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Simple sales receipt for Product Management

ready to move to the next level in your product career I'm [ __ ] from intentional product manager join me as we discuss ways to help you stand out in your job search and your career so you can have more impact and make more money hey everyone welcome to the intentional product manager podcast now today with me is Jason Knight who is a product Management Consultant coach fraction leader and podcaster I think running a podcast for 4 years called One Night in product uh Jason welcome to the intentional product manager podcast thanks for having me it's uh great to be here awesome I would love to dig in right away on your story like you know I know you were product director before then you went into running your own business walk us through uh the entire thing yeah I think we might over estimate like how much of a business that actually was we can certainly talk about it but uh it was very much a side project that we ran for a little bit and then decided to shut down but uh you know that's that's what happens was it 9 out of 10 startups fail anyway so like I don't yeah probably it was supposed to fail but yeah so I started out though interestingly before all of this started out basically as a well what became almost like a corporate lifer like you know I was working for one big multinational corporation for basically 19 years I mean in a number of different roles and the company went through a couple of different Acquisitions itself in that time but still fundamentally working with the same people and the same industry and the same type of company and the same scale of company for basically 19 years and I look back on that now and I think well you know I was pretty much in the gold watch Brigade you know like yeah this is me I'm done like I'm a lifer I'll get put into upper middle management and then one day I'll die and that'll be me done like fine but one of the things that I found towards maybe the end of my tenure there was that basically the firm got bought by a huge private Equity Firm called KKR like one of the biggest and they kind of put the company through this big restructure you know digital transformation you know oh my God like what words are they like that's the kind of a word to strike Terror Into the Heart of anyone especially 100y old corporate and you I start to realize that a lot of the things that I've been doing we never called them products in my time there but that I've been building products for years just under a different name like we were still doing the same whole thing around like trying to convert a Services organization into using standardized products building standardized tooling and working with AI before AI was Co to sort of doing facial analytics and voice analytics and all that stuff so we're doing loads of cool stuff we never called it product but we started calling it product after the you the acquisition or the you the you the Takeover and the digital transformation and I started to realize that maybe working in a big digitally transforming company like they were using safe and everything in certain parts of the organization trying to roll it around the rest of the organization I'm like yeah you know maybe this new world that I now know has a name maybe there's a different place to go and do that so I went out and got my first sort of scaleup job and worked you worked in a team there for a couple of years as a you leading a team of like 5 PMs and then moved on to a bunch of other scale-ups and startups and after a little while I was like well well s of during that stting moment podcast as well as you say like four years ago and as part of that really starting to want to see a few more things and not just work for one company at a time I kind of had this childish urge to just see everything all the time so at one point you know I kind of came out of one job was thinking about what to do next and I was just like yeah you know let's let's try my hand up Consulting and you just before everyone else started to go and try and do that as well so like I kind of got in there just before that was cool as well and uh and started you know trying to do some fractional work trying you know getting into coaching didn't really know what I was doing at the time but you know you work as in from running a business freelancing perspective but kind of got up to speak quickly on that and here I am now still kicking and screaming that's awesome and and you've you know you've made quite a name name for yourself like I yeah for good or for bad yeah multip people told me hey like you know definitely talk to Jason in fact uh one of my coaches was like yeah I've been hearing a lot about Jason so what inspired you to start the podcast what inspired me to start the podcast well I mean I often refer to it as almost like a covid baby I mean you know four years ago 2020 in between lockdowns i' just gone on a family vacation kind of Switched Off for the week you know work had been pretty stressful it been a toet time obviously for a lot of companies in the pandemic and with the kind of the the Furlow and the layoffs and everything and traction and markets and stuff so work hadn't been the most straightforward or fun for a little bit and I kind of deliberately switched myself off a bit and I kind of sort of sat there you know on this Windswept horrible South British Beach thinking you know I need to kind of get out there and do more things outside of work like I I need a like some kind of hobby where I can go out and just meet people and talk about stuff and have you widen my perspective and one of the things that I then foolishly did was basically try and do something that was kind of just still related to work like I didn't go out and start I didn't go get a motorbike or you know go start mountain climbing or anything like that I was like oh yeah okay cool let's do a podcast and start talking to product people and find out what they want to talk about but it was very much just almost like a network extender to start with there was no ambition to I I didn't need to use it for lead generation I didn't need to use it for for anything it was just very much I want to go out and talk to people and have interesting discussions about stuff and that's very much how it started it's kind of still how it remains to day like I still don't directly use it for like a a big monetization play or lead generation it's there I'm sure some people look at it or listen to it and go hey yeah yeah that was interesting maybe I'll talk to that guy but I still like to think that my kind of Consulting and freelancing