Lenny's Podcast: Product | Growth | Career: Picking sharp problems, increasing virality, and unique product frameworks | Oji Udezue (Typeform, Twitter, Calendly, Atlassian)

00:00:00 - 00:30:00

In this podcast episode, Lenny interviews Oji Udezue, a product leader with experience at Microsoft, Atlassian, Calendly, Twitter, and Typeform. They discuss product frameworks, product-led growth, and increasing product virality. Oji shares insights on finding big B2B SaaS ideas and the importance of problem-solving. The podcast also explores the concept of Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and how it helps startups identify their target audience.

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00:30:00 - 01:00:00

The podcast discusses the importance of solving sharp problems for customers and the significance of customer research and conversations for optimizing workflows. It also emphasizes the importance of continuous customer discovery and onboarding in the customer journey. The concept of virality in product marketing is explored, highlighting the importance of building a great product that solves a specific problem. The podcast also touches on the concept of forest time as a valuable practice for product managers and executives.

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01:00:00 - 01:16:15

The podcast guest discusses their experience working at Bridgewater Associates and the unique working environment there. They mention the practice of publicly calling out mistakes, the use of real-time rating systems, and the focus on evaluating people based on their skills, attributes, and values. While they acknowledge the benefits of this approach, they also highlight the emotional toll and lack of empathy in the execution. However, they emphasize that they have taken away valuable lessons from Bridgewater, particularly in considering people in three dimensions in their professional and personal life. The podcast also discusses the need for an abstraction above agile and design thinking in product development, introducing the concept of a product system as a framework for building solid organizations and executing well at the product and business layer. The episode concludes with an invitation to join the premium version of the podcast, which will offer additional tools, help, and interviews with notable individuals.

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products who try to be viral just for what I call synthetic virality that fail. Because in the end,

if you're synthetically viral and people get to the product and it sucks, that's it. Slack wasn't

even viral. There was no synthetic virality. Slack couldn't even connect to organizations for the

longest time. You could be working on the third floor and so on, you just slack on the fourth floor

and you would have no clue. There's no way to share it with them. But what happens when you

went to lunch, people are like, we got Slack and this is amazing. And people on the third floor

like, holy shit, when can we get it? Boom, boom, boom. This is the bedrock of virality.

Build a great product that solves a sharp problem.

Welcome to Lenny's podcast, where I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts

to learn from their hard-won experiences building and growing today's most successful products.

Today, my guest is Ajee Udayzwe. Ajee has helped build and grow products at Microsoft. We worked

on Windows Outlook, Hotmail, and Inner Explorer at Atlassian, where he was head of product for

all their communication tools. At Calendly, where he was chief product officer. At Twitter,

where he was head of product for creation and conversation. He's currently chief product

officer at Titeform, which I am a happy customer of. Ajee has one of the broadest and most

interesting careers in product and he's also one of the most thoughtful humans I've met.

In our conversation, Ajee shares some of his favorite product frameworks and also why you

should be really careful applying frameworks at your company. We dig into what he's learned from

Calendly and Atlassian at Titeform on how to do product-led growth successfully and also how to

get really sharp with your ICP or ideal customer profile. Also, how to increase your product's

virality and a concept called Forestime, which I love, and even his favorite Nigerian food,

which I am currently on the hunt for. With that, I bring you Ajee Udayzwe after a short word from

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Adji, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.

Thank you, Lenny. It's a pleasure to be here.

It's my pleasure. You've been a PM and a product leader. It's so many amazing and also just very

different companies with all with very different approaches to product and growth. I think you

have this really rare broad perspective on what works in product and growth across a lot of different

ways of doing it. I have a bunch of questions for you. I hope you came ready for that.

I am ready.

I love it. I want to start with frameworks. You've written and shared a bunch of really

interesting frameworks for how to think about product and growth. I just want to dig into a

couple of them. One of them is around how to find big B2B SaaS ideas and it's around finding the

right workflow. Could you share this framework and also just like how founders and also investors

can use this idea to find big ideas? Thank you. I think you're referring to where do you fish to

find a unicorn. That's it. The thing behind that is that people can find that on Substack and on

Medium with my writings. The premise is that there's a lot of risk in building startups.

The last decade of product management and startups has really focused on the method

of building software and companies. We talk about the lean approach. We talk about fail fasts.

YC, Doctrine and so on and so forth. I think that that was a necessary phase for us because a lot

of innovation was just the ideas of founders, unvalidated by customers. We needed this inflection

point in our discipline. People need to understand though that customer science is not the solution

to everything otherwise. OpenAI will never have done anything. It's also innovation. The problem

space and the solution to the problem space is still a big driver of success in building

software companies. What problem are you really solving? If you believe that the problem space is

key, so what problems will predict success? In B2B SaaS especially, which is much easier to

circumscribe, is where I start to think about, look, how do you tell from the beginning because

I'm an investor as well as an operator. Now, to segment this space, I think of two dimensions.

One is how many departments in the company does the workflow you're trying to solve apply to?

Is it just a few or is it all of them? The second is how intense or how frequent is the workflow

executed? Is it daily? Is it weekly? Is it three times a week and so on and so forth?

If you draw a nice quadrant of these two things, then you can start to have some predictive power.

Things that are useful in every department, I call every one workflows like things like

collaboration, like Slack, email, calendaring, workflows, social knowledge and notion and so on

and so forth. Then things that apply to single departments, I call niche and things that apply to

that's what I call niche. Then the intensity is about frequency. A month is not infrequent.

Daily is super frequent. If you divide the market or the enterprise into frequency and into how

broad the workflow is, you can actually have predictive power. What I found by looking at

the biggest companies, public and private, in each quadrant was that everyone

frequent workflows intuitively are the most profitable to work on, but also the hardest

to get into because they're dominated by Microsoft and Google and very, very large companies.

For example, one of my friends is the CEO of Coda. This is interesting because he's in that space

for him to think about. Then the place where B2B sites really thrives is a niche

workflows that are highly frequent. High-nigh is what I call it, high frequency niche.

Then the other two quadrants that are a bit more challenging and then you have to figure out how

to navigate your way into one of the other two. If you are in one of the top two quadrants,

high-nigh and high everyone and you solve a really important workflow problem, you can probably

turn into a billion-dollar company. If you do the other two, there's some challenges that you

have to go through and the framework sort of talks about how you should navigate those places

into success. I think it's very important because if this is true, and by the way, like I said,

I did some validation on it, founders can start to, before they invest years, start to think about

what the probability of success is. If you're an investor like me or VC, you can start to think

about how you deploy your money. What are examples of companies in each of those quadrants if you can

frame this in your head? I don't know if you have this in your head already.

High-frequency everyone workflows tend to be things that are done by the doorman to the CEO,

so it's email, it's collaboration, it is writing, it is math, all the basic things.

