Oji Part 2
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Jeff: [00:00:00] You brought up Twitter too. And, and this is one of those ones.

I feel like that is interesting because you were there during very, let's say change filled time, but you were working on the creator's initiative, right? So can you talk very briefly, maybe about what that was just for anyone who doesn't maybe have the full background.

Oji: Yeah, you remember that I was influenced by the guy who started TikTok. He thought of social media growth as, he modeled it as economic migration from Europe into America. He thought about it in terms of one platform to another. I mean, the idea was there's a finite number of people and creators in the world.

Some are not creators already, but will be. And then how do you gain the, greatest share, the greatest migration of the best creators in the world. And he thought that was critical. Most of social media is like an extreme parody rule, like 5 percent create and the rest lurk or emulate. And so the key to growth is to stimulate creation or the appearance of creation.

Some of it is smoke and mirror, but it still works as a stimulator. The Creators Initiative, by creating it, we sought to. [00:01:00] More ably stimulate creators through every means we could, including cash. And so we knew that people wanted this because they told us, but also because other platforms were doing better.

Twitter was like the fourth rated for creators. And we had this data and there'd been other creator initiatives of Twitter. before, but they didn't focus on the right kind of creator. Like we had seven categories, right? Twitter is good for elite creators, like notable people who break news, people who make news, scientists, and so on and so forth.

The problem with notable people is that they're very satisfied, and it's very hard to incentivize them. How much money do you have to pay a scientist who's, uh, doing work on AIDS to post about his work on Twitter? It's very difficult. And we have teams focused on these people if they grew significantly enough, right?

But it's just generally cost prohibitive or resource prohibitive. And so we wanted to refocus on a different kind of creator. The ones that weren't necessarily elite people, but they were very clever. They could create [00:02:00] things that made people laugh, that made people interested. If you're on NeuroTwitter, for example, who's the guy who people follow because not only does he talk about interest in Neurosoft, but he's very funny, makes people laugh.

And so we wanted to stimulate that kind of creator because we didn't have teams arrayed against them because Twitter didn't change. We were focused on old elite creator. And this is again about frameworks. I had to come in and say, You know what? That focus and that framework is wrong. There's a new thing that's happening in the world because the world has changed.

And so we need to change and focus on a different kind of creator to incentivize them.

Jeff: So it was based on the idea of, How do you, rather than have maybe one or two very large talking heads, how do you build this kind of collection of micro communities

Oji: Oh, it's slightly different. Again, Twitter has a bifurcation. They're creators and they're different kinds. What we did on the Creators Initiative is to focus on a different kind of that we've been doing. Then before, the clever ones, the ones who just write, the ones who make cool videos, [00:03:00] right? We had never focused on them.

We wanted to focus on them. And then, the rest of Twitter, I said, 95 percent are people who are literally, like, it's not Facebook. This is not your high school team. It's like, you're creating friends around an interest graph. And for those people, they're not necessarily creators, but they are participators.

They're the people who will follow, the people who will comment, who will write something. And for them, that was a different problem. This is very important because we had to separate these problems. If you don't separate and disentangle them, then you're doing one thing and it's not working. And so for those people, their problems, the creators were like motivation.

Can they do this all day and make money? Do they get enough accolades, right? Do they get a follow graph that gives them the feeling of, Oh, yeah, I'm, I'm the man, right? Those are their motivations, right?

Jeff: Self validation.

Oji: validation and money, basically, that's what it was. Like, and we were very clear. We wrote some of this stuff down.

I won't show you what that is. But the other side is for, [00:04:00] The rest of the parody role is feeling connected to the community, feeling like they know how to follow the people they want to follow, and they get the notifications they want to get specifically tailored to them. And so for them, those are the people that we start creating easy follow tools.

You can follow an interest. We created a communities initiative. Like Twitter now has a community, which hasn't been deeply invested in. A team, there's a small team created that. And we were shooting for a hybrid between Twitter and Reddit, right, at the time. And the idea was like, You could make Twitter small again.

Instead of feeling like this vast universe that you don't know what's going on, it's, you know what, here's my F1 team, and my F1 crew, and I know how to find them easily. I don't even have to follow, I just need to join. And those are different motivations.

Jeff: So it was that I noticed years ago, right? At one point, I think I ran a couple of the side that probably qualified me as a very small creator, but now I'm very much on the just ingester and enjoiner side. I noticed years back, right? It went from, I just got the tweets of people I follow to, there was this kind [00:05:00] of.

Maybe different view or maybe it was the same view. I don't even remember exactly where I would find really interesting stuff that was coming in that feed. I never followed that person. It was just the right interest. And that kind of, that's something that came out of

Oji: Yeah, that's right, because we, eventually, the follow graph, when Twitter was small, following was amazing, right? It was a small town, it was a small village. When it became gigantic, follow became like a speed bump. You literally had to expend calories to get what you wanted. While on Facebook and on TikTok, there was nothing.

There was no barrier. So the follow idea had run its course. We needed better tools to get people the content they wanted. TikTok is very good at this, but without them doing a thing. And so those are some of where those some of ideas came from, where you didn't have to do anything and you got what you needed, what you wanted, and the communities you were after.

Jeff: That was such an important enhancement. I probably would have bailed on Twitter if that hadn't changed because it was just, I wasn't finding it. And suddenly I just started seeing more and more stuff.

Oji: The [00:06:00] guy who worked on it lives down the street here in Austin. He's a good friend of mine.

