this in their LinkedIn profile they’re coming from an environment where a lot of the patterns are already in place. And so when they go into another organization where those patterns aren’t in place, are they able to be the change agents to see those patterns are missing and implement them?

And product roadmaps try to do 15 jobs. It’s hard to understand. How do we simplify it? And that pattern that I’m actually going to try next week of three problems. Based on those three problems, we’re going to try these things next. After that, we may go over here. 

And then, last one. How the hell you take this beautiful mess and make it in a way that it looks simple to me. Start off with 500 stickers and expose the mess. Just get it out there, visualize the mess. Then keep looking at it and keep trying to make it simple. You are applying repeatable patterns in the way that you visualize your patterns. 

Im gonna end with, we have seen before where domains have become very , popular and people create methodologies and certifications to monetize it. They weaponize that domain. I’m hoping we don’t see that happen to product.

So there are a bunch of very valuable patents in product that people have published and shared. And I love that. I hope we don’t get to the stage where I see a frickin A3 piece of paper with 6, 000 million patterns on it and get charged thousands of dollars to learn them.

Read along you will

Shane: welcome to the No Nonsense Agile Podcast. I’m Shane gibson.

Murray: And I’m Murray Robinson. 

John: And I’m John Cutler. 

Murray: Hi John, thanks for coming on. 

John: Thanks for having me.

Murray: So we would like to talk to you about product management. So why don’t we kick off with, a bit of background on who you are and what your experience is.

John: Sure. I dropped out of college to start a video game company. We made a bartending game called Last Call that was a critically acclaimed flop. Because it was of X rated in some ways so none of the major stores in the United States would sell it. It wasn’t truly X rated, but it was just to push the limits. And then, had another startup in real estate broker commission refactoring and I’d spent some time as a musician touring in the United States. And then I started my tech career in earnest with a series of jobs as more product manager, business analyst type roles. I had a stint as a UX researcher. And then in the last couple of years, I stumbled into this job at a company called Amplitude. Where I was a product evangelist. So I was a coach to all of our customers and future customers, which gave me this really broad exposure across different companies and different people. speaking, without filter about their companies, and then recently I worked at a company called Toast in product enablement and I was laid off and I have a bunch of time. So here I am speaking to you. 

Murray: Ok, thanks. What do you think product management is?

John: Product management is responsible for a viable, sustainable business. They have some awareness about how to use design, data and technology to create sources of sustainable growth, differentiated growth, defensible business. And then they act as a coordinating factor in the business to create the different channels that need to be created for effective collaboration, effective decisions, prioritization, et cetera. 

I like to Imagine a company that had no product management. Let’s say the engineers and designers were doing an amazing job. You might not end up with a viable business. Meaning you’d have an amazing product that might not grow, it might not end up being profitable. There might not be an avenue to grow a business around it. So one element of product management is working on that element of is there a business there? Is there some sustainable path to growth or profitability. 

Some other things would happen in a company that didn’t have product management. One of those things would be at a certain point it would be difficult to communicate the strategy. It would be difficult to communicate the why around certain product decisions. It would be difficult to establish relationships with sales. And you’d probably end up building a lot of what sales wanted you to build. If you didn’t have a product manager there discussions would just start to become too numerous and maybe too contentious if you didn’t have certain skills to be able to deal with that. And so generally what you would see is an element of implosion internally if you didn’t have product management. There is some kind of connective tissue, I won’t call it glue, between other elements of the business and then people who are able to design and people who are able to build and do both. Those things would start to crack.

Murray: 

How would you measure the success of your product managers? 

John: Well, you know, I have a friend who’s in consumer goods and they laugh at software business. They laugh at software products. They say, what? You don’t all own PNL? What’s this madness that you don’t own this business? When the distance between what you build, manufacture or distribute out in the world and money is very short. You’re able to measure someone based on that money. So my friend, who’s a product manager for shoes in consumer goods, works with designers and logistics and manufacturing and is responsible for P& L. They own a line of shoes within a shoe company . You can measure them based on their business. 

In software products, especially in software as a service, it’s more akin to a garden that people are paying to reap fruit from for long periods of time. So the distance from your decisions to the money is much more circuitous, it’s much longer. The question there is how do you measure the product manager. I worked a lot in amplitude at advocating for this framework called the North star framework. The whole idea of the North star framework is linking the near term actionable things that you can influence to long term sustainable growth through a series of drivers. And I think the reason why that framework was so popular was that revenue is too leading and too lagging for most software. 

And so you need to think about the connective tissue between the inputs and the long term growth that you have. And usually somewhere in the middle, you end up with something that you can measure a product manager based off of. It’s definitely not shipping points or, anything like that. 

Murray: So can you drill down into the north star framework and explain how it works, how you put it together? 

John: Well, I think that the Northstar framework is a model and a model is a language. And one part of the product manager role is creating a ubiquitous language in their company for value. It’s part art, part science and part sort of vision or craft in the sense that you could have a very mathematically correct model that doesn’t really tell a story. Could have a story. That’s very hard to measure like many things. And you have to put those things together to create some common language around value for people to rally behind.

And so if you think about the North star framework, it’s, KPI trees and driver trees. Opportunity solution trees. Gojiko Adzek had that thing, impact mapping, that’s a similar idea. So this idea is not new at all, but they all strive to solve one problem, which is to create a language for value that spans the leading and lagging, inputs and outputs that you’re dealing with. And then creating a common model that the company can rally around.

So Northstar framework is just one example of that. You pick one metric that’s a leading indicator of sustainable growth, and then you pick a constellation of input metrics that you believe impact and drive that particular Northstar. And teams align themselves on impacting the inputs that they can impact. And that’s basically it. That’s that model.

But I want to be really clear that what’s important to think about is the job that this framework does. And it is a common language around value that can rally your organization. And I’d say that’s a big part of the product manager job. 

The current economic climate has been unfriendly to glue people in many ways. You could get fired or laid off if you’re a glue person. But in general, I do think that there is a sort of facilitary role that PMs have, but if you don’t frame this language around value, and if you don’t advocate for that and get the buy in of the rest of the organization, it doesn’t matter how well you facilitate your team to do its work.

Shane: So a lot of people look at the Northstar framework and the Northstar metric and they focus on that metric. And what I think I just heard you say is actually the conversations, the journey, the exploration, the understanding. All the things you have to do to decide what that may be is as valuable as the measurement number or, the calculation that you come up with. 

