YouSaid · the spoken record

Shaun Clowes

lines on the record: 88
first: 2024-12-29
most recent: 2024-12-29
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Sure, yeah. So, my reforge courses, you can check them all out at reforge.com, as you mentioned, the retention engagement course and the data from product managers course. So love to see folks get some value from that. Lots of people have been through those courses already. And I really get a lot of value from it. But yes, like I said, one of my goals is to help all of us be better product people. I think our leverage could be massive. Where you can get in touch with me, obviously LinkedIn, but also Sean M. Claus on X, if you want to get in touch. And in terms of being useful to me, I mean, broadly speaking, I'm always open to new ideas. Like if people have ideas about how to do better B2B P or G, better B2B product-led sales, for example, better ways of going about distribution and product-led sales and product-led growth inside enterprise companies. Hey, I'm open to learn myself. We're all in one big journey, learning how to do this better.”
2024-12-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Why great AI products are all about the data | Shaun Clowes (CPO Confluent, ex-Salesforce, Atlassian) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, Sydney's a really beautiful city, and it's kind of famous for its beaches, and it's basically a metropolitan city. People probably be very surprised when you visit it. It's a very big city, very metropolitan, a little bit like New York, but New York was really beautiful beaches. If you want to think about it that way, it's kind of crazy. But there's actually a ton of really cool nature and beautiful things all around Sydney. And so if you want to do something off the beaten path, you can actually go to, there's an area called the Blue Mountains, which is like an hour and a half drive from Sydney, and you can have sail down a waterfall, which is, well, actually firstly you go canyoning through a canyon full of water, and then you upsail of waterfall at the end. And if you're looking for just a really beautiful, fun kind of adventure-like thing, an hour and a bit away from a massive metropolitan city, that's my sort of happy place, like really beautiful outdoors stuff while also next to a beautiful city.”
2024-12-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Why great AI products are all about the data | Shaun Clowes (CPO Confluent, ex-Salesforce, Atlassian) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so I've realized that really being able to influence people, it doesn't matter about whether or not you're right or whether or not you're wrong. And at the end of the day, it's first about trust and about relationships and caring about what each other's outcomes are, what their incentives are, and all good things sit on top of that. Once you have those kind of foundations, then you can build really good partnerships. And that's where good progress comes from.”
2024-12-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Why great AI products are all about the data | Shaun Clowes (CPO Confluent, ex-Salesforce, Atlassian) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think about this one a lot. When I started off in my career, I was an engineer's engineer. I used to very much about technical correctness and what computers were capable of and kind of technical righteousness, you know, the right answer rather than there is only one right answer and whatever. And so long we did way of saying that I often think about this phrase, which is people don't care what you know until they know that you care.”
2024-12-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Why great AI products are all about the data | Shaun Clowes (CPO Confluent, ex-Salesforce, Atlassian) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Searches all of our organization's knowledge. So the thing you were just saying before, you're like, you know, what does ASP mean? If I had that in a meeting, I'd just open my new tab, it'd automatically take over my new tab, or what does AST mean? And it will summarize back to me what AST means, and it will give me a link to all the documents inside our company that just grab what AST means. And then it will tell me who the expert in ASP at our company is. It's like just it's like having a second brain. It's like an insanely cool kind of organization search thing.”
2024-12-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Why great AI products are all about the data | Shaun Clowes (CPO Confluent, ex-Salesforce, Atlassian) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, this one, some of your listeners might be using it, but Glean is a pretty well known startup now. They recently raised a ton of money. We've been using Glean at Confluent for a long time. And it's just amazing. It's just amazing. I can't describe how good it is. And I don't say this lightly because, you know, I think search, like business search is probably one of the hardest problems in computing, actually. Getting it right is one of the hardest problems in computing. Amazing. Not often I use a product and I'm like, this thing is like 10 times better than anything that's come before it. It's one of those for me.”
2024-12-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Why great AI products are all about the data | Shaun Clowes (CPO Confluent, ex-Salesforce, Atlassian) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So weird in the first episode, I'm like, what is this show? It's not even clear what time it's set in, and it's very weird. It's really cool.”
2024-12-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Why great AI products are all about the data | Shaun Clowes (CPO Confluent, ex-Salesforce, Atlassian) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've been watching that. Yeah, it's really funny. I really like that. It's so ridiculous, but very funny. So I like that.”
