00:00:07

Hello, everyone. I'm extremely excited to be here for DevOps enterprise summit London, actually my second dev ops enterprise summit. Uh, I did the form thing, which is super interesting. Thank you Jean, for the invite to that. And, uh, I've just found this community to be so incredibly welcoming and giving. And everyone is really, really curious, which is exciting. Sometimes I go to conferences for product management or for UX and everyone kind of has it all figured out, but the dev ops community is, seems perpetually curious, which is great. People share their work and share their stories. Uh, and I'm, I'm just super excited to be here. First a bit about me. I have a background in product management and UX research. Uh, I saw odd jobs in my twenties. I did a, it was in a PowerPoint factory, basically at an investment bank where we would do hundreds of pages of PowerPoint every day.

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That was exciting. Wow. Uh, got involved in music. I had a video game, uh, called last call, which was a bartending game. Uh, drove a Rick Shaw in New York. That was fun. Uh, basically it kind of did a lot of things in my twenties and then kind of settled into this career. Uh, I'm active in a lot of communities, the agile community, product management design now dev ops versus exciting or design community. Uh, I don't really just identify with one of these communities. I think like a lot of people I kind of pick and choose what's interesting, um, from different worlds and I try to figure it out in my head. Uh, and, uh, that's just how I work. I, I have to say one thing though, you know, I became a addictive addicted to DevOps enterprise summit by watching all these videos. And I found it to be some, some of the most compelling, uh, discussions about org design and safety and systems.

00:02:10

And so I have a sweet spot, uh, for the dev ops community. I write a bunch, uh, my blog is it cuddle.fish and I have a two year old. And so my attention span sort of fits into Twitter. And so I do use Twitter a lot. Uh, you can find me at John cuddle fish currently. Uh, I work at a company called amplitude. I'm going to just briefly describe what I do there, cause it's, it's relevant to this topic, uh, today. So amplitude focuses on product analytics for product teams. It's not general BI, it's not marketing, it's not generic sequel. Uh, it helps teams make sense of complex user behaviors with digital experiences, digital products. And we really focus on helping, you know, empowering teams to act, to experiment, to get a Virtru virtuous cycle of learning. Um, I mentioned this because it gets me in contact with lots of teams from lots of different contexts, uh, lots of different journeys industries, et cetera.

00:03:20

And my role there is I, I work as more of an external team coach. I focus on customers, prospects, the broader product public. I do a little bit internal, but mostly externally focused. Uh, I write some books for amplitude. I've written a book for amplitude design workshops. Uh, you get the idea. I basically, it's a dream job. I get to nerd out all day about product stuff, uh, which is extremely exciting for me now, pertinent to this talk is that recently I've had a lot of engineering leaders sitting in on these conversations or actually even initiating the conversations with me, um, because they're interested in product management. They're interested in product analytics design, and a lot of them have had some top-down mandate in their organization that they have to become more product driven. And they're a little curious they're there, they're second guessing how it's going down in their organization.

00:04:22

And I have to admit often that's for a very good reason. And so we're going to get into that a bit in this talk. So that's kind of the inspiration for this talk. There's this real hype in the dev ops community, especially around, uh, projects to products, uh, congrats to MC for cranium, getting that going now, how does this manifest an organization? Suddenly product owners are popping up everywhere. Products are popping up everywhere. Uh, you know, you want budget, call your thing, a product it's easy. You have influence. Um, there is this growing awareness of value streams, which I think is very, uh, very, uh, valuable, but generally there's this awareness. Um, and at DevOps enterprise summit, Las Vegas, I hosted lean coffee and I had some, uh, I was at a table and the questions were bubbling up. Like, what is a product even?

00:05:12

How does a product thinking even fit into our organization? So you can tell people are very actively mulling over this question. Uh, and it's something that, that I decided I would try to address in this particular talk, but I have to admit that that something is missing. You know, I'd talk to companies about how this was being put into motion in their companies. And I would, I would observe these very well-oiled feature factories. You know, there's a product there's features, it's usable, we're getting a lot of stuff done, seen a lot of investment in tools and consultancies and, uh, design thinking, a lot of talk of internal customers that started to get even more confusing to me. And this sort of made sense. I mean, this is a dev ops conference, right? So, um, you know, did I expect a lot more, did I expect a deeper understanding? That's a good question. Obviously, communities need to focus somewhere. So for example, in the door report, there's a box in one of the sort of mental models or the hypothesis trees for the product, uh, for the report. And it mentions lean product development and has two lines. It says gathering, implement customer feedback and experimentation. Those were the two lines.

