The Hubert Palan Hypothesis: Customer-Centricity and Effective Segmentation are Key to Building a Successful Product Company

Speaker A: In today's episode, I talk with Hubert Palan, founder and CEO of ProductBoard, about a range of product management topics from customer centricity to effective segmentation. We answer some of your biggest questions about Hubert's journey in building productboard. Like, what pain point did you identify that led to starting productboard?

Speaker B: Like, I'm doing all this in spreadsheets and PowerPoints. I'm trying to understand the segmentation and I'm trying to make sure that what I put on the roadmap satisfies the needs of the most important customer segments. And I'm, um, you know, tool less.

Speaker A: After you've got your initial foothold, how do you decide which segment to target for expansion?

Speaker B: Product management is a multidimensional, uh, problem. And so we would look at the size of the segment. Uh, we would look at, okay, how many similar companies are there like that? Uh, we would look at willingness to pay, we would look at, you know, additional requirements.

Speaker A: And what was it like to learn from Steve Blank?

Speaker B: Steve Blank was my professor at Berkeley and Lean Startup was just happening. This is back in 2013, you know, and Lean Startup was, was really big then.

Speaker A: Hi and welcome to the Product Science podcast where we're helping startup founders and product leaders build high growth products, teams and companies through real conversations with people who have been there and aren't afraid to share their lessons learned from their failures along the way. I'm, um, your host, Holly Hester Riley, founder and CEO of the Product Science Group. This week's episode is the Hubert Palan Hypothesis. Customer centricity and effective segmentation are key to building a successful product company. Hubert Palan is founder and CEO of ProductBoard. Driven by a passion for building truly excellent products, he started the company when he saw a hole in the market for a dedicated product management platform. Hubert mentors and advises startups and judges teams at entrepreneurship competitions, and frequently speaks at his two alma maters, UC Berkeley, where he got his MBA and Czech Technical University where he received an Ms. M in Computer science. With that, let's go to the conversation with Hubert Palan.

Speaker C: Welcome, Hubert, to the Product Science Podcast. I'm so excited to have you here.

Speaker B: Thanks for having me. It's awesome to be here.

Speaker D: Thanks.

Speaker C: So I'd love to talk to you a bit about your journey as the founder of Productboard. Um, so tell me a little bit about, uh, how that got started.

Speaker B: It's a story of I'm an engineer turned product manager. I got a business degree and I got sucked into the Silicon Valley world here and I Realized that I had all these awesome project management tools at my disposal, like Jira Asana, uh, back in the days, Pivotal Tracker. And I also realized, though Steve Blank was my professor at Berkeley and Lean Startup was just happening, this is back in 2013, and lean startup was really big then, and I understood that everything is about customers and their pain points. And that's what product management is about. How well do you understand what people need and what are you going to do about it? But none of the project management tools like Jira or what I mentioned actually even have the concept of a customer, their pain point, uh, in it. It doesn't exist in those systems. And so I was like, that's crazy. Like, I'm doing all this in spreadsheets and PowerPoints and I'm trying to understand the segmentation and I'm trying to make sure that what I put on the roadmap satisfies the needs of the most important customer segments. And, um, you know, tool less. Like, I don't have a solution. And so I said, let's change that. Let's, let's build a company. Let's build a product that's going to be built specifically for the needs of product managers as opposed to project managers and thus product board. And that's 10 years ago now. And now we have 6,000 companies as customers. And from small to large, companies like, uh, Zoom and Autodesk, or very traditional companies like JPMorgan Chase.

Speaker C: Yeah, the rest is history. Awesome. Um, I'm definitely going to ask you to tell us some more details about that, but first I want to take a minute to just say you mentioned Steve Blank. Um, for any of our listeners who don't know, Steve Blank was the author of Four Steps to the Epiphany. Um, and I believe, uh, worked with Eric Ries maybe, um, before Eric wrote the Lean Startup book. So Steve was sort of like the og.

Speaker B: Steve's the OG and he had Eric to come to the class to both Berkeley and Stanford because Steve was teaching at, uh, both schools. And then got Eric to tell the story of what he did and one of his startups and the lessons learned. And then Eric repackaged it and with beautiful marketing, introduced the Lean Startup, uh, concept. Uh, so. Super valuable.

Speaker C: Yeah. So you got to take a class from Steve at, uh, Berkeley.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: What was that like?