2024-12-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Why great AI products are all about the data | Shaun Clowes (CPO Confluent, ex-Salesforce, Atlassian) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm watching a program. I don't get to watch very much TV mostly at night. I like to watch things that are extremely light that just don't at all inspire any element of stress and that are very short. So I'm basically short and funny is basically my thing. And there's a new program on Netflix. I think it's called Detroiters.”
2024-12-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Why great AI products are all about the data | Shaun Clowes (CPO Confluent, ex-Salesforce, Atlassian) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, they're oldies but goodies. It's probably going to be the lean startup that I still find actually really good. And the kind of key lessons in there, I still think are very applicable to a lot of people, particularly the cohort analysis bit, which for some reason I still don't see people do anywhere near enough cohort analysis. So there you go. That's my little tip. And then inspired how to build products that people love by Marty Kagan and the Silicon Valley product group. That's an oldie but a goody think, you know, it's got a lot of the key lessons of product management in that, even though it's been around for a long time.”
2024-12-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Why great AI products are all about the data | Shaun Clowes (CPO Confluent, ex-Salesforce, Atlassian) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“787fold available data, you have waited far too long, and that's really, I've always found that very insightful and it relates a little bit to what we're talking about about data earlier. But at the end of the day, we get paid in product management to make decisions, good decisions, paid to make good decisions that will deliver business benefit. And a decision with too little data is fatal, a decision that takes too long and collects too much data is also fatal. So like everything, it's about trying to find the balance of all of these different things to try and deliver business advantage.”
2024-12-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Why great AI products are all about the data | Shaun Clowes (CPO Confluent, ex-Salesforce, Atlassian) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A couple of different things that I think sometimes well understood, but just repeating them, I guess, because they're very valuable to me. One is that if you let your calendar rule you, then nothing good will happen. I know people talk about that a lot, but it's surprisingly common in product management in particular that people end up ruled by their calendar. And so it's related to that whole, look at, spend 80% of your time thinking about things going on outside the business. Easy said, very hard to do. And if you don't do it, no one's going to do it for you. And so it's really hard to be successful unless you find a way to force that to happen. So I repeat that. Kind of also somebody said this to me and I never actually looked up the quote, but apparently Colin Powell said that if you're making a decision with less than 30% of the available data, you're making a big mistake. If you're making a decision only after you have seventy percent, it was either 70% or 77%, I can't remember the exact number.”
2024-12-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Why great AI products are all about the data | Shaun Clowes (CPO Confluent, ex-Salesforce, Atlassian) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Isn't that amazing, right? You know, it doesn't mean it's permanently fatal, but asking that question and kind of going through that reckoning turns out they came out came out stronger.”
2024-12-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Why great AI products are all about the data | Shaun Clowes (CPO Confluent, ex-Salesforce, Atlassian) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think if I could do it differently, I might not have necessarily been able to 100% change the decision, but I should have tried. I mean, it was pretty obvious after six months this thing was a bit of a zombie product walking. The least I could have done is said this thing is that we could have called it that way earlier, but instead we proceeded for another year and a half investing in it. And so that's the bit that makes me kind of feel like a real bummer about it.”
2024-12-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Why great AI products are all about the data | Shaun Clowes (CPO Confluent, ex-Salesforce, Atlassian) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was obvious, and we should have been able to call a spade a spade, and I guess speak truth to power. But instead, it kind of got through to the keeper and turned out to be a real accidental drain on resources for years and just a big mistake.”
2024-12-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Why great AI products are all about the data | Shaun Clowes (CPO Confluent, ex-Salesforce, Atlassian) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In hindsight, being in that business, and I feel really bad because, again, good idea, wrong company. And at the end of the day, we launched the product. We actually kept the product in market for two years. And the final straw was weird. The final straw was actually when a customer finally wanted to pay for it. It had been in a market for two years, and we found ourselves with a customer who wanted to pay millions of dollars for it. They were ready to sign on the dotted line. And that was actually the moment we decided to kill the product because if anybody, if this person signs this piece of paper, we are stuck with this forever. This one customer will be bound by contracts for however long or whatever. So we actually ended up killing it at the moment after two years of failure when kind of somebody wanted to pay us money for it. And I look back on that and I'm just like, man, that was a really big. I feel really bad because I'm like, it should have been obvious. It should have been...”