is something that I have to stand on my own like I have to go out and get that work and prove myself through the work not just because I happen to have an interesting conversation with some person that they like on a podcast platform or something like that like I very much see them as all part of the kind of the overall package of me I guess but like I very much see it as a very much like a a conversation platform where I can just go out and have nice interesting chats meet new people find interesting things to talk about and obviously these days just try and share that with a few people that might be inspired by it too it's really awesome so let's come to today so I know you work a lot with companies when they come to you what are the core challenges that they're facing well I sometimes flippantly say that like all companies have like one of the same seven problems or something like that and I don't necessarily think that's 100% true but there are some very common problems that people you like if I'm talking to someone they'll they'll probably have one of these and it'll either be that they for example don't really have a product management function at all or like a particularly functional one like they're sitting there and yeah maybe they're struggling to even build it in the first place like you maybe the Founder's been doing it to start with or it's just been being done by the engineering team and now they've realized that they need to kind of build an actual product management function at all or maybe they're moving from more of a service mindset to a product mindset and they don't really know how to do that they don't even know what type of person to hire to do that because they've never done it before so those are quite common I think also though even if you do have the teams and if you've maybe been doing this for a little bit another big problem that you see is just general lack of alignment or kind of breakdown of working practices which kind of sounds a bit you know Doom and Gloom but just this idea that as companies start to scale up and they start to build layers and layers of process and maybe start to come away from that initial Vision or the initial kind of you know four or five people in a room doing the doing the do like they start to build in accidental inefficiency that kind of combines and layers over time and then they get to a point where you know their software development process starting to slow down they're starting to lose kind of maybe slightly some of the kind of the sense of connection with their customers they're starting to realize that maybe it's not quite so easy to sell the product anymore as it used to be or people within the organization aren't aligned on what the product should be doing or the direction it's going or people don't know or don't have visibility or there's no transparency about what the product team are doing at all so like those are all basically you bucketed under either kind of alignment problems as in you know someone you walk into a company and you just know that someone that you talk to is going to have a very different idea about what the company's doing to someone else but that's a big problem can really kill momentum or it's a of a training and a skills problem or maybe the need for strategic product leadership which people don't have yet because they never kind of got to that point and but also you know trying to persuade say if you still got the founder there for example trying to persuade them that they need to let go a little bit so that others can come in and do that strategic leadership rather than being kind of second guessed by Founders that still want to kind of have their hand on the on the veins got it a lot of the problems you described is it mostly scale-ups you're also working with logic things and they tend to maybe have a different flavor of similar problems well I think you know I mean obviously I've worked for large companies before I still am doing some work with larger companies on a kind of a more coaching or training kind of basis you know I don't for example I probably wouldn't go in as a fractional for like a large corporate or something like that like I don't think that's my sweet spot but I'm very happy to work with large companies for example if they want to do some we work with their head of product or their you their whoever's their a senior product person kind of get them to be a bit more of a senior partner bit more of an executive partner bit more of a you know someone that they can actually consider like a business partner because you know that's something that often happens is like the head of product or whoever that person is whatever their role is they kind of they're kind of in certainly in a non ideal situation or non nonideal organization they'll maybe just kind of retrench into a little kind of product bubble rather than kind of being a true business partner so like as the company gets much larger it tends to be more of a coaching thing most of the people that I get involved deeply on a kind of day-to-day level if I do fractional work for example would be more of the kind of the scale up size you know there's an additional point to that though of course pre-scale up when you're a kind of you know pre pre-product market F sort of seed type companies like really early I do do some work with those as well they tend not to have a lot of money to spend on things like that on people like me so I'm doing some kind of pro bono work for an accelerator at the moment to try and you know help with some of the really early companies they tend to have quite similar problems in the sense of or not not similar in the sense of like alignment and stuff there's too few of them to be misaligned what they tend to have problems with is just value proposition and being able to actually concentrate on the thing that they need to focus on because there are just so many things that they could do so it's interesting and I ched to someone else about this earlier this idea that when you sort of start or when you're introduced to like an early stage founder and you hello how are you hello how are you and you start to talk about like the problems that they have and and the support they need and they obviously ask you what you do and you oh yeah product management you person or whatever and you can almost see them like not physically but you can almost see the internal eye roll they they don't think they need someone like that they don't think they need a product person to come in at this point they need a sales person or marketing person or something like that but then you talk to them and and you start to