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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“Yeah, I mean, I think at the end of the day, it's kind of all of those things, isn't it? Like, if you have first party data but you can't bring it to bear, then it's not very much use. If you have third-party data and you bring it to bearing interesting ways, the problem with data is we're all surrounded by data all the time. So the data's everywhere. What really matters is the right data at the right time in the right place, because we're all humans, right? And so to me, there are obviously data advantages and there are even data network effects if you can end up in a situation where you have very valuable first party data. But in any case, it's still about being able to bring the right data at the right place, at the right time for those users, for them to be able to get advantage from it. A little kind of segue, I guess, on that one is I spent, I know, I spent a lot of my career, weirdly accidentally, I've been a product person for a long time, but weirdly I've ended up inheriting data teams. So I've actually run data teams and a lot of different companies.”
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 Ashby. It's the one all the cool kids are talking about now. And it's funny because people literally talk about it in comparison to all the, even the last generation of modern SaaS ATSs or whatever. And they talk about it in glowing ways because of the way they put data inside the actual workflow. So the actions and its outcomes are directly tiable to each other in the application you're doing the work in. I think that's a pretty compelling user experience.”
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 kind of got raced to the bottom characteristics around it. You're probably right, the distribution is still the hardest part in software, particularly when you're getting started.”
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
“Interviewers and where the interviewers were in the interview cycle. So basically embeds data into the whole life cycle. And I think that there are kind of these ways in which startups can bring these experience benefits by just bringing a kind of different approach to the world that does enable them to capitalize on traditional disruptive innovation. Like at the end of the day, this is just disruptive innovation. It means that most companies have overshot their utility, like the average utility. So you can win by meeting the average utility and being different, you know, meet the bar and be different. Meet the bar and be different is the way to cut through. So that makes sense like that's a half decent playbook. But if even for those companies, now they're going to have all these AI competitors who are using AI to engineer faster to build a competitor just like them as quickly as possible and start jamming it into the channel. It's going to be interesting to see how this whole thing evolves.”
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
“Often use seem to be getting crowded, more crowded just in general and more expensive. That doesn't bode well for I'm the not as good sales force. I'm the not as good sales force, but I'm cheaper. It kind of has to be something different. There has to be some angle upon which you are materially better. And what I saw happening and what I've been seeing happening, and I think it's been really interesting, is a lot of modern next-gen applications are bringing data as a first class citizen into the workflow. And I think that that's pretty compelling, right? So if you look at the next generation of applicant management products that deal with inbound job applicants, a lot of them now, like the latest cool ones, they include your time to fill data. They include outcome data of like who's got the best hiring outcomes, who over what period of time has the worst attrition. Literally all the way back to the end.”
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 mean, it certainly makes sense. Like, ultimately, then the day distribution is always an advantage because the hardest problem is to even be in the consideration set for any given problem. The world is full of problems. It's just when people have that problem, they firstly don't think they're going to solve it at all. And when they do think of solving it, they don't think of you. So distribution is always an incredible advantage. But again, like in the world of AI, it seems like distribution is more likely to get hard than easy. So if you think about, for example, diminishing returns on cold email, because cold email is getting easier and easier to send even worse spam, like it sounds better, but it's effectively causing everybody to become desensitized, everything. I don't know if you've noticed half the LinkedIn reach outs now are all basically clearly LLM generated spam. I mean, to some degree, it's actually worsening the signal-to-noise ratio. And so I think that a lot of the kind of breakthrough distribution mechanisms, the startups,”
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 I don't think this idea that it would just cause a spring up of a whole bunch of new apps that will more easily challenge the incumbents makes any particularly, it's not straightforward to me how that would happen, basically.”
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
“Applications just seems like a fantasy, crazy fantasy. The only way I could really believe it is if you said, well, you could have a new startup that introspected all of the rules that are configured into a Salesforce to try and reverse engineer what your actual business processes are and then kind of operate on top of that. But the best place people to do that would be Salesforce themselves or Abassian in Assyrian's case or workday in workdays case. I just can't see a world in which this like I think one of two things could happen. All this move into AI makes those applications even better, like even more unassailable. Like they basically get stronger. It makes us stronger or it could enable some new level of like applications that come from a more platform based thing, so less a domain specific thing like HCM or”
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
“Interface. So let's say, for example, your Salesforce with Service Cloud. I've heard people say, well, a lot of those service agents might end up being replaced with agentic workflows that will mean that there is no person operating the UI if the UI doesn't even exist anymore, then why do you even need Salesforce? I mean, you just have raw database tables and who even needs forms of databases. You can literally just have databases. But that also doesn't make any sense either because the agents have to operate against the rules of the system. And the rules are defined by the business processes. So think about Salesforce without a head. Imagine Salesforce had no UI. It would still have those business rules that I was talking about. And those business rules are what define what the agent should do. They're almost telling the agent what it should do and how the world can operate, what is possible, what is allowed. And so from my perspective, this idea that this just completely destroys the differentiation of these kind of business process.”
