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

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“An educated guest, a hunch, you know, a lot of it's like kind of the part of business strategy and product strategy that's just hard, it's just kind of, it's like taste. You know, people talk about taste, product taste. Who has product taste? And a lot of it is like it's judgment based on experience. That's all I can say. I don't know. For me personally, I don't know. I lived through the mobile thing pretty closely. Haven't worked at Google on mobile. I lived through that phase. So I can see the same type of thing happening now with bigger. So I'm kind of like using that experience to like go all in. But it's a challenge for people, some people, because they don't have that context or they disagree with it. We've a lot of debate here about the future. You know, Fergot I mentioned earlier, gave myself and a few other people a few of the product leaders. And he gave us like a, I don't know, was it a pitch or what? Plea. 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
“Like any company Intercom is full of diverse opinions about things. And I think with AI, I'm all in. I'm not talking about, I'm all in. I'm leaning forward, the media is coming. I'm sold. I'm way past that point. Also, no one knows like no one knows, and so a lot of the time when we talk internally, like the strong buy-in from Owen, co-founder and CEO, Daz, you know, co-founder, like me, like a lot of the senior leadership team are like, we're in the all income. And so that helps a lot. Of course, if your senior leadership team in the company are all in, of course, then it kind of trickles down. But equally, people sometimes ask some of the kind of hurdles have been like, how do you know? Why are you all in? And I'm like.”
2023-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Try other things like Bard, for example, like Google, Bard is Google's kind of AI search engine. Rewind is another fascinating company. I think it's rewind.ai. Rewind is basically augmented AI for your memory. So you install it on your local machine and it captures everything and remembers everything. It's all local, so there's no privacy issues. And you got to try these things to understand whether it's any good or useful. Where is the boundaries and how does it work and so on. So I'm a believer in that type of thing.”
2023-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, perfect. Yeah, yeah. There definitely is. I'll dig them out. Your question earlier how do you do? Just try a book out a half an hour and just go deep for half an hour and then bookmark a few things, come back to the minute. Like everyone, like, you know, you could be so busy, so many distractions, you just got to have to set aside time.”
2023-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'd love to tell you that it's incredibly structured. I have a great reading list that I get dinner every Sunday morning. It's pretty random. I'm on Twitter, which is now called Xcourse a lot. I follow some people on Twitter. I actually use the recommended feed in Twitter a lot. I think because I interact and look at a lot of AI, I get to see a lot more. So I do that and I kind of do it deliberately to try and generate more stuff. I'll search Twitter as well. I guess loads of cool stuff there. There's some newsletters as well and some people I follow any newsletter. Matt Rickard is one guy who talks a lot about AI. The blogs of companies too, like OpenAI have a pretty good blog, and they write papers and summarize them.”
2023-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, what I've mentioned so far, don't bolt it on. Stay up to date. I mentioned, I feel like I'm behind all the time. It's moving so fast.”
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 we still early there. We're still early. So what we're trying not to do is have the kind of AI inbox team. And they're the only people who work on AI features in the inbox. I think it's much better to have everyone learn about it. By the way, I'm a big believer in generalists. Like a big, big believer in, I mean, I guess my background is like, you know, jack of all trades, master and none is probably how I describe myself. Like I've worked as a researcher, designer, PM. And so I believe in generalists. And so I believe in setting teams up that way. And yes, specialism matters at times. Machine learning for sure is a deep specialism. And in Intercom, we generally much in engineering do much prefer people who learn new things, whether it's like a new coding language or framework or how to design AI interfaces or whatever, get more people being able to do it.”
