Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:00:00 · Oji Udezue
[00:00:00] S0: 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. You know, Slack wasn't even viral, right? There was no synthetic virality. Slack couldn't even connect to organization for the longest time. You could be working on the 3rd Floor and it's only using Slack on the 4th 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 3rd Floor are 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.
00:00:37 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:00:37] S1: Welcome to Lenny's Podcast, where I interview 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 Oji Udezue. Oji has helped build and grow products at Microsoft. We worked on Windows, Outlook, Hotmail, and Internet 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 Typeform, which I am a happy customer of. Oji 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, Oji 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 in a Typeform 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 forest time, which I love, and even his favorite Nigerian food, which I am currently on the hunt for. With that, I bring you Oji Udezue after a short word from our sponsors. You fell in love with building products for a reason, but sometimes the day to day reality is a little different than you imagine. Instead of dreaming up big ideas, talking to customers, and crafting a strategy, you're drowning in spreadsheets and road map updates, and you're spending your days basically putting out fires. A better way is possible. Introducing Jira Product Discovery, the new prioritization and road mapping tool built for product teams by Atlassian. With Jira Product Discovery, you can gather all your product ideas and insights in one place and prioritize confidently, finally replacing those endless spreadsheets. Create and share custom product road maps with any stakeholder in seconds, and it's all built on Jira where your engineering team's already working so true collaboration is finally possible. Great products are built by great teams, not just engineers. Sales, support, leadership, even Greg from finance. Anyone that you want can contribute ideas, feedback, and insights in Jira product discovery for free. No catch.
00:02:51 · Lenny Rachitsky, Oji Udezue
And it's only $10 a month for you. Say goodbye to your spreadsheets and the never ending alignment efforts. The old way of doing product management is over. Rediscover what's possible with Jira Product Discovery. Try it for free at atlassian.com/lenny. That's atlassian.com/lenny. Oji, thank you so much for being here, and welcome to the podcast. [00:03:11] S0: Thank you, Lenny. It's a pleasure to be here. [00:03:14] S1: It's my pleasure. You've been a PM and a product leader at so many amazing and also just very different companies with all with very different approaches to product and growth. And 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. And so I have a bunch of questions for you. I hope you came ready for that. [00:03:34] S0: I am ready. [00:03:35] S1: Okay. Sure. I love it. Okay. So I wanna start with frameworks. You've written and shared a bunch of really interesting frameworks for how to think about product and growth, and so I just wanna dig into a couple of them. And one of them is around how to find big b to b SaaS ideas, and it's around finding the right workflow. Could you just share this framework and also just, like, how founders and also investors can use this idea to find big ideas. [00:04:01] S0: Thank you. So, I think you're referring to where do you fish to find a unicorn? [00:04:05] S1: That's it.
00:04:05 · Oji Udezue
[00:04:05] S0: And the thing behind that is that there's a... And you know, people can find that on Substack and on Medium with my writings. Well, the premise is that there's a lot of risk in building startups, right? And the last decade of product management and startups has really focused on the method of building software in companies. We talk about the lean approach. We talk about fail fasts, YC Doctrine, so on and so forth. And I think that that was a necessary phase for us because a lot of innovation was just the ideas of founders, unvalidated by customers, And 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, right? It's also innovation. Alright? And so the problem space and the solutions to the problem space is still a big driver of success in building software companies. What problem are you really solving? And if you believe that the problem space is key, so what problems will predict success? Right? In b to b SaaS especially, which is much easier to circumscribe, is where I I start to think about, look, how do you tell from the beginning? Because I'm an investor as well as an operator, right? Now, to segment this space, I think of two dimensions, you know. One is how many departments in the company does the workflow you're trying to solve apply to, Right? Is it just a few or is it all of them? Right? And 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? Now, 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 everyone workflows, like things like collaboration, like Slack, email, calendaring, workflow, social knowledge, and like Notion and so on and so forth. And then things that apply to single departments, I call niche and things that apply to... That's what I call niche, right? And 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.
00:06:28 · Oji Udezue, Lenny Rachitsky
And what I found by looking at the biggest companies, public and private, in each quadrant was that every one 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. And so this is interesting because he's in that space for him to think about. And then the place where B2B SaaS really thrives is niche workflows that are highly frequent. Right? HINI is what I call it, you know, high frequency niche. And then there are 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, hi, Nye, and hi, everyone, and you solve a really important problem, 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. And 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 probability of success is. And if you're an investor like me or a VC, you can start to think about how you deploy your money. [00:07:57] S1: What are examples of companies in each of those quadrants, if you can frame this in your... I don't know if you have this in your head already.
00:07:57 · Lenny Rachitsky, Oji Udezue
[00:07:57] S1: What are examples of companies in each of those quadrants, if you can frame this in your... I don't know if you have this in your head already. [00:08:03] S0: 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, you know, all the basic things. And Atlassian, we spend a lot of time thinking about this. So word, you know, we've had, you know, word processing forever in the work in the workspace. Things like Notion and Confluence are huge, are sort of the evolution of that. Slack, email. Companies in that space, Google, Microsoft, Atlassian, etcetera. In the Hainai, which is high frequency niche, you have things like Jira, right? You have things like, you know, tools for recruiters. You have Martech, alright? You have SalesTech. And these are... We know the companies behind them, Atlassian, Salesforce, so on and so forth. And then in in the, you know, low frequency everyone, you have things like maybe form tools, and actually, they're not that many of them, right? Low frequency everyone, or even like expense, actually the best is expensing, right? Not everyone does it all the time, but everyone essentially has to do some of it mostly, at least a lot of people. And then there's a low frequency niche, which is its particular department. So planning, which is done by FP and A, but done infrequently, things like that.