realize that the things all of the things that they're actually having problems with are all fundamental to product management like the value proposition the you the the kind of differentiation that you have the people that you're serving the problems that they have and the solutions that can solve them in the best way and sort of the path to scalability and stuff like that and I think that it's really interesting that many people these days consider product people as the kind of the pen pushers and the ticket monkeys and the people that just kind of just pass messages around but if we kind of D still product management down to its core I think there's a lot of product management support required in early companies but it just doesn't feel like a thing that they need so yeah scale-ups is definitely the kind of my if I had to Define an ICP for myself you know scale-ups would be the ones anytime anybody says product managers are me passing messages around it reminds me of the office space yeah what do you do here yeah it's a great scene and it's one that I think it's almost another you just to kind of bookend that point there's this kind of just general concept of like product managers dreading to be asked what they do and in fact I was asked the other day uh I was at a family party and met like a new partner of one of my cousins or something and and he's like oh yeah yeah so what are you doing I'm like like how do I even explain this you know and it's like it it shouldn't be that complicated but uh you know it's it's just one of those crosses that we prodct people have to bear totally now um You you mentioned something I'm going to go deeper into this there's a lot of interest from folks I meet on fractional product management work for you what does a typical engagement look like and maybe just a part two of the question would be when would a company bring on a fractional product manager or leader so I think for me I mean there's lots of different opinions about what fractional is and whether it's you know even a thing like or if it's always been a thing and they've just given it a new name like you know like a cool new label or something like that there's a strong argument that you know given the or or depending on your stage obviously but like if you have a need so for example if you're go back to these kind of early stage companies if you're an early stage company and you need kind of really Top Class support in an area that you don't have expertise in for example marketing or product or you know maybe Tech you know and there fractional CTO out there as well so like you know that you need some strong senior leadership you maybe don't need it all the time or you maybe can't even afford to have it all the time but at the same time you need some kind of guidance you need someone to come in but not just guidance you know kind of sitting on a throne talking about like philosophical Concepts like you need someone to come in and get stuck in with the team and you either don't need them all the time or you can't afford them all the time or the person that you could afford all the time is probably not the person that you need so therefore you'd rather have less of a much better person's time to kind of steer the company and guide it and you help you make good decisions now there's kind of an additional argument there around like well is this then something that's limited or not like is this something where it's like a 6 Monon 9 month 12 month gig or is it something that's just ongoing but parttime and I think you know there are both models out there and I've seen both of them all of my fractional engagements so far have been effectively time limited my task has very much been to go in sort out some kind of either problem or reboot or something like that and then ultimately hire someone to replace me to take on like you effectively take the team on get into the operational work and kind of build from the base that I've built so like I went into one company and the task was very much like well we want to build a product management function like we never had one before we don't know how to do that could you come in and help us build a proper you know value stream aligned product management function kind of help sell that to the rest of the organization help with our ways of working help just get everything set up for success and then hire aead of product to come in to come and just just take that on and that's what we did so that was you know that was a that was that was good like it was a it was a good kind of self-contained sort of basically project I guess like from you know sort 6 to 9 months whatever the ultimate run time was but some people would just say well that's not fractional now fractional is just like a forever thing but you just you you're just part-time and you do it you know on for the long term I think both can work but my general MMO and the thing that I kind of prefer is getting in there helping them to reach like a stage gate or something like that and then you know get someone else in that doesn't want to be fractional that is set up for Success that can come and work with them fulltime and again sort of take that basis or the kind of the groundwork that I've done and move on and hopefully be more successful you know once I've gone and you know hopefully I'll be remembered but not as much as the person that replaced me yep I love that aspect of it that you're building practices you're there for some time and then you have a replacement who's now yeah like yeah you're there almost like ready to shoot yourself in the head uh just to kind of you know get out of the way but uh you know it's it's hard though because when you go into a company that maybe doesn't know like you know isn't particularly strong product yet they you know maybe bringing you into to try and make them stronger at product obviously it depends on the state the state within the company as to like how receptive they are to certain things and also like even if you get brought in by you know for example the CEO or coo or whoever brings you in not everyone in the company is going to get why you're there or understand what fractional means or understand kind of the bounds of your responsibility so I try and be quite specific in my contracts to say look these are the types of things that I'm going to work on for you like this is what success looks like these are the kind of areas and obviously yeah we'll be flexible where we can but ultimately I should be focusing in these places what can happen is where you just get dragged into day-to-day operations because of course everyone else sees you there and you you're visible