331 | AI and the Future Of Product Management | Lucas Lovell, VP of Product of Paddle

Speaker A: Foreign.

Speaker B: Welcome to the Scale Up Valley podcast where we bring the best founders, CEOs, executives and investors to help you scale your business from 1 million to 1 trillion. Today's guest is Lucas Lovell, the VP of Products at AH Paddle. Lukas, welcome to the show.

Speaker A: Thanks Mike, very happy to be here.

Speaker B: My pleasure. And I'm. I was just discussing with you on. On the, on the pre call that some years ago we, we did a lot of meetups together between Padel and Skillet Valley and when we agreed to do this podcast we were not. You were not even aware because at that time I think you were not yet at Padel. So uh, small world right?

Speaker A: Very, very small world. Very small world. But yeah we do, we do lot, we do lots of events with, with uh, with companies like yours. So Great, great to hear that there's a relationship there.

Speaker C: We will get back to the poll in one minute. Let me just tell you that I'm glad to announce that this podcast is

Speaker B: sponsored by the web agency webtech.

Speaker C: Webtech are uh specialists on getting customers to companies. They are booking 250 meetings a month to their own sales team and their business strategy is to teach other companies what they do for themselves. I'm very excited to announce that I've agreed with Pontus, the CEO of WebTech. A special advantage to our listeners. Our community have now access to a uh pre designed suggestion on how your website could be improved and ah or free trials for both SEO and digital marketing. Oh and by the way we are working with them too and I'm impressed by the results. You can do the same. You just need to go to trywebtech.com mike trywebtech.com mike and tech is without the H just T E C and tell them you are listener of the show. Now back to the pod.

Speaker B: That's amazing. And ah yeah let's get started. You have been four years at paddle. Let us know more a bit about your background and also this journey uh with Paddle because you went from almost a product manage an individual contributor role I see to product leadership. VP product nowadays how it was fascinating uh I would say so far and yeah feel free also to give a uh briefing about what is Padel. So I'm just opening the stage for you and go whatever you want.

Speaker A: Yeah I'll go, I'll go right from the start then I'll tell you, I'll tell you perhaps I can start with how I, how I wound up in product at paddle.

Speaker B: Say that's amazing.

Speaker A: Yeah my, my my background is interesting. Actually, I, I studied law at university and realized about halfway through doing my law degree that I didn't really fancy being a lawyer. This was back at home in Australia, and took quite a keen interest in technology and business and, and decided that that was the, uh, that was the path that I wanted to get on. But it's a very different path to, to, to, to going into being a lawyer from law school. So I was, I was sort of stuck in a bit of a, uh, bit. In a bit of a moment of trying to work out, uh, how do I get onto that path. Right. And I thought that the best way to get onto that path was to go and build an app. And I did that with a couple of friends, which was a really interesting journey, actually. So I started the mobile app. Well, it was the mobile app that eventually turned into a more fully fledged SaaS product. But we started that journey, um, in sort of my second to last year of law school. And then it ended up taking us, um, it ended up sort of taking us all around the world in the end. And, um, uh, we, we grew and built that company. Um, we relocated it from Adelaide in Australia, which is where I'm from, to Paris in France. We were a tourism product. So we sold, we sold a SaaS product to two tourism companies that evolved from a mobile app. I won't go into the details, but it evolved from a mobile app into a, into a SaaS product. Um, and we ended up running that company for about five or six years, which was a really, it was a really exciting journey. We raised a little bit of money. We were a part of some really fun and rewarding acceleration programs in, in France. You might have heard of Station F, which is one of the big sort of incubators and accelerators in Paris.

Speaker B: At Station F, for a while did the, uh, inauguration or it's, uh, correct.

Speaker A: I was there that day. I was there that day.

Speaker B: Roxanne Varsa, right. Was the, uh, leader of Station F. Yeah.