Speaker B: It was amazing. It was like, you know, the mantra of his class is get out of the building and talk to people and see their pupils dilate and make sure that you really understand intimately what they need and Then even after, like when I was starting Productboard, I had lunch with some Steve because he's like in the class, like, hey, anyone here in the class? You can meet me. I'll give you feedback and so on. And so I had, um, the first meeting with him and the conversation was about segmentation and targeting and who should I spend time with and who I shouldn't spend time with. And he basically said, like, look, at this point you should just ask a simple qualification question. And it is, do you know what Lean Startup is? And if you do, okay, talk to that person because they have the mindset and they are the modern product thinkers who understand the need for customer centricity and being close to their needs. And if people say no, there's like, thank them and come back to them later. But don't waste time trying to educate people on it first. Try to find the initial Beach Head segment that has the pain point and knows about it and spend time with those.

Speaker D: That's really clever.

Speaker C: I like how he got to that one question as a way of understanding where a person falls in a number of areas because you can tell if they know about Lean Startup, that they, uh, they probably experience the pains that Lean Startup is trying to solve. Uh, and so you kind of almost like hack your way to that.

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean that's the, that's the art. That is, that's the art in both product management as well as in actually sales and go to market is like, how do you distill a lot of different criteria into a very short set of questions or attributes that you can use to understand who you should be talk to or targeting or marketing to, or who you should nominate for user research interview. Uh, it's important skill.

Speaker C: Yeah, um, I'd love to dive into that a bit more because I agree. And I think that customer segmentation as a product person is a really, um, pivotal decision when we're building product strategy. So I'm curious to hear more about, um, your initial segmentation work for Productboard. What were you looking at or what did you consider, like, before you met with Steve, what were you thinking about segmenting based on.

Speaker B: Yeah, look like, you know, I wasn't quite naive that, um, that I would walk into lunch and that was the thing. Like, I had the whole class with Steve and we talked a lot about it. Plus, you know, the traditional class in business school on marketing strategy is actually product management segmentation. And you, you learn how to do all the quantitative, uh, research and qualitative research and how to do surveys and how to identify clusters and you know, it's kind of a, it's a skill that has been around in a long time in a more traditional setting, not necessarily in the digital product management. To your question about how did we think about it look like it's an evolution with everything. You have the initial idea, everybody starts with an idea and you have an idea that's hopefully informed by your um, experience and that experience turns into internalized intuition and you start making decisions based on that. But I had to realize that my experience as a head of product, I was a VP product at a B2BI platform company uh, here in the heart of Silicon Valley. And I was in the lean startup world. I knew that world very well. I knew how product management is done. I was immersed in that world with all the lean startup community and so on. But what I had to learn and what I had to kind of more articulate to myself, but also to the team that I was working with, like our founding team and the initial group of people is that the needs of me representing that Persona are different than if you're a um, Persona person managing a B2C product versus B2B product or if you're at a large company versus small company. It's probably obvious but you know, if you have a complex product portfolio versus one product, if you are the customer centric lean startup person versus the more traditional back in the days, you know, pragmatic marketing, kind of a, um, training and much more kind of feature centric in the approach and other things like how much you think about design and you know, do you have user research skills, like you know, all of that was informing um, or the market segmented differently. And so that was something that early on we basically said okay, we understand this, we see these dimensions and people are different. And we did it by the way by talking to hundreds of product managers or at VP products, C level execs, um, at large companies and small companies and eventually said okay, so let's just start. We feel like there's a pain point. It's validated. We talked to all these people, there's a need product management, there's no systems for it, and so on. But we said let's start with the specifically like one product manager, um, running one product team at a B2B company because we knew that the importance of customer feedback and understanding the customers is more important. If you have highly concentrated customer portfolio and you need to track exactly who needs what as opposed to in B2C you need more Personas and Segmented approach because the individual voice is weaker, uh, than B2B. And then we said relatively, uh, complex product, but just like one product, not multiple product portfolio and so on and start there and solve the needs of that one product manager. And then later on we were very thoughtful about like, okay, where do we go from there? So now let's start to solve the needs of like a group product manager that's managing multiple teams. And now you need to have more collaborative functionality and you start looking at productivity and you want to do reporting and all that. And so we were very thoughtful, um, in the journey, uh, you know, the milestones, one by one, how we approached it. Does that make sense?