2023-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're trying not to do that. Don't bolt it on. Don't be like, oh, we'll have a bunch of AI people. And we do have some specialists. But generally speaking, we're trying to have everyone learn 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
“Who can build on the foundational technology that we've been building over the last kind of 12 months or so? So that's kind of one thing. I think a second thing that comes to mind is not to think about it as bolted on. You know, I think some people are still in that camp. Like, again, I go back to the mobile thing. There's just so many direct parallels with it. Like I said earlier, at Google, I worked in the mobile apps team. I worked on mobile Gmail. mobile docs and it was like the mobile team and we were in London we're like hey we're the mobile team in london and meanwhile over in mountain view in california no one cared you know it's like it was like your 20 people we're 200 no one uses this stuff on a phone no we're and again a lot of skepticism no one's going to write docs on a phone seriously you're going to write a document they're going to write a full document on a phone are you crazy you know so um so don't do that”
2023-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It forks. So, some projects are very heavy on that ML team and it needs them, but other projects are more front end. Like the inbox stuff I mentioned earlier, where we have Finn and Fin is kind of working, we've built the underlying technology. Now it's a question of, you know, if you have a human support person answering questions in the inbox, that's like a natural chat kind of conversational interface, pretty straightforward. What happens when there's now like an AI assistant in there? How do they talk and what do they do and when do they interject and how do you represent that in the user experience that feels natural? So that's a really hard design problem. Senator kind of back into like, okay, we have a product team that's like a product manager, a product designer, you know, maybe three, four, maybe five engineers. And they're getting help from the machine learning team. So we now have both setups. And increasingly, we can do more with the latter.”
2023-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ultimately, you need a really great machine learning engineers. That's where it starts. And if you don't have that, then... You're going to find it hard to build truly, really, truly great things. So, like, what OpenAI provide and what Anthropic provide and Claude and everyone, they provide amazing and amazing technology, but you got to build on top of it. If you really want something brilliant, you got to build on top of it. So like we adapted what they build for customer support, maybe someday we need to go build our own LLM that's just for customer support. Maybe I don't know where that will all go. And maybe everyone will have their own LLM for every single business. I don't really know, to be honest. Maybe these companies will provide specialized LLMs. But anyway, that's like kind of the first thing. And of course, these people are in high demand. So you need to invest in building out that function, I think. Really invest in building out the function. So that's what we've been doing. Our kind of like ML team is way bigger than it was and way bigger than it ever has been at Intercom. And then...”
2023-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For sure. It is like the minority report The voice translation thing is another one. I can't remember. Maybe it's in mission impossible, where it can take a voice translate it and translate it in real time. So, you know, in this tech is like, again, just here, where like if I was a native Spanish speaker and couldn't speak English, you and I could still have this podcast. Your voice will be translated in Spanish in real time for me. It's like again, mind blowing.”
2023-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I didn't love a black room in a black room, yeah, and the tech has come on so they can analyze your face and build a 3D model. It's really good, like really, really close. So you can imagine that's going to get better based on the trajectory of that technology, it's going to get better. And so the voice thing and the face thing means both of those things are almost indistinguishable from a real person. And AI will be able to ingest all the things people say and do. And when people die, it'll be able to replicate that person. And so there's an afterlife. Hey, you know, like your parent dies and you can still talk to them. And the weirdest thing, maybe it's not good for people. I don't know. But that tech is like just around the corner, you know, and the AI can kind of like question my employment's mind-blowing.”
2023-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Seven years to be a radiologist, and then you're just kind of just into the job AI, it seems, is already better at it. So it's already better at it, and it can ingest every x-ray ever made. Like no human can ever read and think about and synthesize every extra ever made. So, of course, it's better. And then you're like, okay, what happens now? I guess the whole job changes. Radiologists will not take x-ray. Well, I guess it might take them, but they won't analyze them for sure. They'll look at what AI says, check that it's right. And then it's like kind of bedside manner time, like, you know, tell the patient to maybe tell them what kind of course. So like the job just fundamentally changes. And by the way, that could be amazing. Here in Ireland, we have like long queues for hospitals, epic waiting lists for people getting x-rays. So like, this is a really good thing possibly for people. Here's the craziest one I have. AI can listen to your voice and copy it. So it can say things and it sounds exactly like you. And it's really, really good. Like almost indistinguishable people like, that sounds like Paul. And so I mentioned that the metaverse earlier, I don't know if you saw Zuck talked to Lex Friedman. Do that.”