2024-12-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Why great AI products are all about the data | Shaun Clowes (CPO Confluent, ex-Salesforce, Atlassian) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That was one of those products that in hindsight should have been really obvious it was going to fail. But for some reason we were all blinded by the potential. It was a product that was basically to measure the environmental impact of your company and to help you reduce the environmental impact of your company by doing, think about it as a power management, building power management, managing the power draw of computers, managing the power drawer of AC and all of that stuff. That was division. Basically, it's like a kind of a manager environmental impact of your business. Kind of the idea was pretty cool at the time. And also it was the right time for that. And it's still a thing. It's still an area of active research and investment or whatever. But it was like one of those things, talk about the wrong company, wrong plays, wrong time, wrong distribution. Like we had literally no right to win, no right to play, like just absolutely no business.”
2024-12-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Why great AI products are all about the data | Shaun Clowes (CPO Confluent, ex-Salesforce, Atlassian) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, no, no, that was precious, but very bad. Yeah, you know, the one I like to talk about, I wasn't directly responsible for it, but I feel like responsible for it. I was at a company and we launched a product.”
2024-12-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Why great AI products are all about the data | Shaun Clowes (CPO Confluent, ex-Salesforce, Atlassian) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a lot of things that didn't go exactly to plan any very early on in my career. I was a still a developer and I accidentally deleted one of the core systems of the company that I was working at. So that's going to go down in infamy. But luckily that one's far in the rearview mirror.”
2024-12-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Why great AI products are all about the data | Shaun Clowes (CPO Confluent, ex-Salesforce, Atlassian) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At times, easily the best, and it's both, and it can be both. And so it's hard for me to think about what, you know, if I think about the things at a thin section of what I'm good at and are valuable to the world, product management is a pretty fun one to do, and it's different every day. So I think we're pretty privileged for those of you who listen, I mean, obviously your podcast reaches a lot of product people. I think we're pretty privileged to be able to operate at that intersection, but it's not easy because you've got to show value. It's like it's a very complicated job to show value in and to demonstrate value to the world. And it's constantly being attacked, like you mentioned, but it's still amazing. Like when it all goes right, when a product is very successful in the market, it's hard to describe the joy you get from that.”
2024-12-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Why great AI products are all about the data | Shaun Clowes (CPO Confluent, ex-Salesforce, Atlassian) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or whatever is really just another stage. At that point, it will be okay. Well, now, what do I do? Like, what do I do with my life? And so that was why I said earlier that at the end of the day, product management is at times the worst job in the world.”
2024-12-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Why great AI products are all about the data | Shaun Clowes (CPO Confluent, ex-Salesforce, Atlassian) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is there, oh, you mean like you've got everything collectable of protein? Yeah, I was working with somebody at Salesforce and he was like a really, he'd been there a long time, very, very, very successful person, like honestly, you know, didn't need to work anymore. And he said something that I found really useful. He's like, well, now I'm at the point of my life where I want to work at the intersection of things that I am good at and things that will be valuable to the company to do. So basically, like, it feels like the reward of completing your Ingo card is actually to just get to spend more time doing things that are leverage that you enjoy and that are high leverage. And so that seems like a good outcome to me. It's not as though you're going to, I don't think most people are going to work and hopefully have some sort of great financial outcome and then go, well, that's it. I'm picking up thumps, I'm retiring. I think for most people, achieving some sort of financial outcome or some sort of independence.”
2024-12-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Why great AI products are all about the data | Shaun Clowes (CPO Confluent, ex-Salesforce, Atlassian) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Scenario is I've learned something new that I will never use, which at least that made my brain slightly more agile. I don't know, like there must be some potential benefit of that. But the very best case scenario is that when I least suspect it, at some point in the future, it will turn out to be the thing that mats. Like it will be the tool that I need when I'm facing some important problem. And I will be like, oh my God, this was worth every cent. And so if you think about it on an ROI basis doing things that aren't in your wheelhouse, like that aren't the things directly in front of you, the ROI can really be outlandish. Like it can be off the charts, great. But I guess it's speculative because you don't know you're going to need it tomorrow. You don't know if it's going to be something that's going to be a regular tool to use.”
