YouSaid · the spoken record

Paul Adams

lines on the record: 98
first: 2023-10-26
most recent: 2023-10-26
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“A hand light is everywhere basically PADAY. It's like Paddy with an extra A. So P A D D A Y, that's everywhere. So Paddy at Gmail at Paddy. That's my kind of handle everywhere. So that's where you can find me. I'd love people to reach out to me, like genuinely learn. I'd love to hear from people who think my AI talk is nonsense. And it's more like a crypto Web3. I'd love to hear people who have alternative opinions and challenge mine. That's how I kind of like to learn and get better. So if people have those opinions, I'd love to hear them. I'd love to talk to them.”
2023-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At least this is what I've heard has so many myths, you just don't really know what's true, but these are the stories I've been told.”
2023-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think they actually use a different recipe, but Brewed there. I think the brewery in the US is somewhere on the East Coast between New York and Eastern Canada. So it's somewhere there. So often the Guinness in New York can be actually pretty good. The Guinness in San Francisco tends to be really bad. I remember talking to someone about this that works in Guinness. One of my friends does a lot of work in Guinness. I think the boat carry the Guinness goes down through the Panama Canal, back up to San Francisco. So you're like, it's 12 weeks old or something.”
2023-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, there is actually. You just need to be near a brewery. So Guinness is a brewery in Nigeria. There's a huge Guinness market in Nigeria.”
2023-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Guinness in Ireland, people talk about this, and like, it's true, the Guinness in Ireland is much, much better for a whole bunch of reasons. It's basically a fresh product and it's brewed here. It's kind of like the way they think about it is it's like milk. Milk goes off, Guinness goes off, Guinness has vested in a few days, older than a few days old, tends to start deteriorating. So Guinness iron is amazing because it's made here. The other thing I think Ireland does really well as fish. Ireland has not had, by the way, the greatest reputation for culinary excellence over the years. I think Irish food in the States in particular is not good. But the fish here is incredible. You can get incredible fish. Norland's obviously an island, so there's a lot of fish.”
2023-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. And sometimes it's hard. I'd never fired anyone before I joined Intercom, for example. I really did not like doing it. And since then, I've done it quite a few times in a bunch of different circumstances and realized it always works out for both sides. And the nicest thing to do is to do the harder thing. You know, it's actually the nicer thing to do. People are like relieved in this example. It's a nicer thing to do. So it can be a complicated one.”
2023-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The biggest one again is so reductive and simple is to be nice to people. I think Being nice goes way further than people really realize. One thing that I've learned again, the hard way through life is you have no idea what's going on in people's lives. No idea. People could have all sorts of really stressful personal stuff going on. And the reason they did the thing and work that you didn't like is because of that. And so I try and think, be nice, you don't know what's going on Like you might learn later, don't act in a way you would regret. I think being nice in life goes far further than most people give a credit for because it's kind of too much of a, I don't know.”
2023-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's in the bottom left, like just covering the bottom, you know, it's like. Because otherwise, if it wasn't there, I wouldn't look at it I make myself look at it. Yeah.”
2023-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The posted on the monitor is a real life hack I found a few years ago. It's like it's kind of dumb in a way. The post's on the monitor, it's in the way you actually”
2023-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I only work on matters most. Stop worrying with things you can't control. It just reduces the temperature. Again, life lessons learned. I send a lot of dumb emails in my past. Red energy. Oh my God, why are they thinking? You wake up in Dublin to a San Francisco email. You're like, oh, God, runner, you know, keyboard. And if your monitor says these two things, you just don't do that. You just take a breath, get a coffee. Come back. Does it really matter, you know?”
2023-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have a posted on my monitor that says only work on what matters most. It's on my monitor to post it. And if something falls off, I have to write it again. Only work on what matters most. And it's amazing. I go into work. Someone emails me and I'm like, oh, God, you know, I'm like only working what matters most. The second one is related is stop worrying about things you can't control. And so I have two of those.”