00:06:24

So yeah, there's a little bit of that. There's a little bit of where the community focuses, but something still felt off. And this especially manifested when I would hear people talk about the business and the teams or, um, you know, there's still these silos and people's thinking, and so I wanted to dig into that and that's what I'm going to dig into today. So here's the goal of the talk. The goal of this talk is I'm going to share some key important concepts related to product and design. I want to see your brain with ideas that could come in handy as you interact with other people in your organization. Uh, I want to, I want to break through the dogma associated with product companies. A lot of people I speak, uh, speak within the DevOps community, you know, say, well, I get this projects to products thing, but what the hell does this mean in my environment where we're not a software product?

00:07:16

We're not like amplitude where you work or we're not that, so how does it work for us? And I finally want to talk about new ways to think about being product led. This is actually a phrase that's been thrown around being product led. And obviously that leaves a lot of people scratching their heads, especially in this community. Like what does that mean? That means not technology lid or does that mean product manager lead? And we'll get to that in this talk. So let me summarize the talk briefly. We're going to talk a little bit about the essence of being product led. What does that actually mean? And then we're going to talk about the shift to thinking about real customers out there in the world versus internal customers, which I hear a lot about, I'm gonna introduce some concepts. Um, one is the concept of moving from being funnel driven, you know, like sales funnel or marketing funnel, um, to thinking about engagement, ladders, and thinking about lifetime value.

00:08:09

I think this is a super important concept that people, you know, wrap their head around, uh, in this community. We're going to talk about the shift from thinking in terms of, um, features and products is the, you know, the be all thing that we shipped to actually thinking them as temporary solutions, you know, today's solutions to longstanding problems, but a dig into one of the real sticky points in this product stuff, which is short-termism, it doesn't matter whether you talk about projects or products, you can be as short term with products as you are with projects. And so I want to dig into that and that's really the heart of being a more sustainably product led, uh, in your organization. And then I'm going to end with discussing this idea of learning as fast as you ship interesting concept and finally end with embracing the mess.

00:08:59

So first, what does it mean when you hear someone say that's a product led company? There's a lot of confusion around that, especially when people say, oh, well, we're not a software product company. We are Anheuser-Busch or we are burger king. Um, there's both customers of amplitudes that I've talked to these people now, what, what doesn't it mean? Well, it does not mean that product managers run the show. It does not mean you are product management lead, and it doesn't mean that you're somehow not customer driven or customer obsessed or any of those other, you know, cliche kind of terms that we use, um, product lead's kind of cliche in its own way. So what does it actually mean at its core being product led is about believing in the power of design and technology and believing in the power of cross-functional teams on the small, but also sort of larger teams of teams, um, to have an impact.

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And it's about connecting to the real humans using in pain for your product. It's not necessarily about selling a software product, it's about believing in the power of products and that's an important difference. So what do I mean by sustainable impact? Um, what I mean is is that, that the products you're, you're the way you use design and technology should drive sustainable defensible, differentiated mid to long-term growth for your company and mid to longterm outcomes for the customers out in the world, right? There's this element of sustainability, you know, sales driven company can be extremely short-term and close that quarter. But when we are product led, we are believing in design and technology to be able to create these moats and these sustainable growth for our companies. And what I would say is that these are asymmetric outcomes. You know, some of these things like marketing and sales are pretty linear.

00:11:01

Um, sometimes there's an amazing campaign. Um, but a lot of times these things you sort of put money in and you get money out in some ways. Now we're talking about step changes from the business, right? A business working in one way, and then design and technology gets involved and kind of lifts it to another level. And we're also talking about sustainability in terms of the people in your company, feeling their impact sustainably, right? Their sustainable impact. So, you know, you talk to a developer, who's been at your company for five years and they can recount, you know, by the quarter, by the half of ways that their work impacted people out in the world. And that's a special thing when it happens. So you know how to make this real, um, I'll always remember this quote, this was from a, a developer working on what they would like an internal platform.