2024-12-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Why great AI products are all about the data | Shaun Clowes (CPO Confluent, ex-Salesforce, Atlassian) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's interesting because people used to talk about people who were T-shaped or whatever, and I've never really loved the analogy because it's more like people are scribble-shaped. Like, I mean, like, there's the really best people you've worked with. They're more like scribbles than they are T-shaped. Because, of course, you want to be horizontally capable. So you want to be broad. And you do want to be deep. You actually want to be deep in way more than one thing. Now, obviously, when I say deep, I don't mean like I'm not able to do the job of our finance function all day every day, but I'm 100% good enough to go three clicks below, like the simple financial analysis. Because I want to and because it's partly, like, it matters. It's important to be able to do that. And so maybe a different way to think about that bingo card is I've really regretted going deep in something that isn't quite my job. Like I've really regretted it. Like the worst case scenario.”
2024-12-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Why great AI products are all about the data | Shaun Clowes (CPO Confluent, ex-Salesforce, Atlassian) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The type of professional I want to be is that type of person, the type of person who can contribute to the whole company in all sorts of ways, doesn't spend all of their time in everybody else's business, but understands the business and has the mental horsepower and the experience to be dangerous in all sorts of, and I mean that in a compliment way. I don't mean that in a negative way, but to be dangerous in all sorts of situations, I think that when you have kind of like leaders like that behind you and with you, then you're just unstoppable. You're an unstoppable force in business when you kind of have that motion happening.”
2024-12-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Why great AI products are all about the data | Shaun Clowes (CPO Confluent, ex-Salesforce, Atlassian) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About what we should do, should we go left or should we go right? And as usual, he's there and he's mostly just staying silent. And eventually the conversation's been going on for 15 minutes and he's like, hey, everybody, like a year ago, we talked about X, Y, and Z and he proceeds to lay out our product strategy at the time. And he's like, just recently we said the following things. And that was a product strategy, whatever. Now you're saying this. Isn't it obvious that that isn't this, like what you guys are saying is not congruent with that. And if you really meant what you said back then, we should be doing X. And get like the room went silent. Everybody kind of turned to him, kind of nodded. And then everyone went, yeah, okay, I guess we probably should be doing it differently. And so like the meeting stopped when the GC randomly mentioned that he deeply understood our product strategy and he knew enough to be able to contribute in that way. And so the life-changing part for me about that was just this realization that if I'm going to be a really great professional,”
2024-12-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Why great AI products are all about the data | Shaun Clowes (CPO Confluent, ex-Salesforce, Atlassian) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's to constantly be choosing things that are outside that, not totally outside the lines. Don't jump out of a plane if you've never parachuted before. Obviously, you want them to be in some way an adjacency. You want them to have something in common with what you know, but you want them to stretch you and change you. I had like a really kind of transformative experience many, many years ago when I was at Atlasian and a guy called Tom Kennedy. He was our general counsel. So like chief legal officer basically and a lifelong lawyer, very smart guy. I liked him very, very much. But like just a lawyer, you know, corporate lawyer, corporate counsel. I'm sure you know what they're like. And really great guy. And I remember, so mostly in our meetings, our meetings, he didn't talk that much, except about legal things, right? But I remember in one meeting we were having this vigorous debate about a product strategy question.”
2024-12-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Why great AI products are all about the data | Shaun Clowes (CPO Confluent, ex-Salesforce, Atlassian) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oftentimes people stay in a very specific domain, like they prefer to stay in a domain, or they prefer to stay in a specific kind of type of company or a very role that works in a certain way, like companies that have the same operating.”
2024-12-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Why great AI products are all about the data | Shaun Clowes (CPO Confluent, ex-Salesforce, Atlassian) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With as good a sales motion, like you talked about distribution earlier, Salesforce is an absolutely insane distribution machine, like just an incredible company with just an amazing distribution network and a fantastic marketing approach. It's like a PhD in marketing. When you spend your time at Salesforce, you're like, this company is just one of a kind. It's a one of kind and it's so outlandishly good at one specific thing. And so looking back, you know, all of these jobs have been When I say bingo card, like I've just got an outlandish education in these areas that, you know, are not obvious at all. And once you've seen them, they're like superpowers. They're superpowers to be able to bring that same experience to bear on things. And so one thing that I really am trying to figure out is why often people don't do that.”