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
“Although those are both very useful, it's the years and years and years of evolution of the underlying workflows of the product to support the customers, but also the customers evolving those workflows to make them work the way they do. And so how does that impact AI companies, right? You could say it's easier than ever to build forms on a database application. And so I'm like, yeah, okay, that presumably drives the incremental value of every new one of those to zero, right? probably leads to more power to the existing winning systems of record because there'll just be a gazillion competitors who are just more forms and databases so like how would you ever choose between them you may as well just go with the winner you know nobody ever gets fired for buying sales force or whatever you may as well start from from the kind of the premier vendor that's one element you could go the other way and you could say i've heard a few people mount this argument which i think is really interesting that um at the end of the day agents are going to take away most of the the use of that user entry”
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 actually, the longer you have the software, the more it becomes that, the more it becomes less and less like workday and more and more like your specific company, which makes sense because it was built to be configured to meet the needs of any specific company. And every company has their own precious snowflake. And as that happens, those configuration pieces, the bit that makes the application native and a fit for your organization, makes it a fit for nobody else's organization and also makes it a black box to the point that you don't even understand how it works anymore. Like if you went to, for example, Salesforce and you said, hey, could you define all of the processes by which software was sold inside Salesforce, they couldn't tell you that without reading the code of their Salesforce instance? That's not a proprietary secret. That's obviously true because over time, that's literally how sales happen. There is no other way to do a sale other than through their internal tooling. And so what that means is that it's not the UI that matters and it's not the data model that matters.”
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 sit on top of data models, right? So whatever the object is, might be a customer object or a campaign object or an employee object, right? You could say that, well, there's some element of lock-in in the object. The object itself, like the fields of the object, I'm like, pretty boring, right? That's not very interesting. But sure, maybe certainly there's some value in being the system of record, like the default that everybody uses. There's definitely some value in the UX, like the, well, you know, I want to be the best HR facing applications for workings employee data. Yeah, there's some value there. But the real thing, which is staring everybody in the face, is it's all about the business rules. Like that is what drives the locking. Because why do you buy workday? You don't buy workday for its out-of-the-box configuration. You buy workday because you want to configure it to be Lenny Inc.'s HR processes. Like it becomes Lenny Inc.'s workday. It's not Sean Inks workday. It's Lenny Inc.'s workday.”
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 it's really weird. I think people really underestimate where the value is created in these applications. And they just kind of get it completely wrong. And I'm not sure why that is. So if you think about, so I spend a long time at ASEAN, so I worked a lot on Jira, which many people know. And I spent a long time at Salesforce, so I spent a lot of time in the CRM ecosystem, the marketing ecosystem, and all the rest of it. If you want it to be not charitable, you'd step back and you'd look at all those applications and you'd say they're all just forms on databases. You'd say the JIRA is a form on a database. Workday is a form on a database. So Salesforce, there are forms on databases. All vertical SaaS or business SaaS is ultimately forms on databases. And you'd be like, well, how hard can that be to replicate? And the answer is like unbelievably hard, like unbelievably hard. And people just, you totally get it wrong because it's not actually just about the data model. So if you think about, if it forms some databases, it's these beautiful user experience.”
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 next one will be even smarter, but really it's just the hard work of getting a really good data to the LLMs to get them to do good 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
“Policies and procedures that apply to the so you get what I mean by these kind of like the jumps of logic and the jumps of data and the way data is all linked together. If you want to have a smart AI experience, you'll convince yourself that all I really need to do is get a model and wire it in and I'll build a little pipeline that will suck some data in and it will whack it into the LLM. And if you think that way, you're going to be very sad, very, very sad for a very long time because you're constantly going to be wrestling with how do I get data to this thing? How do I get good data to this thing? How do I get timely data to this thing? How do I get well structured data to this thing? And so it's a data management problem. It's getting access to good data, getting access to high quality data, getting access to timely data, and getting it to the LLM to get the LLM to make a smart decision. That's when 90% of the calories go. Maybe it's a bit like Einstein's thing. You know, it's 10% inspiration, 90% perspiration. Nobody wants to hear it. Everybody wants to just think about all these really cool models and how smart they are.”