2023-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Notice it's kind of like maybe cheating, but I go back to a lot of the AI products. I think ChatGPT vision is mind-blowing. I've been playing with Rewind lately. I was a bit late to it. Dez and Kira and a bunch of people here, founders of Intercrime, love rewind, use it and love things amazing. So I'm a bit late to that, but it's just augmented memory. It's kind of like, again, my kind of mind.”
2023-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I'll give you a slightly different answer. I don't really have said any few questions for candidates, and I don't like questions adversely. I don't like questions that rely on memory. Tell me about the last time you did X. Here's an amazing question I got given recently by Alyssa who used to work here. I had to do referral calls. So you're interviewing someone, you want to give them the job and they've got referees. And of course, the referees they have are like the best people that they ever work to and their favorite managers. So this question is, what feedback will I be giving this person in their first performance review? That's an amazing question because the person can't dodge it. You know, there's an answer and it's incredibly enlightening.”
2023-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Most recent is the bear, which I came to late. The reason I actually love the show is because I think it. Somewhat celebrates the grind And I think that's important. I worked in coffee shops a lot when I was younger when I put myself through college and stuff. And like the grind is part of life. It's necessary. The grind is a necessity to get things done and make great things happen sometimes. And I liked that about it. I really liked that about it.”
2023-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, the two books I recommend to everyone always have copies in my office here. It's not how good you are, it's how good you want to be. It's a book by Paul Arden, who has worked in advertising a long time ago. It's an excellent book. It kind of shows people that you feel unlimited potential if you think about it the right way. Everyone does. The second book I recommend to everyone and buy for people and give to them is principles by Ray Dalio. I'm a big fan of Ray Dalio. I think he's incredible. I'm a big believer in principles. A lot of us at Intercom are. I always get those two books and they're totally different. The Paul Iron book is, you can read it in 20 minutes. Principles is like that thick.”
2023-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's interesting and fun to talk about sometimes. Really fascinating. But unless you're like an academic, but if you're working in a company that you're trying to build a software product for people to improve their lives in some small, meaningful way, Like, it doesn't matter. Just use the thing that helps you do that. That's the goal. And use the thing that helps you do that. And that's it.”
2023-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The four forces, which is just like framework out of jobs to be done, the four forces being like different for people, there's different forces when people try and switch product. And some of it's a differentiation table stake stuff, like the attraction of the new solution, the reasons that you might not adopt it habits people have anxieties. Here's another kind of funny story to tell you how much the four forces is really good. Here's a funny story. I was saying earlier that Owen and Daz are trying to convince me to leave Facebook, which I loved at the time, join in to come. They wrote out the four forces for me to join. And then secretly, over a few beers, talk to me and fed me my anxieties. And like, you know, like whatever. Basically worked me on the 4 forces. And I was like, that is, that is genius. That is ingenious. Maybe it's a bit, you know, but it's ingenious.”
2023-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Didn't even give it the thing a name. Someone else named it, I think. And I'm just like, we're just trying to build a great product. So we found it really good in that way. Really simple. And then the other one that we use a lot still here is”
2023-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Coming from talking to Bob, actually, now I think about it. I think it did actually. I think the idea of this idea that you need people who have a lot of energy around the problem. And you kind of have to interview them for that most of the time to feel the energy they have. It's very easy to see if someone's apathetic versus into it. So we've had a pretty good. And we invented this job stories thing kind of by accident. I can't remember exactly what happened, but like. I wrote out this wave of writing a job story basically. Well, we didn't call it a job story. Someone else called it that. We just at the time were like, I can't even remember, you know, there's like a trigger and anyway.”
