Ep. 19 – The Art of Product Leadership: Building with Purpose.

Today, Ellie sits down with Ibrahim Bashir, former VP of Product at Amplitude and current Chief Creative Officer for Run the Business, as he shares his journey from software engineer to product leader at tech giants like Twitter, Amazon, and Box. In this episode, we discuss the evolution of product management, the importance of user-centric design, and the delicate balance between data-driven decisions and human intuition. Ibrahim offers unique perspectives on responsible innovation, scaling B2B products, and the future of product management in the age of AI. 

Transcript

[00:00:00] Ellie: Hi, Abraham, and welcome to the Elusive Consumer. Quite the product leader we have with us here today, current VP of product at Amplitude and previous roles at Twitter, Amazon, and Bot.

[00:00:25] Ibrahim: Yeah, excited to be early. Thanks for hosting me.

[00:00:28] Ellie: So before we jump into your different roles and talk a little bit more about your product philosophy, I’m, of course, keen to hear about your journey that led you to product management. And then your current role at Amplitude, if you could share some of that with us.

[00:00:45] Ibrahim: Yeah, you know, I was fascinated at a very early age by computers and the fact that you could actually create content and software for computers. And so in high school, I started learning how to program. And then somewhere [00:01:00] along the way, somebody told me, Hey, if you want to be a programmer, you should study computer science in school.

[00:01:04] So I studied computer science in undergrad and grad school, and then got a job as a software engineer, as many people do out of college. And I thought I was good at writing code, but one of the things I struggled with was I was always asking, Who are we building this for? Why are we building this versus the other things we could build?

[00:01:21] And what if we built it in a slightly different way? I work in an organization that did not have product managers or designers, not the concept of a cross-functional product team the way we do, you know, in modern software development. And so I really went soul searching to try to do more of that kind of stuff.

[00:01:38] Didn’t really run into product, actually ended up doing consulting for five years. Ended up solving a lot of really interesting business and organizational problems for a lot of different companies across the U. S. And then eventually discovered product. And I think I kind of needed that consulting experience.

[00:01:55] To show me that what I really craved was ownership and [00:02:00] agency on what is built and why it’s built and how it’s built. And then by the time I discovered product, I was laser focused on learning product from a company that I thought was world class at product development, which was Amazon. And so my, my first real PM role was at Amazon and that was not an accident.

[00:02:15] It’s something that I actually, you know, pushed for an interviewed for for many months.

[00:02:21] Ellie: Wow. That’s quite a journey. And I really love the idea of starting as a consultant first. And that that’s quite rare, isn’t it? In the product world to have both of those aspects and skill sets.

[00:02:34] Ibrahim: Yeah, I would say, you know, I, I mentor a lot of people who are early in their product journey or are trying to break into product management. And I think there’s a few tried and true techniques, right? You, you have some sort of stem degree and you go into an associate product manager role straight out of college.

[00:02:48] A lot of people will do Something in their career and then go get an MBA and then switch to product. And I did definitely take an unconventional path. And I think it really was the result of a forward thinking [00:03:00] hiring manager at Amazon at the time. Really a demand for people who could do cross functional delivery at a time where there were not many of them and really just the luck of the draw.

[00:03:08] Like, I, I don’t think it was a replicable formula. It was just sort of a confluence of events that led me to sort of be a PM on the Kindle team in the early days.

[00:03:17] Ellie: Nice. And that actually partly answered my next question in regards to sort of. Mentors or inspirations along the way, who or what were some of those? You mentioned this person at Amazon, but were there any others in particular you can think of?

[00:03:33] Ibrahim: I mean, I wouldn’t name a specific person. What I would name is more of a mindset. I’ve always gravitated towards product mentors and just business leaders who believe in cross functional thinking. Because I think I’m not the kind of PM who sort of is an expert in any one thing. I’ve actually jumped domains a bunch of times.

[00:03:53] And so I gravitate that way and I’ve always gravitated towards leaders who just fundamentally want to solve a problem and they [00:04:00] see Software or services as one dimension of?

[00:04:03] solving that problem, but they really think about things holistically. Like when I think about my former boss at Amazon, the term he used all the time was the end to end experience.

[00:04:13] So, you know, when you’re building and shipping a consumer electronics device. Everything that the customer touches from the website to the physical packaging to the hardware accessories to the returns experience should they have an issue with their device to the customer service number they call if they lose their device, all of that is customer touch points and our philosophy at Amazon and my philosophy to this day is.

[00:04:36] You own that entirety of that experience, whether or not you own those pixels or that customer service number, you own the experience the customer has and making sure it’s delightful. So I think I’ve always gravitated towards that mindset, and I’ve always looked for leaders and looked for companies and businesses that think about the user journey and the customer journey that way

[00:04:54] Ellie: Hmm. And do you find it difficult to implement [00:05:00] that same philosophy across all the different teams that you work with and make sure that it stays consistent?