and you're working with the team and they start not really understanding that you're not there all the time so you you have to be kind of a little bit flexible but also a little bit firm to make sure that you're not getting dragged into stuff that you really shouldn't be like because you know people that are working there all the time should be or you know someone else needs to do that thing but also that you're definitely getting involved in the stuff that you should be so for example not getting excluded from certain types of conversations on the more strategic level more organizational level iello sometimes joke that you know the the danger of fractional work is that you get invited to loads of stuff that you shouldn't and not invited to loads of stuff that you should so you have to be kind of as as as best as possible you need to kind of manage that idea of like look I'm here to help the company on an overall strategic level to make good decisions and set it up for future success I'm not here to run you know standups or you know do day-to-day in you work with like very operational tasks like I could obviously do that if I want to do but that's not why I got into this game but you know you want to try and say that in a way that doesn't sound incredibly lazy because you know people sit there say well what do you mean you don't want to do any work so no no no I do want to do some work but I want to do this type of work that's what you brought me in for I want to do this type of work that you didn't know how to do before and that you need support in not just be some kind of Swiss army knife for of the things that you you know want to get done so it's interesting trying to sort of strike that balance of being available being flexible but not being dragged into tasks and and initiatives and you know basically conversations that you don't need to be in let me ask from a perspective of challenges you know when you go in faction like I'm guessing one big challenge is like getting that trust of everyone to be strategic like is that the biggest challenge and what are the challenges you run into in such situations well I think the thing is that with you know fractional and indeed any Consulting work like a big part of you know your kind of working model is you need to get up to speed really really quickly because if you're only going to be there for a few months you don't have your 30 60 90 days to kind of get interested in sort of into everything like you you need to be able to make an impact sooner you know I've had fractional contracts that have lasted four months you know like that's just past 90 days right like there's there's no there's no kind of um there's no leeway so you need to be able to make an impact and demonstrate an impact really fast now that does mean that you have to kind of come in and rely on for example past patterns that you've seen in other organizations and and sort of try and patn match those as much as possible to the organization that's in front of you most of the time they're going to be a good starting point because you know no matter how much people like to think that all companies are different precious little snowflakes most of them kind of have very similar characteristics if you're working in the same style of company like you know a scale up in B2B space selling to the Enterprise they all basically have the same fundamental problems it's just the way that they look is different so like you can start to pattern match as best you can get up the speed really quickly but also give you know confidence that this person that they brought in isn't just some idiot that's trying to come and you know fleece the company for a bit of easy money but they're actually here to you know be an expert and to you know deliver impact so that then goes onto the trust that you just talked about like obviously depending on who you are like there are various people out there that have a pretty dim kind of expectation or or or feeling about consultants in general or coaches or anyone that they see as kind of not a not a builder yeah whatever that actually means and it's like well I get that like it's easy to sit there and and sort of go to find stories about like how such and such a coach or such and such a consultant or you like McKenzie came in and fired some people and wrote a report and that was it it's like I get that and I understand where that feeling comes from you need to basically demonstrate that you're actually here to deliver something not just to be kind of talking and flapping your lips and you know just taking big paycheck home at the end of every month or whatever it's it's an interesting moment because again not everyone's going to understand why you were brought in in the first place there may even be some level of um you know like even kind of bad blood against you being brought in especially if there's other people in the organization that think well why is this person coming in I'm saying all of the same things that he's saying why why is he even here and I think that's an interesting but you know I've been in that situation before I've sat there in meetings in the past before I went Consulting thinking what the hell's this person doing I saying all the same things as me and I get it can be really frustrating you can take that one or two ways either you sit there and complain and Grumble about it and say well look this is unacceptable why are they paying this person not that it makes a difference to you of course because you know they're not paying out of your salary but or you can take it the positive way and say well look they've got this person in and yes he's saying some of the same things that I was already trying to say maybe he's found a different way to say them or maybe just by very you know the virtue of the fact that you know someone comes in and and has more experience or a different way of saying it or they just have more credibility from wherever they came from but they're saying the same thing as me so that backs me up like this you know the imaginary person that's complaining it makes them look better by association because the person that you the CEO or whatever sitting there saying oh well you know the consultant's saying this which is the same as what my team is saying now maybe I should trust my team more so I think it is easy to kind of slip into this idea that like you know Consultants are just you know snake oil people but you know I think it's a big part of the consultant or the fractionals job to kind of go in and you know demonstrate value and also humility with these people because you know that's another thing like no one wants