2024-12-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Why great AI products are all about the data | Shaun Clowes (CPO Confluent, ex-Salesforce, Atlassian) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Infrastructure that's used by developers everywhere to build really interesting data driven applications, data powered applications to do all sorts of things in real time. And you look across all that and you go, it's all a bit random, right? But I didn't see it that way because I actually was in sales for a bit. So I ran a pre-sales engineering group, went around the world selling software. So when I joined Abbas in, I wanted to kind of understand what it was to sell software at a massive scale with no sales team. Can it even be done? And so I learned a lot in my time at ASEAN. When I went to Metromile, I'm like, well, I've never built a consumer product before. Like I can say that I've actually built a product that's touched many millions of people because Jira has. So I felt pretty good about that, but I'd never built one that I could say, yep, a consumer, your average consumer can use this thing. It's so simple, even my grandma can use it. I'd never built a product like that. So I got that experience at Metron, which is really fun. I'd never worked inside an organization as big as Salesforce or an organization with...”
2024-12-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Why great AI products are all about the data | Shaun Clowes (CPO Confluent, ex-Salesforce, Atlassian) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Side, like I've seen this from some other angle. And so I know that this is likely to work and this is unlikely to work. And so when I joined early on in my career, I was working for a big enterprise software company, sorry, small enterprise software company that sold to the Fortune 100. Then I joined Elassian and like I shared with you, we had no Salesforce at all, actually at all. Literally nobody to sell the software. It sold itself or it didn't get sold at all. And we grew to have 80,000 customers. It was just pure product led growth and just an incredible company. Then it was a Metromile, which was a consumer company that got acquired, made an insurance product for end consumers. So they got nothing to do with technology products, like literally a complicated Internet of Things device you installed in your car. But ultimately, it's an insurance product you'd sell to grandmothers in Florida as much as you would urban millennials. And then at me also after totally backend software that's used by IT organizations at a confluent.”
2024-12-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Why great AI products are all about the data | Shaun Clowes (CPO Confluent, ex-Salesforce, Atlassian) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To think of my career, and certainly in hindsight looking at it this way, Lenny. So, like, I'm just, I don't know, forward looking, it was obvious to me this way, but looking back, my career has been a little bit like a bingo card. Like I've always been looking for to fill in boxes I didn't have filled because I felt like that would make me a better professional. It's like if I didn't know anything about that specific type of sales model or that type of marketing or that type of product management or that type of product or that layer in the stack or that kind of thing is I will if I learn about that thing I will become more versatile so actually two things I will it's fun it's fun to learn something new it's fun to prove to yourself that you can do those new things and then it makes you more versatile because it means at any given problem you go up against you've seen something that that pattern matches to it like it kind of feels like you end up bringing a gun to a knife fight in a way because every problem you look at you're like oh i have seen this from the other”
2024-12-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Why great AI products are all about the data | Shaun Clowes (CPO Confluent, ex-Salesforce, Atlassian) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, exactly right. Exactly right. You know, I've seen cases where a sales team was people trying to get a sales team to do a POG motion. And you can beat them over the head as much as you like. You can get into a meeting and tell them that you really, really want them to do this. But at the end of the day, they're not going to do it. And the same is true for every other kind of function. It's just the nature of things.”
2024-12-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Why great AI products are all about the data | Shaun Clowes (CPO Confluent, ex-Salesforce, Atlassian) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Recent numbers. I can't remember what it was, but it was in the public data or whatever, something like 80,000 or 100,000 customers. Someone gave that. Like, that's a lot of customers. That's a lot of customers. Let's say you're going up against Jira and you're like, yeah, man, I'm going to pick off a thousand customers from Abassium. That's a lot, right? That's a lot. Obviously, a thousand customers is a lot. You only have 19, sorry, it's going to be like 89,000 to go or 79,000 to go or however many it is to go. I can't remember their exact number of customers. But it's very hard to assail a company which has a very large number of customers and a very large amount of revenue. And so that's why I think that POG as a mechanism is incredibly important for almost any type of company. If you can make the motion work, like obviously there are companies for whom the motion just is irrelevant. But for those where it does matter, it seems like the juice is worth the squeeze.”