[00:05:09] It’s sometimes easy to talk about, but less easy to actually implement.

[00:05:15] Ibrahim: it is, I think, obviously. You know, Amazon is not the only customer-focused company in the world. But I think a lot of people’s definition of customer is very narrow. It is who is paying us money, who is willing to talk, who has time to schedule. And I would tend to widen the aperture on customer to people who kick the tires on your product.

[00:05:36] Eventually didn’t use it right or people who are using it for free, but never upgrade or people who once upon a time were paying customers, but left And were frustrated. All of those are customers and I think talking to all of them can help you understand how on point or not you are with your. But to answer your question about ritualizing that it definitely can be difficult because I think there’s a tendency in the industry to [00:06:00] get the product manager to focus on the specific pixels that their engineering counterparts work on and not the entirety of the customer journey.

[00:06:08] Because what I’m really talking about is get involved in the marketing message, get involved in the campaigns, get involved in the documentation. And different people own those pieces, right? And there are organizations and environments where product asking questions about that entire flow is well received.

[00:06:24] And then there are organizations where you might hear, Hey, stay in your lane. Right. But I actually have a friend who who has an interesting job. He’s like a chief escalation officer at a company. And one of the things he tells me all the time is, you know, every PM thinks that they’re going to build the feature that changes the trajectory of their product.

[00:06:39] But really, if you just buckle down and fix your documentation, it would solve half the problems, right? And so that’s why I sort of approach it that way, which is the customer interactions are not rocket science. There are tried and true touch points that that really elevate or deteriorate the customer experience.

[00:06:55] And there are very simple things like your website, your setup experience, your [00:07:00] documentation, your support flow, because those are the moments people remember, right? People write great reviews about. The experience of finding and utilizing your product, or they write really negative reviews about when they had a problem and were just really, really frustrated that it couldn’t get solved.

[00:07:15] Ellie: And we’re going to return to that user aspect and understanding users better in a moment. Before that, I wanted to ask you a little bit more about amplitude. Your website mentions that. You can get data you can trust and insights that you need to take action and drive growth from. Tell us about that and how you differentiate from others.

[00:07:40] Ibrahim: Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, in today’s world where many, many products are digital. Only or digital in conjunction with some physical aspect. Understanding what users are doing in the product is paramount, right? In order to get them to do more of what correlates with your business or in order to [00:08:00] simplify how they go about it, you need to.

[00:08:02] And it’s a great tool to help you improve that digital journey, right. And before you can improve or optimize any digital journey, you have to understand it. So the core value proposition of Amplitude’s platform is to help you understand user behavior across your digital touchpoints. Whether it’s a website, a mobile app, kiosk and IOT device, anything that can send you a signal about a user interaction is fair game for observability, right?

[00:08:26] And so that’s number one, is just understand the user behavior. From there you can validate hypotheses you already have. You can generate new hypotheses. You can understand what’s working well. You can understand what’s not working well, which features are key. You can create segments of users and understand what do your most powerful and loyal users do and how did they arrive at that conclusion?

[00:08:47] What are sort of unhealthy groups of users and what’s common about them? And it’s sort of a never ending list of product ideas that you can then build, ship, experiment, iterate on and then go back into the system and say, did this [00:09:00] help? Did this hurt? Did it help more than I thought? Did it hurt more than I?

[00:09:02] Forecasted on. So it’s really a loop of product decisioning and building that amplitude enables and unlocks to answer your question about differentiation. I mean, there’s a slew of them, but I would say some of the ones that are top of mind is just the self serve access we enable. So historically, you know, you have to almost be a data scientist or product analyst to ask and answer these types of questions.

[00:09:26] And amplitude gives that power to the fingertips of any product builder, product manager, You know, growth team, et cetera. Two is, I think, because we are an event based platform, any digital touchpoint is fair game. So you don’t end up in this world where you have like a mobile view and a web view. It’s, you have a customer journey view that’s united in amplitude.

[00:09:49] We are the only platform that unites qualitative and quantitative data. So you can look at actual digital breadcrumbs overlaid with Like a session recording of user behavior [00:10:00] to actually understand both the qualitative and quantitative story, right? So you can start from one and work your way towards the other.

[00:10:05] And I find, you know, a lot of product decisions hinder on like, well, the customer said this, but this is what the data shows. And amplitude, you can actually blend those two things together and generate your hypotheses. And then lastly, people don’t want to just understand what’s happening in their apps and websites.