John: Oh, absolutely. I always say that powerful things imperfectly measured are more important than perfect measures for not very powerful things. It all starts with a powerful idea. And in fact, in product, we’re creating a future that doesn’t exist yet. And people forget this when they think about measurement.

If I run an AB test and I’m looking at causality in a pretty short timeframe that I did something and it improved something or something went up or down. Most product businesses at their core are not built on those things that happen in the near term in one week or two weeks.

They’re built on shaping a new future that doesn’t exist yet. And so part of the art of the Northstar framework is to think about what would happen if our strategy was really working here? What would we observe? And then start thinking about that. And in fact, I would always tell teams, don’t worry about how to measure it. We’ll figure out how to measure it. But what’s the powerful idea? So for example, at Amplitude, we had weekly learning users. That’s a powerful idea for Amplitude because there’s plenty of analytics products that are for solo analysts. Just find the answer, answer the question, give it to someone else in the organization. Weekly learning users had three inputs. One was activating the account, so getting clean data running for them. The second one was broadcasted learning, so it would be like, Shane you find an insight and you share it with me. But then the third one was called consumption of learnings. Which was, I need to consume your learning. And in fact, if you create a dashboard for the team that goes on to be used for the whole year, that counts as consumption of learnings and that’s what creates a weekly learning user.

The measurements might, be a little bit off or they might be okay, but it’s the idea that counts. I would much rather have a qualitative Northstar with a set of qualitative inputs that were powerful that we could measure by talking to customers and connecting with them than I would have a weak quantitative set of inputs in Northstar.

Murray: Just following on what you said about it’s a journey not the destination. We find this with a lot of other things we talk to people about. And I could imagine people reading your Northstar stuff and have a couple of product managers go away and do it all by themselves and then announce to somebody, here’s our North star framework, and then all the business people are going, huh?

John: That’s the job, to circulate and build shared understanding around that. 

At Amplitude, our customer success team used weekly learning users because they thought that it was important. We didn’t use it as much in marketing for top of the funnel , but as people began to get further down the funnel, we started to think about lifecycle marketing, how you can improve the use of features within the product.

And so it had a uniting effect. But to your point, it passed muster with the other part of the organization. They didn’t scoff at it. At toast we were working on a North star that basically amounted to thriving restaurants and why, because the company’s mission was to help restaurants and restaurant communities thrive.

And the people who work at restaurants thrive, how do you measure a thriving restaurant? That’s a little harder than you would think. But it was certainly good to start aligning people around the idea that there was potential around that. .

Shane: And so it’s the learning as you go down defining those things, that’s important. If you never actually get to a final North star metric. That’s probably okay. Setting some and learning from them is as important as finally getting to the finish line.

John: And it takes practice. If you think about any organization of any size, the nice thing about Northstar framework, it’s pretty fractal. In a sense, every team has its own mini Northstar, which was an input. And in many ways, having an actionable input that you feel confident about is more important than the Northstar. So let’s say that, Toast spent three years figuring out how to measure thriving restaurants. That’s probably an important process, but it’s less important than Team A building confidence that the input that they were trying to influence had an impact on that. The North star should take care of itself. In fact, if you can influence the North star directly, it’s probably not a great North star. It’s too gameable. 

Murray: So how can it go wrong? Cause all patterns have a dark side. So what’s the dark side of North star metrics. 

John: I don’t know. You fall in love with the causal tree that you’re creating and it’s usually more messy than you can boil down into one KPI tree. I think that would be number one. Number two, you don’t change it when your strategy changes. You change your strategy and you never reflect that in your North star. Third is it’s not very powerful. It’s like weekly active users, but people say, so what. Maybe you have a product where being active shows that you’re struggling with the product. Other companies are persuaded they have a million products when they really just have one product. Happens in banks a lot. Checking account one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10. Customers don’t care which checking account you’re using. They care about their financial wellbeing. So those are some of the most common ones. 

Murray: So there’s quite a bit of research by Standish chaos group, by Pendo, Google, Microsoft, and others, which shows that only 20 to 30 percent of product features are used. About 45 percent are never used about 30 percent are used rarely. Which strikes me as a tremendous waste. . So do you think that sort of research is real? Is it valid? And if you think it is, then what should we be doing about it?

John: So it was real. I mean the number is real. The context behind the number is what really counts. You have a product, an admin goes in and sets it up once, and only the admin uses the admin feature. And then you’ve got 1000 users. Do you measure that as not being used? Gets used once a month. Is that used or not used? Now, a lot of this stuff came out of AB tests that show, 90 percent of the tests failed to improve the thing that they’re doing, but what are those companies doing? They’re doing like algorithmic optimization. So that’s not a good test. That’s not a lot of B2B software. You’re not AB testing everything. 

The bigger problem is that you go so broad in your product that you have 55 different segments and personas, each using things and you have to maintain all that complexity, but you haven’t found your sweet spot customer.

Even bigger problem is the features they have to use. That suck. Who’s done the analysis on that. In fact, they could be forced to use it and it could be terrible to use. Does that count in the 80%? So that metric is notionally correct. We don’t know about what we don’t know. And most of the stuff we build you just have to ship it and test it. 

I think the right discussion to have is a lot of times we make low leverage decisions. So if you were to have an X axis, which was leverage and in the middle, it’s neutral leverage and off to the right, it’s high leverage and off to the left is actually detrimental. The bigger problem is less of a simplistic 80, 20 thing. It’s the decision quality of the teams. And that’s a bigger problem than a simplistic, 80 percent of features are not used. 

Murray: So one reason I think it might be true or partially true is because I see a lot of product managers who are order takers for senior management. Do this, do that. And where do those ideas come from? They come from the sales team. They come from a competitor’s product. They come from something that somebody just read in the Harvard Business Review. And none of it is validated. There’s not many product organizations that are actually doing user experience research , even though everyone talks about it. So that could be a good reason why a lot of features are low value. 

John: Yeah, that fits nicely. An example would be, these products, which are Franken products that have 50 segments or 50 personas that try to use the same product. And they’ve built little features to close every one of those 50 segments of customers. Yet no one gets any joy or satisfaction out of using that product. And that would be an example of every one of those features closed a hundred thousand or 500, 000 dollar deal. But the net effect of all of those features has left them with a product, which is difficult to extend, difficult to support, difficult to customize, difficult to do sales engineering with.