Speaker A: Awesome. So Station, Station F opened in my second year in Paris, which is quite a long time ago now. But that was a massive moment for the French tech ecosystem and I, I feel very lucky to have been a part of that. Um, went on that journey, which was really interesting and had an amazing time. It took us around the world, taught us how to, how to think about building product and talking to customers and growing a company. Very green, but a wonderful experience. And it all came unstuck for us during COVID actually. So, because we were a product, but we built a product that we sold into tourism companies, into medium sized tourism companies. A lot of our business really dried up during COVID and, and the whole adventure or the whole journey started to go a bit south. Um, so that was the start of my journey at Paddle. I ended up leaving the company. All the co founders decided that we were going to, to wind the business up. Um, my other two co founders went back to Australia but I was pretty keen to stay in Europe and see, see if I could continue the adventure. A few more chapters and then I found my way to Paddle. And I didn't really know much about Paddle at the time. I was really interested in the product. I think I resonated with the value proposition. Having run a small startup that wanted to scale internationally and attempted to do so so landed in a product role at Paddle. Just off the back of Paddle's Series C fundraise. Um, there was a big hiring spree after the Series C fundraise that I was a part of. The business at that point in time was about 90 people. I think about 90 people around the 100 mark. Um, and I've sort of grown with the company over the last four, four and a half years. The company is a much bigger company now. Um, we're about 300 people. We've been through a Series D, we acquired a company called ProfitWell in the US which is a story that lots of folks in the industry are aware of which was a really amazing experience and also sort of individually I guess grown from being a product manager to, to being in a product leadership role which has been quite, quite the ride. So I guess like there's two journeys that I sort of think about at Paddle. There's the, there's the company journey which um, has been, has been quite amazing over the last four, four and a half years. And then also the individual journey going from being a product manager through to being vp, uh, of product and leading a wonderful team of product managers. Um, so yeah, I guess for those who aren't familiar, Paddle is a end to end billing and payments product. Um, we help our customers um, capture revenue all around the world. We help them grow their companies and we do all of that under a merchant of record model which means we handle all of the tax and compliance around the transaction enabling companies to grow without constraint and we work with a lot of really ambitious founders who want to take their products global from day one. Um, and we play a small part in them doing so. So it's a really rewarding role. It's a great product. We have a Wonderful customer base and it's been a really exciting journey to date.

Speaker B: That's awesome. Um, and there is a very nice SaaS report also coming from Pavel, so I think you, you all should check it out. I'm getting a lot of value and not saying this because Lucas's ear is. I'm generally saying that uh, I've been consulting your material and it's quite good for Anyone who likes SaaS and wants to benchmark and understand how the industry is evolving. So. And uh, this is super cool. There is something that I always like to say that the best VPs are the ones who are able to be passionate about their function but think like CEOs, right? This founder experience, entrepreneurial experience before coming from Australia to another continent to Paris, especially with a different language. And we know that French really like to speak French, not, not Eng. I'm sure this, this also requires again something that are critical skills for any VP and for any founder, which is adaptation. Um, adapt to the market, understand the market, be persistent. But. But also at the same time don't try to reinvent the wheel. I think all those skills are, are really important as you scale up a company because you also need to reinvent yourself at least every 12 months. And I would say every 12 months at this stage of growth, if it was earlier, probably every one to two quarters you need to become a different person to keep up with the pace of the company. But I think it's at the same time, I know I'm doing a lot of comments here, uh, and allow me to brainstorm with the audience and with you, which is um, you also need to be able to go from more of founding position where potentially you had a lot of decision power to go back to PM and trusting you that you would get to VP product and get probably to a more, more executive kind of role where you would have a more participation in the game. But maybe the culture is so good that at the PM level you already felt that you had skin on the game and an impact. So how has been this transition and how it helps you to be a better VP product today?

Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Thanks for sharing those thoughts. I think, um, the first thing I'd say is Paddle is a great place for founders. We have a number of ex founders at Paddle and I think it says a lot about the company culture. Um, we have, we like empowerment of people is a really core component of how we build and think about our organization. And we also really believe especially in product and decentralized decision making. So the way we operate, I think lends itself to people who have founder backgrounds and we're also an ambitious company. Right. So I think that's important. Founders want to be in an environment which is ambitious and fast paced and, and always thinking about the future. So I think joining a VC backed company like Paddle that has, that has very strong ambitions was a great place for me to land and I really gelled with the people here and I think they also put me on projects that really enabled me to lean into my experience and use my skill set. So it's also on us as leaders to deploy uh, uh, our people in the right way. Right. In ways that they can be most successful. And we always think about that. Right. In leadership here at Paddle. When we, when we hire people, we know that, you know, the difference between someone who, who has a founder background and someone who might not have a founder background is going to mean that they're going to have different strengths, different weaknesses. Founders aren't perfect, by the way. It's not all upside. Right. Sometimes, um, founders can be really challenging to work with.