2023-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like here at Inchcom, we have a kind of a one to five ratio. So, like a PM has about five engineers on a team. And you're looking at this thing write in code and you're like, Happens next, you know, like do we need as many engineers or will their role change and they'll start in different types of things like reviewing code instead of writing code? So that kind of blew my mind. And then the visual stuff, like I mentioned earlier, I think the visual thing was bigger than the original one. It can parse imagery and like, you know, it can help you see the world. You take a photo of your bike and say, hey, what's wrong? And I'll tell you what's wrong, how to fix it. You can be traveling, take photos of stuff. It's in a different language. It's like etched in stone on a like 12th century cathedral. You're like, what does that say? And it'll tell you what it says. Like it's just like do that, you know, this is when I'm actually repeating most people these days. Here in Ireland, if you want to be a radiologist, you know, so like study x-rays and tell people what's wrong and so on and so forth. It's seven years training to learn that learn that skill.”
2023-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of orchestration, a lot of teaching it, and then ChatGPT showed up and it was like, oh, it can do it by itself. It gets it wrong sometimes, but so do people. People get the question wrong too. It's kind of as good as a person nearly for a lot of these basic things. So that blew my mind. And then that was just, oh, I can answer questions. But then you're like, it can reason. There's actually like a debate about whether is this reasoning or deduction, but it can work things out. I'm not one for going down into these like really philosophical things. Like I'm like, we just need to build up. Let's go back building the product or whatever. But it can work things out. And that blew my mind. And like we fed a whole bunch of, we fed ChatGPT and other companies too. Like we played other LLMs and so on. It can work things out. And that was kind of mind-blowing. Then you can see it doing things like writing code. And I was like, wow, it's really good at writing code. What does that mean? And then you start thinking.”
2023-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I kind of go back to that before after thing. So ChatGPT, the first version of ChatGPT was a before after, where we had built, like we've been working, like I said, in this space, we've had machine learning team for a long time. The way our machine learning thing worked before ChatGPT was there's a lot of manual setup, like a customer support manager would have to orchestrate the bot and teach it what to say and.”
2023-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With it, they can answer up to 50, 60, 70 percent of their inbound questions with Finn. So we've some customers who see huge success, but it's early. And so has it transformed our business financially? Not yet. It's not like this kind of fast-growing startups, if you think of intercommas or like AI intercommas, I guess a new startup, even though we're 900 people, you know, the kind of growth curve you're looking for this kind of exponential curve as opposed to like big public company kind of linear growth curve. With the exponential one, it takes a while. The first kind of year, two years is to like bottom of that. And so I think we're still in the like trying to figure out exactly what's going on, trying to talk to educate people. But, you know, we have enough evidence to believe it's the future for sure.”
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 very early, honestly, to be able to answer that properly, and it depends what you measure as success. So again, there's a lot of hype and buzz with AI. So if you're measuring it by interest, it's a huge success. A lot of people, like our target customers, customer support, our customer support manager leader. And so they're like very curious. They're like, does it actually work? Does a little bit, again, back to the earlier thing of like, there's so much hype, there's a bit of skepticism around it. Does it actually work? Is it as good as a person? Hey, and you know, like in customer support, people who tend to work in that role are typically very high empathy care a lot about people. And so they're like, but is it as good as a person? Is it nice, friendly? Like, does it understand humanity? So there's a lot of curiosity and a lot of interest. And a lot of people trying it. We have some customers who are hugely successful.”
2023-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The role, the teams. Loads of cool stuff, you know, like new types of jobs for people, like conversation designers, a job we have where you design the conversations that Finn does our manages. So anyway, that's what Finn is. Finn has expanded. So Finn is now also in our Intercom inbox, the place that people answer queries, customer spoke queries. And now Finn's in there too, helping the support reps, like suggesting answers for them to use or helping them rephrase things. So it's now augmenting people as well as answering questions by itself.”