Speaker C: Yeah, no, I think that sounds fantastic. I love how specific you got about not just saying like, oh, product managers at big companies or something like that, but you got very specific. It's B2B. Um, it's one product that they're managing, you know.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think that's the mindset, like how customer centric you are. Like the lean startup, you know. And then there were more. There was like, who calls the shot at the company is it product people or is it engineering? And frequently, you know, in a very engineering driven company, or it could be sales. Right. It could be a very sales driven company where whatever is the biggest, uh, deal. Just, you know, that's how you determine the priority. Um, so yeah, all, all of that was in our. And we had it written down. We had, you know, the dimensions and we were very specific about it.

Speaker C: That's really great. It's actually dovetails really well with a, um, some of the work that I often do is about dimensions, identifying those dimensions and then deciding which ones are the most important ones to segment based on so that you can create that strategy, which, um, it sounds like you did. One of the ways that I like to think about it is it's like a series of problem segment desired outcome combinations. And it sounds like you had that in the sense of, um, you went from, okay, the first set of people you were covering had only one product. And then you expanded, you changed. Okay, the segment's going to be group product manager instead of individual product manager. And so they're still managing their product with the tool. Um, they're still experiencing some of the same pains, but they have a slightly different set of constraints around them because now they're in the group context. Um, so that's really beautiful.

Speaker B: You know, the behavioral aspect is, uh, you know. Right. It's like, you know, what are the needs? So in our case Also, you know, the aspect of customer centricity, it was basically we wanted to satisfy the needs of people who have been already doing research and talking to customers and consolidating feedback. And they were doing it in spreadsheets typically because there was nowhere else to do it. And so we looked at that segment m knowing that it by the way, was subset. I remember, I don't know, six years ago I did a survey, um, and I would say like, hey, what are the features or capabilities or jobs, right? And I know very well that feature is not a job, but it's kind of the other side of the same coin because there is always a pain and you're solving it with something. And so I looked at it and I understood that there were clusters. I did like a super simple K means clustering. And I looked at, okay, there's a segment of the um, customer obsessed, insights driven product managers who just listen to everything and maybe because it's a new product and they're still validating a lot of things and so, um, it's more uh, valuable to them. And there's another segment of customers that care much more about roadmapping and alignment and maybe they're on a bigger team and their pain points are different and they don't care about the customer insights as much. Maybe because of their maturity, maybe because it's just not an immediate pain point. Maybe they're in a more established industry and they kind of know the market way more than if you're launching something new to the market. And so that was all into it. Now the challenge is obviously, as you know, is the behaviors is not something that people have there on their LinkedIn. It's like, what's the proxy? And so I remember I would look at people's LinkedIn in the early days or like, you know, maybe we're doing some campaigns and outreaches and so on. And I would look like, is there something that's telling me that it's a modern person in the product management thinking, right? And it was based on the companies that they worked before or courses that they took or if they were coming from design role, if it was like a design background product manager, I had much higher success rate with those people because they were much more exposed to design thinking, which was ahead of lean startup. And so all that was the challenge, like, okay, you have this idealized dimensions, but then, uh, how do you turn it practically into something like where do you find these customers? Whether it's for user research or whether it's for um, eventually Go to market. Right?

Speaker C: Yeah, no, that is one of the tricky parts. And I think that a lot of teams get caught because they're thinking about how can I find them? And they sort of stumble over themselves because they're like, well I can't segment on that because I don't know how to find it out. Uh, but I think there are ways to get past it.

Speaker A: So how did you get past that?

Speaker B: Well, I did what I said, uh, with the LinkedIn and trying to find some proxies. Um, we also did a thing where we ask qualification questions at the beginning of this trial, uh, signup flow and we ask like, hey, it was kind of like a mad lib fill out back then. It's like I'm a. And then we ask product manager versus other people because there was designers who were signing up, there were engineers who were signing up and so on. So we knew that at A, and we asked like a B2B versus B2C company, how large is the company? And then we ask about what, um, I think like uh, how many products or portfolio did they have? So, so we asked that. So we had that coming in, uh, as you know, the signups and we knew even before we had trial we did like a beta signup where back then we asked people to authenticate with LinkedIn and we also had that mad lib just like to as a, like um, just like hey, collecting information and we'll get back to you when we launch. And so we had hundreds of people who just learned about us. Um, and that's the first group of people that we went to based on who fit the criteria. And then until now we're a large company and we're still having the conversation. How do you find the modern product managers at the large. Large companies that are going through digital transformation and they're the easiest. Right. They need the least education and they're the likeliest to uh, try product board right away. So it's still the same challenge because field like that is not in zoom info or whatever go to market tool, you know, to go target people.