At last year, we spent a lot of time thinking about this. Ward, we've had word processing forever

in the workspace. Things like notion and confidence are huge, a sort of evolution of that. Slack,

email, companies in that space, Google, Microsoft, Atlassian, etc. In the high nigh,

which is high-frequency niche, you have things like JIRA, you have things like tools for recruiters,

you have MarTech, you have sales tech. We know the companies behind them,

Atlassian, Salesforce, so on and so forth. In the low-frequency everyone, you have things like

maybe form tools, and actually they're not that many of them, low-frequency everyone,

or even like expense, actually the best thing is the expense thing. Not everyone does it all the

time, but everyone essentially has to do some of it mostly, at least a lot of people. Then there's

a low-frequency niche, which is a particular department, so planning, which is done by FNA,

but done infrequently, things like that. How frequent is frequent in your experience? Does

it have to be once a week at least? What do you think is that minimum bar? Frequent is every day,

really, or multiple times a week. Infrequent starts to be like two times a week once a month,

and of course there's a big interregnum in the middle of that.

It's interesting that there are examples of companies that succeeded in those lower

quadrants of infrequence, say the expensing use case. Do you have a sense of what it takes to

win there? Because I imagine most startups are in that area, and I imagine founders are like,

what can we do to win still? Well, this isn't the static framework in the sense that

companies are not destined to be in one of these things. The essence of strategy is to navigate

from, you know, the curve of travel is essentially go from the lower to the higher, right? Atlassian

is trying to go from high niche to high everyone with confidence and with all the tools that they

have. People below are trying to get into the high-frequency niche by focusing on their core

customer. So what it looks like in, say, low-frequency everyone works for something like that is,

well, if some people are using it infrequently but they must use it, well, that's a good thing,

right? But then maybe you provide a module that is used by the finance department every day,

right? And so suddenly you're moving into the high-frequency everyone works for. So it's about

finding a part of the organization that considers this mission critical and then solving their

problems beyond the problems for everyone, for example, in that quadrant. Is there an example

that comes to mind of either a Callen Lee or type form at Atlassian where you pushed it further up

the frequency direction or the everyone direction? For example, a type form now, this is real for me,

type form technically is low-frequency niche or low-frequency everyone, depending on how easy

it is to use and how it surrounds the customer. And one of the things that I'm trying to do

as part of product strategy is to move it into high-frequency niche, high-night, which is a very

productive place to be. So for marketers, for salespeople, I want to make sure that they think

of us first, right? And because we are particularly good at customer-facing interactions, if they

think that we are the way to win new business and to make money, then a portion of our audience,

not every single one of them, will consider us high-night. And I think expanding that

foothold is the way to navigate a business like that. You can see that with Poultry, you can see

that with SurveyMonkey. Lots of companies are thinking about how to further unbundle that market

for a very, very specific kind of customer. And that is what they're trying to do. They're trying

to hit the high-night, even for that sort of more generic workflow. That's an awesome example.

You also have this framework that I think you call the zone of benefit, which is around

how much better does your solution have to be than the status quo? A lot of people are like,

hey, look at this product. It's better than what you have now. And usually, if you're like,

ah, whatever, it's good enough. And you've had some insights on just how much better it needs

to be for people to care. Can you share that? Honestly, the reason I like being a product

manager is, on any given day, I'm drawing from anthropology, sociology, behavioral economics,

leadership, communication skills. I have a master's in engineering, so I'm an engineer as well.

I've done marketing and sales. So really pulling from so many things. And the reason I talk about

the zone of benefit is, ultimately, what we're trying to do is impetus magicology to humans.

That's it. If you really think about it, that's one essence of what we're trying to do.

So the zone of benefit works as a framework because people will not pay for things that don't

either really shrink the workflow that they're doing or doesn't give them super power. So the

same amount of time, but twice as much output. But the most important thing is that it has to be

noticeable. If you do something 20% better, often people around you, just as a human, people don't

notice. And so for a product to make a difference, it has to be at least two, three more X for people

to say, you know what, this is offering enough value for me to maybe make a switching cost,

and so on and so forth. And it really comes down to, look, economic theory tells us that

people work for leisure. They work enough to afford their leisure. It's sort of broad,

and I know some people don't necessarily do that, surely in the tech industry,

people just love to work. But that is really it at, you know, where you think about 8 billion

people on the planet. And the zone of benefit really hones in on the fact that if you're going

to help me work less, make about the same amount of money, then for you, for me to notice you,

you have to accelerate me by three times for me to care.

Okay, awesome. So three times. So the idea there is, you should feel like this is three times more

productive and the thing that I'm trying to do, it saves me three times. I don't know, I do it three

times faster. Yeah, that's when people actually feel it, and they feel it enough where they part

with money. Awesome. And I think what's cool about this is it helps you identify the ICP for your

product. If you're working a startup or even a new product within an existing product to figure

out who exactly is going to most benefit from this, is that part of this? Yes, yes. Your best

customers aren't price sensitive for what you're shooting for, because they get it, right? They

fundamentally understand it. So yes, when you're shooting for ICPs, now every startup has, you

know, like marketing problems, getting an audience problem. But once you start getting a decent

audience over 100 people more, you should start to notice the people who are like, you know what,

I really care about this. And that starts to tell you a little bit about who's your target audience.

Would you be up for sharing the ICP of some of the companies you worked at just to give

people a sense of what would be a good ICP? I think for Atlassian, it's really kind of obvious.

It's, you know, developers mostly, but its tech teams are at large because the fundamental of

an R&D team is building stuff. And JIRA helps the engineers who actually build stuff to track

what they do and to give visibility to it so that it can be valuable to the organization. So that

is incontroversial. So the ICP is really clear and have been clear for, you know, for Atlassian

for a very long time. Countly is this weird company where people don't see all the value. People

think it's just casual scheduling, but really the people who care about scheduling the most,

and I don't mean calendaring. Calendaring is very different from scheduling.

People who care about scheduling the most are salespeople because it's the lifeblood of them

earning money and marketers because it's the lifeblood of them maybe learning about their

customer, recruiters because it's the lifeblood of them attracting and scheduling the people that

they need to do their job. So Cali's ICP is where people who are scheduling with people who are not

in the organization for some business reason. Typeform is marketers mostly because

Typeform exists to make the web talkative, to make it more human. And with Typeform you can brand

that conversation and actually make it conversational because the one question at a time,

the beautiful design. And so marketers feel like we help their websites talk to each other. Product

people think we help their web apps talk to people they care about. UX people feel the same way. So

those are some, I think the interesting thing is Twitter. I was going to ask, I said I can ask

what the ICP from Twitter might be. So Twitter is actually more fun in terms of our ICP because

first of all, I'll talk about the thing that's not obvious about Twitter. Twitter has 30% of

Twitter's customer base where unseen. There were media organizations, people like the NFL, the NBA,

HBO who wanted content, their content to reach more people to be in conversational spaces.

And there were essentially business customers and not seen in the

conversation pool. It's not obvious, but we interact with them all the time

and we rev shared ads for their videos. Because we're making content all the time. And so Twitter

was a way to extend the monetization of that content, that inventory that I already had.

But when you go to the consumer side of Twitter, what's the ICP? Well, actually Twitter understood,

and this is sort of reflected in what Elon Musk is doing these days, that he doesn't seem to

understand. And if you ask anyone who was at Twitter, you will see the understanding in their

eyes and the fact that he doesn't understand because Twitter's ICP is bifurcated. On one side,

it is the most accomplished people in the world, right? The people who have something to say.