2023-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Finn is first and foremost an AI chatbot. So if you think about customer service, people have questions for a business and historically that was mostly email and phone and mostly ticketing based. So you'd file a ticket. A lot of do not reply email and kind of so on. And then came along conversational customer support, which is just basic messaging, like WhatsApp or iMessage I mentioned earlier. Now there's like bot first experiences and Finn is an AI chatbot. AI first chat bot first. So the first line of defense for a customer support team is Finn, not a person. And so it fundamentally changes. And Finn can do the results who seem to finn are like mind-blown. Our biggest challenge is actually trying to help customer support teams think about organizational change. You know, it's not like the tech is like way ahead. It's actually like people wrapping their heads around what this means for.”
2023-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we did. We totally changed how we think, how we work. And we just went kind of heads down and built a product called Fin. We built other things first. Actually, Finn came later, I think about it. But we just went, we kind of went all in on it. It was a little bit of a bet the farm kind of mindset. So we've done it. I think other companies like Google with Bard have to do it, you know, and maybe they were a little bit slow, but it's so early in this tech cycle that I think they're fine. So, you know, yeah, you just have to, we did. It was hard, but we had to do it.”
2023-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yeah. I'll give you Intercom first. Again, this date's kind of, I think it was never 28, like etched in our head. We have Fergo, who is our head of machine learning. And Fergo just turns around that day and he's like, okay, then he tweeted something, actually. He had a tweet that day that was like, this is it. This is the time. This is the moment. This is the before after. I actually often talk about people, there's a little framework I have, like before after moments. This is a before after moment. There was before and that is after and like everything has changed. So we literally ripped up our strategy almost entirely and started again, like from first principles and said, okay, why do people use Intercom? You know, Intercom is a customer support product. And then very soon after that, Sam Altman, who's the founder of OpenAI, said, hey, one of the first industries that's going to be disrupted is customer service.”
2023-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I changed my flight. Change my flight to Tuesday, right? It can do things like that. And so it can do a lot of things. It can build rules. I think any product that has any kind of workflow in it, which is almost all B2B SaaS products. Any product that has multimedia in it, they're in the media line or whatever. I don't know if this metaphor is working, but the media is coming and they're in its path. And so for a lot of these products that you just need to look at what AI can do. And then for some of it, it'll be like kind of replacement. AI will replace, it'll just do it. And another place is it'll be augmentation. It'll augment. It'll help people as a co-pilot ideas that are going around. But yeah, I think that you got to map your product and what AI can do and what it will be able to do and then ask yourself, okay, what are we going to do?”
2023-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I can give you like a list. It can write, it can summarize text, it can write text, it can answer queries, it can find facts, it can scan text, it can scan images, it can listen to your voice and repeat it. It can take actions. That's the thing the next big thing coming. It can take actions, actually do things. It could like, hey, AI, whatever the AI is called.”
2023-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Get sidetracked by the technology for sure. And I do. I just mentioned, hey, going out for dinner and taking a photo of my food. You can get sidetracked by the tech. And some of it's really cool. I wouldn't start there. I'd start with the thing your product does. Like what's the core premise behind it? Why do people use it? What problem is it solved for them? That kind of thing. And then ask the question. So go back to basics. Okay, what is my product for? And why do people love it? And then ask, can AI do that? And for a lot, the answer is going to be yes, it can. For some, it can partially do it. And maybe for others, it can't do that, at least not yet. And the types of things, you know, so you kind of need to mack like what your product does against what AI can do. And like AI can do a lot. It can write.”
2023-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Coming or not, you know, it's not everything is. And if so, for some, I think they require a kind of a foundational strategic change. Others, it might be less so. But I think that's actually the headspace that I think people need to be in.”