[00:10:20] They want to take action, right? They’re like, well, I see this interesting behavior. Let me actually create an experiment around it, right? Or do some targeted outreach around it. And so because of our action oriented ecosystem, we are the power that integrates with a lot of other tools where you might execute changes in the user experience.

[00:10:39] So those are some of our differentiators.

[00:10:42] Ellie: Brilliant. You touched about the importance of gathering various types of data, including qual and quant. Talk to us about how you balance between being data informed while not being overly data driven.

[00:10:59] Ibrahim: Yeah. [00:11:00] I think about it in two modes. The first is, are you in a discovery mode or delivery mode? So to me, a discovery mode is we’re just trying to sort of we’re in a fog And we’re trying to grasp what the problem might be right. So there I think looking at very high level metrics, right? Like just general activity or frequency is useful and soup.

[00:11:19] Super generative type conversations, just like talking to prospects and customers in an open ended manner, give you some hypotheses. And so when you’re doing sort of that top level strategic thinking, I think you want to be more broad and open minded about what you’re looking at. And then once you’ve actually latched onto a problem and said, this is the problem to fix, and this is what it looks like today, and this is what good could look like and what great could look like, or what best in class benchmarks show me, and then you’re aggressively trying to optimize the metric, that’s where I think you start to be more data driven, right?

[00:11:51] And so I think there is a danger in being too prescriptive around optimizing a metric when you haven’t actually lasered in on the problem that’s worth solving. [00:12:00] But once you have a handle on that problem, and you know, What the bar is that you need to get to, then I think aggressively iterating until you hit it and shipping you features until you solve it and experimenting around the best solution path is great.

[00:12:12] And so I think of it more like a macro and a micro view, and at both junctures, I do like to blend qual and quant because I think when those are dissonant, when they’re telling you different things, Something is going on. It could be as simple as you have data error. It could be as simple as you’re talking to a biased group of customers.

[00:12:30] It could be that you’re not thinking about your product value in the right way. And so that’s actually when I interview product managers, it’s one of my favorite questions to ask them is walk me through an example where you had quantitative data and qualitative input, and they were telling you different things and how you navigated that dissonance.

[00:12:48] Ellie: And oftentimes those are the breakthrough moments, isn’t it? That’s the best insights that you can gauge from those combined methodologies.

[00:12:57] I want to talk a little bit more about your product [00:13:00] philosophy. You’ve already mentioned thinking more holistically. But you’ve written about prioritizing iteration over ideation.

[00:13:08] Can you expand a bit more on that mindset?

[00:13:12] Ibrahim: I think in a lot of product teams across a lot of organizations, there is this analysis paralysis of making sure the thing we’re going to build is going to be perfect. That is going to move the needle. And I’m not saying that’s perfect. Fundamentally, a bad thing because building software writing code is probably the most expensive way to validate a theory, right?

[00:13:34] Prototypes are cheaper than that. Sketches are cheaper than that. Talking with your hands, writing a doc. It’s all simpler than writing and shipping code, which comes with an ongoing maintenance tax, but I think fundamentally the best products are built through iteration. It’s almost like compounding something that you’ve learned that’s valuable, right?

[00:13:54] And so if you start with a meaningful insight and then you just continue to build on that insight, [00:14:00] after X number of releases, you have. pretty significant value proposition that you’ve built up, right? Versus if you spent all that time just really overthinking and analyzing what you might build and then come out with one big release, you’re putting a lot of stress and a lot of risk on that one output, right?

[00:14:17] And so that’s what I mean by iteration over ideation, which is I think ideation is great, but at some point you have to validate those ideas, right? That is the job of product. And so I think getting to a decision, even though it might not be a perfect decision, is really the goal of product managers.

[00:14:32] And when faced with a plethora of decisions, that quality of decision making over time as you iterate on your product is really what separates great product managers from not.

[00:14:42] Ellie: Do you have any examples in your career of when this approach has led to a breakthrough for you?

[00:14:48] Ibrahim: Let me think. When I worked at box, we were always, always trying to increase the number of customers who were willing to pay for our [00:15:00] API’s. And so we tried many, many different techniques, right? Like gating the API providing certain volumes for free, improving the documentation, improving the sign up and setup flow for our developer products, increasing the number of languages we supported.

[00:15:14] And at some point, one of the things we realized was there was a huge contingent of customers who would use our APIs, but we could never convince them to pay for it because they had this Perception that they were actually using the APIs to round out the product, like the product was functionally mostly what they wanted, but there were certain things that they wanted to automate or simplify on the workflow or tweak and customize in their own way.

[00:15:38] And so they thought this is really us just. Using the Lego blocks to make it perfect. And why would we pay for this? Right? And so the iteration part comes in is after many, many, many conversations with these types of customers, we actually sort of arrived at the conclusion that we were not thinking about the value we were providing correctly.