This is why there's neuro Twitter, there's weather Twitter, there is cancer Twitter,

and so on and so forth. In fact, if something breaks, some new innovation happens in the world,

it probably breaks on Twitter before it breaks anywhere else, because these are people

in informal communities following each other and sharing their results. So basically,

there's this big circle of experts, we break down into celebrities, we break down into luminaries,

leaders, and so on and so forth. That's the ICP. Now, how does Twitter work? These people

attract the other 90% who listen to these people, but also they need to create the

only formal communities around the things they're passionate about and have this

mimetic relationship with the luminaries and the experts. And that is sort of the planet Twitter.

Experts on one side, humans who need to connect with the things they're passionate about,

the people who are like them. That is the ICP of Twitter, the people who have something to say

in those two categories. Are you happy you're not working on Twitter anymore?

I am ecstatic. I'm ecstatic. It seems like such a shit show. No shade on anything or

anyone purposely, but what's happening is evident, so I don't think I have much to say about that.

Yeah, what a wild ride over there. Zooming out on the frameworks question,

when I asked you ahead of our chat about what frameworks you love and anything you think would

be interesting to share, you had a really interesting response, and so I'd love for you

to just share your perspective on frameworks broadly. Yeah, look, I'm two things simultaneously.

One is I actually, I like frameworks. The way that I try to express them is mental models,

because the essence of a framework or mental model is that it is a shortcut. It packages some

dense thinking into a way for you to approach a problem or to approach an opinion and so on and

so forth. So I do collect them, but I think that what's important, a fairly important management

is to have the ability to understand the fundamentals or the empirical relationship

that constructs a framework in the first place. In math, you would call it like being able to

derive the equation. And the reason that's important is because there's so much uncertainty

in what we do, like project management isn't a science. In fact, programming isn't even a science,

really, because if it was, we'd treat it differently. So the art of building, say,

a software company that is profitable is not scientific. There's a lot of uncertainty,

a lot of unknowns, there's timing issues. So I guess while I love mental models,

while I love frameworks, what I want people who listen to me and maybe listen to you to understand

is you have to go deeper, because as situations change, like as an investor and advisor to startups,

I advise differently if you are just starting, if you're in the middle, and if you're scaling,

in the book that I'm writing on product, I actually make that distinction a lot in the book,

which stage are you, because then the thing that applies to you is different. If you understand

the fundamentals, you'll be able to use frameworks in a much more productive way,

because you'll adapt it to your stage, you'll adapt it to the problem. And I think that's

really important. I see lots of people using frameworks very blindly, and I think that's

harmful to them and harmful to their businesses. What a great segue to where I wanted to take

us next, which is around the book that you're writing, which is my understanding is it's

product management for product-led growth, and I'm on your waitlist to find out when it's out,

and I saw that the other day you asked people for their advice on what to call the book. Do

you have any favorites at this point and what you might title it? Well, first of all, there are two

things happening with the book. One is I believe PLG is, and I have maybe a different definition

of PLG, but I think the way that we are basically adapting products to the consumer

or to the business professional and using the product itself to sell the value proposition

is really key to transitioning from what we used to do 20 years ago to today. Basically,

I think even enterprise companies will tend towards a consumer-type product management

over the next decade than the other way around. That's my bet, and so let's call that PLG just

writ large. And also, I think product management is set for growth, so obviously that's good for

you, Lenny, because everyone needs to know how to do this. It's the integrative art within building

software and software seeding the world. The book, I want to get very practical, what matters about

doing those two things well, and the best titles coming up are, my original title was

building rocket ships. So it's like, how do you think through all the different things you need

to build a really successful software company? Think about the practice, think about the business,

meld those two things together. So a lot of people love that title. Well, there's a huge variation

in submissions, so I think we're going to do that one more time and offer more options before we

nail down the title of the book, so till TBD. Cool. All right, I'm excited to see where you land.

So let's just spend some time on PLG. I feel like this is your bread and butter as a product

leader. You've worked at some of the most successful PLG companies, and I think you have

some of the most unique perspectives on what works and doesn't work. And I saw you share a preview

of what you're going to be sharing the book, and so there's a few things there that I thought

were really interesting that I haven't seen other places when it comes to PLG, so I was just

going to dig into it. Absolutely. The first is this framing that you had for where to start

and how to focus with your PLG problem, and you just grabbed it as starting with a sharp

problem. Can you talk about what that means? Yeah. So I'm trying to connect dots. The sharp

problem is a little bit of that whole quadrant framework, which is what problem are you going

to work on? I think that problems have predictive power of success if you actually solve the problem,

and this is different from I have an idea. Yeah, I think that a lot of innovation can come from

inspiration, or the best inspiration comes from understanding customers and their problems.

So my advice to founders is pick a problem that is materially felt by your customers,

pain points that steal their time, their energy, their money, their focus, their ability to afford

their leisure. If you can solve those kinds of problems, and look, I know that it's broad,

but because it requires insight, the best founders often are people who felt a problem,

understand it. Understand it is really difficult. I understand that there may be like five,

10, 20 billion people who feel it, and they don't want to solve that problem,

versus I feel a problem, but only 100,000 people care, in which case maybe it's not that intense

anyway, unless you can charge them thousands and thousands of dollars. So pick those kinds of problems

if you have the narrative in your head that if you really solve this, people will pony up. That's

what I asked people to find. So many of us just have a sharp idea. Look, I've built a startup on

a non-sharp problem, and I knew how it felt. But I also know working in companies that are

solving sharp problems, how it feels. So it's a huge tailwind to do that. In fact, when you work

on sharp problems, it's hard to fail, because you can make mistakes, and the customer's obsession

will carry you. But if you work on something that doesn't have a sharp problem,

mistakes can kill you, because essentially you're having to pay a lot for marketing,

you're having to pay a lot for word of mouth. People, when they get poor, they don't care about it,

like recessions. Coming back to something you mentioned earlier, but just like how

much pain it needs to be for people to care, or how much pain it needs to solve versus the status

quo, I think is a really important element of this. I think most founders, like, no,

I need to solve a problem. But usually it's not painful enough, or it's not solving it enough.

Given either an example of something that you've tried, or you've seen of just like,

that was a sharpish problem, but not sharp enough. And people didn't care. Either a company worked,

or a startup you advised of just like, okay, that wasn't sharp enough.

I don't want to create enemies, because I know a lot of founders. But here's one. Here's one.

I don't know if you remember during the pandemic, this venture studio,

by I think one of the ex-founders of Evernote, created M'Hoon camera, remember?

Oh, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, hit that great video.

It was fun, but I don't think it was a sharp problem. Right? Like, you, it was fun. But yeah,

it didn't, it didn't change the world of your Zoom camera. It didn't change the world of your

collaboration. And so I think that's one example of a non-sharp problem, for example, for most people.