I think the order taking thing that’s the type of discussion we need to be having. And I think that the 80 20, feature usage metric is a interesting metric. I think the more important discussions are the ones like you just mentioned 

Shane: So one of the guests we had on just lately talked about this idea that as humans, what we always do is just add, and we never take away. And emotionally it’s hard. You built something and nobody’s using it. And you should kill that part of your product, but you’re emotionally attached to it. you see product teams actually focusing on removing features? And is there a pattern that they use? 

John: It certainly isn’t very common. Where people have conviction, usually those are the folks who remove those features. I have seen teams do kill a feature day. I thought it was a joke. I think two or three years ago I said international kill a feature day. I just invented a day and I actually had, a couple of people reach out and then said, I sent it to our team and said that this is international kill a feature day. And so we did. Yeah, I don’t have too much. It seems hard. I think that the refactoring one is more interesting. Some have this very regimented process. Some unfortunately have to negotiate the ability to fix anything. Then you have other teams that give carte blanche to anyone. If you can fix it in a couple of days just do it. And other companies, it’s, I don’t care how many days it takes, just fix it. 

Murray: What do you think about Agile and the idea of Agile product management. Do you see Agile as being important as part of your product development? 

John: I’ve gone through stages with this. I used to get in these arguments with Ron Jeffries for months about some scrum thing or Ryan Ripley or all the no estimates stuff and all these things. And then I guess I started Amplitude and then I just drifted away. I didn’t drift away from the community. There’s people like Tim Ottinger or Matt Barcom or folks like that, I talk with all the time, but I sort of drifted away from the debates. I got into it too. I went to the Heart of Agile event with Alistair at this one thing. And then, there was Modern Agile. I was into that with Josh Kerievski. I was doing all the stuff and I’ve been in touch, with those folks, but I haven’t been as involved. 

Murray: But do you think it’s important or do you think it’s rubbish?

John: It’s easy to say, Oh my God, the certifications. And Oh my God, SAFE. It’s so easy to make fun of some of these things that are going on. 

I think having met folks like Josh and people whove been around for a while I have such a place in my heart for the core ideas and the core principles. I get very defensive too, when I see people in the product community taking pot shots at agile stuff. 

It’s not all rubbish. It’s a community of people with overlapping common interests. And that’s how I’ve always interpreted Agile. Not as a thing, but as a community of people sharing what was working and then trying to enact change in environments. 

Shane: So, I’ve come out of data. I see scrum as a set of patterns that are well described that teams can pick up and experiment with. And then we see bad behavior once it becomes a money and certification game rather than a pattern library. When I entered into Product I struggled to find patterns. There’s no methodology or certification really that I could find. And so it seems to be the Wild West. Have I missed something? 

John: No, no. I joked, especially in amplitude that some of the customers and prospects we had, had gone through their lean transformation, then their early agile transformation, and they’re DevOps thing, and then there was this design transformation that came on in the middle. Then it was effective to be a really high performing feature factory. 

This is why it’s funny that Marty Kagan put out that idea of we’re gonna do this product transformation now. It just happens differently. It’s OKRs and the structure that your teams are going to be. I really liked Teresa Torres’s work, but that similarly has been pointed at as we must do. that. We must have all our teams doing continuous discovery in our group. So I don’t think you’ve missed it so much. It’s just the same thing is happening in product. I think what’s different with product, Is it’s way more nebulous. 

I think everything takes an arc. Product is no different at the same time as it’s more of a mushy discipline. It’s so contextual in many different places that it might look a little different than you expect. 

Shane: There’s a whole lot of semantic arguments between product owner, product manager, product leader is a new term coming out. How do you see it? How do you see those roles and how would you articulate it?

John: It’s almost like these parallel paths that overlap and intertwine each other. I think really what happened is a tradition emerged out of entrepreneurial tech companies that are selling their products. And then I think you had internal products. We are I. T. We are building these things for different people. And then this other tradition built on it. So I think the only way to understand them is through the cultural movements that they were part of, and product owner obviously did emerge from scrum. 

But I would never want a product owner to feel like they can’t apply for a product management job. They need to remember that you are not your title, you are not your company. You are not your company’s decisions around what frameworks to adopt or not. So why worry about it. When a product owner tells me I’m applying to a job and they’re looking for product manager, I just say. Just change your title. I don’t care. If you think that you’re qualified for the job. 

Back to the dichotomy of like product owner, product manager. It’s hard for me to embrace the PMPO at the same time thing, mostly because I’ve been in a lot of environments where that was unnecessary. However, I’ll just say one thing. That’s interesting. In an org that has a senior director of product, a director of product. And then senior product managers who are ICPMs. Maybe the senior director of product is serving as a bit more of the PM. And maybe the senior product manager is adopting some of those more sort of delivery centric things.

It’s parallel paths. It’s traditions. I don’t think it should matter to most people if they can do the job. I’d have to say a lot of the banks that end up with the PMPO thing it’s just a legacy leftover of a I.T business divide. 

Shane: So often people describe the difference as a product manager manages product owners. What’s your view on that? 

John: On one hand, you’ll see situations where VP of product is mostly in a facilitation. They’re mostly just guiding their senior PMs. You’ll see other situations where the VP of product is setting the strategy and pushing delivery down to the PM’s below. So it’s just a variation by organization. 

Shane: Okay, so in agile we always talk in self sufficient, self organizing teams. Ideally what you’d do is you give the team a goal and let the team get on and do the work because they’re the experts. I struggle to see how that is feasible. Is that something you’ve seen? Is that actually a valuable pattern?

John: In a lot of product organizations, we do what’s called the W form of planning and strategy. The W is basically top down is starting to relay some intent, some questions. Some opportunities. Bottom up is starting to circulate the opportunities they see closer to their product. Sometimes, you start the W off at the end of the year, if you’re doing some kind of annual planning . And if familiar with the double diamond, it’s almost like the W keeps getting narrower and narrower and shorter and shorter as you go along. So at first the teams are surprised by the top down context and they give their own. And then it’s iterations on that strategy to the point where you start to converge and you have something much more coherent and consistent. That’s typically how you’re achieving alignment in these organizations that have teams that have a fair amount of autonomy and, that’s typically how you’re achieving that level of alignment. 