Speaker C: Yeah. So you sort of alluded to a shift there of, you know, where you've gotten to today or what kind of new customers you're looking to acquire. I'm curious to hear more about like a difficult decision you made along the way. I'm thinking about what you said when you mentioned um, you know, PMs that are modern and product minded versus PMs that are like at a big company but they're more traditional whenever you face decisions like that. How do you decide which one you're going to go after?

Speaker B: Yeah, ah, it's a complex decision. Right? It's as you know, product management is a multidimensional, uh, problem. And so we would look at the size of the, uh, segment. We would look at, okay, how many similar companies are there like that. Uh, we would look at willingness to pay, we would look at additional requirements. Back in the days we didn't have the enterprise functionality and all the compliance certifications that we had right now that we have now. So we would just proactively disqualify that quickly to make sure that we're not wasting time. Like, hey, thank you so much, but we're not ready yet. I would also go to events where I could meet people at scale or I would go to every pitch I could go. I would go to Lean Startup conferences or their lanes. I would go to, uh, meetups and I would kind of like one too many broadcasts and people would self select. Um, yeah, I don't think there's any magic bullet to this. Right. Like you need to do all the work. It's a lot of hard work. It's a lot of hard work. The one thing that's interesting is I, uh, know this is product management, um, audience. But the same applies to investors and raising money. Because your most important thing, it doesn't matter if you're a product manager or if you're a founder, is time. And you need to define the focus and who are you going to talk to, how are you going to spend time? Everything has opportunity, cost. And so I had the same thing in the early days. I would waste so much time talking to investors who didn't understand product management. And I would have to spend like, hey, this is why it's important. This is how it's differentiated and this is what product managers do. And it would just be colossal waste of time. And then, you know, I would meet somebody and you know, just obviously operating partners at the top VC firms who been product managers before. And so like Ilya Fishman, my, my investor from Kleiner Perkins, he used to run product at Dropbox. This is the easiest pitch. They like qualification, understand, like, okay, I get it. Of course. Yeah, I mean, product manager, I get it. So like, tell me about how you're going to solve it and how you're differentiated. Yeah, and so, and so that's the same thing with product managers. Like, you know, again, we repeat it, but that's so core the qualification and making sure that you understand the target audience and that you have very thought out, kind of um, step by step how you're going to attack the market. Because at the end of the day you have to make a decision. Do I add another use case? Do I satisfy a new need? Do I expand the set of capabilities that my product um, has or do I double down on what the use case that I already have but make them better or improve the usability? And that's every day. And you know, you talk about product strategy, it's an awesome topic. Like I think that we should talk way more about that because you're probably helping people a lot and I see that as a pain point. Um, you know, it's not well understood, uh, area. But anyway, you know, I'm just drawing the broader picture because I feel like when the product managers can articulate this knowledge of the customer in a way that resonates with other stakeholders at the company because sales is doing the same thing, marketing is doing the same thing. It's all about the ICP on the go to market side. Uh, and it's the same thing, dimensions, qualification. And suddenly you can start speaking the same language. But you need to make sure that you have consistent understanding of okay, who's the target market, what are the pain points, jobs or capabilities or features kind of um, that the different uh, audiences need. And if you have alignment on that then I mean the work is so much easier, the collaboration is so much easier.

Speaker C: Yeah. I've seen companies that have both sides of this, like the side where they are aligned, sales and marketing and product are actually targeting the same type of customer and they are aligned on what the outcome is supposed to be for the customer and what the value proposition is, what problem they're solving. And those companies, they can go so far. But I've also seen companies where there's literally a Persona book. Like each of those teams has their own set of Personas and they're not aligned. And that's the place where it's really hard. Right.

Speaker B: I would say that's probably the vast majority of cases are like that, that you have a separate ICP and you have a. And even like product marketing has a separate ICP from what the actual sales team is doing. And then you have a separate Persona which is maybe it's design Personas. Right. And it ignores the market aspect of it. That is very common actually.

Speaker E: Right.

Speaker B: Like frequently Personas are more like a design user Personas as opposed to Persona representing the business market segments that product managers need to think about. Because at the end of the day it needs to be a viable business, not just a product that satisfies needs of a specific user. Yeah, the user might have no budget.

Speaker E: Right.