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
“What will make my AI experience really great? It's definitely not going to be the model because these models are mostly going to be somewhat replaceable and you could say, okay, well, is it going to be the prompts? Maybe, but, you know, so many good prompts are better than others, and you certainly, like, that's kind of an ongoing investment you'd probably want to make to ask better questions, to get the LLM to deliver better answers. But it's obvious that the real answer is the context, like all the context you're going to give it, all the data you're going to copy and paste. And so if you think about, let's say, I'm building a, you know, I have no relationship to this, but let's say I was trying to build a human capital, like a HCM bot, like an AI bot. Let's say I was working at workday and I was trying to bring an AI bot. It's pretty obvious that the smarts of the bot would really be related to all of the employee information, but not just that, it would be the benefits information. It would be the legal situation in the country where that person is currently working. It would be the company.”
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
“hasn't got all that data to do synthesis on top of it's got nothing and so that means that like lnoms can only be as good as the the data they are given and how recent that data is they're ultimately like information shredders they're like they are they are you know limitless information eaters like they just can't be you can never have enough information to give to an LLM to truly gain its value the more things you give it the better it gets broadly speaking that's the you know kind of just not perfect but that's close enough and so what that means is as an internal product leader or you know using putting lnms to work you need to figure out how to bring as much information about customers or their asks or your competitors all of it how much can you find all of it and bring it together and give it to the LLM either in your tooling or even in just copying and pasting or whatever your flow is going to be that's one thing but then if you take it beyond that and you go okay well now I'm a product leader and I'm building an app and I want to put AI in my app”
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 the end of the day, these models are very, very, very smart, but they're also insanely dumb. And everyone knows that, right? Insanely dumb. In other words, they really only know what they were trained on or what you bring to them right at that moment. Like in that millisecond, and then they will forget it immediately. And it's very easy to convince yourself that that isn't true, but it's actually what really matters. And let me add one extra piece that makes that really important. At the end of the day, information has a decay rate. So think about customer feedback. It has a decay rate. Or what your competitors are doing has a decay rate. So any new piece of data decays in its value to your decision making very, very quickly, very, very quickly. You can plot your own decay chart if you want to. But the answer is very, very quickly. And so when you think about the job, which is synthesizing all of this very complicated information to make good decisions, what does that mean? Well, you've got this synthesis machine, which is this LLM thing that's going to help you do synthesis.”
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 mean, I think there's two implications for people as they're building products based on AI and as they're thinking about AI in their workflow. So let's start with the first one because that's how product managers do product management things. You just asked this question of like, should it be specific tools built for to make AI easier for product managers to use? Or is it in fact more general models being put to work?”
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
“Example, we get form, we get a ton of inbound customer requests, as you can imagine, coming from the field or directly from customers. We use LLMs to take in those asks, to summarize what they're about, to find other asks that are like that one, like really in a compelling way, like a real way, like a semantic way, not other words that are exactly the same. Are these the same concept so that we can look across all of the inbound demand on us and say, well, the most popular idea is this one and is getting more popular. The least popular idea is this one. It is getting less popular in a really deep, rich way, even across hundreds or thousands of pieces of inbound feedback. I think it's a really great time to be a product manager if you can put these types of tools to work. But they would, they don't do the job for you. They just help you do these things that are intricate in that job of finding the gaps, finding the opportunities, finding the common threads.”
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, mostly I find that the straight up LLMs themselves are good enough. And we do have some internal tooling that we built around, I don't know if you've ever had Sachin Reki on the show. You may have, he was a product leader, pretty well known in the gross community, and he was a leader at LinkedIn for a long time. And he kind of, he used to call this concept a feedback river. And he basically said, really smart product managers are constantly swimming at a feedback river. They set out to surround themselves by Feedback River. And I really deeply believe in that. It's like, okay, how can I surround myself with user interview data, with direct customer feedback, with NPS data, with computer information? I'm always trying to wash myself over with information. And where I'm going with this is that LLMs and tooling based on it can be exceptionally good for this.”