00:11:54

And they said, I'm working on one of our internal platforms, but I'm so inspired by what we're doing out in the world. And that's the essence of what we're talking about is there's just that relationship to impact out in the world. Now I mentioned Anheuser-Busch is the Samplitude customer ABMBev I guess now what did it mean for them to be product led? How did they use designing technology to create an asymmetric outcome? So they actually thought, well, wow, we need to figure out how to get our sales, our field sales team working more effectively. And I'm not sure if you know, a lot about Anheuser-Busch, they're actually very lean centric. They've got this foundation in lean thinking and they applied that to that problem. And they thought about how they could create digital experiences for their field sales team. So they were using technology to make their sales team more effective.

00:12:43

And that's kind of what we're talking about in terms of being product led. Now, another essence of being product led is this idea of breaking down silos. And it's often that I hear this idea of the business and it, or the business and the technology org. And when we are more product led, those silos begin to fade away. Everything is the business. And that's a critical difference. When you think about this sort of imaginary line between the business people and the people who are, you know, on the hamster wheels, making the software. And at that point, actually the whole company becomes the product. And if you work in an organization that's huge and you make shoes, or you do another thing like that. This is why product thinking and being product that applies to your company because at a certain point, the company is the product. And you're just thinking about more creative ways to use design and technology to create those outcomes. So, you know, I think the projects, the products is a very interesting way to think about, but imagine projects to products, to experiences and ecosystems and value networks and all kinds of things that make the whole company, the product, and that's really the leap that we're hoping to make.

00:14:06

So the next thing is this shift to real customers. And so let me start with a story. You know, this is a great example of how, what works is great for a point in time, but then stops working. So at this particular company, um, they, they tried to adopt this product, thinking everything was a product. They started talking about internal customers. Um, and you know, the way that that team described it to me is that it was, it was really helpful at that time to think that way there was a lot more empathy. It was less transactional. It was more connected in the way they work. And so at the time thinking in terms of internal customers was really, really, really helpful. Now what happened. And this is what I always find this fascinating when, what works starts to become your Achilles heel. So people started to ask more and more questions.

00:15:00

How is our work on ETL impacting the real human beings out there in the world? Our internal customer is happy as all can be, but how about the real customers is our internal customer making great decisions, or even I have a better idea about how we can do a better job for the humans out in the world. So they become a victim of their progress, right? They had they've up-leveled their teams to take this systems thinking and thinking about impact, but now the teams were extending it out into the world. And that was the start of a level of healthy tension in that organization. So that shift to the term partner was, was, was critical in that organization and keeping the customers out in the world front and center. And the reason why I mentioned this is it seems like it's, you know, quibbling over words or partner internal customer. But when we think about the shift to being product led, when we really think about what this means, we're talking about becoming a single business, a single product, and above all that customer we're helping out there in the world is, is the person that we are most aligned with.

00:16:08

So the third, uh, idea I want to talk about, which is very relevant. If you can nail this, you can nail a lot of discussions internally about what are you doing and what are you optimizing for? So what I like to think of it is that the, the transition from funnels, which are like this to engagement, ladders, and the idea of customer lifetime value, and I'll step through these things, uh, to help you. So a traditional marketing sales funniest literally funnels, literally, you sort of drop people into the top. You pay to market to them. They move down that particular funnel and you start selling to the more there's top of the funnel. There's middle of the funnel. There's bottom of the funnel. You, you buy that customer and then you have a customer. And so it's like dropping a human down, down a funnel, and that's pretty linear, right?

00:16:59

Um, you can improve on how that process works, but it's, it's, it's highly competitive. Everyone's trying to get those customers at the same time. Now what's happening in the larger landscape at the moment that has changed that. So with the shift to subscription models and the shift to decrease switching costs between products, it's having a huge impact in how people, uh, view that particular problem. So how does it work? So you've landed this customer and it's actually the start of the relationship. It's just the beginning. And now you have to think about retention. You have to think about expansion. Um, you have to think about evolving your product, taming your product, grooming your product complexity, because this is an ongoing thing. You're going to have this customer, hopefully for a long time, you have to think about new technologies, new opportunities to meet their needs.