Speaker C: So yeah, yeah, exactly. You gotta solve needs for a user in a way that works for the business. I think you're right. I mean, probably is the majority of companies where that's the case, um, where those teams aren't talking to the same target customer. I'm wondering if you could tell us more about the duration. Like you've been at this for 10 years, right? And product board is now, um, over a billion dollars in valuation. Uh, so you are a unicorn. Um, how long did it take you to get there and tell us more about that journey?

Speaker B: So, um, it's accurate what you're describing. It took a while, uh, to get there and we are meaningful. We are by no means, hey, we've arrived, there's way more work to do. And ah, it's a journey and the journey continues. And it takes years, especially in our space, the B2B platforms. It's a lot of work, it's a lot of complexity. Um, and it's not unusual that it takes years and years and years. Um, for us the challenge was way more about validating the solution than the problem problem as well. But it was very early obvious that product managers don't have solution, that you're hacking it somewhere else. Uh, obviously it wasn't clear and all the understanding of the segmentation that we talked about earlier still needed to be done. But more importantly it was like, how is the solution going to look like and how the platform should be architected both from user experience perspective as well as from logical data model perspective and what entities we should own and how it should be all put together. And so that took a long time at the beginning and we spent like two years prototyping and doing research and talking to people and figuring out, okay, what should be the core set of capabilities. And we went at one point like, oh, we're going to build all these jobs to be done functionality and it's going to be like the best thing and blue ocean strategy segmentation canvases and so on. And that's just like awesome, like cutting edge. The latest in the market where people understand what jobs to be done is even today still and actually would pay money for it. If you're talking to a CIO is like so foreign language to them. Um, so that took a while and so it took us like three years until we actually launched and started charging publicly because there was a lot of systematic Work to de risk it. And retrospect maybe we could have moved faster and um, all that, but it didn't feel quite right. And then also once we had the product, the metrics were still, it was growing, growing, growing. But it wasn't ironically until we reached this feature set that fulfilled complete workflows for people. And it's kind of a, and then it's kind of, you know, exponentially ticked off and started growing way faster. And it's, you know, this is a different, this is a difficult situation because people frequently ask, hey, you know, how, how did you know that a product is ready? Or what happened? And there was no like a uh, one single bullet. It was just like a lot of things that had to happen. And the really the fit, the product market fit had to happen. And on the flip side though you get the advice of like, oh, you hear people like we need to add one more feature in order for this product to build right. To start working. And there's the right solution because sometimes you do need to add a feature. If the workflow is not complete and you don't have that, people can't use it, then they don't get the value out of the overall workflow. Yeah, you actually do need to add more stuff.

Speaker C: I was just going to say I love the way you're framing it there with um, them completing the user, completing an entire workflow that once you had the constellation of features that let the user complete the entire workflow, that's when things really started to get traction. I think uh, that's an important concept um, that I've also seen uh, and believe in.

Speaker B: And the challenge there, by the way, the challenge is how you define what the workflow is or what the job to be done is or uh, what the capabilities. That's the art, that's the, there's many different ways how you position it. I mean that's where the innovation happens as you suddenly look at it differently. Because you could say hey, roadmapping, okay, roadmapping, let's build roadmapping solution and you start building roadmaps and productboard is roadmapping. But how about customer centric collaborative roadmapping? Traditionally you would have a roadmap where you can't comment, you can have conversation. It's a one way, right?

Speaker C: Static document.

Speaker B: Static document. And then you would have dynamic but still one way. And now what if the roadmap is more of a conversation rather than one way communication? Because you collect feedback through the roadmap. Because roadmap is a, it Starts with like, hey, this is what we intend to build. Tell me whether it's right, like a validation mechanism. Almost right, because now you would look at uh, the feedback that you get and the different people are going to. Somebody's going to tell you, oh yeah, this is great, this is awesome. This is exactly what I need. And somebody's going to tell you, like, this is not what I need at all. I need something completely else. And then only when you take it all in and you look at the segments and you ask yourself like, okay, so is the customer that's aligned with the roadmap the most important type of customer for us? Okay, keep going. And if not, hey, you need to adjust, but without having the conversation around the roadmap. So anyway, my point is that the way you define what is it that you're solving, that's the key. Because again, roadmapping versus customer centric roadmapping, you will prioritize very different things.