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 harder for sure. It's harder because Yeah, and a lot of the tech is invisible. A lot of the things, like we have a machine learning team, we've had on here for a long time. So we've been working in the space for quite some time, but it's funny, even if you go back like 18 months, I think if I was on your podcast 18 months ago and you said to me, like, hey, what do you think about AI? I would have said something like, it's not real. Machine learning is real. Let's talk about that. So things change. And my perception of it's changed. But a lot of the improvements are kind of like behind the scenes. There were large language models or different types of things people are building in the background of infrastructure. So I don't know what it looks like to design mobile mockups that are like AI mockups. But I do think that people need to start really thinking strategically. Maybe it's just not a mock-up stage, but start to think really strategically about their product and whether it's in the line of the media order.”
2023-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Anyway, you got to try it. You just got to try it. So, like, my advice people is you've got to try it, you've got to set aside the time, or it will pass you by. It does remind me of the mobile, the kind of mobile wave about a decade ago. Again, I was at Google at the time. I was working in the mobile team, so I guess it was my job to stay on top of things. But at that time, some companies like Facebook went all in on it, maybe a bit late, but they eventually made the brave decision. And I think if people don't explore AI properly, it will leave them behind.”
2023-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where you can take photos and you have the mobile app. And I go out for dinner last Friday night with my wife. I try not to take work to dinner with my wife. But I wanted to try it. And I took some photos of her food. And like, you know, can do all sorts of crazy stuff, like tell you how healthy the meal is or whatever.”
2023-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The advice I have for people, and the advice I have for myself, I'm in that too. Like, I wake up every day to too many emails and Slack chats and, you know, people knocking on my door and my desk and all kind of things. So this is a challenge for me too. You just have to take the time. Like there's just no other way for me. And that to me doesn't mean, you know, it's about priorities. It doesn't mean that you need to work crazy hours. I don't believe in working crazy hours. I don't know what hours I work. I don't have 50 hours a week, maybe. I think beyond that, you start to make bad decisions and things like that. You get tired. I need to live the rest of your life. Like you got to put it into your day, you know, whether that's like setting aside dedicated time to read. Reading is the thing. You got to read. You got to stay up to date and you got to play with things and try things if you don't have chat GPT, if you don't have like a kind of a, I can't remember if it's a pro licenser or whatever. But if you haven't upgraded to get access to things like GPT 4 Vision.”
2023-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think that's where a lot of people might be, where the height was so much hype. It was so noisy and still is a little bit so noisy that you kind of tune it out a little bit. And some people have kind of fallen into that camp. I'm all in in the other camp. This is going to radically transform society. And it kind of like blows my mind even seeing new types of things that come out like ChatGPT vision just came out recently and like just seeing the things that people can do with it. And we're like just scratching the surface still. So we're all in for sure.”
2023-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So there's definitely, I think, a lot of skepticism, or maybe cynicism around it. And I can understand why. You know, the other things didn't really pan out. No, the metaverse is kind of coming back. And I kind of think about, I'm trying to remember there's a lot of the law where you have the hype and then the trough of disillusionment and then you kind of come out the other side.”
2023-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The ChatGPT launch November 29th, I think last year. Ever since that day, I literally wake up every day thinking about AI pretty much. And I read as much as possible and still feel like I'm way behind in it. I think for me, like when I talk to people about AI, people typically fall into one of two camps. You're either all in, like really, truly all in. This is a meteor coming towards you. bigger than mobile as a kind of technology shift as big as the internet. Maybe it's bigger than the internet itself as a kind of technology shift, the way it'll shape society. So like I'm all in. I'm like, I've gone over the hill or whatever. I'm over the other side. And so there's people in that camp. And then I think there's people in another camp, which is, I've heard this before, it's hype. Like, you know, last year it was crypto, it was Web3, like none of those things worked out. It was the metaverse.”
2023-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, under the trade off with quality that people really struggle with, we've high standards of ourselves. A lot of intercom comes from a kind of design founder background. We value the craft a lot. We never want to be embarrassed by what we ship. So there's a real tension there, a real trade-off where people have these high standards, which we encourage. And we encourage people to ship fast and learn and make mistakes. It's a constant kind of tension that we're navigating.”