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
“Will probably do this. They will probably do that. It's more likely they would do this than they would do that. And so normally that type of insight was hard won. It took a lot of sweat work. You basically had to read a lot of stuff. You kind of had to use your brain as this big kind of summarization machine. And eventually you knew what you felt about all the things you had read, but you couldn't summarize why. LLMs that let you get to that really, really, really quickly in a very structured way. But only if you push at the edges, provoke the answers you don't want to hear, provoke the problems, like try and prove to yourself that you're wrong, I think is the easiest way to start trying to use some of these tools.”
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
“All about the knot, not where it does, where it does not. Like people spend far too much time looking for what they're hoping to see, not for what they're not looking to see. So you can literally ask ChatGPT to help you find where the customer is probing at the edges of what you're trying to do, where it's wrong, where what you're saying is not what they believe. And you can ask your questions like that. You can ask it where what your customers are saying would better fit what your competitors are saying. So you can basically say, hey, you can copy and paste one of your competitors positioning documents into chat DPT and say, is this a better fit for what they have said than my thing, which is you can summarize your own strategy, you can take your competitors.public documents and you can ask it to summarize what their strategy probably is. And it's actually surprisingly good at that because mostly your public documents are actually a summary or at least a derivative of what your strategy is. So it will give you crazy insights into what other people's, literally their product strategy at times creepy like, oh.”
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 you don't kind of set this up to learn, then you're going to lose no amount of applying LLMs or any type of structured reasoning is going to help you because you're just basically reading back what you want to hear or some weird summarized version of what you want to hear. But stepping back from all of that, like what I like to do specifically getting to LLMs is like I think that we live in just the most amazing time for product managers right now in terms of being able to analyze vast quantities of information and see the common threads. And so let me give you a few examples of that. One might be you can do a bunch of customer interviews.”
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, so firstly, like stepping back a little bit just into the motherhood and apple pie portion of qualitative research or whatever, like I find that most people don't even understand or don't start with a rigorous foundation in what they're going to need to do to get the answers that they want. So for example, your listeners have probably heard about the Nielsen number before, but basically the idea is that once you interview between seven and 14 people, you stop learning new things. Less than seven, you don't learn enough. More than 14, you stop learning anything new. And so if you interviewed two people, you probably don't have enough data. If you interview 22, you probably had too much. So they don't even right-size their efforts. So that's a problem. So they don't start that way. Then they go into these conversations asking leading questions, which really are designed to get the customer to say what they already want to be true, which is so they haven't done enough research or they've done too much, and then they're blown up all of the results before they've even heard anything. So, you know, if you don't, if you don't right size your risk.”
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
“Could have dramatically outlandish returns. And so people, I think, firstly, people often say that they do a lot of this stuff, but they actually don't, because they don't have any structured way of doing it. So what they really mean is every now and then I get in a customer call or every now and then I get stuck into an escalation. And so they kind of conveniently bucketing it. So firstly, they don't do it in a very structured way. Then they don't bring back analysis, the true insights from that thing. So they don't really gain very much at all. It's just more activity, no outcomes. Activity is not people do far too much activity with not enough outcomes. And there just isn't enough time in the day to do that, to be successful.”
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 one thing to say you're spending a lot of time looking outside the building. It's a whole other thing to hear from the places you don't normally hear from. So avoid availability or confirmation bias. Most of the time people go talk to the people they always talk to. And they learn nothing particularly new. They don't synthesize the results that they got from that conversation. They don't seek out the counterfactual. They don't seek out the proof that they're wrong. They don't analyze what their competitors are doing and figure out what that must tell you about the market. They don't bring back the data of how their product is actually being used versus how people say it's being used. It's like, you know, kind of all data, no analysis is not very useful. Like all kind of, you know, everyone can bring back an omnibus edition of like, you know, random stuff I heard on a Tuesday, but the competitive advantage is extracted and we're figuring out what other people don't see, figuring out what, you know, where we're wrong, figuring out where well placed about.”
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 generally guide product managers to do. One is to always start from the point of view outside the building in every document, in everything, always talk from the customer's perspective, from the market's perspective, from the competitor's perspective. And the people who listen to me on that, I would say get better almost immediately because they're starting from a place that's easier to understand. And then secondarily be data informed. They kind of use all of that view of the world, but don't just make up a bunch of statements, like support that statement with anecdotes and bits of data. It doesn't have to be a treatise, but like kind of bring kind of convince everybody of what the world really looks like and what the opportunities ahead of the company looks like and good things happen to you. And all of a sudden you go from a world where nobody wants to help you get anything done to where everybody wants you to win. They want you to win and they may not give you everything you want, but they certainly will try because they're like, well, of all the bets we could make, this is a good one.”