2024-12-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Why great AI products are all about the data | Shaun Clowes (CPO Confluent, ex-Salesforce, Atlassian) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's about a balance. It's about getting the motions to work. And for really sophisticated companies, the people who really nail this, it's about making both motions work together. If you can get a PLG motion work to feed your sales team and a sales team motion work to feed your PLG funnel when the sales leads aren't ready yet, and kind of you can get those motions into playing with each other. You can make a lot of money. It can be an extremely successful way to go to build a very resilient business. Why? Because you get a lot of customers and you get a lot of revenue. You can't be that successful as a company if you have a lot of revenue, but a small number of customers because you're captive. Everyone knows that. You can't be that successful as a company if you have a lot of customers but not enough revenue because you just don't have enough money to sustain operations. So the magic is in having both a very large number of customers and a very large amount of revenue. It's very hard to knock over a company like that. If I look back on my time at ASEAN, I think they shared their most”
2024-12-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Why great AI products are all about the data | Shaun Clowes (CPO Confluent, ex-Salesforce, Atlassian) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Differentiation, differentiated competitive advantage. Yeah, I say it is. I'd say it is. And so they kind of working, I just worked my way backwards and I go, okay, you can say that your PLG investment might be too high. You could be like, well, if I invest more, I won't get any more juice. I can't spend my life just experimenting and onboarding. That's not the only thing that matters. And that's very, very true. But it's very hard to argue it should be turned to zero. And so to me, therefore, it's about the balance. It's about, okay, how does POG fit with the other different ways that I grow in my business? So a confluent, for example, we have a PLG function. We do grow with self-serve signups, people who sign up, literally their credit card, like lots of them sign up and they're very successful, never speak to us. You know, we also have an enterprise sales team that sells directly to very big companies, some of the biggest banks in the world. People you would definitely know of. I don't think it has to be one or the other. I think that, you know,”
2024-12-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Why great AI products are all about the data | Shaun Clowes (CPO Confluent, ex-Salesforce, Atlassian) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One thing to say that you should think about the end user, it's a whole other thing to have a system by which you do that because people pay lip service to all sorts of things, but I'm sure you've heard this one before, but in economics, people only do what their incentives told them to do. Broadly speaking, that is what they do. That is what happens. You get what you set out to measure. You get what you give people incentives to do. If there is nobody in the organization whose true incentive is to measure that success, the end user success, their enjoyment, their happiness, their retention, their engagement early on, it will not happen, or at best it will be a hobby. And so then by extension, if I start from there, then I say, okay, let's say it doesn't exist. POG doesn't exist, and therefore it's a hobby. And therefore they will be a bunch of hobby people who care about this, then you ask yourself, okay, will that mean that there will be many products for which those experiences really suck? And does that mean that that will be an opportunity for competitors of those products to be better at that?”
2024-12-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Why great AI products are all about the data | Shaun Clowes (CPO Confluent, ex-Salesforce, Atlassian) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First, let's examine the counterfactual, right? So let's start with the opposite of your question and say, hey, how would the world be sadder if we all just gave up on POG? Like if we just said, hey, there's no point in doing it in B2B Saas. The problem is that there is not a natural force that pulls companies towards thinking about the end user's enjoyment and success earlier in their journey. There is no natural force, there's no natural counterfailing force. Why is that? I mean, 101, the buyer is the most important person, the economic buyer is the most economic person. Their needs are the number one thing. They're usually the person driving the RFP. They're usually the person dealing with the sales organization. So the needs of the person who you hear are usually all feature driven and they're not from the end users. And so you're kind of sowing a seed of your own demise. If you don't think about that end user, but”
2024-12-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Why great AI products are all about the data | Shaun Clowes (CPO Confluent, ex-Salesforce, Atlassian) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But they can be complicated because of all those relationships and because of the way they sit amongst all of the other parts of the organization. So many organizations fail because they don't really find much that wins or when they do find wins, it just seems totally random, or they do find a lot of wins, but they all can't understand them because they seem like they're just a random walkthrough opportunities. There's many different ways to kind of fail to fit as you go through your growth phase from trying the ideas to success to scaling to operationalizing.”
2024-12-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Why great AI products are all about the data | Shaun Clowes (CPO Confluent, ex-Salesforce, Atlassian) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So you have to kind of make it a system, like you have to prove that it can be repeated, and then you have to scale it. Like it has to become a thing, it has to become part of your DNA. You have to be taking a POG lens to everything you do all the way from pay to acquisition to activation, retention, engagement, cross-product expansion, upsell. I mean, you name it, like all the different ways you can grow a product by revenue or engagement. There's many different ways to go about that. And so you end up having to scale out and be able to do all of those different things. And then you have to figure out how you fit in with the rest of the organization. Because as other people who build products all day every day, there's other people who sell that product all day or day. There's other people who market that product all day or day. And so, you know, growth organizations are in this interesting space. They're in between everybody else. They're kind of in everybody else's sandpit in a little bit, in a little way. And they're kind of at the edge of everybody's kind of full-time job. And they are very valuable.”