2023-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't get as excited about incremental things. No, I haven't said that. Of course, a place for that too, especially as companies get bigger. But I get excited about big bets. And if you make big bets, you're going to get a lot of it wrong. So a lot of the principles that we built here at Intercom or in building software, like we have a principle called ship to learn. And we've actually changed it since over on the wall here. Ship fast, ship early, ship often is what it says now. You say ship to learn. Ship fast, ship early, ship often. It's like in that idea is the idea of failure. You know, it's not going to go right. And it's going to go wrong more often than not. But if you ship early and fast and learn fast, you can change fast and you can improve fast. And that's kind of how that's the kind of culture that we, as much as possible, try to embrace and teach people. But it's much easier said than done.”
2023-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very, very still, it still is, you know, like I've personally failed so many times. There are two stories and the Google one is like long, deep, deep tentacles. They're two stories. I failed a ton of times. At Intercom, I remember when I was at Facebook, I was very happy. I knew Onendes, who the co-founders of Intercom. And they're trying to persuade me to join Intercom. We were like, it was like 10-person company at the time. But Owen said something to me at that time, which has stuck at me ever since. He said, you know, at Facebook, you can design the product, but at Intercom, you can design the company. And that was extremely appealing to me, like a great pitch. He's like, just design the company with us that you want to work in. And so part of that was a company that embraces failure, that says it's okay to try things. I'm a big believer in like big bets, high risk, high reward.”
2023-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, when I left, Google kind of assumed that I was one of the spies. I was quarantined when I told them I was leaving. They forensically analyzed my laptop, like all sorts of stuff like that. So it was pretty intense. Looking back, I can understand why that happened. But the root cause for me is that the project has been run from a place of fear, competitive fear, which I don't think leads to good things.”
2023-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, Midway. I'm stressed at even telling you about it. The project hadn't been launched, it was still under wraps. It was highly confidential. Google had done a lot of things at the time that were the first for them. I don't know if they've done them since, but things like everyone worked in Google+ was sent to a different building. That building had a different key card. If you didn't work in Google+, you could not get in. All sorts of kind of countercultural things at the time. As a result, there was a lot of antagonism internally for Google+. And so when I left in the middle of the project, kind of leaving with all of the plans in my head to the enemy, some people saw me as a trader, understandably. Other people thought I was enlightened, you know, fancy you talked to. But it was, like, it was the right thing for me to do. But at the time, you know, it was a hard thing to do.”
2023-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For me personally, Facebook is amazing, an amazing place at the time and exciting, and they were trying to do things for the other reasons, the kind of good reasons. Let's build an amazing product for people”
2023-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so we used to do is what I used to do with people was map out their social network, all the people in it, their family, their friends, how they communicate. We'd map on all the channels. We'd talk about what worked well, what didn't. We did this with dozens and dozens of people over the course maybe 18 months. And the same pattern emerged every single time, which was people need way better ways to communicate with small groups of family and friends. And I kind of look back now and go like, WhatsApp, you know, or like it may be like iMessage if everyone's on Apple, but like really obvious in hindsight. But at the time, not obvious. And so we kind of tried to build a product around that called Google+. But again, it was kind of motivated from the wrong place. And so halfway through the research that I'd kind of done, all this research had been made public through a conference talk and suck. And Facebook noticed got in touch. One thing led to another and I left and joined Facebook, which was an amazing thing.”
2023-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Incredible product, one of my favorite products. I think one of the best products ever made, they're building Android. I was in the mobile team and the mobile apps team at the time. The Android came out. So I'm incredibly good product. So I just happened to be in the social side, which wasn't as good. And yeah, Google Buzz is kind of a privacy disaster. And Google Plus, similar. And so kind of halfway through I kind of published research about groups and how I've done a ton of research. An interesting kind of side note there is at the time I was been asked, I was working in the research in the UX team as a researcher. I was been asked to do a lot of tactical research, like usability study type stuff. Like, can people use these products? And I ended up doing a lot of formative research as well in the same session. I'd kind of say to the team, like, hey, I'll do the research. I'll answer your questions. But also, I'm going to do this other thing. And I'm going to take 20 minutes doing that.”