00:17:57

And that's what we refer to as lifetime value of the customer. So when I hear a lot of engineering leaders talk about, you know, advocating for certain efforts or initiatives, I don't often hear about lifetime value of that customer. I don't hear about how they intend to increase the lifetime value of that customer. So this at the core is the shift from projects to products. It's not just a, you know, command F replace, uh, projects for products. It's fundamentally about how customers are paying for and interacting with what your company has to offer. It's persistent, it's longstanding evolving. It's not just a dogmatic new way of working. The reason why we're shifting to products is because that's how we have to shift how we work to respond to how consumers and businesses are purchasing software. It's actually more like an ecosystem or a service ecology.

00:18:51

It's not just dropping the product off the back of the truck, and then hoping that's gonna end up that way. So the question that you need to ask is how is my particular component or servers or tool contributing to customer lifetime value, moving customers up the engagement ladder, right? So imagine instead of a funnel, you have a ladder and you're actually moving customers, you know, to, you know, higher up into an elevated state in terms of the value they can get from your product. So similar to that thinking is that I've noticed in a lot of these sort of products, projects to products, you know, people get very obsessed with features and they start explaining what products are. But let me, let me try to simplify something for you. Products and features are temporary, but differentiated answers solutions to longstanding needs. They're actually a femoral, you know, some products last for other, but a lot of products don't, especially with software and what we can do with technology.

00:19:50

We're constantly finding new ways to meet human needs. I worked at a company called Zendesk. Zendesk helps support agents, handle support requests, kind of understand that that's been around for awhile, but how can we use machine learning or AI to help the humans out in the world, get their problems solved more quickly? Well, that created a step change for the business. Like that's an interesting angle. So once we make this shift to persistent products, it becomes harder to define. And back to what I said before, in, in, in a sense, the company becomes the product. Now in a lot of these product transformations, I'm seeing in the enterprise, this thinking is kind of missing. They're sort of taking, you know, early two thousands or mid nineties idea of product life cycles, and they're smashed stabbing them into 2020, um, ideas of what it means to offer products.

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And so you, you know, you go from these linear old models to these new engagement loops and it's a new game. So that's the one thing that I'm noticing now, why is it important to think of features and products as these temporary things? Because that's the shift away from these well-oiled feature factories that we need to see. So, you know, people argue what's, what's the thing of value that you've built? Is it the thing, is it the bits that you've sort of deployed or is it your deep understanding of the core needs of our customer that we're meeting? And I would argue that technology comes and goes what we need to plan for the obsolescence of our products and the technology that we make we're never done. And if we are something is wrong, I mentioned the word sustainability a couple of times, and I think that it's, it's worth kind of digging into sustainability for a short section here, but, um, Craig Larman ambassador Vodi in 2009, had this interpretation of the Toyota way.

00:21:46

And th the, the lean thinking house and at the top of the house is sustainable shortest lead time, best quality and value to people in society. Most customer delivery, um, low lowest cost, highest morale and safety. And it's that part, the sustainable shortest lead time, sustainable shortest lead time, best quality and value to people in society. Note that it isn't sustainable shortest lead time and just quality it's quality, lead time and value to people out there. Uh, and people and society. You can make your customers happy, but destroy the planet. As we know yet in business to business and large enterprises, it is way easier to ship new shiny objects for short term revenue growth, right, uh, than it is to be great design thinkers or product thinkers, right? Those are, those are shiny objects. Marketing will do their thing. Sales will do their thing.

00:22:44

Um, before you know what those things will be flying off the shelves. Who'd be closing the deals. Everyone will be celebrating because really, you know, humans buy on features, but renew on outcomes. How often have you obsessed about the features and something you're about to buy you've bought it and then found out that your outcome is wasn't exactly what you thought it was. And when you renew and you decide to pay up, you're not looking at features the same way as you did before the differentiator here, when it comes to this idea of sustainable product led growth is that you have a product strategy. You make great decisions over time, you build this foundation and design and technology to become engines for growth, retention, expansion, et cetera. Um, that's what differentiates the truly best product led companies in the world. It's not, you know, the AB experiment that proves that landing page a is better than landing page B or C or D or E. Certainly that's an interesting activity. Marketing does that all the time, but really the interplay of product strategy, uh, and experimentation and delivery. Yes, that's kind of important and learning about our customers on a deep level becomes the differentiator.