What are signs that it's sharp enough, just like in your experience? I know you talked about it,

steals your time, energy, money, focus. What are flags that like, this is sharp enough

in your, in your experience? I think there are two ways to think about it. If you're,

if you're on the trenches as a founder, the easiest way to, to, to map out the sharp problem is draw

the current approximate average workflow for your target customer, at least what you think is a target,

and then draw the workflow after they've used your software and see how shorter it is, how much

shorter it is. Yes or no. And I try to measure those lines. If you draw them as horizontal lines,

try to measure those lines and see if it's much shorter. If it's 2x shorter, 3x shorter,

that's, so let's say pre-customer, that is the best way to hone in on it. Post-customer,

you should talk to the people who are most enthusiastic and derive their workflow and their

workflow change and try to measure that. I think that's how you figure out if it's a sharp problem

or not. The other thing that we talk about in startup, you know, a super early stage world is

I call it the whites of their eyes, right? When you take a problem and you share it with someone

who is, is, is, is going to affect their workflow. And I use the word workflow a ton because I don't

use specs anymore or use cases. I think workflows are the unit of productivity. When you see people's

eyes get big and expose more whites to you, you're probably onto something. It's not enough.

That's not a workflow thing. That's an excitement thing. But people often react that way when you're

solving a really sharp problem for them. And then people spontaneous will bring up money that they,

this like, when can I pay, when can I, those kinds of things give you an indication.

Two other versions of the showing more whites of your eyes, which I love.

Another two other versions of that I've heard is one is you, you see their pupils dilate

and they're just like, Whoa, I need this now. And then the other is someone describe it as you see

this nod of as you're talking, they're just like, Oh, I get it. I get this. And then they're like,

Okay, we need this in our, in our, in our company. I'm a little over those ones because sometimes

it's just excitement and this noise. And so the things I said previously about workflow

compression or capability inflation, I think those are more reliable, which is all about like

customer research and customer conversations. And that's what I would focus on. Yeah, but I'm

saying all this from mistakes I've made, right? Basically, so I feel like this is scar tissue,

which is what I'm trying to pour into the book. Speaking of talking to customers, another one

of your big bull points in the book is around continuous customer discovery.

And I'm curious what you found to be successful and actually doing that. You know, a lot of people

talk about it when you keep talking to customers, get feedback constantly. What actually works in

your experience? Yeah, I feel like all of park management is about discovery these days. Everyone

talks about it. And I want to make a distinction. I think discovery is when you use customer

conversations to understand a very specific thing that you want to optimize further workflow that

you want to optimize further. And then you call the people who are most likely to be affected and

you do use various research strategies to talk to them. There's a version of that also that is

what I call continuous conversations, which is a calendar and a type form,

which we'll do more and more of. You should organize it so that your PMs, your designers,

your engineering managers, and your PMMs are constantly talking to customers by default,

meaning that customer conversations show up on their calendar every week,

automatically, without them getting involved. And then they're trained on how to have the conversation.

Because the death of customer discovery is friction. If you ask individuals to do customer

discovery, they will not do customer discovery. This is the thing that dies in an innovative

company because it's very difficult to actually talk to the right customer, not talk to any customer,

talk to the right customer continuously. But it's the third thing that I like to talk about,

which is customer listening. In fact, I'm going to talk about this industry in October, the PM

conference. Customer listening is different. It's not really discovery. It is the scarfing up of

customer signals that are happening constantly anyway. So people are talking on social,

people are talking on app stores and G2 crowd. If you have an instrumented churn survey,

people are talking. If you have NPS, people are not only giving you the scores where they're

putting in the verbatims. If you have a bug report, which we had at Atlassian, people are

filing bugs. Developers love to file bugs. So of course, we have that for that audience.

And then if you go to Zendesk and customer support, people are either talking about one thing,

all the time, or a range of things. And you can see the frequency distribution. And of course,

in Salesforce, you have closed one. These are all things happening, no matter what you do.

Whether you're listening or not, you're getting these signals. One of the big,

hairy audacious goals of product management is being able to process these signals efficiently.

We did it in a certain way at Cali, which I drew a rig together through

workflows and Slack, and then having individuals triage those things. And if you can do that

hard, and at industry, I'll talk a little bit about how to do it, it's not exactly discovery.

It is what matters. Our job is to meld customer delight with business ambition.

And it feels essential beyond discovery that you are listening and you're understanding what

matters from a customer delight perspective. And I don't think many of us do this really well.

I've tried to do it everywhere. I've gone Twitter,

Atlassian, Calendly, now a type form. But it still feels like something that

the industry can get better at. This touches on advice that Teresa Torres

teaches around continuous customer discovery. And she actually had a really good tactic that

I'll share here that stuck with me about how to actually do this. So the way she recommends

companies do this is have a little pop up on your site asking visitors, like we'd love to

talk to you and get your feedback on our product. And it just links them to a Calendly to book a

meeting. And that's how it shows up on the calendar. Yeah, that's what we did at Calendly.

But I will say, it's a couple of caveats. We did that in the community. We had community.cali.com.

And we understood that that was a self-selected group, but it was still important to talk to them

because they were still representative. And of course, you should do it in the product. The

challenge of that approach is always, is it the right customer? And the pro con of that is talking

to one customer is useless. Talking to 100 is super useful. And so the challenge is,

are you targeting the right person? So some intelligence up front and who to show it to

and why you're showing it to them so that they can come is interesting. Very particularly

effective, by the way, for growth. Because if people don't activate or churn, they don't want to

talk to you. But if you can present that thing out in their activation or conversion journey,

they might actually talk to you. And so that's really key. So I 100% agree with Teresa. That's

exactly what you should do for not even, I would even call it discoveries for listening.

All right. And some of it can be discovery. Yeah, I think that's exactly what you should do.

As you're talking, I'm realizing I'm using most of the products you've helped build.

I'm on Twitter a lot. I use Calendly a lot. I use TypeMirm as my default survey tool.

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Back on track, another important part of the book that you're writing is around onboarding.

And something that I talk a lot about on this podcast is just the power of onboarding and how

impactful it is to retention and so much of the eventual success of your product and how customers

use it. And so I'd love to hear just your advice on what you think is really important.

Like, I guess why onboarding is so important in success and pillage, and also just like

what tactics have you found to be really effective?

Let me talk about a few fundamentals. Onboarding is a substitute for sales and

all these account management teams for millions of customers. The task is how do you

make it approximate a human and how friendly a human is and how approachable a human is.

Because if you can do that, then you can process thousands and thousands of customers very quickly.

Onboarding is an exercise in understanding the mindset of a buyer, of an evaluator.

It's nothing more than that, meaning that the province of understanding is social psychology.

It's not really product, it's buyer psychology. And I guess who knows a lot about this stuff?

It's people in the offline industry, the people who stock shelves, the people who

provide inventory online, and so on and so forth. They are extraordinarily good at this.

So the reason I say this is to divert people who are growths to really find where to source

their inspiration from for onboarding, first of all. If you think about this as intentful,

in that way, which is people come not knowing anything about you, and then they progressively

develop confidence that you are the tool of choice, you don't have to break it down into

how does that journey go through a mind, the average mind anyway, and how do you assist each part?

One is value proposition understanding. One is trying to see if it's simple enough and provides

enough value. One is kicking tires, and one is making the choice that this is something I'm

going to go forward with. How does your onboarding support all of these things? Now, I think there

two parts of onboarding. One is mandatory, the setup. It has to be spare. I try not to make it

more than three screens, but it's about how do you say what this does and provide the essential

setup that your customer needs to be successful. Accountably, for example, we ask them about

connecting their calendar and setting some defaults, is it nine to five or whatever that is.

Those two things set up all the future success, and if we made it optional, more people would fail.