2023-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's like so many people who spend so much of their energy debating the nuances and peculiarities of one version. Who cares? Like no one cares. Oh, I don't care. They care obviously. Your customers don't care. People you're trying to build the product for don't care. No one cares. That's like a cool intellectual debate. Kind of for me, maybe it's too extreme. It doesn't really have any place in work, you know, like in the work we do. We're just trying to build a great product. And so for us with JavaScript done, it was a really good way of us centering on the customer problem, like focusing on not getting distracted, basing it in research, like good, solid research informed insight that told us the thing people were trying to do. Like, what is the thing people are trying to do? Again, energy. Do they have a lot of energy around it? Maybe the energy thing might have.”
2023-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. I'll be totally honest at the risk of offending people if they listen. We worked with Bob West, who's age years ago, I think Bob's great guy. And we kind of followed that model of jobs to be done more than the ODI, I think is the other school of thought. Anyway, I'll try and say this in a simple way. We found Jobs Fountains to be really good, very, very useful. But in a very simple way, again, back to this idea of simple frameworks in a simple way. Of separately”
2023-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's failed. And why did it fail? Spotify and already had the same market they were solving the same set of problems. Audio was arguably the better product at the time. I don't know if that's true, but arguably the better. I always think Spotify is a product. But the story, they got the story wrong. And so, again, I think all product people, whether you're a designer, product manager, people in research, data science, need to think about the story all the time. Work of marketing, work of product marketing, and like learn about how to explain the As much as how to build the product”
2023-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is really important, as important. And actually, sometimes you'll see like not great products, certainly worse on paper. I'm trying to remember the Spotify competitor back in the day, people were like, Yeah, or one of these where”
2023-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just, I don't know, in my career again, so a bunch of products that were built, there were good products in good markets. They failed, and I couldn't work it out. And eventually I came back to this idea that maybe someone might say Paul, it's marketing. You're talking about marketing. But like story, the story's wrong or the story's missing. And so sometimes it would be a great product in a great market explained in a convoluted way. I see that a lot. I used to see that a lot at Google again. Just explained in a very complicated way over intellectualized. And as a result, people are like, what? What are you talking about? You know, you don't get their attention. And so the story.”
2023-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, yeah, with product market fit, pretty basic, well understood, very important. The way I describe product market fit is you've got to build a right product for the right market. I think, by the way, as an aside, not enough people think about the market side of that equation. A lot of product people don't think about the market side. But for me, it's very simple. The market is the people, the problems they have, and how important the problems are to them. To have a good market, you need a lot of people with the same problem and they need to care a lot about it. Again, back to the Google social stuff, we found a lot of people with the same problem, but they didn't really care. They didn't really care. What they had was fine. So a lot of people with the same problem and a lot of energy around the problem. And the product is the solution to that. So that's the market's the who the product's the what”
2023-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Crossing, it's painful. But if you don't cross it, you'll never know. So if you think you're going up to the boundary, then you stop before it. Turns out it's actually miles over there. So I think with a lot of this stuff, you don't really have a choice. You kind of kind of cross the boundary, feel the pain. Humble enough to realize you didn't get it right and kind of go again Whatever the right course corrective course is.”
2023-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It reminds me to know where the boundary is what I was going to say. It reminds me of a story back to the olden days stories. Remember when I went, I remember at Google, privacy was like really top of mind to the point that it would block decisions, like block product progress, just privacy circular conversations, so many circular conversations, and nothing ever got built or shipped. I worked on a project for a year at Google, and we shipped nothing in the year. Just circular conversations, which killed me at the time. When I went to Facebook, I realized they have a different approach to privacy. Again, I'm not advocating it's necessarily good, it certainly didn't help their brand. But there was kind of an idea that to know where the boundary is, you got to cross it.”
2023-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Talking to people about this before. Sometimes the conclusion of the conversation is something like So, any way to do it. Like you actually can't do it a different way. And so maybe the question is really high up, how high does the pendulum go versus like you got to swing it? And then it's like, how far do you swing it? And for sure, you're right. With AI, we are like, we're actually, we're swinging pretty high. Maybe I overestimated earlier if AI is like in the differentiation camp to kind of mix the frameworks. We're still building a lot of table stakes features too, like building depth into the product. And that's 50-50. I think I mentioned 50-50 earlier. So that's 50-50. So we're not totally swinging it. We're not like, you know, it's swung, but we're also kind of doing the other thing and balancing things out. So I think you probably have to swing it.”
