Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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.
00:35:30 · Oji Udezue, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:35:30] S0: Yeah. That's what we did at Calendly. You know? But I I will say... So a couple of caveats. We did that in the community. We had, you know, community.calendly.com. And we understood that that was a self selected group, but it was still important to talk to them because they were still representative. And of course, you you should do it in the product. The challenge of that approach is always, is it the right customer? Right? And, you know, the pro con of that is talking to one customer is useless. Talking to a 100 is super useful. And so the challenge is, are you targeting the right person? So some intelligence upfront and, like, who to show it to and why you're showing it to them so that they can come is interesting. Very particularly effective by the way for growth. Because if people don't activate or churn, they don't wanna talk to you. But if you can present that thing in their activation or conversion journey, they might actually talk to you. And so that's really key. So I a 100% agree with Teresa. That's exactly what you should do for not even... I wouldn't even call it discoveries for listening. Right? And some of it can be discovery. Yeah. I I think that's exactly what you should do. [00:36:45] S1: As you're talking, I'm realizing I'm using most of the products you've helped build. I'm on Twitter a lot. I use Calendly a lot. I use Typeform as my default survey tool. [00:36:55] S0: I saw that. My team is really excited that you're using Typeform. [00:36:58] S1: You're... You've impacted my life in so many ways, Oji.
00:36:58 · Lenny Rachitsky, Oji Udezue
[00:36:58] S1: You're... You've impacted my life in so many ways, Oji. [00:37:02] S0: I think you owe me money, Lenny. I think [00:37:04] S1: you money. How much? How much do we... Give me your Venmo QR code. It's on [00:37:08] S0: the You
00:37:11 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:37:11] S1: 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 finally replacing those endless spreadsheets. Create and share custom product roadmaps 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. 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. Getting back on on track, another, important part of the book that you're writing is is around onboarding. And something that I talk lot about on this podcast is just the power of onboarding and how impactful it is to retention and so much of the eventual success of your product and how customers use it. And so I'd love to hear just your advice on what you think is really important. I guess why onboarding is so important in success in PLG, and also just like what tactics have you found to be really effective?
00:38:58 · Oji Udezue
[00:38:58] S0: Let me talk about a few fundamentals. Onboarding is a substitute for sales and, you know, all these account management teams for millions of customers. The task is how do you make it approximate a human and how friendly a human is and how approachable a human is. Because if you can do that, then you can process thousands and thousands of customers very quickly. Onboarding is an exercise in understanding the mindset of a buyer, of an evaluator. It's nothing more than that. Meaning that the province of understanding is social psychology. It's not really product. It's biopsychology. And I guess who knows a lot about this stuff? It's people in the, offline industry, the people who stock shelves, the people who provide inventory online, and so on and so forth, they are extraordinarily good at this. So the reason I say this is to divert people who are gross to really find where to source their inspiration from for onboarding, first of all. If you think about this as intentful in that way, which is people come not knowing anything about you and then they progressively develop confidence that you are the tool of choice, you then have to break it down into how does that journey go through a mind, the average mind anyway, and how do you assist each part? One is value proposition understanding. One is trying to see if it's simple enough and provides enough value. One is kicking tires, and one is making the choice that this is something I'm going to go forward with. How does your onboarding support all of these things? Now, I think there are two parts of onboarding. One is mandatory, the setup. It has to be spare. I try not to make it more than three screens, but it's about how do you say what this does and provide the essential setup that your customer needs to be successful. At Calendly, for example, we ask them about connecting their calendar and setting some defaults. Is it nine to five or whatever that is? Those two things set up all the future success. And if we made it optional, more people would fail. So it's information and the essential setup, and it should be as short as possible. Then there's a whole other set of things that should be optional because they're not necessary for everyone to be successful, but they're beneficial if people are curious.