Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:11:17 · Oji Udezue, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:11:17] S0: For example, a Typeform now, this is real for me. Typeform 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-nine, which is a very productive place to be. So for marketers, for salespeople, I wanna 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-nine. And I think expanding that foothold is the way to navigate a business like that. You can see that with Qualtrics, you can see that with SurveyMonkey, you know, 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-nine even for that sort of more generic, workflow. [00:12:27] S1: 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 people are like, yeah. 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?
00:12:45 · Oji Udezue
[00:12:45] S0: Honestly, the 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'm a trained, you know, I have a master's in engineering, so like 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 impedance match technology to humans. That's it. Like 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 superpower, so the same amount of time but twice as much output. But the most important thing is that it has to be noticeable, right? If you do something 20% better, often people, just 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 switch in 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, especially in the tech industry, people just love to work. But that is really it at, you know, when you think about 8,000,000,000 people on the planet. And the zone of benefit really hones in on the fact that if you're gonna help me work less, make about the same amount of money, then for me to notice you, you have to accelerate me by three times for me to care.
00:14:35 · Lenny Rachitsky, Oji Udezue
[00:14:35] S1: Okay. Awesome. So three times. So the idea there is you should feel like this is three times more productive in the thing that I'm trying to do or saves me three times, I don't know, like, do it three times faster. [00:14:44] S0: Yeah. That's when people actually feel it and they feel it enough where they part with money. [00:14:49] S1: Awesome. And I think what's cool about this is it helps you identify the ICP for your product if you're working on startup or even a new product within existing product to figure out who exactly is gonna most benefit from this? Is that part of this? [00:15:01] S0: 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 a 100 people more, you should start to notice the people who are like, you know what? This... I really care about this. And that starts to tell you a little bit about who who is your who's your target audience. [00:15:33] S1: 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?
00:15:40 · Oji Udezue
[00:15:40] S0: I think for Atlassian, it's really kind of obvious. It's, you know, developers mostly, but it's tech teams writ large because the fundamental of an R and 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 they can be valuable to the organization. So that that is incontroversial. So the ICP is really clear and had been clear for, you know, for Atlassian for a very long time. Calendly 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 Calendly's ICPs were people who were scheduling with people who were not in their 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 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.
00:17:27 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:17:27] S1: I was gonna ask I was gonna ask what the ICP for Twitter might be. Still So
00:17:33 · Oji Udezue
[00:17:33] S0: Twitter is actually more fun in terms of 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 were unseen. They were media organizations. People like the NFL, the NBA, HBO, who wanted con... Their content to reach more people, to be in conversational spaces. And they were essentially business customers and not seen in the in the conversation pool. It's not obvious, but we interacted with them all the time, and we rev shared ads for their their videos. Right? Because we're making content all the time, and so Twitter was a way to extend the monetization of that that content, that inventory they already had. But when you go to the consumer side of Twitter, who are... What was the ICP? Well, actually, 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's... Who was at Twitter, you will 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 their own informal communities around the things they're passionate about and have this mimetic relationship with the 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.