[00:15:58] We were actually counting the [00:16:00] revenue generated from this product. And what we should have been counting was the retention and stickiness it generated when we gave it away. And so that. iterative building and customer research loop actually led us to a complete strategy change, which was the north star of that product line shifted from incremental ARR to actual retention points that we increased, right?

[00:16:24] And it actually led a change where we stopped thinking about which features are going to lead to more paying customers. And we actually started focusing on simplicity of getting people activated and onboarded. And not really worrying about the volume of API usage. And then we chose to monetize in different ways, which is you’re using our APIs.

[00:16:40] If you want better reliability, if you want faster latency, if you want faster throughput, those are premium capabilities you can pay for, right? And so it’s just an example of where iterating on the learning actually helped us find product market fit better.

[00:16:55] Ellie: Brilliant. I want to talk a little bit about your role [00:17:00] as advisor at First Round Capital. How do you see the venture capital landscape evolving, especially for product centric

[00:17:10] Ibrahim: Yeah, well, I think at this point, most Startups are her product centric startups. But I would say, you know, until the last 18 months ago, there was a huge, huge focus on just growth at all costs. And one of the things I like to look at when I’m thinking about a business is not only are you growing, right?

[00:17:29] But how. Sticky are the, the users or the customers that you’re acquiring and how sustainable is the business model, right? One of the jokes I always like to use is if you have to spend a dollar to make 50 cents, that’s not a sustainable business. And I think, unfortunately, a lot of companies operate that way.

[00:17:45] They’re, they’re using growth techniques that are quite expensive and channels that are not really longterm viable to. Capture swaths of users that aren’t going to stick around. And so those aren’t businesses. Those are just sort of growth loops and growth [00:18:00] hacks that aren’t sustainable. And so to answer your question the things I try to look for and try to educate founders and heads of products that I advise on is, are you thinking holistically about growth retention and margins?

[00:18:11] And are you organizing your teams in a way that the right people are? single threaded focused on the pieces of the strategy that you think are important and that you’re not spreading yourself too thin. Because I think that is one of the things every startup deals with is limited resources. And so you really have to be judicious.

[00:18:30] But my role with first round is really just, I get introduced to interesting teams and founders and serve as a sounding board for them on product strategy, on hiring their first product person, on creating a culture of learning and innovation in their product organizations, which I think can be a challenge for a lot of founders because they either didn’t come from a product background, they haven’t worked with formal Product management function, or they’re really just domain experts in a particular discipline and haven’t really built [00:19:00] a company.

[00:19:01] Ellie: Got it. Now let’s move on to the users and understanding them betters. Talk to us about some of the challenges in understanding user needs and behaviors.

[00:19:13] Ibrahim: Yeah, I mean, those are, those are widespread, but I would say one is, you know, users are not directly going to tell you. What they need from your product, right? I mean, I think the old saying is if you ask people what they wanted, they would say a faster horse, right? Nobody’s gonna tell you they want a car.

[00:19:30] And so I think getting users to articulate the problem and the true pain is really an art. And then getting them to understand how your product might go about solving it is another piece of that. Making sure that you actually think through the commercial angle of it, because a lot of times people will articulate a problem, but.

[00:19:52] They’re not going to pay for the solution, right? So thinking through like, is there a commercial path here? If you were to build a solution, I [00:20:00] think is another one as well. And then lastly, I think a lot of companies are founded on an insight around a problem that’s not a mass scale problem, right? And so I would say that’s the last piece for me is actually validating that what a user or customer is telling you is representative of the larger market.

[00:20:18] And that’s why I’m a big believer in user research and customer conversations combined with other signals. Right? Benchmarking data, market research, talking to analysts, talking to partners and other domain experts who live and work in the field, I think can help you corroborate and validate what you’re hearing from customers.

[00:20:40] Ellie: And how do you ensure you mentioned the aspects of being representative? How do you make sure that the. Sort of testing and feedback and user needs that you are gathering and collating is more inclusive and actually representative of all your potential [00:21:00] users.

[00:21:01] Ibrahim: Yeah. I mean, I go back to the idea I mentioned before, which is you want to be talking not only to your free users and you’re paying users. You want to be talking to your prospective users. Your former users. And especially if you work in B to B products like I do right now, you want to even think about the levels of users.

[00:21:18] There’s the actual people who use your software. There are the people who administer the deployment of your software, which is more of an admin persona, right? And then there are the people who buy your software, which is a few levels up and their perception of value is very different. So the user cares about.

[00:21:35] their productivity, right? The admin cares about compliance and configurability. The buyer cares about ultimate business outcome, right? And so I think actually making sure you’re having multiple altitudes of user conversation about the job to be done about the job to maintain and govern about the perception of R.