Speaker B: Exactly.

Speaker A: But I think, I think, you know, one of the, one of the things that really attracted me to the company in the first place is something that I still try and encourage today, which is like creating an environment that founders can really flourish in. Like we have probably have four or five actually at the company who have, who have run businesses beforehand spanning IC roles and leadership roles. So I think that's the first thing I'd say that Patterly is a great place for founders to be. But yeah, you're not wrong. Right. Like the transition from being a founder to working inside of a large sort of scaling company like Paddle is interesting. I think for me, I hadn't worked in a larger company before, so it was a first for me. Like a lot of founders have worked in companies like paddle, then go and start their thing and then might go back again. So there's an element of familiarity there. Whereas for me it was curiosity. I was actually quite interested and excited about the opportunity to learn from people who have scaled organizations and run more successful companies than I had. Right. So I think for me I uh, came into the business with, with the attitude that it was going to be a learning experience, that I was going to learn a lot from the people at Paddle and I didn't, I definitely have. And I think that that, that has sort of also set me up for success in some ways. The fact that I did probably sort of leaning lean into it as a learning opportunity, I think one of the mistakes that some founders make is that the nature of being a founder is that you have extremely high conviction that you are right. And when you come into an organization, sometimes that can rub people up the wrong way. So I think when you're transitioning from founder to uh, uh, employee, it's just about managing your expectations, understanding that, you know, your skill set can be deployed in really good ways. But also you can learn from that experience as well. You can learn from the people inside that company who've had a different path to you. And if you go in with that mindset, then I think, you know, almost always you're going to find yourself being really successful and, and accelerate and progress pretty quickly through the company because your skillset is so unique.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker B: Something interesting is we like to say that, right, the first PM in the company is the founder, uh, and sometimes the founder CEO if we have more a technical cto, uh, which is typically the combination of a founding team. So I think at the same time it seems a natural fit for a PM to be a founder because again, you also need to be comfortable, uh, combining a lot of different disciplines. Which is exactly what founders need to be comfortable is you need to be comfortable with uncertainty, with a lot of variables, with patterns, with testing things without giving up, uh, being persistent, being able to pitch, to present your vision at the same time. Adaptation, when I think it's. Of course I don't have a product background, but I've worked with several product leaders across the years and even PMs in my leadership team work. And um, I got to understand a bit more about the PM role and um, I fully respect the work they do. So how does this evolve? Kind of having your own cell And I think also something amazing about the PMs and correct me if I'm as. I'm not technical, if I'm doing any mistakes or sharing any mistakes. Sometimes you need to work with a team that you don't have authority over you, you just have influence, which is a lot of what founders do. Again, so you don't have, probably in the beginning of your startup you don't have a lot of amazing compensation packages. So you need to bring people for the passion for the vision, not because you are able to pay them, uh, a lot of money. So they are not coming because of your authority, they are coming because of your vision, because they appreciate to work with you, because they believe they can grow with you and because they live in division.