2023-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People have done it before, or people who are specialized. And we hired a bunch of specialists only to realize that they're not adaptable. And in Intercom, we believe in kind of, we have a lot of ambiguity and we lean into the ambiguity. And people who are highly specialized can thrive in big companies, really thrive. They're invaluable employees, but in a fluid startup-y culture with a lot of ambiguity, they can really drown, really struggle. Maybe the middle of this pendulum kind of landing in the middle is let's hire someone who has done a bit of it. And I'm a bit of specialism, not much, but enough to try and figure it out. So we hire a lot of those kind of people today.”
2023-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's good, undesirable state. Do we even know what we're doing? Like, we're just a bunch of random people. Do we know what we're doing? We need to hire some experts. We need to hire some experts. If we're going to go up market, we need to upmarket people who've done it before. So, you know, that was undesirable state. Fix it by hiring people who've done it before. Then we hired loads of people who've done it before. And what they did was brought the culture and ways of working of their prior company to Intercom. And so we totally overcorrected. Didn't work out in a lot of cases. In most cases, it didn't work out because we weren't trying to be a bigger company that already exists. We were trying to be us. So like hiring and building teams was another where we really overcorrected to find out like, okay, it's a balance here. Related to that one, related to hiring one is like generalists and specialists, kind of similar to them.”
2023-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But the temptation is that you overcorrect. And we've done this so many times in so many domains, everything from, okay, we don't have enough differentiation. A year later, oh, wait a minute. Like, we're missing all the table steaks. Okay, one over there. So product building is one. People is another one. Maybe, I don't know, maybe five years into Intercom, we were on this kind of high growth trajectory, really kind of good classic startup before our pricing problems. Kind of We looked around and said none of us have done this before.”
2023-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I actually kind of mentioned an example of it earlier. Differentiation table stakes with swing in the pendulum. So swinging the pendulum means. Take a step back from everyday work life, and you kind of make the observation that something's in an undesirable state. So maybe, whoa, we've all the differentiation in the world, but people can't adopt the product because we've never built any of these table stakes. That's like undesirable. Or we've now built all these table stakes and we've not been investing in differentiation. And actually, we're not that attractive to people because switching product is like a pain and we're not just not attractive to people. We need to like, okay, so this undesirable state. And then so you go and fix it.”
2023-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And hence, kind of, if you're a startup, you need to invest a lot more in differentiation. And then over the years, I think you start to balance the books a bit.”
2023-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're entering some kind of any kind of established category, customer support for us, big established category, massive, a lot of table stakes built up over years, decades. ServiceNow, Service Cloud, Salesforce, Zendask, like decades of table stake feature building. So to play the game, you need a lot of the table stakes unless you have incredible differentiation. So from the early years of Intercom, people just buy us alongside Service Cloud or Zendesk. They just buy us alongside. They're like, this Intercom thing, we were like Messenger first modern messaging and modern UX. They were like, we want that for our customers alongside the big giant bag of table steaks because Intercom doesn't have any of those. Then over the years, we've built the table stakes to a point where, okay, now we can fully play the game and we can people can switch so they can swap Zendesk for Intercom. But it took us years to get there.”