2024-12-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Why great AI products are all about the data | Shaun Clowes (CPO Confluent, ex-Salesforce, Atlassian) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ultimately, a lot of these types of endeavors are a matter of balance. So, what I mean by that is growth teams tend to go through a set of phases. Their first phase is proving their value at all, right? So call that the gold rush phase. This thing's probably not worth even doing. Why are we doing this? Merryband of people out there trying to prove that there's some growth vector somewhere, right? So that's the proof of phase. And so the advantage of that phase is like life's good because there's usually a lot of growth to be found because nobody's gone looking before. So life's good. But it's pretty random because you're just literally searching across a random search phase going, have we tried X? Have we tried Y? Have we tried Z? Then kind of once you get that model going, then it starts to be, okay, how do we scale this thing? Like, is this just a flash in Japan? Did we just find a little bit of low hanging fruit and there's nothing else here there? Is this just a project we should have done rather than an ongoing?”
2024-12-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Why great AI products are all about the data | Shaun Clowes (CPO Confluent, ex-Salesforce, Atlassian) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Services and consulting and whatever, then people will buy almost any software. Or you can certainly be successful with a lot of different software. But back in 2012, it wasn't clear of like, okay, which instead you wanted this differently and you told them in software that Sell itself is the juice worth the squeeze. And, you know, now I would say that it's pretty clear that the juice is worth the squeeze to the point that people, lots of people think about this all the time, but it was a bit of an interesting kind of time at that time.”
2024-12-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Why great AI products are all about the data | Shaun Clowes (CPO Confluent, ex-Salesforce, Atlassian) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it is. It's like it's like when I so there was around about 2012, and at that time, kind of Grosshacking was a thing. People don't really use that term anymore, but in B2C, it was a very big deal because people could see Facebook doing their 10 friends in seven days and they could see this kind of thing that was working for people. And they're like, man, that's amazing. And at ASIM, we set out to go, okay, well, do those techniques work in B2B? And also, it's kind of obvious now that a lot of them do and that it's worth doing. But at the time, it wasn't that obvious because for a lot of B2B companies, I mean, you summarized it earlier, Lenny, distribution covers all faults. Like almost all ills can be filled in by really great distribution. Like if you have really good ground game, really good marketing, a really good ground game, and kind of jamming your product into the channel, like you're jamming your product in front of people, and you're papering over the ugly parts with customer success people.”
2024-12-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Why great AI products are all about the data | Shaun Clowes (CPO Confluent, ex-Salesforce, Atlassian) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Interesting, it's really funny because at last they did something similar. We had a global holdout group actually that was held out of all experiments. So the experiment platform couldn't target that group at all. So 10% of all people never saw anything ever. Turns out to be really, really helpful because you can always compare them against whatever the experience was for any of the same vintage of cohort. I agree with you. But the other thing is I don't really love some of that thinking process just in general. It's like, hey, let's say an experiment does show a temporary benefit. If an experiment shows a temporary benefit but that benefit does not persist forever, does that mean the temporary benefit was never worth it? Or does that just mean the temporary benefit was an opportunity to reach another level you just didn't capitalize on? I don't think there's a perfect answer is what I'm trying to say. It's like I don't think that the fact that a benefit doesn't last forever means that you failed. But I agree with you that not trying to understand what is the net benefit been, what is a net lift bin is also really important too. That's why we wrote this so hard.”
2024-12-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Why great AI products are all about the data | Shaun Clowes (CPO Confluent, ex-Salesforce, Atlassian) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A random aberration is not a useful tool, right? And so you've got to go up and then you might go downstream and you might find, yep, they last for two in the second week, but in the third week, they all churn. So basically pointless. Why are we even talking about this? Or then you might step all the way back and go, okay, yes, those people do get retained for longer, but their average ASP is smaller. Because what we really care about, we do care about engagement and we care about more customers, but we want to keep the customers at a high ASP to reach a certain revenue goal. Like the final goal is happy customers paying us money. So that's what I mean about getting going a click up. If you go a click to the left, a click to the right, so before and after, and then a click up and you still see that the thing that tells you the story that you want to tell, then now you've got something that's very compelling because people want to hear about that. They want to hear, well, what did happen before? What did happen after, and why is that why is that outcome happening? But you have to really do your homework and really be rigorous about it to avoid finding fools.”