Speaker A: Right? Yeah, I think, yeah, it's super interesting. Um, I, I made an Intentional decision to go into product from being a founder. Right? Like when you're a founder and you start your own company, you do everything. You do marketing, you do sales, you do finance, you do product. Right? You do everything. And, and you know, I thought about like, oh, should I go into a sales role? Should I go into like a. More of a commercial go to market role? But I, I ended up deciding that actually working in product was probably the best use of my skills as a founder. And I think that's why we see lots of founders move into product. Because one of the things that makes you a great product manager is that you have the ability to work with people who represent different disciplines and therefore represent different objectives. Right. So one of the things that we often talk about in product is especially as you get, as you get more senior, uh, is a lot of your job is working horizontally across the business and not just vertical within your swim lane. Right. So the fact that a founder can come into a product team and having run their own business, understand what marketing, what, what good looks like, understand what good looks like in sales, in finance, in legal, there is absolutely, I'm absolutely not saying that they're experts in any of those fields. Right. By any stretch, especially in an organization that's much larger, uh, where the problem set in each of those different disciplines is much more difficult. Challenging. But the fact that you can be in the conversation, right. The fact that you can somewhat speak their language a little bit, right? Yeah. Hold your own and enter into a really healthy dialogue, right. Where you can represent the product perspective, but also have really have a lot of empathy for their perspective, actually makes you very effective in your role. And so I think, I think ultimately, you know, I meet lots of product people who've gone and done their own thing in the past, who've started their own company in the past, and it might not have worked out, or maybe it did work out and this is sort of the next chapter in their career. But I do think there's something about product management that, that, that really lends itself to, to, to the founder background. You know, when you think about, you think about the, the product life cycle. So we, we think about sort of discovery delivery and adoption, discovery being going out and learning about the problems that your customers are experiencing and going deep on those problems and finding data, be it data that's external to the business, be it internal user data, be it researching different technologies. All those components of discovery is one part of product, and that requires you to interface with sales to get access to customers. With success, to get access to customers, with marketing, to sort of understand like top of funnel and how our demand gen funnel is working. Then you think about delivery and that's like, okay, work with engineering and sort of like actually put together the necessary artifacts to go and take something and convert it into reality and design and sort of that classic product engineering design triad. And you think of adoption which is about okay, how do I actually get that thing that I built into the hands of customers and along, along sort of the, the, the, the life cycle. You're interfacing with so many different people around the company. You know, in, in a product like ours, fintech and payments, you know, regulation is really important for us to stay on top of. The regulatory landscape is complex. So we have to work very closely with legal when we're, when we're thinking about the things that we could build or the direction that we want to go. So you have to have a conversation there. So sort of the way you work is very much like, oh, I have to go and like think about all these different disciplines in the company and understand their perspective and have empathy for their perspective but ultimately sell them on a, sell them on a vision, sell them on a direction that we want to take the product. Right. And that, that sort of requires you to have a bit of sales in you as well. One of the, one of the best things I ever did for myself as a product person is have a bit of a background in sales. Right. Even though I'm not sort of an AE selling to customers, I still sell a lot. I'm selling internally, I'm selling to stakeholders, I'm selling to our executive team, I'm selling a roadmap, I'm selling a strategy. Right. I'm getting alignment. And all of that requires you to deploy sort of communication, I guess, methods and be able to put your sales cap on. I think product really brings together a lot of different skills and that's what I love about it as well by the way. Like that's what attracts me to the role. But yeah, I do lean very heavily on my founder background all the time working in product. Yeah.

Speaker B: And it makes me think of that quote, we are all in sales even if we are not formally in sales. And that's a very good point that almost as a product manager, let's say that you are managing a company with stakeholders that are not part of your direct team, again that you need to influence and you need to convince them to come with you, uh, on a vision, on a journey. And then when you have the product, VP products, probably you need to lead different startup founders and align all those companies and make it a portfolio with a common corporate strategy. So they all have their own business strategies and we kind of have a holding of companies that make the big product or the big platform congruent, uh, and that align with the gold market. Is this a good analogy to kind of differentiate the transition from PM to VP products? Uh, or what do you think are the skills and the muscles that needs to be developed for you to, to, to, to go for this career, uh, progression?

Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. I think, I think there are a bunch of things that change. The most obvious one being the scope of your role changes. So when you're a pm, um, or an icpm, um, you're usually working within sort of a single pillar of the product or a single problem space. Ultimately you know, at paddle, where we are one product, right? We uh, we are not sort of a group of small products. We are, we are one product. But there are, there are products within that product if you like. Right, right. And, and those products or slices of the product are uh, owned by different product managers. So for example, like we have ownership over our billing product and we have ownership over our payments product, ownership over our checkout product. Right? All of that, all of that comes together to, to provide the holistic PADDLE product or PADDLE platform. But ultimately you know, as a pm, the scope of your role is, is, is limited to that, to that particular domain or area of the product. And then at a VP level, the scope of your role is sort of the whole thing, right? It's, it's, it's taking all the parts and bringing them together, um, and sort of thinking about discovery, delivery, adoption across all of it without being in the weeds as much as you would be as an icpm, sort of going deep on one particular component of it. So the scope is naturally different. I think something that I think about a lot is like what's your primary artifact? And your primary artifact as, as an ICPM is probably your roadmap, right? Like you own your roadmap and that's the main thing that you uh, have to manage day to day. And you know, you think about strategy and you, you know, there's strategy is bi directional, strategy comes down from the top and it's also informed underneath. But your primary artifact is your roadmap at uh, a, at an ICPM level. Whereas as you get more senior, your primary artifacts become strategy. Right? So I'm no longer managing a roadmap, I'm managing a Strategy. And the strategy is designed to inform the roadmap. So I don't view the strategy as an artifact. For me, the strategy is an artifact for the product managers to go and curate excellent roadmaps that take the company forward, take our product forward. Right. So there's sort of this roadmap, uh, strategy dynamic that really shifts as you get more senior and at a VP product level, you know, that is your ownership. Right. It's really owning the strategy and direction of the product. And then I think, as I said earlier, another key difference is sort of this concept of working vertically versus working horizontally. Like my primary team or my primary stakeholders are like other leaders of other functions to make sure that we are achieving cross functional alignment on the direction that we're heading, to make sure, you know, we're all in the same boat, rowing together in unison to move forward as quickly as we can. Um, and then I think the other thing that is probably different is like the metrics you're looking at every day. So of course like, you know, in the leadership role, you're overseeing adoption metrics and all the other metrics that are coming out of the product, but you're also looking at business metrics, you're looking at revenue, you're looking at gross margin. You're really thinking about how do I connect the product in its entirety to business outcomes and business impact. And staying on top of that is super important in a VP role as well.

Speaker B: Yeah, you just crossed uh, an important topic that probably this has been discussed so many times in podcasts. Maybe we would not stay there a lot, but maybe I would just to try to provoke here a bit. Our conversation is, we know if product leaders have this founder mindset that they are comfortable to navigate across different disciplines. Why do we have such um, a lot of silos sometimes coming from product and the go to market functions. Right. So I'm sure you have been like myself in companies that it seems that sales, marketing, customer success are speaking one language and product is speaking a completely different language and they are not able to get out of that cosmo, that friction. They are not able like think like CEOs first and functional leaders second. They are much more thinking about how do I protect my team, how do I fight for more resources instead of what does the team as a whole needs and what the company needs in order to succeed. And maybe also a, uh, reflection. Is it help that you have more of a founder mindset in your journey that probably you, you don't or at least you help your leadership team at paddle to not face such a big friction that you see in so many companies. And I would say I, uh, also don't like generalization. Right. I think you can see that also in different stages. I think sometimes we have the problem, we fix it, we bring new leaders and it's solved or we work on the team. Right. It doesn't mean that this problem is always there. I think there are stages and seasons, especially when we are in cris and moments of inflection and moments of transition. That's when those, those problems emerge even more.

Speaker C: Right?

Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. This is something that we are much better at now. At paddle. I think we went through a bit of a. I don't know what the word is, but we, we, we, we went through a process of sort of, you know, trying to find a much better sense of alignment between cross functional leaders. I think, I think it's a maturity thing. I think some companies are much better at this and, and become better at this over time. It was definitely a journey that we went on maybe two or three years ago where I felt like there was more friction between functional leaders. And now I feel like there's actually very little. I think there's a few things that play into it. Uh, the first one I'd say is just alignment on strategy. How much clarity is leadership giving functional leaders, so say xco, for example, how much clarity are they giving functional leaders on the direction that they want the business to go in? Because often, often functional leaders disagreeing with direction or disagreeing on certain topics is because they just lack unified clarity around the direction that the company should be going in, whether that comes from an executive level like the CEO, uh, or whether that comes from the board or whoever it is. But I think once you, once you give functional leaders that sense of clarity and that sense of this is our aligned mission, strategy, vision, right. I think a lot of those problems start to go away. I think another thing that we, that we spent a lot of time on as a cross functional leadership team is icp, right. So, so sometimes sales sees a big opportunity over here, right, with this particular type of customer and they think, oh, if only we could build those three things to go and unlock that type of customer, that would be wonderful. Yet that's just all that is, is the opinion of the sales leader. Right. Whereas the product, the product leadership team might actually be thinking about this direction. Right. And we, we had this problem at Paddle where we did, we actually just didn't have alignment on icp. We didn't have alignment on Are we building for the same type of customer that you want to sell to? Right. It's uh, it sounds like a pretty simple question. It's actually not. It's actually a pretty complex question. Right. But, but it's such an important question for cross functional leaders to align on because ultimately, I mean it's just, it's just one step downstream from strategy. Right. Like are we all aligned on the ICP that A, we're building for and B, you're distributing to and uh, that conversation. And it's usually like a multi month conversation, but it's a super important one. Right. I think the other, the other component to this is also personal incentivization. Now you know, it's, it's real that a product leader is typically incentivized on different things than what a sales leader is. So in sales or commercial roles you typically have much uh, like short term, like short term incentives are much more common.