So it's information and the essential setup, and it should be as short as possible. Then there's a

whole other set of things that should be optional because they're not necessary for everyone to be

successful. Well, they're beneficial if people are curious, and also it can be what we call a

random access, so people can get back to it any time they want, like if they're feeling help.

And so if you divide onboarding into those two things and then figure out what to put in one

and what to put in the other, I think you can be quite successful. And this is just the tip of

the iceberg that I get into in the book. Are there any examples of really big onboarding wins,

things that really helped with conversion or activation that come to mind?

Well, I think keep it short is one big win. The fewer things, the better that are essential,

that everyone has to go through. It's unclear if all those click-throughs go here, go here,

and all those things work. The wizards, yeah. The wizards have had, in my experience, limited

benefit, so much as just directing people to the one thing that they need to do,

post-mandatory onboarding. Having examples, not 10, one or two, of what good looks like

is particularly powerful because it's mimetic. People see, oh, okay, this is exactly what I'm

shooting for is very powerful. In terms of trial and conversion, letting people understand and

being very clear about where they are in the trial cycle, whether you want them to pay for it now,

or they need to pay for it later after seven days, having them understand that really clearly so

they know where they are versus they feel like they're completely at sea, I think is very important

for conversion. I think there are a few things like that, but I also want to mention that

it's different for every product. Depending on where you are in the quadrant and the amount of

augmentation and problem solving and how sharp the problem is, you might want to adjust your approach.

This is the kind of thing that there is some fundamentals, but it's not necessarily this

one size fits all. In fact, at Typeform, we're trying to maybe invent a new twist on freemium

just because of some of the things we're seeing for our particular customers.

These are, for me, some new learning as well as I go through each different product.

Along these lines of onboarding activation and getting a user activated is really important,

and I'm curious, do you have an example of what an activation milestone was at Calendly,

or Twitter, or Typeform, just to give people a sense of here's a good example of an activated

user milestone? I think this goes back to people of the Pandos and amplitudes of this world.

You have to think through your AHA journey. At Calendly and also at Typeform, we have three

thresholds of increasing activation. We just try to make sure that people go through each one.

As many people as possible. Frankly, we try to figure the drop off

between the increasing definitions of activation. At Calendly, we want to make sure you've created

your first meeting, right? But then if you've created five within a week, that's really much

more powerful. At Typeform, it's really about have you published the form and have you gotten

responses, and have you gone to look at what the responses mean in the insights page, for example.

At Twitter, it is, are you following anyone or are you being followed? Because that verb,

follow, is the way you start to construct your informal community. Remember what I said is,

Twitter is for people who want informal community around a topic. That is not,

Facebook is about who do you know, Twitter is about who do you want to know, who's

passionate about what you're passionate about. And so if you haven't set up your follow graph

at all, you're not going to really activate. It's not going to be compelling for you.

Awesome. Those are great examples. It's funny hearing that Twitter activation milestone

out of context sounds so creepy. Have you followed anyone or is anyone following you?

Yeah, because a lot of people go in and then they don't, they tweet into the void or they don't feel

like they have a voice. Right. But that's not the most important thing. Most important thing is,

are you getting content that you're interested in and makes you want to come back and see more

and follow is a huge part of doing that. Yeah. Just on the point of Twitter, I don't know if

this goes anywhere, but it's crazy how it keeps going no matter how much destruction is happening

all around. You want me to talk about that because I want to talk about it. Please.

So, you know, one of the things that they, they, they, I want to say day, one of the things I

learned early on is network effects. Yeah. Network effects. Let me define it. Network

effects is when you create value for passive members by other people joining the network.

So I am by myself. I have done nothing. I'm at home chilling, but one person joins the network

and I immediately gain benefit. Okay. So think about Facebook.

If there are 8 billion people on Facebook, it means that all of a sudden I can reach

everyone on the planet. And so the more people on Facebook, the more it's valuable to me,

regardless of my effort. That's network effect. If I'm into word, word, you know, word processor,

you know, Microsoft word and the more people who use that file format, it means that the more word

documents I can read. And so I did nothing. So by increasing the people adoption of word,

I gain benefit network effect. That's what it is. So Twitter, you know, and then this is the

mental mode of critical mass. Network effect is about critical mass. You hit a critical mass

and sometimes that's not mathematically defined. And then you've hit network effect because

people want to come because people are already there. Right. So Twitter has hit critical mass

and lots of your favorite social networks. Network effects is a feature by itself and it's the most

powerful feature. A good way to illustrate the power of network effects is Twitter did not

die because threads came up, came about, right? That's the power of network effect.

In fact, the last telegram was sent in 2016, over 100 years after it was invented because of network

effects. It had to be manually closed down. I believe friends, they're still alive. So we have

to be really clear that it's really hard to kill a network effects business now. How do you,

how do you actually accomplish it if you were to accomplish it? Well, the revenue side of any

social network is vulnerable to attack. So for example, if advertisers stop being on Twitter,

for example, they're not gone because again, network effects affects them. They want to go

where the eyeballs are. But if for some reason they disappeared, then while the people will continue

to come, the ability to have money to improve the network will disappear. And that is sort of

a negative spiral. What is very, very hard to kill business is how to kill software that has

reached network effect, although you can kill businesses that have reached network effect.

That's a really important and interesting insight. I think what's even especially interesting about

Twitter is Elon and the team have kind of like removed every other benefit of Twitter,

like the brand gone, employees, 80% gone, like every part of it is being cut off except for

the network effects. And so it's a really cool case study. Dan, how could Meyer tweeted this?

It was a previous guest of just like, it's a good case study of what is just the power of just network

effects. That's right. I think that people will, you know, when I did a really interesting course

at Berkeley Business School, asked about technology companies and so on. And this is a

perfect case study on network effects, the best I've ever seen. It is incredible.

Yeah, it's wild. Threads isn't able to get there quickly, unlike what it felt like initially.

I mean, threads will prosper, I believe. And again, you know, it will just be another

click for advertisers who understand the Facebook marketplace versus

Twitter ad marketplace is much harder to access. And so I think the way Threads wins is that it's

a revenue spiral versus the like pure activity spiral.

Interesting. Where essentially they find ways to, even with lower base,

make generate revenue, which drives advertisers, drives more investment.

Correct. Correct.

All right, that'll be funny, fun story to watch. Kind of along those same lines. I want to chat

about virality a little bit. You worked on some of those viral products out there in BTC,

as Twitter is an example, but also in B2B, which is really rare and interesting.

And I know there's no silver bullet for increasing virality, but everyone's always

wondering, how do I increase the virality of my product? So I'm curious,

anything you could share, any tactics that you've seen work to increase the virality,

especially if a B2B product?

Well, as is my style, I want people to understand what virality is in the first place,

because I think people have misconceptions about it. People think virality is some, you know,

hot males tag at the bottom that says, go get a free account.

Virality is really when the word of mouth of a product is high quality.

That's really the essence of it. Let me rephrase that. It's when customers market your product,

right? And that is incredibly powerful, but also that's incredibly actionable,

if that makes sense. There are products who try to be viral, just for what I call synthetic

virality that fail. Because in the end, if you're synthetically viral and people get to the product

and it sucks, that's it. That's the end. Even hot male, for example, people talk about the viral

tag. I don't know. You know what I'm talking about? Because I absolutely at the bottom.