Murray: I wanted to continue on with roles by asking you about product leader, cause I’m seeing Marty Kagan talk about how important a product leader is . What makes a good product leader?

John: They’re a good leader. I think that there’s general leadership skills, attitudes and characteristics, and then there’s stuff related to product. One of the key things that the product leader needs to do is work on clarity and coherence. So I was talking to someone today and they had this great example of what a good product leader would do. If their organization was in sort of strategic flux, instead of waiting around for the C suite to figure out the strategy a good product leader would start to preempt that by working to help people grapple with the questions that they need to work out to give the teams the clarity and alignment that they need. Back to the W actually, it’s a great example to describe what a good product leader would do.

In addition to hiring great people and setting up the system that they would have and supporting people and coaching people and doing all those general leadership things. They will probably do some of that coherence building that only someone as close to , the C suite of the company could potentially do, especially if it’s a CPO or someone.

Most teams are not going to be able to advocate for a major refactor or a major re architecting of what they need to do. So a really good product leader at that point would start circulating the reality of the need to do that particular refactoring or re architecting. Start building alliances to do that, start explaining the why of what it’s doing and start building that air cover. 

I think that in a lot of what Marty’s talking about too, there’s also this change agent nature of the product leader, which is assuming in some of these large enterprise companies that the product leader is also the chief advocate for a product way of working. That’s very difficult. In fact, what’s so funny is you’ll see leaders from Amazon or leaders from other places come into companies that need that transformation and they’ll fail miserably. They realize how much they took advantage of all the just realities that existed in their prior company.

And they don’t have that change agent motion to do that. So that might be another thing we might see in an enterprise trying to adopt more product ways of working is the leader needs to explain why product thinking is important, advocate for design, build the model around sustainable growth, maybe arrive at a North star. Set some direction, some product strategy. It’s hard. It’s very hard. If you’re doing double duty like that. 

The way that I think about it too, is there’s there’s design, data and technology and those are your tool chest. And I think one thing that product leaders have that often the CEO will not have or other people will have Is that they should be very versed in what those levers can bring for you and how you can seize opportunities with those levers. And it doesn’t mean they need to be an engineer to understand the technology side. It doesn’t mean they need to be a designer to understand the design side. And it doesn’t mean they need to be a data scientist understand the data side. But they need to be able to weave that story about why these are powerful tool chests to use to achieve the company goals. Especially I’m talking about a company that doesn’t sell digital products. If you’re a oil company, or if you’re a furniture manufacturer or a toy company. It’s a good chance that there’s not someone at a senior enough level who understands the palette. Of what’s possible to use those things to achieve your goals.

I remember during the pandemic, there was a great DevOps leader from Norway, and he told me an amazing story about how he’s been just chipping away for 10 years to advocate for the practices, and it felt like he was going nowhere. And he said, finally, in the middle of the pandemic, I finally sat there and the ink was drawing on the law while a lawyer, designer and a developer were shipping the ability to give all the Norwegians their bridge money as part of the pandemic. And that was the culmination of his career. And I thought, this is someone who understood the power of data, the power of technology. And understood enough about design and just put the pieces in place over a decade of feeling like it wasn’t working. And finally his work really came to fruition at that point. 

Murray: So to continue on with product leader, I’m wondering is the startup founder, the product leader. Is Steve Jobs, the product leader of Apple? Is Elon Musk, the product leader of Tesla? 

John: Oh, they like to think they are. Sometimes you find a startup founder. Who has a lot of product shops. Sometimes you don’t, and frankly, the first PM hire is always the riskiest hire. It’s a joke in the product management community. Don’t become the drummer of SpinalTap.

It’s the same thing with being a product manager of a small startup when the founder is very passionate about some domain, but doesn’t have a lot of product chops. Because there’s a good chance that they’ll think they know what they’re doing and they just feel they need this nebulous thing. They don’t know what exactly that thing is, and then they’ll bring that person in.

But I would say that a lot of people do have reasonable product chops. For example, in a lot of developer or data focused products, you do start to see technical founders shine because they have a very good knowledge of the palette and they might even have a deep awareness of the customers when those companies struggle is when they start to have to sell to people who are not like them.

We talk about Steve jobs, but how many startup founders thought they were Steve jobs are sitting in the dustbin of humanity. We don’t know that number because we haven’t heard about them. 

Murray: one of the main things you see product managers being asked to do is develop a product roadmap. So what’s the best way to develop a product roadmap?

John: Product roadmaps, try to do 15 jobs. So you’re not going to be able to do all those jobs with one product roadmap. Some of them veer a little bit into delivery planning. Some of them are prospective to get the right conversation going. Some of them capture decisions. Some are more outcome focused. Some are more, no, actually, what are you building? Some are for whole departments, some are for particular teams. Some are broad strokes. There’s only six things on it. Sometimes they’re for 1, 500 people and have thousand things on it. It’s very hard to use one roadmap for all of those jobs. 

I think that the next thing is it starts with strategy. People sometimes think the strategy is the roadmap. That’s not true. You have to start with that opinionated perspective on how you’ll win. A roadmap is built off of a strategy and some set of assumptions . 

The way that I like to Do roadmaps is, start with a opportunity based or problem based roadmap on very broad strokes, very fat marker sketch. I don’t like to use tools. I don’t like to use anything that feels like it’s real yet. Some of the best roadmaps I’ve seen are literally simple now, next later roadmaps that have a set of problems on them. 

I always remember there’s a guy named Buster who was an early PM at Slack. And I went to a developer meetup in San Francisco where he was presenting the developer roadmap for Slack. And that was just pure poetry in motion. He just walks up and he’s like, well, we’ve , listened to you all, and we’ve heard these are three puzzles you have. He just puts them up on the slide. And we’ve been thinking a lot about those. And here’s some things we want to try. He just lists the next things down there. He said, in the future, we might do this. Put some on there. Any questions? They ask questions. He answers them. It was poetry. There weren’t more than eight things on this slide.

And they were all grounded in the problem that the audience had. And instead of giving them the solution he started connecting with people in the audience about what problem they have and what we’ve been hearing from them and the research. And then led that into a description of, here’s some of the things we’re going to try to address those problems. It was beautiful. 

