Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:24:59 · Oji Udezue
[00:24:59] S0: 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 gonna 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 inability to afford their leisure. If you can solve those kinds of problems, and look, I know that it's broad, because it requires insight, you know, the best founders often are people who felt a problem, understand it, understand that it's really difficult, and understand that there may be like five, 10, 20,000,000,000 people who feel it, and they don't wanna solve that problem. Versus I feel a problem, but only a 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 if you have the narrative in your head that if you really solve this, people will pony up. That's what I ask people to find. Too many of us just have a sharp idea. Look. I've built a startup on a non sharp problem, and I I I knew how it felt. But I also know working in companies that are solving sharp problems, how it feels is 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.
00:27:15 · Lenny Rachitsky, Oji Udezue
[00:27:15] S1: Coming back to something you mentioned earlier about 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. Some... Either a company you worked or a startup you advised of just like, okay. That wasn't it wasn't sharp enough. [00:27:46] S0: I don't wanna create enemies because I know a lot of founders. But but I... 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 Mmhmm camera. [00:28:04] S1: Remember that? Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. [00:28:05] S0: Yeah. It [00:28:06] S1: made a great video. [00:28:07] S0: 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. [00:28:31] S1: 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?
00:28:42 · Oji Udezue
[00:28:42] S0: 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 a 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 then 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 two x shorter, three x 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 or super early stage world is, I call it the whites of their eyes. Like when you take a problem and you share it with someone who is gonna affect their workflow, 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 spontaneously bring up money. They... This, like, when can I pay? When can I? Those kinds of things give you an indication.
00:30:23 · Lenny Rachitsky, Oji Udezue
[00:30:23] S1: 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, woah. 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. [00:30:46] S0: I'm a little over those ones because sometimes it's just excitement and this noise. Mhmm. 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. That's what I would focus on. Yeah. 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. [00:31:17] S1: Speaking of talking to customers, another one of your big bullet points in the book is around continuous customer discovery. And I'm curious what you found to be successful in 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?
00:31:34 · Oji Udezue
[00:31:34] S0: Yeah. I feel like all of product 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 Calendly and a Typeform, 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 automagically without them getting involved, and then they're trained on how to have the conversation. Because the 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 in a in a in an innovative company because it's very difficult to actually talk to the right customer, not talk to any customer, talk list of the right customer continuously. What is the third thing that I like to talk about, which is customer listening? In fact, I'm gonna talk about this at 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 g two crowd. People are... If you have a churn... Instrumented churn survey, people are talking. If you have NPS, people are not only giving you the scores, but they're putting in the verbatims. If you have a bug report, which we had at Atlassian, people are filing bugs. You know, 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.
00:34:11 · Oji Udezue, Lenny Rachitsky
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 Calendly, which I jury rigged together through, you know, workflows and Slack, and then having individuals triage those things. And if you can do that hard, and, you know, at industry, I'll talk a little bit about how to do it, it's not exactly discovery. It is what matters. Right? Our job is to meld customer delight with business ambition. And it feels essential beyond discovery that you are listening and you 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 at Typeform, but it still feels like something that the industry can get better at. [00:35:08] S1: 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, hey. 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.