2023-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of 50 50 probably in terms of resources, but it has swung 70 30 in both directions at times. The last piece about it is I think it's really powerful to look at a roadmap or look at a proposed roadmap and ask yourself which of these two things matters more to us, not with us actually to our customers right now. The other thing that we've talked a lot about here internally is if you're a startup,”
2023-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But on the other side, there's a kind of entry requirement or like table stakes to play the game, you got to have a certain amount of things. And so there are table stake features. They're often very boring. They're like real basic stuff, boring stuff, and easy to ignore and easy to not build. And again, a mistake with Intercom maybe over the years is that we were much more attracted to the differentiation and built a lot of that. So we went through different iterations of our roadmap. sometimes like changing over the course of a year or two where we were like all the differentiation to realize that everyone loved it and really wanted to buy but they couldn't because we didn't have the basic report that they needed or we didn't have the basic permission feature that they needed and then the roadmap was built based on those like trading off where do we need more differentiation or trading off whether we need to invest more table stakes and so these days the place of intercom today is like”
2023-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My lesson from a lot of these was we were different and better in these Google projects in ways people didn't care about all sorts of Google projects like Google Wave was an amazingly innovative product that no one really cared about. So be different and better in ways people care about. So that's the attraction. That's like, oh, I want to check out that. That looks cool. I want to check that out. That looks better than what I have today.”
2023-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of like the Kano model to be familiar with that, but It's very simple. It's kind of like, I guess we took the KNO model and tried to make a really crazy simple version of it. Again, I'm a little bit allergic to things like this. I can't even hate myself for bringing up the KNO model. I'm allergic to people over intellectualizing frameworks and like, you know, oh, well, have you seen the new different law of whatever? I'm like, keep things simple, practical, and pragmatic. And then let's all again go back to work and start building the product so that customers can benefit because that's actually all that matters. And so differentiation table stakes, very simple. I think people who adopt a product or buy a product or switch to a product, there's kind of two driving forces. One is the attraction of the new solution. And that's basically differentiation. So what's different and better? But critically, what's different and better in ways that customers care about? Again, back to all the failed projects.”
2023-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People can't understand their bill. So my advice is keep it simple reject so hard to not to like resist the temptation to add extra ways in which you price.”
2023-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The number one thing I would say is keep it simple. Simple. It's so tempting to, like with us, for example, a lot of SaaS products have add-ons where like, hey, we built X and that's like 10 bucks or 100,000, depending on what kind of product you're selling. We built X and that's the price of X. Hey, we've just built Y. Y is awesome. And it's a new thing you can do and unlocks all these new capabilities. People shouldn't get that for free because it's a new thing they didn't have. So let's charge more for Y. That doesn't really work with the other. Okay, let's look at an add-on. Oh, yeah, cool. People just add on. But then later, now you've got people who have the add-on and people who don't. And then you're like, and you add another thing. And so tiering, we've added tiers. We've like, you know, cut with products tiers, add-ons, tearing in the add-on.”
2023-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Price is people's, you know, for some person, they get like 10 units of value. I think that's about $5. Someone else is like, I pay you $5,000 for those 10 units of value. The biggest mistake was a lot of mistakes compounded. And this is an area where I think we were risk averse. We've ended up with too many pricing models. We've built on top of old compared to mistakes. And it took a brave decision to say we're going to start again.”
2023-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We had a principle called align price to value. By the way, I think pricing is incredibly difficult. A lot of the design team who work in pricing here, you know, I say to them hardest design problems I know. Like I'm onboarding is another one, onboarding people into a product is also like people are like, oh, hey, you just design a few steps and it's pretty easy. People follow the steps. Again, like deceptively difficult to design great onboarding. So I think pricing is like deceptively difficult. We had a principle around aligning price to value. People should pay based on the amount of value they get in the product. Easy to say and incredibly hard to do. Value is subjective.”
2023-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Before it is literally that simple, I think. Like we have a rebrand at the moment happening, and that'll be it before, after a moment. We're redesigning our pricing. And then the day that pricing goes live, that'll be it before, after because it was like nothing's the same. And so we need to go back out and talk to people again. Like I'm a big believer in talking, you got to talk to customers. It's the only way. You got to talk, talk, talk, learn, learn, learn. Don't take about the safe face value. Go deeper. And so, you know, a lot of these before after moments, once you've passed the app into the after, you got to start learning, were we right? Were we wrong? What happened? What do people think, you know?”