Murray: That’s good, but often what you get is your senior management saying, Okay, John, that’s nice and everything, but what am I going to get next quarter and the quarter after that? It starts to become very deliverable focused. 

John: You just have to coach them back for that. One of the most successful frameworks that I came up with, and it was unintentional, it’s called this thing called mandate levels It’s an A through H list of mandates and A is build exactly this to this predetermined specification. And it goes all the way up to H and it’s generate a long term business outcome. I always run this test with product teams cause it’s really funny. I’ll say, Hey Shane just bring back 30 million in a year. Are you good with that?.

And A is I’m literally telling you exactly what to do down to the specification. And then it goes build something that does this and then solve this more open ended problem. And then move a near term metric.

And so one of the things I tell people is that when, leadership just wants the list of things to build, bump up one level. First, let me show you a slide of the problems we’re going to solve. And here’s those things, you’ve asked us to ship. 

So people try to do this, let’s be more outcome focused. Let’s be empowered. Let’s do all this stuff. It’s like zero to 60. They go from never having measured anything that they’ve shipped. Going from a completely prescriptive roadmap to a now next later roadmap with the teams doing discovery for six hours a day. Just not going to happen in most cases.

And so I always think that you want to like bump up the mandate level. Because to me, empower doesn’t mean anything. I always go back to the mandate levels and that’s what you’re empowered to do. You’re empowered by having a job and being empowered to ship exactly this. Maybe it’s not the empowerment you want, but that’s the empowerment that exists in the company. And so I always try to think in terms of the mandate levels, when that question comes up and try to get the team to bump up one level and hack the system to be a little bit more outcome focused.

Shane: So, on this podcast, you talked about the W pattern . The mandate levels. The three problems . How the hell do you boil the ocean and take that noise and then distill it down to something you can point at?

John: The constraint of having to share something visually helps me distill down the idea so that I always get the mess out there first. I’ve made lists of 150 items. That I boil down, I list 200 things that I watch out for X or a hundred things of this. I have the ability to go super deep into the mess. I’ll just brainstorm a hundred stickies, 500 stickies. And then it’s just a process of shaping and thinking about mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive. Does this help, is this boiling it down? 

I always like with my visualizations to push the limits of the mess that you can fit into a visualization. So I did this thing called the should can matrix- what should we do and what can we do. It’s a nine box, but it’s not. So I start out with something simple and then I shift the boxes around. 

I used to be really into these less of this, more of this. What I realized about those is that they were fun to look at, but I don’t know if they were helping people. Over time, I’ve evolved the way I do these drawings to try to get away from things that just seem to make funny sense on the surface to having depth to them.

I think a lot about Trojan horses. And so to me, a Trojan horse is a framework that’s initially easy to consume, but has layers of depth to it. So for example, Team Topologies is a brilliant Trojan horse because you can understand it in two seconds and you can talk about it for two years and just take it down depth and depth.

Opportunity Solution Trees by Teresa Torres, that’s another good Trojan horse. It might not be quite as deep as team topologies, but you can take it down as far as you want to go. So I try to evolve my own Trojan horses. For example, I did a workshop the other day and I was really obsessed with this idea of just versus, but. Just is we just need to do this and, but is, but have you thought of this. You need the just people and you need the butt people. In fact, it is a yin yang. I’ll get a little trick like that in my mind. And then I’ll start to evolve the visualization of it and evolve the framework to do it. 

I would love to teach more courses and things. Not that I think I’ve figured it all out, but I have figured out these patterns of doing visualizations and diagramming that work for me that might be helpful to folks. 

Murray: One thing I’ve increasingly noticed about patterns is that they can all be subverted and turned into almost their opposite. So we see this a lot in the agile space where you have organizations which are hierarchical authoritarian micromanaging theory X. They don’t trust people, they don’t tell the truth, a lot of internal manipulation. So they implement agile and they turn it all into a hierarchical authoritarian micromanaging framework where nobody tells the truth. And it’s the same with OKRs. It seems any pattern can be turned into some sort of opposite of what it’s intended to be.

John: The challenge, I think that we’re seeing right now in the industry is a lot of people are questioning themselves and their companies. In the United States, loyalty in companies is an all time low. I’m concerned because what’s not to like. Empower the teams, courageous leaders, outcomes. We’re going to continuously improve. We’re going to have impact. We’re going to do all these things. Great. . 

Meanwhile, realistically, there’s a whole other narrative. . There’s layoffs with massive profits. There’s executives saying the worst corporate speak you could ever imagine. There’s people gaslighting people about AI. There’s people saying people’s roles aren’t even important. POs should jump off a bridge or become a PM by tomorrow or something. What’s getting to me lately is I wonder if we’re losing that core curiosity, meeting people where they are. And helping them along their way and also acknowledging that it’s very difficult out there. Some of these tech companies that do all these fantastic products, there’s been five rounds of layoffs and no one trusts anyone in leadership and they’re just complete shit shows.

So you have a large bureaucratic enterprise shit show and you have a large rapid growth tech company shit show. They’re both shit shows. And so maybe it’s less important about how they’re doing product or how they’re doing agile or whether they’re doing waterfall or not or whatever. And it’s more important about are they being good present people?

I normally don’t talk like this, but I think there’s something missing now that people need from each other.

Murray: There’s been quite a bit of discussion about this on the product management subreddit. A lot of product managers are very frustrated and a lot of them are facing layoffs. I remember one post where the product manager had got really angry and frustrated with everybody. And he appeared to say right. I’ve had enough of this. I’m going to start being really authoritarian and micromanaging to everybody now because of his frustration and the pressures on him and it’s like he was just giving up on all this empowerment. 

Shane: For me, it comes back to lack of leadership. And lack of ethics of leadership. We’ve had a change of government and the previous government increased the number of government employees by 50 percent over their six year term. So very much like the technology software industry around the world where lots of people have been hired for various reasons and those people are now being let go. And one of our agencies, TVNZ, has just got rid of a whole lot of stuff and then bought in Accenture to do a multi year multi million dollar digital transformation. Another government agency in the ministry of health has got rid of a whole lot of people, but the senior leaders in that organization were not willing to take a pay cut. So yes, we’re in a constraint space world now but actually, the leaders are not feeling the pain that they’re inflicting on the rest of the organization for decisions they made. And I think that’s what needs to change. 