Speaker B: Exactly.

Speaker A: So they typically operate on sort of quarterly, quarterly quotas and they will be paid based on the outcome of that quarterly performance, whereas a product leader doesn't have a quarterly quota as it pertains to sort of bookings or that sort of stuff. And so product is probably more inclined to make decisions for the long term. Right. They're less inclined to be making decisions for the short term and more likely inclined to be making sort of medium to long term decisions. So the, the horizon of your decision making is very different. Right. And I think, I think that's where the clarity becomes even more important because you need to have something that you can come together on and agree. Listen, yes, our incentivization structures are quite different as individuals but ultimately we want the same thing. Right. Which is this outcome, uh, for Paddle. And we need to be aligned in how we get there. And it will always be true that personal incentives will vary between different functional leadership roles.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker A: I don't, I don't think you can get away from that. I'm not suggesting that we should go and change incentivization structures sort of between product and sales or success, but you do have to navigate some of that complexity and the way you do that is through clarity of strategy and vision.

Speaker B: And uh, uh, I think it's also important that incentivization when you kind of the leadership team all aligns in terms of the vision that they want to achieve and to kind of have a common layer of compensation if we achieve the vision. So we can also kind of play the short mid, long term, especially for the revenue leaders. Right. Because then Okay. I want to earn well in the short term and um, achieve my goals also because I know my, that my role as a sales, in a sales position, if I miss several quarters probably I will not be here a long time. So but at the same time if I make the right thing, if it, if damages my results in the short term for the company, I will be compensated anyway because this is where our vision is going. So as a leadership team member I will get compensated by making a not so popular decision as the sales or customer success leader. However, I would say customer success is more a farmer, sales is more enter. So that's where typically you also don't like a lot of change because typically you don't even like new things. You want things that are already working and that make you calculate better how you achieve the number of account executives that you need with the conversion rates with the number of meetings, how much will it land in terms of acv, deals closed and quota made and as you said, commission paid. So uh, I think it's really important the team and we go back to the founder mentality is I think at a certain point also especially at this stage, 300 people, we become more going from the pirates to more corporate kind of structure. So people are less there for the passion but also for the gravitas, the money, the status. Um, so many stuff, uh, just to say that I'm working at a super special company, whatever it is. But a lot of times um, and there is nothing wrong about it. I think that money is an important asset and tool for all of us and we can do a lot of good things with, with more money in our bank account and sometimes even make better decisions and support more people. Right. So there is nothing wrong about it. But I think the trade off between passion and money is a bit more, it's, it's completely different from the trade off between money and passion at the founder level. So. And I think this is also elevates even more the friction uh, at the C suite or at the leadership team level. Do you agree with that?

Speaker A: Yeah, I think, I think so. Yeah, I think so. Directionally I think like, you know, it's funny, we actually are still trying to maintain, you know, a sense of scrappiness and I mean, I think, I think you use the term culture, you go from being pirates to corporates. We actually, we actually have spoken very openly recently about, we want to be more piratic. Like we, we, we, we still want the pirates because you need to, you need to have a, you need to have a Blend, right. You need to have a blend. And, and I think people, you know, to, to sort of take your term corporate, you do need people who can bring operational maturity. You do need people who can bring systems and processes. You do need people who've been there, done that and seen a company go from where we are today to where we want to be in 2, 3, 4, 5 years time. It's all important. But I think you need to blend that with the ambitious, passionate, piratic, rule breaking type of Personas that can come in and really make a difference. Right. And, and, and sort of keep pushing boundaries. I think, I think when a company loses that starts to, it starts to impact like their ability to grow at pace, et cetera, et cetera. So I very much believe in having a blend of both and I think Paddle does too by the way. I think PADDLE is one of those companies that over my time here we've brought in a lot of really sort of mature leadership which has been great because it's really leveled up the organization in many ways. But I do think we have sort of still a nice cohort of folks who really like to push boundaries and get their hands dirty on certain things.