2024-12-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Why great AI products are all about the data | Shaun Clowes (CPO Confluent, ex-Salesforce, Atlassian) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About that, it'd be okay. If I'm looking at a piece of data, what was upstream of this piece of data? And does that look normal? So this thing happened or whatever, which you're very, very excited about. What happened before that? And does that match what you think should have been right? So what happened before this? What was the situation? And then, okay, for that thing that you're looking at, what happened after? If you have an idea of what happened before and after, that gives you some idea of whether or not this thing is at all worth interesting to talk about. And then go one click above this data that you're looking at. So it's like, okay, these things, let's say it's, you know, I'm looking at onboarding success. Let's say I'm looking at onboarding success to second week retention or something like that. I'm like, I have found this thing that totally crushes it, this intervention crushes it. If you go upstream and you find out that this intervention only applies to 2% of the inbound onboarding stream, it's meaningless. It's most likely just a random aberration. But even if it was...”
2024-12-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Why great AI products are all about the data | Shaun Clowes (CPO Confluent, ex-Salesforce, Atlassian) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Subject to some sort of selection bias. Like oftentimes when I see analysis from different product leaders, you're even data teams. You can drive a truck through it, like literally drive a truck through it. And if you present data with authority and that data is ridiculous or the analysis is just full of holes, you don't just not get benefit for that. Like you lose a whole bunch of brownie points. It would be better not to show up with an analysis that isn't clear than it would be to show up with an analysis that's dumb. And I see people self-immolate on this actually relatively regularly because they just bring a knife to a gunfight or whatever. They do bring in an analysis that is just not, it doesn't hold water. And they present it and then get shot down live, which is nobody's idea of a good time. So kind of if I give you a little bit of additional tacticals thing, things.”
2024-12-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Why great AI products are all about the data | Shaun Clowes (CPO Confluent, ex-Salesforce, Atlassian) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the first thing I always encourage people to do is to look at a piece of data. If you're looking at a piece of data and the result tells you something that your intuition tells you is like insanely wrong, that you're probably not right. First, believe your intuition and go and prove yourself right. Don't just take it at first glance because most of the time, it's like Occam's rays are the most likely explanation for something that is insanely not intuitive, is that it's just wrong, that there's a problem somewhere. Now, occasionally sometimes you actually will be right. Now those will be pay dirt moments. Those are the moments that make it all worth it. There are times when you do find the nugget of gold. You're staring at it and like, this is it, this was the problem. This was the thing we were looking for this whole time. But you have to be very diligent about like following it through, like really understanding what you're looking at. Is this data representative? Is this data like a good sample of the audience we care about? Is it already...”
2024-12-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Why great AI products are all about the data | Shaun Clowes (CPO Confluent, ex-Salesforce, Atlassian) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so Obsessed is like it's something you can easily overdo very, very easily overdo. So it's about right-sizing data, having the right data at your fingertips, having the right kind of view on data rather than kind of like trying to expect data to give you the answer or trying to use data as a weapon or trying to use data as a way to kind of force people to believe you or to go in your direction. But data is kind of at the center of everything and about how to influence and be successful in products you're building and arguments you're mounting internally and everything else.”
2024-12-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Why great AI products are all about the data | Shaun Clowes (CPO Confluent, ex-Salesforce, Atlassian) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which is weird because product managers don't normally own data teams. I think it's because I have just like a really massive affinity for data. I've always been really data, I used to call myself data-driven. It was kind of my jam because in hindsight, I look back and I think is the opposite. Data is more like a compass than a GPS, right? Like if you look at data as a way of giving you the answer, you're always wrong. You're always wrong or you're slow. Wrong or slow or sometimes both. Because mostly data doesn't give you the answer. It just tells you if what you just said is like ridiculous or there's potentially something there. So it's more like about disproving whatever you think. And you end up being slow because if you try and use data for everything, your brain is ultimately a data sifter or whatever. So the reason your intuition tells you something is because you've seen a ton of data that tells you that this is the most likely answer.”
2024-12-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Why great AI products are all about the data | Shaun Clowes (CPO Confluent, ex-Salesforce, Atlassian) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source