I look at 37 signals as a really interesting organization. But one of the key things is the founders still own the company. They’re still accountable to be the leaders in the success of that company. And so I think that’s part of what we’re missing at the moment is that true leadership, that true ownership within organizations.

John: True leadership is very cultural and is very contextual. We have leadership porn in the United States. Every bookstore in every airport is telling you how to be this, do everything leader with ultimate grit and lean in and lean out and connect and be your authentic self, but don’t. Get into the details, but then be a leader . And I agree with you about the leadership thing. Although I think even that statement has become a bit of a cop out. A lot of people say, Oh, it’s the system stupid. Can we accept that humans are shaped by their system and then design the system too?

The intent of the quote about the system is that people do shape systems. That was a call to leadership that you might have some ability to shape the system that you’re doing. And so I think defining what leadership means in the company you’re in and what you care about and what you stand for is something we don’t talk enough about. In the product community, the default answer to any problem is, oh, it’s just a product leader problem.

If you just had the gritty enough product leaders, it would all be fine. Don’t make excuses . Stand up for yourself. You can do it, but that’s all very culturally imbued U.S answers to when someone’s having a hard time. There’s value to it, but we don’t talk as much about the collective. We don’t talk as much about what you’re doing for other people. It’s a sort of rehash of a hero’s journey, great man theory, which is all history can be explained through these sort of heroes. We’ve turned great man theory into great leader theory.

And so I think that it’s, what kind of leadership do we want? And what kind of cultures do we want in our companies? This is a challenging discussion to have, obviously. Someone wrote me on Substack today, saying I’m a huge communist and , I’ve written the communist manifesto with one of my posts But then I realized wow, okay, imagine if we did talk about politics every day. 

Murray: So it’s been my experience that 20 to 30 percent of the leaders I’ve worked for had a positive impact on their team and the value that they produce for the organization. Out of the remaining 70%, probably about half of them were bureaucrats who had neither a positive nor negative impact. They just ran the bureaucratic machine . And the remaining 35 percent had a really negative impact on their team’s ability to produce value for the organization, because they were selfish, manipulative people playing the political game who were completely focused on looking good at the expense of others .

And we had a guy on called Ron Westrum, who writes about organizational culture and leadership, and he calls the positive one, generative mission focused leadership, the middle one, bureaucratic leadership and the bottom one he calls pathological. 

So the thing that ties it all together is how do people deal with bad news? Somebody who is a mission focused, generative leader, encourages the messenger. They surface the bad news so that we can discuss it and resolve it. The bureaucrat tends to ignore it or bury it in process. They’re concerned about defending their department. So the news doesn’t get out. And the toxic pathological leader, they’re the people who changed the red project management report into the green one as it goes up by hiding everything. And the way they do that is by implementing a culture of fear so that everyone knows the messenger’s going to get shot. I think Amy Edmondson is talking about the same sort of thing in her fearless organization. Do you think about that model?

John: I agree with the Westrum range and I think the idea of what happens with information and then what gets worked with is good. And I think we need to overlay that across different cultures . So like a generative culture might manifest in some different ways, depending on the culture you were working with. 

Murray: Shane and I have talked about this quite a bit since that interview, and we both think that it’s not so much the organizational culture or even the country culture, it’s the leader themselves. The leader defines the culture and the systems of a group through their thinking. The systems are a reflection of the way the leader thinks and their assumptions. 

Shane: I think also, it’s the behavior of the teams, whether they accept that or not. I’ve worked with leaders where they made it very clear that we had a window to experiment with some change. And I’ve worked with teams that respected that. And then I’ve worked with teams that ignored it and didn’t deliver anything. And that leader got burned. 

John: One thing that struck me is the idea of one culture in a company. Really its many overlapping cultures. 

For example, in Silicon Valley, whenever I talk about continuous improvement, they say well, why would we ever do that? That’s the manager’s job. Why would we do a retrospective? We hire managers to remove impediments for teams and just let them produce value. No one wants to stick around and do the talkie retro stuff. Why would we want to do that? That’s what the manager is for. 

Murray: I think cultures are the unspoken rules of the organization and maybe of the broader society that you’re in. These are the things that people know that they’re going to be rewarded for or punished for. And often they contradict the posters on the wall. You find them out by example or by stories. Since they’re based on what is rewarded and punished, then they are determined by leaders. And we’ve had people like Daniel Mezick who’s all about open space agility, come on . And he said, I can change the culture of a group very quickly by getting a commitment from leaders to change what people’s mandate levels are. If they demonstrate that they’re committed to this expansion of accountability, autonomy and authority then the team will just switch overnight because they’ve just learnt this is the new culture.

John: I guess I’ve seen that in action. My friend Heidi here in Santa Barbara did an event with Dan Mezick. It was pretty choreographed activity. I think he spent as much time with the leaders as he did at the event just trying to sort of align them on what the expectations would be. I really respect his work. You have some other folks are saying blow the whole thing up. Alright, where just gonna have this flat company and everyone needs to just embrace the generative way of thinking about it. And you’ll all be okay.

Daniel doesn’t take those things lightly when he sets up those events. I think it’s pretty amazing when he does it. And also he understands the boundary of the thing. Part of him meeting with that team beforehand is to understand the sort of boundary of possible within that setting. Understanding the potentiality in the environment. 

Murray: To come back to the great man theory of leadership, my response is leadership is very important. Let’s not reject it but let’s recognize that everybody can be a leader at every level, even if they’re not anointed as a leader. And that is often a good response to a bad situation. If you’ve been disempowered, you can get all negative or you can try being a leader and improving things and talk to people and push up the mandate levels.

John: There’s a spectrum here. You do have people who believe that the environment is going to render all progress impossible. And the other end you have these people who ignore the environment, they ignore systemic bias. I put this post up on LinkedIn recently and a black woman had to remind me that it’s gonna be very difficult for me to do that in the environment that I’m in. And someone else chimed in saying what she said resonated with her. 