[00:21:55] O. Y. And the relative value that you’re providing in [00:22:00] comparison to the price you’re charging. I think having those multiple levels of user conversation is key.

[00:22:06] Ellie: And have you ever had a time when a user testing revealed a critical flaw or potential opportunity that you and your team hadn’t considered?

[00:22:19] Ibrahim: Yeah, maybe I’ll go back to my Amazon experience. So I was the PM of the first kindle fire tablet that Amazon launched. And when we first conceived this idea, it was a very, very quick turnaround, like from agreeing to do this to actually shipping the device in customers hands was less than six months, which is pretty fast for consumer electronics device launch.

[00:22:41] And one of the initial versions of the product involved putting all Amazon properties on it independently. So for example, you had the Kindle reading app, you had the music app, you had the app store, you had a browser, you had a video player, all independently installed on this device. And [00:23:00] so the actual experience of setting up this device, you would sort of, it would give you a login screen and you’d log in.

[00:23:05] And then you would go to the music player and it would say, please log into Amazon Music. And you’d go to the video player and say, please log into the video player, because these apps were all one portal that all these different business units at Amazon had built. And nobody had thought through if I’m an Amazon customer buying this.

[00:23:24] I don’t want to sit there logging in again and again. To me, I have one unified Amazon login. Right? And so user testing there helped us understand that in order to create a differentiated value proposition than just a generic tablet where you load up all the Amazon apps, we needed to think of a more unified single sign on experience.

[00:23:43] That’s one. Two is if you have a unified Identity for the customer. You can actually provide them value added services that other competitors couldn’t, right? And so, I mean, this is all you know, pretty standard these days, but giving people digital benefits when they buy a [00:24:00] consumer electronic device was very innovative at the time, things like, Hey, you bought a tablet being an Amazon customer entitles you to some free videos you can watch without actually having to buy or download anything right away, or some free music is.

[00:24:14] Imported into your account where we have a library of books that you can peruse for free, right? And so I think that idea was pretty novel at the time and we got it from customer trials where we realized we were Leaving value on the table by creating more friction to access content and media.

[00:24:33] Ellie: It’s amazing that sometimes the most simple ideas are what keep your customers loyal. And talking about building great products and on top of the user testing needs, what does responsible innovation mean to you and why is that important?

[00:24:53] Ibrahim: Yeah, responsible innovation to me is making sure that the technology you’re putting out there in the [00:25:00] world is not Leading to unintended consequences and side effects, right? I mean, the most famous example of something I’ve worked on was Twitter, where nominally Twitter is a way for anybody to connect with people in the world and broadcast their ideas and build a following and communicate.

[00:25:19] But around the time that I left Twitter, you know, it really was becoming a vehicle for Political interest to push incendiary ideas and really agitate people and really just confuse the landscape. Right? And so it’s a megaphone, but if the wrong people have their hands on megaphone, it can really just be used for shouting and creating noise.

[00:25:38] Right? And so responsible innovation to me is about putting guardrails in place such that abuse is not The average use case and that abusive behavior can be moderated and controlled and sort of removed from the platform as need be, right? And I think it’s quite interesting [00:26:00] if you go back to the framework I mentioned earlier, if all you care about is growth, user growth, revenue growth, then you’re really not incentivized to put in those guardrails because it Prevents bad actors from joining and using right but if you do institute that things you might have lesser absolute growth, but you will have more sustained growth and the people who do on board are more likely to stick around.

[00:26:22] So just to continue the Twitter example, there’s a version of Twitter which has like everybody on there shouting. Right. And then there’s a version of Twitter that has some very engaged and control people on it and it’s not being used for abusive behavior. And I think the latter version has less DAUs probably, but those DAUs are probably feeling more safe on the platform.

[00:26:44] Ellie: Hmm. And I think partly also in terms of responsible innovation, when it comes to some hardware in electronics, we’ve also seen more organizations, also with software, I [00:27:00] guess think about different abilities and disabilities of users. Is that an aspect that you’ve also seen, seen an increase?

[00:27:09] Ibrahim: I have, and I think you know, right or wrong, that focus tends to follow the money. And so I think there are certain Product lines and industries where accessibility, where localization, where power management will lead you to more customers being able to adopt and utilize your product. And that’s where it makes sense, but where you can unfortunately get away with not.

[00:27:32] Being as inclusive and enabling people won’t focus on it. Right. I do think this is where having product leaders who have a breadth of experience and strong empathy and diverse backgrounds is helpful. You know, a lot of times we talk about. Diversity in our industry more as like a check the box move.

[00:27:53] But the reality is when you have a diverse background leaders building products, they bring those experiences to [00:28:00] bear, right. And they make sure that their products are more inclusive for the people they’re building them for.