But remember, it wasn't just that. It was one of the first webmail things. And webmail was

revolutionary because you didn't have to have a pop three client and lose your email across

multiple devices. It solved a lot of really good problems for customers at the time for email.

And so when they arrived from the free account, it was like, holy crap, this is amazing, right?

And so let's do that. Uber doesn't have any weird viral traps, but it compresses the workflow of

healing a cab so much that it's viral, if that makes sense. In fact, at this time where Austin

kicked them out for and other apps came in and filled the void, and then it came back after the

year and just crushed everybody. There was no campaign. It was just viral by itself. So that's

what virality is. So then the question is, how do you increase it? Well, look, fundamentally, build

a great product that solves a sharp problem and build it really well. If you do this, this is

the bedrock of virality. If you don't do this, there's no viral tactic that will work

in a sustained way, right? It will fizzle. But if you do this, you can lay on synthetic virality

strategies for referral, strategies for coming back to the app and creating an account, right?

Remember, before Cali, there was acuity scheduling. There was other things.

The difference was Cali was so well made, so simple for schedulers, so respectful of scheduler's

time, not just the creator's time, that the virality worked. It did not work for others who

sucked. X.ai and other places, they weren't that good. You have to be good to be viral.

That is such an important insight that everyone looks at Cali only like, of course,

you're sharing calendars with everyone, it's going to go viral. That's like, what a cool trick.

But your point is so interesting that there were previous versions of that, but the

product itself wasn't great, the experience wasn't great, it was too complicated, it didn't work.

And that's what made it so viral. Yeah, there may be some of the things I think affect virality,

but I think that this is the nugget that people need to take away,

that is the foundation, the bedrock of all of them. Customer support actually affects virality.

If you have fanatical customer support, people will love it. Viral tactics like the page that

says, well, get an account and so on, all these signing documents, Cali and so on and so forth.

Network effects, in Cali, you have these green dots. If you and a person have Cali,

it tells you when you're free. All network effects, really high quality execution,

synthetic virality all contribute to net virality. But the fundamental is exactly what we just discussed.

Just got to get it all right. No big deal.

Build the best product possible. Honestly, if you want to be viral, that's, you know,

Slack wasn't even viral, right? There was no synthetic virality. Slack wouldn't even connect

to organizations for the longest time. Why? You could be working on the third floor and so on,

you just Slack on the fourth floor and you would have no clue. There's no way to share it with them.

But what happens when you went to lunch, people are like, we got Slack and this is amazing.

And people on the third floor are like, holy shit, when can we get it? Boom, boom, boom.

Great product first is virality. Seth Godin has this phrase that I always come back to,

if you want to make your product remarkable, something people want to remark about.

And that's basically the core word of mouth. Yes, yes, yes.

I was watching a talk you did on this kind of topic and you had this great phrase that you

sort of touched on, but I think it's so good. And I just want to make sure we highlight it,

which is that virality is customer augmented marketing.

Yeah, I think it's the thing that I started with first. It's when your marketing is

essentially done by your customers, right? Because what it does, it affords you the ability to spend

less on marketing. And you can either uplevel your marketing execution with that or save money

that you can put in the product. Atlassian spends maybe like 10, 20 percentage points less on

marketing than the equivalent competitors because it's viral. And also because there's

network effects at this point as well, say Jira. And so it's customer augmented marketing. Your

customers are either forcing other people to adopt it or shaming them into adopting it or

formowing them into adopting it. So yes, virality is essentially customer augmented marketing,

which gives you options. I love that phrase. I'm going to use it now.

I have just a few more questions before we get to our very exciting lightning round. And these

are kind of random two topics that I wanted to chat on. One is this concept that you call forest

time. It's a post you wrote about the importance of forest time. Can you just describe what that is

and why it's so important and then also just how to do this? I operate. I'm an operator right now,

meaning that I'm building things. I work for a company. But I also advise and invest,

which is different. When I'm advising, I'm looking from above, from outside. I have a bird's eye view

and I'm able to say, you know what, this will work. This won't work. What have you done? Can I look

at the results and then, you know, cycle the advice based on what you're seeing and what I'm seeing?

When I'm operating, I'm building a team. I'm hiring. I'm managing all the things.

Elina shout out that hates sometimes. And that's what I'm doing. When you are operating,

you have the fog of war. Like it is so intense that you don't have the attention to have a bird's

eye view constantly. And so forest time is the idea that you make time within your week,

within your month to see the forest for the trees. Most of the time when you're operating,

you're seeing the tree, which is the problem for you. But sometimes you need to see the forest

so you can figure out it as an alternate path different from the one that you are currently

on your campaign. And so it's time to elevate, to get some bird's eye view, to see the entire

landscape and see if there are alternative paths through the current problems that you're escaping.

And I think that it has to be very intentional. And the intentionality there is some, I have

published a workflow, a document that helps you make that step to make that elevation. Like

what are the issues? What are alternative ways to solve this potentially that I'm not seeing,

et cetera. And what I try to do is I try to create that forest time for my executive team as well,

because it's not just me that suffers from this, it's most everybody. In fact, it's most PMs,

because PMs are so influential that the spoke of the wheel of product creation and product

development that we often, it's a sine wave, right? You are discovering and shaping problems,

and then you are commanding and captain and execution, and it's endless. And they're endless

meetings. And so you need to create time for forest time for elevation. If you don't, you'll

become less effective over time. It's just attrition. And then just to make it even more

concrete for people, what are examples of forest time? Is it taking time off? Is it advising on

the side? Is it taking a day off at the end of a month, a full day or two days? And instead of

just playing golf, although that's fine, it is doing a workflow worksheet to survey the forest

specifically. And sometimes people, managers are like, wait, you're giving people a day off when

they should be working harder and harder. And I think it's completely worth it. It's not about

working harder, it's working smarter. It's about seeing more options than you see. And so I'm very

happy to give that time to product managers, to product executives or design executives or

engineering executives, because I think that if they do it properly, then we'll have better execution

in the long run. Let's put it this way, we aim in product development, we aim for maybe like 10%

of the time and then we execute and build for the other side. It's not just, I mean, there's

more stuff we do. If your aim is off, then you're spending $1, $2 million incorrectly

of people's time. And so forest time should improve your aim. That's the entire point,

because your aim is a precursor to a huge amount of investment. And so I think it's well worth it.

I love this. So specifically, what you do with your team is once a month, you give them a day to

do this kind of worksheet that you put together. And then that worksheet is in this post that you

wrote that we, you know, point to. Is that right? Correct. Correct. Amazing. Okay, great. This is

very tactical advice. I love it. Okay, one last question before a very exciting lightning round.