And so we have these folks who weaponize this type of leadership porn. You just need to be more resilient. You just need to have more agency. You just need to step up more. You just need to push the limit. No one’s stopping you. You can do it. You can do it. You can do it. A great example is this word agency. You get told by people a lot, you need to have agency. You can grow your agency and this is what you need. They’re removing the idea that people who’ve studied agency say it’s a social construct as well. You’re as much given agency by your environment as you might express agency. And so I think that the ultimate is somewhere in the middle. Both things can be true. Many things can be true. We’re in a complex situation. The hot takes and dichotomies aren’t really helping. Agile’s dead. PO’s should, quit. It’s all one in the same to me, the same kind of very black, white thinking.

Murray: That really resonates with me. You get people like Jocko Wilnick the total responsibility guy who’s a former SEAL Team 6 Marine and he comes on total responsibility. Kill or be killed. You’re responsible for everything that happens in your life. Which is a great way of justifying everything if you’re a rich, privileged person.? 

John: I really was impacted recently by a book by Peter Block, who wrote Confronting our Freedom, leading a culture of chosen accountability and belonging. I really like his books because he believes in the community, our ability to help other people, and he also believes that we have some level of choice and we have some chosen level of accountability to do things. 

Murray: The other end of the scale that youve been talking about is this really passive aggressive, defensive. I can’t change the system. Everything’s all against me. It’s all the power structures and society and gender and race. All I can do is be critical and hope that, somebody changes all of society. So that’s incredibly self defeating as well. 

John: Both sides of those are the sort of just thing, but is in the middle, which makes it difficult. When I think of a context full advice, it’s like, They are right about everything. I don’t doubt the person when they say there’s systemic bias. I don’t doubt the idea that it’d be difficult and that there are challenges based on your gender. I don’t doubt all those things. All those context things are difficult. And yet I want to help that person. So it’s both ends of that spectrum are challenging.

I think that there is some middle ground in believing that we have some level of free choice and that we can make decisions and we can choose to respond to things that are happening. And the Yin Yang of that thing in the middle is to also understand that there’s systemic things that can be challenging. We shape our environments and are shaped by our environments.

And I think that a lot of people actually are very allergic to that idea. They feel that’s bringing problems, not solutions. But I, do think there’s a sort of Yin Yang in the middle that people are involved in coaching and helping. That’s my personal philosophy I’m building a lot in the last six months. I do find myself choosing this middle ground. . 

But people love salvation. These context free takes are in some ways very hopeful. , I met Marty Kagan once. I really enjoyed spending time with Marty Kagan at this conference many years ago. I actually really appreciate his books. He genuinely wants to help people. And he is helping lots and lots of people. He fits the person that we need to give people hope that it’s possible that you can do this. So I do think you need the evangelists. You need the people who are advocating for the better way. And you need the people who are reminding people that it’s more complex. And then some of us occupy the beautiful mess in the middle. 

Murray: Okay. Maybe we should go to summaries. Shane, do you want to kick us off?

Shane: I do. 

You started off talking about the fact that you were a video game developer. And then you talked about the breadth of experience and roles and skills that you got very quickly. And then you talked about product managers being more around coaching, not delivery. And then you said, what will happen if that role didn’t exist for a product manager? Who’s going to figure out whether there’s a viable business in this product. You’ll end up the team building what the customer told sales they needed. So sales can close it. You won’t have a, why. You won’t have a roadmap or a strategy that says in three months we’ll look at this; in six months we think this; and five years, these are the things we think will be important. So as long as you happy that you don’t need any of those things, then don’t have a product manager. But we all know that each one of those things have value. So you probably need it. 

You then talked about the difference between physical products, where typically the product manager owns the P& L. They are accountable for spending money and making money. Yet when we go into a digital world, somehow we lose that. And then you talked about the distance between a decision and the dollars. How much time’s involved between that decision and the dollars turning up to justify that decision. 

Then we went and talked about Northstar. And we have a bunch of measures that are leading and lagging. The key thing that came out is the measure is valuable, but actually it’s the discussion we have on how we model value. The conversations give us a shared language for that value and then we’re just looking for leading indicators of future value. So measures that tell us we’re going to achieve that long term value or we’re not and we probably want to change something. So coming back to that key theme of don’t worry about how to measure it. You said it’s the conversation around the idea that’s the most important thing . And that you would always take powerful, qualitative inputs over weak quantitative measures. Once people have an idea of what it might be, does it pass muster across the organization? Do people just nod and go, yeah, it makes sense. Let’s go see if it’s right. Or do they start arguing because then we don’t have a shared language, or we don’t have a shared value, or we don’t have the right thing. So it’s the learning we get from those conversations that’s more valuable than the final measurement we may end up with. 

You talked about products that have 50 personas that it serves badly. Lots of people are using it again, the job done, but they don’t like it. Maybe that’s something we should think about and then how do we know whether we’re being additive and things need to die? Really, it’s conviction that matters. You talked about people, if they can have a high level conviction around their product, they will go remove stuff that they know needs to go.

And then the idea of a killer feature day, as in kill a feature day, not create a killer feature. I like that idea. Just go and kill some stuff and see what happens. 

And then we talked about the moving of product to become a method. We talked a little bit about product manager versus product owner. The W’s. We’ve had a guest on before that talked about mission command. Tell them the goal, get feedback on what they think they’re going to do. Figure out that they don’t understand the goal. Reiterate the goal. They’ll then reiterate what they’re going to do. And the conversation loops. 

And then often people that go Ex this in their LinkedIn profile they’re coming from an environment where a lot of the patterns are already in place. And so when they go into another organization where those patterns aren’t in place, are they able to be the change agents to see those patterns are missing and implement them?

And product roadmaps try to do 15 jobs. It’s hard to understand. How do we simplify it? And that pattern that I’m actually going to try next week of three problems. Based on those three problems, we’re going to try these things next. After that, we may go over here. 

And then, last one. How the hell you take this beautiful mess and make it in a way that it looks simple to me. Start off with 500 stickers and expose the mess. Just get it out there, visualize the mess. Then keep looking at it and keep trying to make it simple. You are applying repeatable patterns in the way that you visualize your patterns. 

Im gonna end with, we have seen before where domains have become very , popular and people create methodologies and certifications to monetize it. They weaponize that domain. I’m hoping we don’t see that happen to product.

So there are a bunch of very valuable patents in product that people have published and shared. And I love that. I hope we don’t get to the stage where I see a frickin A3 piece of paper with 6, 000 million patterns on it and get charged thousands of dollars to learn them.

Murray! 