Speaker C: I think that's really interesting how you talk about customer centric collaborative roadmapping as I imagine you have as well. I've seen a lot of different companies approaches to roadmapping and most of the time I'm disappointed by them. Um, but sometimes a company does a really good job and when they do, it's some kind of ongoing conversation. Uh, one time when I was working at a high growth startup, the VP product who was my boss, um, because this is years ago, did a monthly roadmap meeting with the whole company. And so every single month he would get in front of the company and be like, this is what the roadmap looks like right now. Give me feedback. And then he also had an internal wiki where you could go and a system for providing that feedback. And unfortunately in the years since then I haven't seen um, as good of systems at a lot of places because they're not setting it up for a conversation. So many people are just like, this is what we're doing, just deal with it.

Speaker D: Yeah.

Speaker B: And then even in situations where you're like, hey, uh, sales, give us input. And then you get a prioritized list of top 10 asks. But for whom? Okay, so this top 10 asks because this quarter you have these deals or leads and opportunities, uh, in the pipeline and that's why you prioritize top ten. Um, anyway, so it's like, for whom? It always needs to. Every conversation that the product people need to have is like, if somebody asks for something like, that's great. I appreciate so much this input. Who is it for? And what problem is it solving? And you need to capture that because that the segmentation behind that is like. Because then you can have a conversation. It's like, I appreciate it, um, you know, Jimmy, and from the sales team that's so valuable. But clearly you see that the type of customer that's asking for this is not the target customer for us at this very moment. It isn't. Because strategically we decided that it's not the segment. Right. You know, and so on. And so it's like, we will get to it, we will get to it later or we will not get to it because it's a completely use case that is, uh, strategically not important and it's covered by other systems. And strategically we decided we're not going to go there. But to your point, this conversation needs to be happening and everybody needs to have that context. And it doesn't matter how junior senior you are in the hierarchy in the product management organization. I always thought of the difference in like the level where you are in the product organization, more about the scope of the needs or use cases or parts of the product that you own, rather than, uh, execution versus strategy. Of course the head of product is. Strategy is the core of the job. But even if you're the most junior PM who owns the team at the bottom of the hierarchy of the organization, you should have a vision and think, uh, about strategy for that small aspect, a small set of use cases that you own. But it shouldn't be just like, oh, it's not my job to figure out what should be coming next because that's the job of my boss. Right. It's more like it's the pyramid. And instead of people being on the different levels of the pyramid, it's kind of like a sliver of the pyramid. You own a small sliver if you're more junior. But it's from vision through strategy to execution all the way down.

Speaker C: Um, I agree with so much of what you're saying and it's refreshing to hear. I often coach, um, or give advice to early career product managers who complain to me that they don't understand their boss's product strategy or they don't think their boss has one. I, um, literally last week or the week before, I teach product management at nyu and I asked my students, um, how many of them had ever worked at a company where they thought they understood the product strategy. Not a single one. 46 students in the class, Not a single one raised their hand. And then just in make sure I wasn't wrong, I was like, well, how many of you have worked in a tech company? And more than half of them raised their hand. I was like, great. Nobody understands what the product strategy is.

Speaker B: And for the record, it's hard. And it's hard even here at Productboard. And I write these documents and I talk about it and it's like the context that is required to fully grasp the market's broader market. All the um, all the aspects, like in our case of the entire product management and development life cycle. The competitors and the positioning and who's owning what. It's just like so broad and so deep and complex of a space that to distill it and kind of make sure that everybody on the product team gets it and then understands like, okay, so in this big picture, this is our path, right? And this is the small pieces together. It's challenging and there's no shortcut, unfortunately. I mean you have to do the workshops, you have to communicate frequently. You need to do the AMA sessions, you need to have the big 10 page document and then a summary of it. And it's constant communication, constant coordination.

Speaker C: Something you just said really amused um, me, which is, um, in a great way. Uh, you know, you're a modern product manager when you call a 10 page document really big.

Speaker B: It's an interesting um, problem to solve. Right? Because at the end of the day it is problem of knowledge management and information sharing.

Speaker F: Mhm.

Speaker B: Because I've been this like Hubert here at Product world, the founder, CEO, like I've for the last 10 years, or actually even before, you know, because they were thinking about it, uh, at nights before we started working full time on it. That's the only thing that I've been thinking about. Product management, their needs and perspective. Everyone in the world. I would talk to every product manager, I would just like talk to them, how are you doing? What are your pain points? And so, and so I have this context and then you have, ah, somebody who just started, who's super smart, ambitious, has all the skills in terms of abilities, analytical thinking and curiosity and so on. But the delta between what I know about product managers in the market and them is so deep. And now how do you bridge it? How do you bridge it in a way that, so three months, um, six months. When do you expect the person to have super deep understanding, just like you have as a potentially impatient founder who's like, you don't get it. How come you're prioritizing this? There's many more important things, but the reality is that the person has never talked to the Thousands of people that I have, they don't have that. And so what do I have? I can go and I can write a one pager because that's the maximum that people would retain. Or I write a 10 pager that you would joke that, oh my God, it's so long. But how do I summarize 10 years of market research literally into even 10 pages? It's just like scratching the surface.