You worked at Bridgewater Associates, which I didn't know until I started digging into your

past. That sounds creepy. And Bridgewater Associates famous for what Ray Dalio's

hedge fund author of principles and all these other credible books. And it's a very unique

working environment. So I just wanted to ask about your experience there. Specifically,

one of the craziest things there is just this thing called dots, I think it's called, or people

just call out mistakes that people make at the company. And it's public. Is that how it actually

was any, any memories of that? Yeah, yeah, I was a senior management, what's called an SMA,

which is the management layer right under Ray's team. And

we were the priests of, of the, of the church of Bridgewater Bridgewater did things like record,

this is public college, I'm not saying anything. Yeah, or every meeting. Eventually we created

a dot collector, which is allows you to rate people in real time. So I'm just having a conversation

with you. And before the meeting closes, in front of each other, I pull up my laptop and I rate you

and rate the interaction. And you know, in theory, the idea is that if you constantly rate people

across hundreds of interactions, that you build a picture of them that is fairly accurate,

statistically accurate, that will transcend, you know, maybe that emotional

relationship is wisdom of the crowd idea. So that's the theory. In practice, it is

emotionally like exhausting. And like you said, the little creepy even the recording.

So I think there were things about Bridgewater that I didn't, I understood intellectually in

terms of the purpose that Ray had designed, but didn't quite work. It's like, the way I think about

this is the theory of the principles are really good. The practice can be quite

and the execution can be quite off and not very human or not very empathetic. But I will say this,

Bridgewater taught me things that I don't think any other organization in the world taught me.

Like one example is Bridgewater thinks of people in three dimensions, their skills, their attributes

and their values. Most organizations think about people in terms of just their skills.

But it makes sense that people have attributes and values, right? That people are, you know,

timid, people are bold, people like to jump in, people like to stand back, and you know,

all those other things we think about personality and proclivity. Bridgewater tries to establish

and measure them and also tries to write job descriptions that say this is the kind of attributes

we're looking for, not just the skills we're looking for. And then of course values like, you

know, are you a thief or are you principled and so on and so forth. Now, that idea of looking at

talent or people in general, both in your professional life or in your personal life,

is a huge addition to me as a professional from Bridgewater. So I am not by any means saying,

I'm saying that there were things I didn't enjoy about Bridgewater, but things that I learned that

I've learned nowhere else as well. Did you take that to what you do today, thinking of people in

those three different ways and 100% like that? In my professional life, in my personal life,

when I interview people, I am cognizant of those three things and I try to extract those three

things because I think it improves your success. You know, famously, like all the weird skill-based

interviewing at Google was only 50, you know, 50-50 predictive. And the reason is,

Google did not consider the other two things, I believe. Right? You know, Bridgewater was willing

to endure 80% attrition to arrive at the best people. Now, I don't think it works for them

because some of their system was not empathetic of humans, like expecting humans to be computers.

But I thought that was a very important insight.

Awesome. Ajee, is there anything else that you want to share before we get to our very exciting

lightning round? In the history of product development, we have basically started to create

abstraction to guide our work, right, versus wild, wild, wild west. So the engineers came

up with agile and pair programming and all these things. The designers have come up with,

you know, design thinking, design sprints and combined research to talk about how to do discovery

of various complexity. And the question is, the product abstraction, so there's code,

there's product in this business. So the product and business layer, what is our abstraction?

What is our crucible for organizing our work? We don't even have one. We don't have a name for it.

And so the idea of a product system is that there's an abstraction above

agile and design thinking that we have to pay attention to how to build solid organizations

and to execute well at the product and the business layer. This is a co-created framework

with me and Azine. And the idea here is, how do you construct a good product system?

And literally, you could boil it down into a checklist of the systems you need to build to

build a really good cohesive R&D organization. So I think that's the tee-up. I'm going to

have to leave you thirsty because someone else is probably going to go deep into it.

Amazing. And that's your wife that you mentioned who you are co-creating this

framework with and who we're going to have on the podcast in the future.

That's right.

What is it like being married to another product leader? Would you recommend?

100%. You're going to have really productive conversations. You can redesign other

companies' applications in one conversation in the evening.

Amazing. Well, that was almost the lightning round question, but I moved it up earlier.

And so with that, we've reached our very exciting lightning round. Are you ready?

Yeah, I'm ready. Let's do it.

Okay, great. Let's do it. What are two or three books that you've recommended most to other people?

There's one business book that I recommend. I think it's called The Halo Effect.

It's basically a book that lets you call bullshit on all these other business books that

tell you all kinds of stupid shit. It is how to deconstruct what is important

in a business and self-help book and what is not important and what is just circumstantial

storytelling with random facts and form-fitting evidence. It's called The Halo Effect.

Read it. Why do you need to read it? Because garbage in, garbage out.

People were amazed that the Outlier Effect, Malcolm Gladwell, and people have been tearing

it down for 15 years now. But everyone ingested it and thought it was the most important thing.

But how do you know what's important to take away from it and what's not? The Halo Effect

will help you. And then the other thing is I read for pleasure because I read a lot for work.

And so science fiction is the thing. There's lots to recommend, but I would say that people

should either read Dune, Frank Herbert, or Foundation by Asimov. If you haven't read those

two things on your science fiction person, you really should. The world building is incredible.

You know, I understand Tolkien and fantasy, but the science fiction side of it is those two books.

There's also a TV series of Foundation now, which I can't say I recommend absolutely,

but it's a beautiful show. Yeah, I haven't watched Foundation yet. I just felt like

I just felt super weird watching it after reading it. And I could only make it through

three quarters of Dune version, you know, part one, but I will make it through them.

I don't expect them. The books are glorious. If you love prose, the books are

man crazy. But I will get through them eventually.

I've not actually read Dune, but the movie was incredible. I played the video game

Dune where you're just smining spice all day and stuck in my brain forever.

Okay, next question. What is a favorite interview question that you like to ask

candidates that you're interviewing? I try to ask to, I feel this is what I feel like

is going to give people a cheat sheet when I interview them. But I try to ask two questions.

So I'm not a person who does favorites. It's hard for me to pick favorites, but

I ask people to introduce themselves. And I think it tells me a lot about them,

how they tell about themselves, what they say about themselves, and the content of it.

I ask people about the things they think they're truly great at.

And then I ask people about the things they think they need to learn.

The latter two is about their professional skill, their craft.

I think it tells me a lot about how they communicate. It tells me a lot about how thoughtful they are.

It tells me a lot about what they're proud of and what they lead into. And those kinds of

things are very important to me. What is a favorite product you recently discovered that you love?

I have been optimizing my workspace a lot. So I'm on a kicker right now where I use Windows,

I was on Windows PM, and I still have my Windows box. But a lot of people use Macs of work,

and I've used Macs for the last few years. So even though I switch between them,

I've spent a lot more time on Mac, and my Windows experience is completely optimized.

Like it is perfect. Well, Mac, I'm like the window in socks. There's all these gaps I see.

So I've been trying to figure out how to dial in my Mac experience. I've been,

you know, I hate the activity monitor sucks, like what's a replacement, you know, the sound.

It doesn't support sound through HDMI or sound through, I don't know, just some weird setup.

So I've been optimizing that one particular product that I like in the context of that is

Unlocks. It's like one man product that allows me to just look at my phone and log into my Mac

when I walk up and then locks it when I walk away. And it actually detects my proximity.

So it will start the logging process while I get close. I think that's incredible. And I feel

like it improves my productivity. Very cool. Sounds like a lot. I hate a raid for Macs over here.

Well, for someone who uses a lot. No, I think it pros and cons. I'm no longer paid by Microsoft.

So things I don't like. But there are also things that, you know, the Mac isn't perfect either.