to walk in to work one day and just see this new consultant coming in sort of waving their baseball bat around and saying that they're you know the second coming of Christ or anything like that no it's like you they need someone that can kind of balance these two ideas of like yes this person is an expert in in their trade but you people here are the experts in your company so let's bring those two things together and then we'll try and deliver some good results my favorite example of that doesn't come from work situations it's when I heard something from a mentor and I went and told my wife and she was like oh yeah I've been saying that for three years suddenly you want to do it like but okay now you know it all it all adds up multiple people the most important thing is it gets done right like who cares like if you know Bob Susan or whoever had the had the idea that actually then or said the thing that got it done as long as it gets done and you're in a position now where you can move forward from wherever you were before again yeah I understand that there's a need for a psychological need for people to to take credit for things or to be given credit for things and they think that it's going to come up in their next performance review or something like that these are all valid concerns but ultimately the most important thing really is that the thing gets done and uh if it takes one additional voice to come and get it done and they get you the result that you want then you should still be happy now let's switch Gees a bit I'd be remiss if I didn't talk about product management careers since that's a a big big part of this uh this podcast so when you look at product managers with successful careers in today's market like what are the things that they're doing that helps them succeed I mean I can't obviously speak for every single company out there but I'd say that certainly when I've been looking to help hire people or when I have hired people and also speaking to others out there and you know when they're looking to hire people I think like the ones that are making the biggest waves are the ones or the ones that are most appreciated by you know companies that are trying to do product well are the ones that actually have some kind of end to-end ownership of product rather than seeing product as a kind of I don't know internal facing function that's just there to pass tickets around like you we kind of talked about earlier like a team that cares about you know going out speaking to the customers or users but also cares about speaking to the business Building Bridges across the functions so that they can be seen as a partner and someone that wants to work with these people rather than you know just someone that's again retrenched into their little bubble because they think that product management should own everything yeah people that can actually you know come to the leadership team with a kind of a combination of opinion and flexibility like yeah so they're not just going up there and saying oh well complaining about everything but you know or complaining that the boss has said to do something they want you to investigate something but trying to find pragmatic and quick ways to to demonstrate that whether that is or isn't a good idea but also someone that when they come to the you the boss or whoever it is that they need to present to they're not just coming to them with like a plate of options they're coming to them with a plate of options but also a recommendation and and a kind of a a preferred way ahead based on some data that they've actually some evidence that they've actually you know that they've pulled together so like I don't think many CEOs want to be like yeah most CEOs that I speak to and have seen out and about like even in quite non-product first companies they still want the product team or they at least say they want the product team to deliver certain types of impact I think what happens is that in many cases the product teams maybe kind of go in half coocked they don't have necessarily all of the information or they there's a bit of opinion in there or they don't have a better plan or alternative to the thing that that they've been asked to look at because they didn't do that work yet and then there starts to be this kind of erosion of trust between the leadership team and the product team because it just they just don't see them making any real progress and they start to feel that they need to sort of override them and give them things to do so I think yeah the the PMS that are making the biggest impact are the ones that can actually go out there stand their ground when they need to but also give way when it makes sense and just have a really solid opinion about you know and evidence to back that opinion about where the best way to go is I think that uh it's really easy to get demotivated as product managers when you're sort of in a company that where it doesn't feel like that's appreciated and when where you feel that they do just want you to type up tickets and fill in the right templates and keep pushing work through and basically be that message passer I mean look I'm not going to sit there and blame these people for being in a situations because of course you know most of these people don't want to be doing that but at the same time yeah one of the things that that those PMS even in those sorts of situations can do and if I look back at points in my career is just try something you know try to move it a little bit in the direction that you think is better and S prove evidence and show impact because if you're just going to sit there and and you kind of give up and accept it that's also fine if that's what you need to do but like you shouldn't complain about it at that point yeah fair and if I may ask one more question on that how are these people building that credibility that they have had intered ownership is it their resume is it something they're posting on LinkedIn just curious ahe about that well we don't have to look too far these days to find sort of thought thought pieces and posts saying that you know product managers need to be posting their stuff all over LinkedIn and starting newsletters and starting podcasts and you doing their content game and I get relatively frequent questions from you know people on LinkedIn or whatever saying oh yeah how do I get started should I get started and all this stuff and it's like well first of all absolutely you should get started like go and do that if if it brings you Joy like I started doing a podcast four years ago 400 a bit years ago now I had no idea if it was going to bring me joy I thought I'd try it and it