Speaker C: Absolutely.

Speaker B: So anyway, and I'm not advocating for writing a book, but the challenge is how do you do it? How do you do it? You should probably write a book actually. You don't have the time.

Speaker C: Yeah, I think, um, ah, I will share. One of my favorite things about doing that kind of work is, um, video. Ah. So like, you know, it doesn't have to be written and we can communicate, uh, if we're good at creating, you know, visual content or whatnot, or if we have a partner who is, um, we can communicate so much with a video, um, that people, uh, will grasp really fast. Um, it's something that I have found. Uh, whenever I've seen a product leader put together something like that, I'm always so impressed. But you always come away from it and you're like, what, who was their production team and why do they have one?

Speaker B: Yeah, I remember when I talked, uh, to Amy Bancell, who's the, she's The, I think SVP at Autodesk. She owns AutoCAD, the biggest product. And she said that they had a production cost because they had to communicate to the rest of the business stakeholders the pain points and make the case for what they wanted to invest in. And to your point, like the video and this is Autodesk. It's like a big company, so different kind of budget. Um, but it was super impactful and conveying the emotions of the frustrated users when they were trying to do something and making sure that the business decision makers, um, see that and feel the pain almost was just critical. The empathy was critical to justify a lot of the prioritization decisions and the investments.

Speaker C: It is, it's so critical that building that empathy so that your stakeholders have that empathy too, goes such a long way in your product. Well, listen, um, unfortunately I think we're about out of time, but, uh, it has been so much fun to talk to you, Hubert. Um, I would love to know where our guests can find you if they are interested in, uh, getting more of your wisdom.

Speaker B: Yeah, uh, productboard.com is the company. Go to LinkedIn, Hubert Palan. Or you can find me at TwitterPalan. Um, and reach out, connect. I'd love to talk. I love talking to product managers. I feel like I always learn something new. The craft is not static. Right? It evolves. And now with AI, like what are people doing with AI, like, you know, just like, so cool.

Speaker C: That's the new frontier. It's the new frontier. Yeah. Yeah, it's a lot happening.

Speaker B: Thank you for having me.

Speaker C: Awesome. Thanks so much, Hubert.

Speaker A: What great insights from Hubert. Next up is our new lab notes segment where I and my team from the Product Science Group discuss our key insights and takeaways from the conversation. In our first lab note, Dina Levitan, lead product management consultant at the Product Science Group, shares a perspective on roadmaps that she came away from the interview with.

Speaker D: I was thinking about that, uh, at the kind of meta level that the roadmap itself is an opportunity to do continuous discovery as you're speaking with the stakeholders and learning more about what different people within the organization and the customers need, could continue to evolve the roadmap and incorporate that additional input. Um, I thought that was cool. As you know, as he was mentioning, the bi directional flow of information that the roadmap can serve both to provide inspiration for people to get ideas and further the conversation, but also to incorporate their ideas into a, ah, living document.

Speaker A: So Lab Note 603.1 is Roadmaps are a conversation, not a one way document. In our next lab note, I talk with Alison Kassing, user researcher, and Dina Levitan about different artifacts that help leaders share context and knowledge.

Speaker C: Dena and Allison, you've both done a lot of, you know, customer snapshots and

Speaker A: what are some of the other tools

Speaker C: that, that you found really helpful, I guess. Allison, why don't you start?

Speaker F: Yeah, I think you mentioned this too. That video is so helpful to bring this information along because it really shows the uh, person in their context and shows the pain or the delight in the m moment. I just feel like we're seeing a lot of movement in tools to make this easier. So I think maybe a realized value across the industry. Uh, that's one, yeah.

Speaker C: Dina, do you have any other uh, artifacts that you'd like to talk about?

Speaker D: Yeah, I think uh, one of the artifacts that we heard Hubert talk about was the icp. I think the most important thing there is that the ICP is shared across the company and the different departments. Sales, marketing, product. Because without a shared vision of what is that ideal customer, uh, the different uh, departments won't know how to move towards that goal. So I really think the ICP is a good example of artifacts that provides the who and the why is this customer a good fit and helps with, uh, aligning across departments.