2023-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very afraid of the existential threat posed by Facebook. Facebook were very confident they could pull off some kind of like new social advertising unit that would be like an AdWords or something like that that would like destroy Google's revenue, eat them from the inside out. And so being there at the time was fascinating and moving between the two companies. At Google, I worked on a lot of failed social projects, like you mentioned. Google Buzz, then later Google+. I think a lot of the motivation for those projects came from a place of fear. You know, it didn't come from a place of let's make a great product for people. That's like really understand the things people struggle with when communicating with family and friends. That's really, really try and create something wonderful. It came from a place of fear. And so during those times, I kind of learned, I think, how not to lead in places. And by the way, I should say, you know, at the time in Google, there was other things happening that were amazing. Like Google were building Google Maps.”
2023-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, similar to the kind of like, you know, walking off stage thing, you live and learn. I was at Google for four years and I was on Facebook for kind of two and a half years or so. And in both of those companies, this is at the height of the social.”
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 it'll happen kind of organically, I guess, or very naturally, you know. But yeah, ever since then, every time I walk out onto a conference talk stage still today, I ask myself, I have this tiny doubt in the back of my head. Like, it's never happened since. But yeah, I think you have to go with it, with these things, you know, like when life kind of throws you these whatever curveballs, you have got to kind of adapt. And it's not that big a deal. None of these things are that big a deal at the end of the day. You know, you kind of move on, live and learn. Yeah, but I still hope it doesn't happen again.”
2023-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I just froze. I couldn't remember what I was supposed to say. It was the first ever time in my life I'd rehearsed a talk word for word. Usually I have talking points and I'm ad lib and things get mixed around and it's kind of informal. This was like media trained. Like don't do not say the wrong thing kind of talk. And I just could not remember what to say. I had some version of a panic attack, walked off stage. I was still miced up, cursed. Everyone started laughing. I was like, geez, are they laughing at me? You know, oh my God, this is, but I can manage to turn around. I walked back out. I'd kind of been disarmed internally in my head and the rest of it went well, but it was, and I was famous that night, you know, out in Cannes afterwards, like on the whatever, the seafront, it's just like Rose everywhere. And yeah, I was famous and infamous for my performance.”
2023-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some things that happen in work are very member at the time. They don't really scar you. This goes in the book, it's scarred for life. Yeah, it's good a long story short. I was at Facebook just over a decade ago, loved it at the time. I think it was a great place to be at the time. And basically San Francisco, I did a lot of talks for Facebook internally and externally. Facebook had a keynote slot. Always have a keynote slot at Cannes, the world's biggest advertising festival. And the year prior Zuck had been interviewed. He was the speaker. He'd been interviewed, gotten a hard time on privacy. It didn't go well as well as they'd hoped. So the next year they asked me to do it. Maybe it was the Irish accent, you know, that made the offer come my way. And yeah, I got out and spent the stage. The world's biggest advertising stage. And I'd say I was like three, four minutes into the talk. A talk I'd given, a very similar talk when I'd given lots of times.”
2023-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And this is a meteor coming towards you. This is going to radically transform society. And I think if people don't explore AI properly, it will leave them behind. I'd start with the thing your product does. What's the core premise behind it? Why do people use it? What problem does it solve for them, that kind of thing? So go back to basics and then ask, can AI do that? And for a lot, the answer is going to be yes, it can. For some, it might be, it can partially do it. And then maybe for others, it can't do that, at least not yet. And then for some of it, it'll be like kind of replacement. AI would replace, it'll just do it. And other places will be augmentation. It'll augment. It'll help people. But yeah, I think that you got to match your product and what AI can do and what it will be able to do and then ask yourself, okay, what are we going to do?”
2023-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source