Speaker B: And sometimes we, the ones who are more in the tech ecosystem and in the startup or scale up ecosystem sometimes forget that for those large corporate leaders, a 300 company, for them it's kind of still a bit small. It's quite risky and it requires a quite of passion to join. Maybe the 300 to a thousand that's one layer but then 1 to 10k in terms of employees, that's another layer and some of them maybe are considering to exchange. Coming from a 10k plus employee headcount company to a 300, uh, it's, it's a big risk. You are again, you are not coming just motivated by the money. You are coming again motivated by the passion. How, as you said, how do I share my experience running a 500 or 600 or a thousand, uh, headcount organization, two or 300 headcount organization that is moving into that scale up um, process. Uh, I agree with you, uh, it's curious. Another topic that I think it's critical in all our conversations right nowadays, which is uh, I think we all as users more or less literate in terms of AI. We are seeing how ChatGPT Pro is evolving. I think we all get surprised every single day that we use or I think I talk from my experience, my team, we are bringing it a lot to meetings and just playing with it as it was almost A member of the team. I think at the time. I'm already having conversations with, with ChatGPT. Uh, and I, I know I'm, I'm kind of being too Simplist by saying ChatGPT is just the AI tools we have with much more solutions that, that we have out there. But how do you see AI, uh, impacting products and how, how do you see the, the future of product organizations with the influence of AI?

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, super interesting question and something that I think all of us are still trying to work out. Right. You know, uh, we've made a ton of progress in the last year on AI. Like it's just amazing what you can do now that you couldn't do 12 months ago. But, but I still think we've got a long way to go. I use, I use AI every single day. Without a doubt. I'm on Chat GPT Gemini every single day. I use it for all sorts of tasks. I know all of our PMs use it for, uh, all sorts of tasks. Everything from helping them write SQL queries through to supporting analysis of data through to helping them come up with meeting agendas. Right. And crafting comms and writing an email and helping them with structured thinking. And I think, I think they're all wonderful use cases because ultimately they're making us more efficient as, as, as product people. And I think the main thing that I'm seeing at the moment from a product management perspective is, is execution is just becoming cheaper and faster. Right. Product managers are spending less time on executional grunt work. Things like writing product requirement documents, digging through data, building discovery templates. Because all of that you can just do 4 or 5x quicker now with AI. And it's not to suggest that AI is doing all of it, but it can really accelerate um, your ability to do those things. So I think the first thing that's happening is that execution on the grunt work is just becoming much cheaper and much faster. Right. Which is a great thing I think because it means that PMs can spend more time on strategic thinking, on talking to customers and all that sort of stuff, which, which is great. So I think it's also going to force PMs to level up, up the strategic thinking. And I think when you level up your strategic thinking, you sort of unlock another more use cases for AI to sort of help you along that journey. I also think that, that in terms of the building part of AI, like how products are helping us build things, I think the quality of prototyping and generating proofs of concept is going up a lot. Right. So I think a product manager can easily get something into an MVP state or a prototype state without requiring design or engineering resource. And I don't think we're yet at a point where those things can necessarily be productionized, especially in a company like paddle, which is a payments platform. So like highly sensitive data, like highly secure infrastructure that needs to be reliable and scalable. So like we're not at a point where like PMs are like sort of building stuff that's getting, that's going to production, but like PMs can very easily and these days build prototypes to throw in front of a customer to validate a hypothesis or a set of hypotheses. Right. And they can do that without having to, having to require, I guess, development resource, which is making product engineering organizations more efficient. Right. So I think getting MVPs to market it more quickly, validating concepts, validating prototypes, testing ideas with customers, um, without just like, like, like saying, hey, I've got this idea. Do you like it? It's like, I've got this idea, I've done a mock up here it is react to the actual thing and not just my words is really, really powerful. Right. So I think, I think there are a few things that, that, that are great for product managers like execution speed, the ability to generate prototypes and sort of leveling up strategic thinking. I think something that is interesting that I've spent a bit of time reflecting on is I guess the idea that perhaps AI is making PMs less customer centric. And I'll talk, uh, about what I mean by that. I think there is a world in which AI is deepening our understanding of customers. There's also a world in which AI is distancing PMs from customers. And the reason I say that is because I think PMs these days have an incredible ability to access customer insight without actually talking to customers. Right. So our sales teams are talking to customers every single day. M. There are hundreds of calls every week that get uploaded to GONG at Paddle. And it's very, very easy to generate customer insight by writing a few prompts and letting it spit out all the data from those calls. Right? So that's great because you can get a lot of insight cheaply, quickly. Right. What it does though, is it distance the product. It distances the product manager from the customer themselves. And I think it's really, it's, it's something that we have to be aware of because a lot of the value of talking to customers is actually emotive it's not necessarily what they say, it's how they say it. So if a customer gives a point of feedback about something, the tone they use, the types of words they use, the language they use, the look on their face. Right. Is actually a really important input into understanding their perception of that problem. And when you're just using AI to effectively build scripts that just pump out data and then saying that's all the customer insight, all you're doing is making yourself in some ways less proximate to the actual customer. And I think there's value in remaining proximate to the customer. So I think on the one hand, AI is great because we can generate an insane amount of customer insight that we couldn't do before very easily. But at the same time, I'd be wary of PMs using that as a reason to not talk to customers or not get facetime with customers. Because the emotive reaction, the emotive response, the emotional, the delivery of that feedback is so crucial for you to understand how your product resonates with your customers.