Speaker F: I was thinking some others even competitive analysis can be helpful to share if that's something that people have. And then also like journey maps, if that can be a really quick way to understand a user and, and what they're doing. And this comes at all levels. Like obviously as a founder you have so much information, but even a product manager or a researcher holds so much just from what they've observed that this really hits at all levels of disseminating, trying to share as much as you can about what you know.

Speaker A: So that brings us to Lab Note 603.2. Tools like roadmaps, Customer interview snapshots, Ideal customer profiles, Competitive landscapes and Journey Maps help leaders share context and set direction. Other tools that we love to use at Product Science Group are the Proto Persona, market segments and product opportunity Assessments. I discuss those in the next clip with Mark Inakia, lead Product manager and designer at the Product Science Group.

Speaker C: One of the other things that came up for me was Personas versus other ways of dealing with this. You want to share a little more.

Speaker E: So a way that I've approached proto Personas, as we call them, a Product Science group is in specifically running discovery around understanding the most valuable behaviors to drive. So that ends up looking like a proto Persona that tells a story about who is the customer most likely to do X valuable behavior. This is really useful because it can span across different functions, because then sales can take that and say, okay, how do we in our sales process drive that valuable behavior? Marketing can do the same. Product can do the same. The issue with that though is that it is so essential that it requires further collaboration to be made usable in a really material way by each function. So for example, what are the metrics that would actually matter to say that for that valuable behavior for marketing? Let's say it's impressions on our product landing page or something, or our marketing page. Why is it valuable to drive that behavior for us in marketing? And even if you don't approach product Personas in that way, being able to bring that data in is still really important. That being said, I of course with a design focus and a qualitative focus, you have to approach Personas as a product. They're a tool that people are going to use. And by and large I see very little people actually using. So that's why I think about having something that's really personal, relatable, simple and just easy to use from that perspective, I think approaching a product Persona from the context of data that makes it actually meaningful is more in the prep work leading up to the proto Persona and in the conversation around how it's used than necessarily what has to be in the document itself. Because if we are aligned on what kind of business are we trying to drive or what kind of metrics are we trying to drive for these particular users, then we're already on the same page and we can focus on, okay, cool, we know that we're trying to solve the same problem for these people. We know why it's a valuable problem. So now how do we do that? What would actually drive that for this person?

Speaker A: Which leads to LabNote 603.3 for more valuable Personas, enrich them with data and an understanding of both behavior and business opportunities. In our final lab note, I talk with Dina Levitan about using a proxy question to identify who resonates with the problem your product solves.

Speaker D: Yeah, Hubert had mentioned how there's different types of companies, there's the product led companies, the sales led companies, Engela companies, and for his products product board, he's really looking for those product led companies and, and his focus is on trying to get the right people, um, in those initial conversations and he called them, who's the one who's calling the shots at the company? And one of his mechanisms that he brought up the simple question of do you know about the Lean Startup method? Really spoke to me, the context he added later about why does he like those users or why is he looking for those people? It's because they need the least amount of education and they're the likeliest to try the product right away. Uh, I thought that was really a neat, uh, way of tying up, um, the proxy for the, for this case. Do you know about the Lean Startup method as, as a proxy for, you know, how evolved is, is the product organization and how, how easy will it be for them to adopt the product?

Speaker C: One of the other things that he said, uh, in that vein was about finding people who are already doing some of these things, but doing them in spreadsheets because then he's not trying to convince them to change everything about what they're doing. He's just trying to say, hey, we can make this easier. Let's give you a tool for it. And uh, I thought that was really, really smart.

Speaker A: So That's Lab Note 603.4. Find simple questions to identify who is best suited to get value from your product. Well, that concludes our lab notes section. Each of these lab notes will be in the show notes as well. It was such a pleasure to talk with Hubert Pilon about customer centricity and effective segmentation. I hope you enjoyed this episode. The Product Science Podcast is brought to you by the Product Science Group. We teach startup founders and product leaders how to use the Product Science method to discover the strongest product opportunities and lay the foundations for high growth products, teams and companies. We do this through community coaching, training and consulting. Learn more@productsciencegroup.com Enjoying this episode? Don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss our next episode. Or visit us@, uh, productsciencepodcast.com to find show notes or sign up for more information from me and our guests. If you like the show, please leave a rating or review. It goes a long way towards helping other people find us. Now go out there and experiment.

Speaker D: SA.