2023-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The other thing is don't be afraid, maybe I think people are a bit afraid of it. And like, for example, if I started walking around our office here saying, hey, I think we only need two engineers per team going forward. That's probably not really a good idea to do that. And I think in reality, that's not going to be how it plays out. Loads of great studies over the years about how people don't end up losing jobs. The jobs get moved around. And also, you know, for customer support, for example, it's a high attrition job. So people say like, hey, everyone's going to lose their job. A bot's going to take over. It's like maybe some of that will happen, but probably to attrition. Because then like people, someone quit and just didn't get backfilled. So, you know, the doomsday scenarios that I don't think will play out as much. But for sure, like, you know, it's easy to kind of be afraid of it. And I think you kind of have to leave.”
2023-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Also, try and read things that say it's all a load of crap, you know? So, like. It's very easy. I've been guilty of this many times. Back to mistakes you've made. I've been guilty of this many times where I've jumped on a bandwagon and it was all wrong. And the older I get, like the Web3 thing, I'm like, I don't even know what Web3 is. Crypto, I never, I never bought crypto. Maybe I'm wrong about that. But I'm not a bandwagon jumper. But I kind of, maybe it might have been when I was earlier. And I try these days to read the alternative opinion people who are skeptical or I think it's bad. A lot of people think this is terrible for humanity. This technology is going to eat us alive. So I try and balance my optimism. I'm kind of a delusionally optimistic thinker. So I try and balance that with negativity.”
2023-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. It's very hard to, you know, if you're, I don't know if the reporting thing will play out that way, but if you're like a Tableau type company, you've tons of designers who design dashboards and filters and querying type workflow. Like, what do they do? The UI is the box. So it's really hard to get into your head like, we must, if you believe, if you have conviction that we must change really hard.”
2023-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think, again, this is like Han Wavy. Who knows? Maybe that's all done, dead now. And the reporting product of the future is just a box. And the box just goes to the database. And the box is just who is our best sales went last year. January. Okay. Who was our top performing rep in January? Venny. Like the reporting products in the future might look like that. And so project management tools is another one. It was a bunch of products that I think are just outside the most obvious customer support one and yet equally ripe for a newcomer to come with a completely different paradigm and potentially take over.”
2023-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that's true for sure. That's true. Showing people is definitely the easiest way. I think the customer support is definitely that I said Sam Watman's like number one, customer support. So you're like, okay, adapt. Yeah, we adapt our die is kind of our mantra. Adapter die. I think that there are other industries where they're on the same journey. It's just not as obvious. So, for example, reporting software, you know, Tableau or any kind of reporting product, how do they work? Well, they're like the typical kind of like read write app, build dashboards, filtering, querying, kind of hardcore querying, kind of query database, get some numbers, show it in a UI, a lot of thought and care goes into like how you present that data to people, the different types of charts that are appropriate, help people make good decisions ultimately”
2023-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Get the conviction I have without kind of drowning out voices of alternative voices and opinions, which are often valid too.”
2023-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About how maybe all of our roadmap with AI is wrong. Maybe we're like kind of, I don't know if you think are familiar with the Horizons framework, a Horizon 1, 2, and 3. So, like Horizon 1 is kind of the medium, short to medium term, like next 12 months, 12 to 18 months. Horizon 2 being like, hey, what's happening? Whatever, 18 to 36 months out. I think people use different time frames, different horizons. Anyway, we're like in Horizon 1 land. We're like, yeah, and then next year we're going to do this. And he's like, yeah, but two years from now, if this path plays out, everything we're doing now is going to be irrelevant and useless. You're like, okay, you know, and so like those discussions happen and the level of ambiguity is off the charts. So a lot of the challenges have been navigating that ambiguity and helping people”
2023-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source