[00:28:06] Ellie: Hmm. Absolutely. Representation matters, as they say. I want to talk about quality over quickness. Can you share some examples of what that looks like in product development?

[00:28:18] Ibrahim: Yeah, one of my favorite things is, you know, if you’ve ever used a product for a meaningful amount of time, if that product’s performance changes, you’re going to notice it pretty quickly, right? Whether it’s the email app on your phone or some messaging thing, like any kind of jitteriness for a Power user for an active user is very noticeable.

[00:28:40] So one of the things I, and to me, performance latency, these are part of quality. And so one of the things I’ve always tried to push when I’m working on products is baseline level of like, we can never surpass this threshold from a performance perspective, because what tends to happen is people get very enamored with the number of features and the [00:29:00] velocity of features and things like that.

[00:29:01] And that’s all well and good because that gives you the ability to come across as a market leader. It allows you to sort of. Keep creating momentum and awareness around your product. But at some point for the people who actually core use your product, right? Their main use case is severely impacted by performance, but their main use case might not be severely impacted by some.

[00:29:24] Power user feature or some new fangled version of something you’re coming out with, right? And so I think a lot of times product teams can lose sight of the fact of keeping the main thing, the main thing. And the main thing not only has to work, it has to be fast, it has to be reliable, and it has to be cheap, right?

[00:29:40] And so I think you can get very, very enamored on the possibilities of things people might be doing with our product. But at the end of the day, there’s a main use case for every product and not losing sight of that, I think is very important.

[00:29:53] Ellie: you mentioned several aspects there in terms of faster and cheaper that we all [00:30:00] struggle with in terms of client demands and organization pressures. What practices do you put in place to maintain that high quality under tight deadlines?

[00:30:13] Ibrahim: So number one is, I think, building user empathy is important. And, you know, we were talking about customer focus earlier, but I think there’s a difference between the product team having customer insight versus everybody in the organization having customer insight. And I think it’s really, really important for product teams to not only build that muscle, But then to evangelize those learnings internally, if you think about some of the anti patterns that teams fall into and, and butt heads on is, well, product wants us to build this, but it doesn’t make any sense.

[00:30:41] Well, it doesn’t make any sense because you don’t know what the customers are asking for. Right. And, and I really put that onus on product to say, are you communicating enough about what you’re hearing from customers and why it’s important to your cross functional partners, engineering, design. Marketing, sales, support, et cetera, right?[00:31:00]

[00:31:00] And so I think it is really, really important as a practice to share customer learnings. Number two is, I think there is no substitute for direct customer learning. And so I think at scale, a lot of companies can fall into the trap of looking at proxies, right? So they’re looking at Notes from customer calls or customer feedback tickets or conversations with salespeople, which are all valuable.

[00:31:24] They’re sort of second degree signals, but you have to have direct attribution at some point. You have to say, I literally sat down with somebody who uses our product and watch them use it, and there’s no substitute for that. So I think that’s another trap that can happen is relying on proxies. And then the third is assuming that the new and shiny.

[00:31:43] Is the majority of usage, right? This is sort of a, a pet philosophy on mind, which is nobody goes into a library and says, give me only the newest books people go in. Cause most of the checkouts are happening on the known amazing books and the, you know, back catalog, [00:32:00] right? Nobody goes into a music store and says, I only want to listen to the last three months of the music roadmap.

[00:32:06] They’re like, no, I want the greatest hits from these artists. Right. But in a product, if you think about the chatter that’s happening in a product organization, it’s 99 percent of it’s focused on the new features that are coming out. What’s the timeline? Are there any delays? What’s the path to green? And nobody ever raises their hand and says, I think 99 percent of our customers are using the product that already exists.

[00:32:24] That is the majority of energy and focus and intention and awareness that we have. And so I think you can lose sight of that and sort of get away from your core a lot of times. So those are the three things I try to focus on is keep the focus on the core. Keep talking to customers directly and make sure you actually have rituals where you’re evangelizing those learnings for everybody to benefit.

[00:32:47] And it’s honestly gotten so much easier with technology, right? In the past, you might have like a PM talk to a customer in the wild. Now it’s like, oh, you just have recordings of the user calls and transcriptions and automated snippets and things like that. [00:33:00]

[00:33:01] Ellie: for sure understanding and viewing your customers. I like that what you mentioned in terms of seeing it for yourself is really no substitution for that. In terms of teaching your approach and scaling products, but also teams, you teach a course on scaling B2B products. What are the unique challenges there?

[00:33:25] Ibrahim: I think a few things, you know, the gist of my class is one giving people a foundation of how to evaluate a B2B business. You know, a lot of times PMs will just be caught up in a feature delivery business and not really understand what is the problem we solve for customers and how do customers become aware.