eventually did and and that was you that was great so I carried on doing it but I've tried other things in the past that didn't work out so well for me so I stopped doing them but again I don't believe and I'm prepared to be proven wrong but I don't believe that many product people are out there starting to post a bit more on LinkedIn and getting loads of big promotions or new jobs I just don't believe that that happens regularly enough for it to be a valid kind of you know gambling strategy like sure yeah you can get a royal flush in poker but you're going to be waiting quite a while for that to happen so I don't think that happens as as much as some people might think but at the same time it's never a bad idea to try and position yourself as an expert in in those ways but also even if you don't position yourself as an expert the very kind of process of writing this stuff up and talking about it and doing whatever is you do and it helps you get your own story straight so yeah like it helps you to communicate the value of this stuff more it helps you to become a more effective Communicator helps you kind of stress test your ideas and stuff like that but yeah I do I think that many CEOs or or hiring managers are out there kind of trolling through people's LinkedIn post to see if they're the ones that they should hire I don't think so I think people are still going quite oldfashioned CVS and resumés just to you know try to uh you try to find them that way and I you know I think to be fair having reviewed a rather large number of rums over the last sort of six months or so for different roles plus also some stuff that I've been doing on the side you know as a kind of a little hobby project there's a lot of not great rumes out there and like I'm not saying that the people are bad like they they still you can you can look you got to look in there and you can see that there's a like a a good story trying to get out but it's told in such a way that you have to either hunt for it or it's just not there at all so like that's one of the most important things for me is like yeah sure it's a brutal Market out there we all know that the you know the job market is not great at the moment but if you're sitting there as a hiring manager and you've got 150 CVS on your desk like you need you're only going to look at or you're only really going to seriously entertain the ones that really impress you and that's what people I don't think do enough when they're actually trying to sell themselves is you know they just list out a bunch of things that they did in chronological order from start to finish and some very generic I did product management blurb at the top so yeah I mean again sure these people did a great job but this resume is not showing that and they need to show it yeah so looking forward actually first let's explore the impact of AI you know there's a few people who are like oh it's the worst thing ever it's going to take over product management AI is the new product manager of course we he that but what do you think is really happening uh how is AI affecting product management the work of BMS and their careers I mean look I think Ai and again I said earlier that I was working on AI before it was cool and it's definitely cool now and it's definitely way better than it was when I was working on it in anger but like the the most interesting thing about AI is that it's absolutely amazing it's incredible I can't believe the things that I can do on a day-to-day basis now that I could never do before either with regards to you know if I still want like for side projects and stuff like crank out code or anything like that you know I used to be a developer so I could write it by hand but it's much quicker to do it through you know chat GPT or co-pilot or whatever if I want to use it to summarize documents or sort of extract things and documents if I want to use it to provide like templates of things or to you to maybe spit ideas with or kind of extract insights from my own thinking and stuff like that like these all like I can't believe that we could do these things but it's also frankly not anywhere near as good as some people think it is even as amazing as it is like the amazingness that some people think is is like way over the top like I don't think for example that there's any credibility to anyone saying that for example uh generative AI llms are going to somehow replace strategy like I I don't see that like I've done lots of experiments with strategy work in llms just to see what it comes out with and it's always very disappointing like and then you sit there and say okay well you know fine what about things like writing prds and specs and tickets and user stories and stuff like that now again look sure like I've seen tools that do that there are obviously some quite popular ones out there and I have nothing against any of them like I think they're all doing useful interesting spins on work that is frankly boring for product managers to have to do like no one wants to sit there cranking out page after page of PRD that's barely ever going to get read and so many other things in it are fairly standard things that anyone could have written but like do I believe that you can just take that and give it to your engineering team or give it to you sell it to the executive team or something no of course not you still need to go through and do the work and this for me is still the biggest and most interesting thing with llms and output some llms sometimes use the phrase like llms should be inputs not outputs or you should use them to start but you still need to do the work and I think if people are using it in that way I think it's fantastic great accelerator tools if you're expecting to be able to for example crank out a strategy or crank out some copy or crank out some some tickets or user stories or whatever and just you know book it and go like no I I think that's a recipe for disaster and I think also the mo the kind of the par of llm output is that obviously we all know about hallucinations and the fact that these things don't always get it right and that's fine like if you know what you're doing then you can spot those and you can fix them tidy up knock the edges off all of that stuff but if you know what you're doing you could have done it yourself anyway would have just been you would have just taken a little bit longer if you don't know what you're doing then this is an incredible accelerent but you also don't know how to shape it or smooth it or polish it or anything and therefore you're either going to look at go hey well that looks cool to me and just send it off and God knows what will happen