Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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.
00:19:57 · Lenny Rachitsky, Oji Udezue
[00:19:57] S1: Are you happy you're not working on Twitter anymore? [00:20:00] S0: I am ecstatic. I'm ecstatic. It seems it seems like such a such a shit show. You know, no shade on anything or anyone, like, purposely, but, you know, look. What's happening is evident, so I don't think I have much to say about that. [00:20:18] S1: Yeah. What a wild ride over there. [00:20:20] S0: Mhmm. [00:20:20] S1: 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.
00:20:34 · Oji Udezue
[00:20:34] S0: Yeah. Look, two things simultaneously. One is I actually... I like frameworks. What what... The the way that I try to express them is mental models. Right? Because the essence of a framework and 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 actually in product management, is to have the ability to understand the fundamentals or the empirical relationship that constructs the 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, product 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, you know, 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. Right? In the book that I'm writing on product, I actually make that distinction a lot in the book, which is 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.