Yeah, indeed. What is a favorite life motto that you repeat to yourself or share with other people

either in work or in life that you find valuable? I've taken to saying that there's more knowledge

outside my head than inside it. And this is a plea for curiosity. I have three main things

that I that are my North Star personally, but also when I say personally, I mean everything

professionally, which is originality, curiosity and wisdom. And so this thing about there's more

knowledge outside my head than inside my head is a plea for curiosity. It's a plea for skepticism.

It's a plea to be humble about what you know, no matter how old you are,

about the world around you and always be listening for more, even when you know something,

let other people speak because they might add 10% more to the 90% you know. And so

being an active listener is very important. Beautiful. Last question. You are from Nigeria.

What is that Nigerian food that you think people need to find and get ASAP?

I will recommend to, depending on how familiar you are. So if you've never had fried plantain

with beef stew, oh man, that sounds great. And you should stop what you're doing, stop work,

whatever you're doing, find your next Nigerian friend and go get some. Okay. This is the food

that most Nigerians will basically trade years of life to have access to. Okay. So that's what I

would say. And then the second thing is, if you really want to go, you know, if you want to be

in the in club in Niger, as we call it, you got to try pepper soup. Now, if you're not into spicy

stuff, I'm sorry, the door is close to you. But pepper soup is really in. And it is amazing.

It'll make you sweat, but it's delicious. And you should give it a shot.

Ajee, I think we've solved many people's sharp problems. I really appreciate you making time

being here. Two final questions. Where can folks find you online if they want to reach out? And

how can listeners be useful to you? I publish and substack when I have time. You should check it

out. It's usually all about things that are beneath the surface, what's behind the thing.

I believe that's how you'll find it. I'm on Twitter as well. So you can follow me because

I will talk about products. How you can be useful to me is go follow me on Twitter, sign up for

updates on the book. If you do, I will draw from that audience to help name the book to help design

the cover for the book. The book is intended to have a freemium because I want this book to be

available to people in Africa and India across the world. So there'll be a free version of it.

And there'll be premium versions with more tools, more help, and maybe even like interviews with

luminaries that you care and love as well. And so hopefully that will fund the free side of it

as well. So come in, become part of the party, maybe join a pre-read, an early draft read.

That is the best way you can help. So it's a call to all PMs and people of goodwill.

Amazing. What a great answer to that question. I'm going to go get some pepper soup and some

plantain beef meals. Thank you so much for being here. And I'm going to go get some food.

All right. Thank you, Lenny. It was a super enjoyable one. Love hanging out and Godspeed.

Bye, everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable,

you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app.

Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review, as that really helps other

listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at

lennyspodcast.com. See you in the next episode.

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.

Keywords

Oji Udezue, Typeform, Twitter, Calendly, Atlassian, B2B SaaS, quadrants, profitability, success, founders, investors, strategy, zone of benefit, product management, target audience, mental models, follow graph, network effects, social networks, revenue spiral, customer augmented marketing, Bridgewater Associates, real-time rating systems, evaluating people, skills, attributes, values, Mac platform, Nigerian cuisine

People

Oji Udezue, Lenny

Companies

Typeform, Twitter, Calendly, Atlassian

References

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Brought to you by Jira Product Discovery—Atlassian’s new prioritization and roadmapping tool built for product teams

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Oji Udezue is Chief Product Officer at Typeform and has held leadership roles at Twitter (Head of Product for Creation and Conversation), Calendly (CPO), and Atlassian (Head of Product for communication tools). He is well-known for bringing a product-led-growth (PLG) mindset to the companies he joins. Additionally, Oji mentors startups, is a Managing Partner at the Kernel Fund, and writes online about product management. In this episode, we discuss:

• Oji’s “Where to Fish to Land a Unicorn” and “Zone of Benefit” frameworks

• Why you need to find the “sharpest” problem

• How to operationalize continuous customer discovery

• Tips on optimizing onboarding flows

• Freemium vs. gated offerings in PLG

• Tactical strategies for making your product more viral

• The concept of “forest time” and how it can provide clarity in your work

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Find the transcript for this episode and all past episodes at: https://www.lennyspodcast.com/episodes/. Today’s transcript will be live by 8 a.m. PT.

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Where to find Oji Udezue:

• Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/ojiudezue

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ojiudezue/

• Substack: https://substack.com/@ojiudezue

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Where to find Lenny:

• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com

• Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/lennysan

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/

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In this episode, we cover:

(00:00) Oji’s background

(03:38) Oji’s “Where to Fish to Land a Unicorn” framework

(05:26) Workflow quadrants

(09:30) How product people can push frequency 

(12:28) Oji’s “Zone of Benefit” framework

(14:49) How to find your ICPs

(15:33) ICPs at Twitter

(20:20) Oji’s philosophy on frameworks

(22:31) Oji’s upcoming book

(24:34) An explanation of “sharp problems”

(28:31) Signs your problem is “sharp enough”

(31:17) Discovery vs. continuous conversations

(35:08) Customer listening

(38:31) Onboarding fundamentals

(43:49) Activated user milestones

(45:47) The power of network effects

(50:15) An explanation of virality and how to increase it

(56:32) How to use “forest time” to zoom out and see problems in a new way

(1:00:53) Lessons from Oji’s time at Bridgewater Associates

(1:05:07) Why R&D teams need a larger system beyond Agile and design

(1:06:57) Lightning round

—

Referenced:

• Where to fish to land a unicorn: https://ojiudezue.medium.com/where-to-fish-to-land-a-unicorn-in-b2b-saas-9bc93c96152c

• Coda: https://coda.io/

• Atlassian: https://www.atlassian.com/

• Finding high-frequency customers (use cases): https://ojiudezue.medium.com/finding-high-frequency-customers-use-cases-53773a753bb5

• Evernote: https://evernote.com/

• Industry PM conference: https://www.industryconference.com/

• Typeform: https://www.typeform.com/

• Build better products with continuous product discovery | Teresa Torres: https://www.lennyspodcast.com/videos/build-better-products-with-continuous-product-discovery-teresa-torres/

• Pendo: https://www.pendo.io/

• Amplitude: https://amplitude.com/

• Dan Hockenmaier on Twitter: https://twitter.com/danhockenmaier

• Seth Godin’s blog: https://seths.blog/

• A key ritual: Forest time: https://ojiudezue.substack.com/p/a-key-ritual-forest-time

• Principles: https://www.principles.com/

• Dot Collector: https://principlesus.com/dot-collector-real-time-feedback/

• The Halo Effect: . . . and the Eight Other Business Delusions That Deceive Managers: https://www.amazon.com/Halo-Effect-Business-Delusions-Managers/dp/1476784035/

• Dune: https://www.amazon.com/Dune-Penguin-Galaxy-Frank-Herbert/dp/0143111582

• Foundation: https://www.amazon.com/Foundation-3-Book-Boxed-Set-Empire/dp/0593499573

• Foundation on AppleTV+: https://tv.apple.com/us/show/foundation/umc.cmc.5983fipzqbicvrve6jdfep4x3

• Unlox: https://unlox.it/

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Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@lennyrachitsky.com.

—

Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed.

Get full access to Lenny's Newsletter at www.lennysnewsletter.com/subscribe