Speaker B: And something that I take from your insights as well is again, the importance of our differentiation will be much more towards relationships. Again, cross functional alignment with other peers, with other team members and aligning them towards the vision and with customers, again doing exactly the same and partners and probably all the rest. Even in, I would say even in the strategic thinking level, even AI can help a lot there. But you still need also to make the decision and direct sometimes also the AI in a certain direction. So I agree with you, the strategic thinking is not there yet. But still I already see people that are able to up their game because of AI.

Speaker C: Ah.

Speaker B: Because they would not be thinking about certain topics if it was not AI bringing them up. Right.

Speaker A: So yeah, from like a strategy perspective, I mean I definitely use AI to help me articulate strategic concepts.

Speaker B: Exactly.

Speaker A: So when I will often bring like a strategic concept or some strategic thinking to a chatgpt or to a Gemini and say, listen, like I've got this idea, I'm trying to work through how I should frame this concept exactly or how I should articulate this concept and concise. Is there a framework that I can use to communicate this really easily? And it's super effective at that. Actually it is super effective at that. If you, if you feed it sort of thinking and it can help you sharpen your thinking. I think that's a great use case for AI.

Speaker C: Ah.

Speaker B: Lucas, the time is coming to an end when we are having fun. So we always like to Wrap up our show. It's, uh, a question that allows you to also share a bit more about yourself. So if you'd have the opportunity to have, uh, a coffee with the Lucas that was coming from Paris and thinking, I go to Australia, should I join stay in Europe and join a scale up and join paddle, what would you tell to that, Lukas?

Speaker A: That is a good question. I would tell them to stay. Firstly, I love Australia, but I definitely tell Lucas to. To stay in Europe and continue the adventure. I think the thing I'd probably remind myself of is that not every experience has to have a financial outcome. And sometimes the learning that you gain from an experience is, is more valuable than the financial outcome. So especially early career, keep indexing towards learning, right? Keep putting yourself in positions where you're going to learn. Keep sort of exploring outside of your comfort zone, and ultimately the financial outcome will come at some point in life. For me, when I lost the company, there was nothing to show for the five or six years that I put in. And that was hard when I walked away from it, but. But on reflection, I still think I've generated an enormous amount of wealth from that experience. It might not be in a bank account, but it is definitely there through learning and opportunity. So I think that's what I'd remind myself.

Speaker B: That's amazing. Lukas, it has been a pleasure to have you on the show. We wish you all the best and you are always welcome to come back. Keep us posted. Thank you very much.

Speaker A: Thank you, Mark. It's been a pleasure. Appreciate it.

Speaker B: And to our community, thanks for being there. We keep bringing you the best of the best to make your life a little bit easier as you scale up your company. See you soon. And keep scaling.