[00:33:42] And. How do they compare us to other stuff and what makes us valuable relative to other things? And so just establishing a foundational understanding of a B2B business is step one. We spent a lot of time sort of dissecting and understanding the core flywheels of a business. And then we actually talk about how you find product [00:34:00] market fit, how you maintain product market fit as your user base.

[00:34:04] So I’m going to talk a little bit about how product market fit and go to market fit. And how product market fit and go to market fit are two different elements of building a sustainable business, Right. So to answer your question some of the challenges that you face in B2B products are What I mentioned earlier, you have these levels of users, you have the actual end user, you have the administrator or configuration or implementation person, and then you have this buying persona as well.

[00:34:29] So you have those three layers, you have the complexity of there’s many, many ways to reach your user right on the low end, you might have a self serve product where people discovered and tried and by themselves in the mid market, you have might have more inbound where people. Get started on your product, but then they come to you to upgrade or pay for some premium feature, right on the enterprise side, you might have outbound where really you’re going out to customers where they exist and pitching them on your product and your vision, and it’s a very long sales cycle and sort of a proof [00:35:00] of concept and an implementation, and it might take months, quarters, even years to implement sometimes.

[00:35:05] And then lastly, there are even B to B products that are primarily partner focused, where You know, PMS are building something, but then there’s a whole partner ecosystem that brings it to the market, right? So if you think of a business like Alassian, I believe the majority of the revenue is actually through partner sales, not through direct sales or inbound sales.

[00:35:22] So so that there’s all this complexity at the user level, there’s different altitudes and at the go to market level, there’s different motions. And so being a PM on the B to B side can actually get. quite complex. And then you layer in companies having multiple products and multiple motions. It actually creates a lot of tension in terms of road mapping, planning, et cetera.

[00:35:43] Right. And so those are some of the complexities we talk about. And then, you know, frameworks are a dime a dozen. And so a big part of the class that I teach is actually helping people with their products day to day and dissecting their strategy and figuring out how to sort of work with their leadership team.

[00:35:59] To sort of [00:36:00] shift things in the right direction.

[00:36:01] Ellie: Right. Which leads me to my other question. You mentioned tensions there. How do you foster an environment of strong opinions, weakly held among product teams?

[00:36:12] Ibrahim: Yeah. I think there are a few different tricks. One is, I mean, you just say it, Right. Which is, Hey, look, any sort of debate around product decisions or doubling down investment or, you know, sunset. Certain features, you don’t associate the people with the decisions, right? It’s, it’s really about the business And the customer.

[00:36:31] That’s one way to sort of even the playing field and keep things neutral. The second I would say is you know, political lines can be drawn in product organizations, like any kind of organization, and I think having rotations and allowing PMs to work on different aspects of the product portfolio.

[00:36:48] Is really, really good. So that could just be working on two different products that could also mean shifting between being sort of a growth p. m. to a feature p. m. to a platform p. m. I think that generates a lot of [00:37:00] empathy for the different constraints that people juggle, right? Lastly, I think the most interesting companies, if you think of the most iconic brands, they have leaders who have done stints in different parts of their portfolio, right?

[00:37:14] And so I think promoting from within people who truly understand the breadth of your platform and the edges of your business is really, really valuable because they can bring learnings from one part of the organization to the other and build bridges and short circuits. Issues before they even arise.

[00:37:31] Right? So I’m a big, big fan of Hey, somebody used to be in customer success. Now they’re in product, right? Or somebody from product went into something more on the business development side, and it just created a new way for them to talk to their partners. And so I think that cross pollination is key, and it actually reduces friction before it even materializes.

[00:37:52] Ellie: Right. And I want to talk a little bit in terms of leadership styles and approaches and how it differs for you when [00:38:00] you’re looking at scaling teams versus when you’re working on initial products.

[00:38:06] Ibrahim: Yeah, maybe I’ll take the initial product one first, which is I think when you’re trying to find product market fit, you want people who are very, very good at sussing out customer pain, right? So strong at research and getting access to your target market without a lot of constraints. And then the other one being rapid iteration, right?

[00:38:28] Somebody who’s actually able to build throw away things and put them in front of customers and get to an answer quickly. And so I think those skills you know, sometimes they’re called entrepreneurial, sometimes they’re called scrappy, sometimes it’s called hustle, but you really need somebody who is sort of.

[00:38:45] Structured in an unstructured way a little bit, right. Versus I think when you’re really trying to scale a team, you found a formula for what works and you really need people who can sort of put the pedal to the metal and use some gas. And so that’s where I think you need [00:39:00] better operators and people who can sort of understand at a systemic level, these are the pillars of our strategy. And these are the. Tenants of our execution principles and who can just really get things done and navigate all the complexity of an organization to do that and I think there’s there’s an in between right where you’re on the cusp of scaling because you’ve almost found product market fit where you need people who can almost sort of flex in either direction.