Murray: Okay. The through line for me in this discussion was product leadership.

Mandate levels. That’s a great one. I really liked the idea. It’s pushing the envelope. I actually have discussed pushing the envelope with people I’ve been coaching before, and it can work well, .

But overall, I think we were talking about how do you lead change in an organization, in a group, in a team? We ended up having a deep discussion about that at the end, which is do you just give up and go and try and find another job? Or do you, be the bull in the China shop and try and smash through? No, the answer’s in the middle, like it is with most things. 

John: Yep, exactly. 

Murray: Be the change you want to see in the world, servant leadership and humble curiosity and things like that. You can’t make anybody do anything unless you’re a dictator. All you can do is try and help change people’s thinking. Try and influence people and a lot of your tools are about that.

John: Yeah, I’ve been thinking a lot about the Trojan horse. I think that’s what I actually do. So that might be my calling, embrace the mess tools that have some layers of depth to them like mandate levels you get in a second, but you could probably spend a day or two thinking about it.

Murray: I’ve been saying for quite a while that 70, 80 percent of our product features aren’t used and you disagreed with me. And I found your argument quite persuasive, which is that you as a product manager and your organisation are making decisions about the product some of those have a negative value some of them have no value and some of them have positive value. Is it 80 20? Probably not. There are features that are hardly ever used that are very important for administration. There are other features, which you just have to do to get through a procurement checklist, even if you think they’re dumb and maybe nobody uses those either, but I really liked the idea of thinking about your product decisions as do they create postive value, no value or negative value and how can we find that out before we commit too heavily to it. And I think this is where, research, continuous discovery, the metrics will help you . So that’s all really good. 

Is there anything you want to comment on? Before we go to socials? 

John: No, it’s been a wonderful conversation. Will anyone listen to it all? Hats off to anyone made it this far. 

Murray: For people who are, going on this journey, what are three books that you would recommend people read?

John: Images of organization by Gareth Morgan. It’s number one. How to measure anything intangibles in business. That’s number two. And, I would say maybe there’s a book by Peter Block called Confronting Our Freedom, Leading a Culture of Chosen Accountability and Belonging. I really liked that. Images of organization is great. Gareth Morgan describes different ways to view an organization as a brain, as a machine as a culture, as a system of domination. As a psychic prison. And then there’s flux and change. That might be the sweet spot for a lot of folks in the agile community. But what you notice when you read that book is oh my God, I’ve tried to stay away from the idea of an organization as a political system. I’ve been biased to a brain and flux and transformation and information moving around the org. And I’m biased away from machine. But I had to accept that I hadn’t leaned in as much to other ways of looking at organizations. 

Murray: Alright, now, where is the best place for people to read your thoughts?

John: I write this blog called The Beautiful Mess. That’s probably the reliable way to get stuff. You could connect with me on LinkedIn, send me a DM. I usually respond to those. We could connect. 

Murray: And is there any way we can help you?

John: Oh, connect back. It wasn’t like a purposeful thing to drift away from the agile community. It just happened. If there’s a conference I could do these events. 

I’m curious about people who are grappling with the current reality. I have this post called the way of ways you should Google it . You’ll see it’s an image and it starts out with emerges from practice, name coin, first books, blog papers, way mindset, manifesto, then the first conference, then passionate early adopters and explosion of patterns and practices, how to books, small consultancies, you are not doing way if posts, certifications, titles, first vendor tool, offerings, vendor fund, conferences, Gartner magic quadrant. Vendor competition heats up, big five service offerings by way to solve problems. Evangelists mourn the state of the way it’s in the lower right hand corner of the image. You should check out the way of ways, but I’m curious how people are grappling with the way of ways in the agile community.

Products not that far behind so maybe the product folks should be a little less cavalier with their gripes about everyone else. Cause they’re not too far behind,

Murray: So what’s the next step after we’re not doing it right if?

John: You’re not doing ways if, is usually what triggers certifications. And also the first way is deadpost. So it’s not far behind. Small consultancies don’t need certification. You only need certification when you’re going big. Cause then you need to get quality control. And usually certification is well meaning in the beginning, but then just becomes a racket. Marty Kagan has his approved coaches. That’s certification. So every comment about don’t certify. The dude certifies. 

I think what we will see though as these organizations become more complex , you’re going to start to see more of an appreciation of an ecosystem approach, like embracing the internal products that exist embracing data as a product internally. So this all kind of works in funny ways. Where you see the most interesting adoption of product practices is within the data and platform and developer experience. That’s the overlap at the moment. 

I don’t think it’s the DevOps community anymore, but the most interesting thinking about socio technical systems, how we’re programming, events, storming. The DDD conference that happened just in Denver recently. I looked at the posts from that and I thought, geez, why weren’t there designers there? Why weren’t there product people there? They’re the one mapping the domains of these companies thinking about architecture. And so I actually think that there is not product is dead, but Hey the team topology stuff, the DDD stuff, all that stuff is answering the question. How the hell is anyone doing this at scale? And so I think that’s a very important consideration. Without the architecture, there is no empowered team. So all this stuff that you need to just, tell teams to be empowered and you’re all set. No, if you’re shipping every six months, you’re not going to test anything. It’s by the grace of God, you’ll get anything shipped anyway. There’s some really interesting things happening at the moment. If we just sit back. 

Shane: Agree with most of that. What I don’t agree with is the move of product into data. it’s incredibly valuable and we should do it. What’s happened though, is data people who never liked going outside their domain are making shit up. We’re taking all our practices and our patterns from the data world and rebadging them as product. And what we’re not doing. Is we’re not going and getting people from the product domain who know how to do product, how to be a product manager, how to do all those things you’ve talked about, and invite them into our domain and say, what can we learn? So we’re basically making shit up and putting the word product after data. Rather than say, how can we adopt practices from product and apply them in our domain to make us better at what we do. 

So there you go. Come into the data domain and bring some product thinking to it because hell, we need it.

John: Stop making every data diagram look like a data pipeline. I was joking with the founder of M particle because every single drawing, none of them has a human in it. It’s all talking about the life of data. Not necessarily the use case it solves for or the person. 

Murray: Well, Thank you very much for your time. We’ve had a long and deep conversation. 

John: Okay, cool. All right.

Murray: Yeah. Really appreciate it.

John: Yeah, my pleasure.