00:24:01

So I always like to point this out with a quote from a customer, uh, a customer, a sales person I used to work with, and they said we used to sell on the roadmap, but now we sell a record of innovation. We sell the outcomes we generated over the last year for our customers. That's such a great quote because if you've ever dealt with sales, sales is always asking you for case study sales is always saying, I just need a case study. If I could prove the ROI of the second, you know, things would fly off the shelves. Now what's ironic is product hears that and then goes off and builds all the features that sales thinks that, that you need. Now, what you should do when you hear that is to go off and build what will produce the ROI for the case study.

00:24:41

So an interesting angle, when you think about, um, sustainability, so a couple of things to just wrap up here, um, couple more models that help you think about this idea of product. The one key ID here is are you learning as fast as you ship? Now, I've been tracking this in the DevOps community and other communities for awhile. And if you go back a couple years, you know, for a lot of companies, it was like, we just need to execute. We're going so slow. You know, our competitor, uh, Jean Kim bragged about this competitor of our shipping every hour. And we ship every six months. And you know, this is the end of the world. And those companies develop these massive inventories of ideas of things to do. Um, and maybe they were drowning in debt or they needed to rearchitect what they're doing, but, you know, so, so th this is the situation.

00:25:36

These companies found themselves in where they had all this learning accumulated. They just couldn't ship fast enough. Now compare this to what happens. So that was, that company starts catching up. They go to DevOps enterprise summit for a couple years. The features are flying out the door. You're making stuff you've got from six weeks down to six days to six hours. You're only six X behind Gene's example. Um, each new release you're turning heads internally in your company. Wow. But for many teams, the bottleneck at this point has shifted, right? You've gone from learning faster than you can ship to shipping faster than you can learn. And that's obviously a good place to me be don't get me wrong, but it's, it's an important, um, thing to understand that that's what happened. That's what's happening because the danger is really, as you start to add more and more complexity to your product and your offering in your architecture and everything, the proportion of that complexity that delivers these asymmetric outcomes for your customers really matters.

00:26:40

And if you don't pay attention before, you know it, your product will represent the mishmash of ideas that got you here in the first place, cause you didn't learn fast enough. So you kind of end up in a bad place. So your challenge in this thing is closing that learning loop. Um, I mentioned this because this is as important. These insights are as important as some elements of CIC or other things that you're doing right. Solve those problems by all means. But you have to think about closing loop. This is an extension of observability in a sense, um, but it's, you know, we relate it to the product and the value it delivers. So I'll end you with this idea of embracing the mess. And I think this is one of the hardest things that leaders, engineering leaders and other people, especially in larger companies have with what it takes to be truly product led.

00:27:33

And that is that when teams are doing this and the best teams in the world are doing this to someone from the outside, it looks like a disorganized cluster F it looks like a mess. Um, you might stumble in and seen designers and developers pairing the team, picking up the phone and talking directly with customers. They're learning something in pivoting. I love when a team told me they know that things are working when they spend longer on it. Ooh, that's kind of, you know, chew on that for a little bit. Um, it's, it's a mess to anyone from the outside and I leave you with that because I think that's the hardest thing for companies to kind of the hurdle they need to get over. And it's that what works, doesn't look like work to people. And especially when it comes to these sort of these, these topics around product.

00:28:28

So in closing, um, hopefully I've given you some, um, ideas, you know, ranging from what it means to be product led to this idea of engagement ladders. Um, so the idea of learning, uh, as fast as you ship to understanding the idea of lifetime value, um, to thinking about products and features as these sort of temporary, but differentiated solutions, we sort of want our technology to become obsolete in some sense. Um, I'm always reminded, I sort of have to have an ask for the audience and, um, I think that's a DevOps enterprise summit thing. Um, but I am very eager to chat with more product oriented engineering leaders. Uh, I am doing a lot of work now at amplitude where I'm trying to answer their questions about what this whole product thing is in a way that passes muster with them. And frankly, the bar is pretty high with a lot of engineering leaders. I want to understand what makes adopting these ways of working difficult. Uh, and I want to brainstorm with people, especially around the analytics question about why we get this Conway's law of, of data in the organization, what finding that single view of the customer so difficult. And then I want to learn more about your journeys to becoming more product led that kind of the good sides and the bad side. So that's my talk. I'd be happy to answer more questions. Thank you so much.