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 most important thing and the kind of the chestnut that I repeat to everybody is that at the end of the day the time you spend looking inside the building doesn't really benefit you very much at all, right? And, you know, Steve Blank and people used to talk about you should be spending 80% of your time thinking about things going on outside the building. You might not be outside the building, but you should spend 80% of your time thinking outside the building. And I would say a very small number of PMs do that. They get dragged into internal politics. They get dragged into scrum management or scrum execution or product delivery, like elements of the delivery thing. And you just can't win that way. You just can't win that way. You can never get an A because you're fundamentally not solving the job. The job is not about execution or anything. It's about finding reliable, differentiated value, right? That you can uniquely deliver into the market. So I would say if there's one thing, two things I would say actually 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
“About trying to figure out an edge. It's like trying to look at the world, find the portion of the chessboard that isn't occupied, but that is valuable, and find a way to get into it, invade it, and destroy it. It's a really fun, it's decisions under uncertainty. And that makes it unbelievably fun, like really, really painful and very frustrating and very hard to convince people, but very, very fun. Equal measures, basically.”
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 first started adding PM, somebody, you know, it's obviously a chestnut, but he pointed out that realistically when you're product manager, your job is to say no to 90% of things that have brought your way. And so that kind of makes you the bad person, pretty much from the start. And so you're saying no to 90% so you can say yes to 10%. And that kind of puts you behind the eight ball right at the very beginning. And so you have to kind of very quickly get runs on the board. You have to prove to have the right insights, to have the right data, to make the right decisions, or you don't get another go. You don't get another swing. You don't get another swing at it. So it makes sense that, you know, product managers are the easiest to kind of single out and kind of criticize. But that is also what makes it the funnest thing. Like if you think about why do we do this? You know, somebody once asked me, would you retire? Why do people do what they do? Because certainly at some point it isn't just about the money. And at the end of the day, product management is so damn fun because it's”
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 I think we could all say that we're not reliably producing 10 times product managers every day, every day of the week.”
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 I wanted to be a 10 times engineer. I'll leave it to others to decide to tell you whether or not I was or where I wasn't. But certainly I wanted to be. And I tried to be a really great engineer. And it must be true that if there's 10 times engineers, and I would argue there definitely are, there must be 10 times product managers too. But at the same time, those 10 times product managers, because product management is ultimately about leverage, so it's about helping other people have dramatically more impact than they would if they were unorganized, that they didn't have somebody to kind of organize the goals and what we're trying to achieve, then that means that a 10 times product manager has 100 times return or more because they're 10 times seeing the return on 10 times resources, right? So the outcomes are so wild, like wildly distributed, and the benefits are so good that you would have thought that it would have behooved us. There would have been a way that this had evolved and improved and really gotten way crisper than it has. But here we are, you know, I'm not saying that we haven't gotten better. We 100% have.”
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 honestly a big conundrum for me. I think it's actually part of it's grandiose to say so, a bit of my life's work. Why is it that product management is still such a relatively undeveloped discipline? 15 to 20 years into this thing, you would have thought that it would be less random than it is. Like the outcomes are random, the behaviors are random, individual performance is random, you know, seemingly, right? And so there's something about the current state of product management that isn't getting at the truly important things, the truly valued things, the right way to think about problems, the right way to think through problems, the abstract reasoning that's needed. There's something that isn't working about it. I spent a long time trying to put my finger on it and then be like, how do you reproducely produce that, reproducibly produce people who can really be really great product managers? The thing is that if you think all the way back to it, like I spent a long time as an engineer and people always talk about 10 times engineers, right?”
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
“People really underestimate where the value is created in these applications, and they just kind of get it completely wrong.”
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
“You've got this synthesis machine, which is this L at lamb thing that's going to help you do synthesis. But if it hasn't got all that data to do synthesis on top of, it's got nothing. And so that means that LLMs can only be as good as the data they are given and how recent that data is.”
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
“Everything always talk from the custom order's perspective, from the market's perspective, from the competitor's perspective. Very small number of PMs do that. They get dragged into internal politics, they get dragged into scrum management or scrum execution or product delivery, and you just can't win that way”
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
“Why is it that product management is still such a relatively undeveloped discipline? Like, where 15 to 20 years into this? And so there's something about the current state of product management that isn't getting at the truly important things, the truly valued things. If we were doctors, you'd be like, that's totally unacceptable.”
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