then or you'll have to pass it on to someone that does know what they're doing in which case you'll reducing some of the time saving so I think in the right hands these tools are incredibly powerful the the fear that I have is that people use that power not to accelerate their thinking and buy time for the sort the stuff that they're still the best at but they start to use it to try to replace thinking in which case you know I think we're all going to yeah we're going to basically have a bunch of very disappointing products and compan is coming up in the future I love the word you use the accelerant basically if you're going in the right direction it can get you there faster if you're going in the wrong direction it definitely gets you there faster as well I don't want my company to you know be tanked by the fact that I didn't spot a hallucination or as you know some people out there talking I know Roger Martin the strategist has been talking about this on social media as well still want to get him on my podcast one day if you're listening to this Roger come and get me but like this he's been talking or having lots of conversations with people about like this idea of like AI generating strategy and of course it can generate a strategy I could go into chat GPT now or Claude or whatever and I could say give me a strategy for whatever and it would write out a very detailed strategy it would put all my strengths and weaknesses and I you fill out all my seven powers and everything they would do everything for me but do I believe that that will be the best strategy who knows and and llm definitely doesn't know because of course the way that all this stuff works is that it's kind of building it out of the combined knowledge base and all the the Corpus of materials that's been put in there basically consuming the entire internet which of course had lots of documents about strategy and however it's worked out what to put on the screen when you ask it it's not validating that in any way so yeah so you could sit there and say okay well fine maybe I can get an llm to generate me 50 different strategies and then I can go and start testing them or something like that and yeah cool but that sounds like a lot of work I I think that it goes back to that point around like yeah exactly as you say if you're already going in a good direction use these tools to make you get there faster but I probably would be reluctant to get it to choose the direction for me I'd want to do that thinking myself myself still I did a quick experiment I was like hey just explain Google's strategy to me I asked you at GPD was the biggest nonsensical thing I've ever read it's like they're Innovative they're this they're that they Leverage The B of AI I'm like okay cool but it's the it's the same thing right like the the the biggest proponents of these things and and there are many out there I don't think any of them can really make the argument that these tools know what they're saying because they don't and that's fine like someone I had someone on my podcast a few weeks months ago now and and I kind of raised this question with him and he was like well even if it's kind of randomly picking the next words or yeah the next sent or whatever if it's the right next next word or sentence then the result is still a good result it's like well yeah that that's true but how do you know it's right and that's that's you know because the llm doesn't know that it's right and due to the architecture of these things can't know that it's right and that's fine like again I'm not expecting these tools to know if they're right but then I'm also then not expecting people who do know whether they're right or not to just offload that responsibility they still need to take respons but it's like with the um the the self-driving cars the you know the Teslas and the full self-driving that isn't full self-driving but this idea that they kind of disconnect the or disengage the for self driving uh just before a crash for example so that they weren't technically in control at that point and the fact that you still need to have an fully engaged driver behind the wheel that can still take control if they need to so yeah this is great that's probably how I'd want this stuff to work I don't want I don't think I'm currently trust a fully self-driving car to fully self-drive but it's the same then the same kind of philosophical concept at least with with the kind of the the decisions that we make off of generative AI outputs like do I really trust them or do I still need to check so far I've always needed to check and you know to your point there's always been something that you think well yeah know that's not quite right so as long as we're not removing that from the equation and again using these things to accelerate around that then I think there there's a lot that could be done and PM you know there's this whole kind of cliche oh it's not PMS that are going to get put out of work by AI they're going to get put out of work by PMS using AI I think there's probably a lot more to that because you know these people will be able to get through a lot more work and hopefully a lot of the work that they're getting through will be The Drudge work that we probably didn't really want PMS doing in the first place buying time for them to think about how they can actually make a bigger impact with their product I think that's going to be the best kind of mixture of the two love it one more question about AI how do you you know given all your work in podcasting fractional PM coaching what are the top users for you for AI so I still very much use AI transcriptions for example either for you recordings of calls or um for you for for podcasts and you know podcast transcriptions I use AI tools to clean up audio uh a lot more these days I still don't use things like the script for the full editing experience because I think they make too many mistakes kind of you can kind of hear the uh the glitches from time to time and um you know obviously images and stuff like for background removal and you know kind of making making pictures for PowerPoint slides and stuff like that for presentations which is you know probably still my hero use case here I don't have to go to up you was it UPS spash or unsplash whatever like the the uh the online picture places anymore I don't need to go to any of those places anymore if I want a picture for my slide for a talk or something I can just go and get it and it's fine um probably not what the people that were making these things really imagined be the hero use case for me but you know it's it's all good but also again like um I very much like