[00:39:25] Ellie: And that partly covers my next question in terms of advice that you would give to product managers who are just starting their career, what specific skills or strategies they should focus on.

[00:39:39] Ibrahim: Yeah, you know, my Consistent advice to PMS, especially early in their career is get reps and get new reps, right? And so don’t fall into the trap of, you know, I spent three years doing the same thing over and over, right? Do it until you feel like you’ve mastered it and then push. To learn new skills, either by [00:40:00] switching domains or by switching products or by switching the angle through which you’re attacking the problem.

[00:40:07] But again, that’s my bias. I believe in a breadth first view of product management. And so I think cross functional pollination is key. I think trying different things is key. But there’s nothing wrong with sort of really finding a domain you’re passionate about it and working on that. But I think you then really.

[00:40:24] Evolve in your depth of understanding of the problem versus your breath as a product person. So it kind of depends on what your ultimate goal is, but I do think learning reps are key. And you know, whenever I think about. People I’ve hired who have been successful or unsuccessful, I would say, you know, if you look at their first 90 days, actually being able to go through a full product cycle where they ideate ship and learn is key because it gets their feet wet.

[00:40:53] And then they’re able to actually. Build on that learning and ship faster, ship different, whatever they might need to do. And then I [00:41:00] think the people who struggle, they always sort of through no fault of their own end up in a situation where it’s like, well, that got deprioritized or that investment wasn’t quite enough, or we never really did the thing.

[00:41:09] And so that’s my biggest advice is make sure you are working on things that are a priority and you can explain why it’s a priority. And there’s a real energy in the organization behind getting it done because that’s the foundation of anything.

[00:41:23] Ellie: Hmm. And as an advisor, what are some of the common blind spots that you see among product leaders? You’ve talked about the importance of breadth of experiences. What do you see currently missing or lacking?

[00:41:42] Ibrahim: how much time do we have? No, no. I think some of the some of the things I see, you know, especially with the people I’m advising is they fall into this trap of. The product leader gets to make all the decisions and has to have their fingerprints on all decisions when the reality is you don’t need to, or want to have that [00:42:00] much input on all decisions, right?

[00:42:01] If people are making the right decisions without your involvement, I think that’s perfectly fine. I think a lot of product leaders spread their organizations way too thin and don’t realize there are different taxes you have to keep paying with every investment. So making a new investment. Has to be a very thoughtful exercise and a very cross functionally aligned exercise.

[00:42:21] And I see people a lot of times just spinning up things willy nilly without realizing like, Oh, this is one more thing marketing has to message on. This is one more thing sales has to talk about. There’s one more thing support has to do. And so I think. Thinking through the cross functional tax of something and making sure everybody’s prepared to pay it in terms of ROI is important.

[00:42:40] I would also add I’ve seen recently there’s an overemphasis on sort of some of the mechanical aspects of product management. So is it you know, are my PRDs following a certain template? Are people sort of sharing their metric on a weekly basis? And I think Especially as you scale up as a product leader, you’re going to have products at different points in their [00:43:00] journey, right?

[00:43:01] Products that are looking for fit, products that are looking to scale, products that probably need to be sunset. And I think you need to treat the PMs and the teams that are doing each of those things really differently. And so I would summarize it by saying there’s a desire for consistency in the product org and one playbook and blueprint for everything.

[00:43:20] And I just think fundamentally it’s More art than science and you can’t formula your way into it.

[00:43:27] Ellie: love that. And finally, what gets you most excited about the future of product management and innovation?

[00:43:36] Ibrahim: Well, I will mention, I think the technology and tools and especially with the advent of AI have really made it easier to do some of the grunt work. Some of the boilerplate work. Like if you think about. Some of the time consuming tasks. It’s like, Hey, I talked to a dozen customers and now I’m really synthesizing my notes while AI can help you with that.

[00:43:56] Right. Or I know sort of a high level skeleton [00:44:00] of, of the key work streams in our strategy, and I need to create some tickets out of it. Right. And then the tools are much better at that. And so I think as a lot of the mundane tasks get taken off the table, it really frees people up. To focus on thoughtful decision making, right?

[00:44:19] I think that is the most valuable thing that PM can do is have time to think and reason and make judicious investments and decisions about what to build, when to build it, why to build it, who to build it for. And so I think I’m excited about the future of product management because I think a lot of things that were a drag on that, that distracted from that are being taken off the table.

[00:44:41] Ellie: Brilliant ending. Thank you so much for your time, Ibrahim. It’s been an absolute pleasure having you.

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