using things like Claud to kind of explore spaces so like you know if I'm not sure about the best way to approach a problem or if I'm not sure whether certain combinations of things were like obviously again it doesn't know I'm not don't think for a second it knows but what it'll do you based on it the way that it works is it will at least kind of look at the different things I put in and and try and point out inconsistencies or you know maybe just like point out things that were missed and stuff like that I think it can be helpful for that type of thing but I think if I think about it if I think about like all of my use of AI like I could have done all of the things there's not a single thing that's come out of AI that I've sat there and thought wow I never would have known how to do that before like yeah maybe I would have had to have read a blog post instead of asking chat GPT but like it's not yeah I don't sit there and say this has changed my life all it does is do it quicker which is in itself good you know as a fractional as a consultant as a contractor you you know probably juggling quite a lot of tasks so it's definitely good to be able to do stuff quicker but a lot of the stuff that that gets that comes out of these things you're still looking at manually yourself and then sort of make making a final decision so again big excelent for me especially when working across multiple your clients and projects another interesting thing that you can use it for actually when you're maybe evaluating a client is and this is something more with tools like perplexity and stuff like that which have internet access where you can basically go in and get it to basically build a report based on a a client's or potential client's website like oh hey I'm speaking to whomever okay cool uh go to their website and basically like a business model canvas for for their company now obviously I don't know if it's going to be right or wrong because nor does perplexity or any of the LMS that power perplexity but it's a good start and can sit there and I can say okay so these are the things that's dug out in a fairly structured format so now I can start thinking about those things and asking them about that when I speak to them so again there's still this asking layer but it's at least pulling together some of the information and formatting it for me and kind of enabling me to get to the point quicker love it now last question Jason looking forward what do you expect as far as product management careers to happen in 2025 and Beyond and what advice would you have for BMS as they they move forward well the other interesting point about AI but in kind of the context of that question is that obviously on the one hand yeah I think all product managers are going to need to get much more comfortable with using AI tools to accelerate themselves because otherwise people are going to start to say well why are you taking so long to do everything and especially with all these startups that you come along and able to you do things themselves very quickly like it enables PMS in larger organizations to sort of speed up enough that they can maybe not get completely competed obviously there's still other barriers there but I think another thing though is just getting really comfortable with what AI can and can't do with regards to their own product because every PM I'm pretty sure is in a position now where they're being pressured to kind of come up with an AI strategy for their product like what are you going to put in your product that you know what AI features are you going to put in there how are we going to aiy our stuff and you know obviously part of that to kind of keep up with the hype part of that's cuz the competitors doing it part of that's probably because you have investors that are pressuring the board to to do pressing the executive team to do that have an answer to that question like you what can AI legitimately and genuinely do to improve your experience rather than being just kind of wallpaper that you're stuck on the side I think PMS are going to have to get comfortable with that and I still then just go back to the whole idea of sort of product management as a business function I think that across 2025 whether it happens in all companies not I think the best PMS will be out there Building Bridges not just with their customers but with their stakeholders with the people that they work with all the people around the organization that are involved in getting that product out to people and managing those relationships and making sure that they understand their perspectives and that they can sort of step out of this product management bubble and see that it's not just about building something for the you know a valuable product for for users that's critically important but it also has to work for the business and it has to work with the business as well like it has to make sense to the entire business and I think that the best PMS across the next you know 12 months are going to be ones that can embrace the business parts of their role not just get sort of drawn into product management dogma and Frameworks and stuff like use those what you can but ultimately your your biggest kind of you know accelerant I think will be to be seen as that business partner and you kind of lead product from a business perspective as well as just a customer and a user perspective Jason thank you so much for being in the podcast we I learned a lot I'm sure all the listeners would learn a lot from your various experience in careers and fractional pm and podcasting well I like to be as useful as I can or at least interesting or sometimes mildly amusing so whatever I can do you I'm always happy to connect up with people in chat or if anyone's got any questions I'm always happy to to try to answer and where do people find out more about you your work how do they connect with you sadly LinkedIn is still one of the places even though it's like uh throwing throwing like a coins down a wishing well these days as to whether anyone gets to read your content or not so yeah you can obviously find me on LinkedIn got the podcast on one night inpr product.com also links to a newsletter which I sporadically write if I have things to talk about and uh there's also my Consulting website as well one night consulting.com you can see what I did with the the name there uh but again LinkedIn is probably if you want like an instant response LinkedIn is probably the place to go awesome thank you so much Jason appreciate it thanks for having me hey be sure to check out our website at intentional product manager.com to see how you can level up in your career