Jeff: nice. If you see him tell him, I say, well done. Saved one person at least. Now let's totally change subjects a little bit. As much as I love talking with the background of Twitter is I've been using that since the early days. But you have this concept that I think is so important. You called it Forest Time, right? And that's the whole idea is you, you pick up and you look at the forest or the trees, but can you, I'm going to butcher if I explain this. Maybe I'll just let you explain kind of what it is and why it's so important.

I'll probably call it Forced Time again and go on a Star Wars riff or something.

Oji: No, I think once I explain it, you won't call it forest time anymore. It's forest time because it comes from this idea that you can't see the forest with the trees. Like the trees are so close to you don't realize is this amazing like big preserve around you You can't enjoy it at all if that's your purpose And the idea here is that when you're operating like your job right now that things are coming at you fast Right so fast you have to lead you have to think you have to [00:07:00] do you have to chart the future You have to communicate you have to communicate with a c suite You have to give me a team and I think that You I call it the fog of war, right?

Every time you're in that operating role as a fog of war, I do a lot of consulting and speaking for not just like on stage, but for teams, right? I, I will consult with the team of various companies. And what I find is, When I'm looking at a problem from the outside, I usually have a lot of perspective. I can see the good thing about my career is that I've done product design, marketing, a little bit of sales, and I have a master's in engineering.

So when I look at an organization, I see like a broad picture. I'm like, you know what? I can see a problem here. Oh, you got to fix this. Fix that. But when I'm operating, actually, even though I have all that knowledge in my head, sometimes I have blinders on, like it's so fast. And so forest time is the practice of taking time off.

[00:08:00] Right. To see if you can elevate, to get above the tree line, so you can resurvey your strategic and your tactical situation so you see if you need to make adjustments. It's very hard to do that when you give yourself no time. You're going from Monday to Friday to Monday to Friday. And so what I try to do for myself, and it's very difficult because time, is every month I'll take a couple of days.

And I will go through a very specific exercise that elevates my view so I can know whether I need to change something. They only have 12 months in a year, 52 weeks. That's, it's not a lot of time. And if you don't do this, you just keep doing the same old thing, including all the mistakes you were making.

And what I try to do is to get my team to do the same thing, my executive team. So all my P's and maybe directors, I say, you've got to take this time off. And it's counterintuitive, but I find that it. The benefits outweigh the costs.

Jeff: the difference of, right? If we look at early on here at LogRocket, we did [00:09:00] session replay. We help people fix bugs. If we just never, ever picked heads up, you were just straight on. Maybe you can create a little bit better visibility, a little bit better integration at some point, you're not solving, like you said, you look at workflows, not just jobs to be done and you start to broaden the scope of that.

And we would be focused on just that same problem versus looking at how do we solve the problem of how do you bring these teams together and create a better solution to create a better digital experience for your users. And that encompasses product teams, engineering. UX is so much more.

Oji: Yeah, and that is best. What I try to do is make sure that I try to force it on my officer staff. If you're in the military, there's the officer corps, the commissioned officers, the people who go to West Point, people who lead. Because, I need them to have perspective. I need them to be able to say, this isn't working.

I need them to say, wow, look, there's another problem that's actually more important. I don't care if I'm halfway through this. We're not going to do that. And that's what forest time does. It gives perspective. [00:10:00] It gives you, it clears the fog of war for you, wherever you are. Now, people who are, I don't want to say rank in the file, people who Mostly execute because of their seniority.

I want the same thing for them, but it's more important for me that the leaders have that, right, that clarity. Because that's what lets them, often the people who are close to the work actually see the realities. It's just sometimes we're not listening. Sometimes we're just like, here's our mission and our vision and our strategy and blah, blah, bang.

No, like sometimes those things need to change because of the things on the ground. So you need to keep listening, but also you need perspective.

Jeff: I think some of the biggest things we have started to do here came from, let's bring up less senior people. I think some of the bigger impact things we've done here have come from social people on the ground. Raising up and going, I think we should do this. And it's interesting is several times, actually, the pushback has been, no, it doesn't fit into the box.

It doesn't fit into, and actually once or twice they went off and just did a little experiment on it themselves, came back and said, Hey, this resonated [00:11:00] really well with those results. It was like, shoot, I guess we got it. You were right. We were wrong. I love the idea of picking up. Cause even those people when they're doing it can show us, Hey, maybe our heads are down a little too much too.

Oji: Yep. No, a hundred percent. Like the thing, the way I talk about this, I know you want to talk about something else is, your job as a leader, part of your job anyway, is to mine all the intelligence on your team. So you have to be paying attention to the edges. the smallest person on your team. You have to have channels to listen.

If we're listening to our customers who actually don't know really what we do, they're very needy. They just have their problems solved. Why wouldn't you listen?

Jeff: Customers are needy. I love, not our customers. Our customers are wonderful, but. Customers in general are definitely needy.

Oji: They're needy. They don't know the technology. They don't know how to solve the problem. They just have, it's just like raw need. I'm paying you. You better solve it. And no, but no, I don't mean, I love customers. Obviously we're in this game. We're in this game for them.

Jeff: Luckily, our customers will be smart [00:12:00] enough to know what we mean here.

Oji: We're in this game for them. But I will also say that. There's intelligence everywhere, right? Especially if you've hired a really great team, why aren't you listening to them? And so you have to, as a leader, you have to create a system that allows you to also listen to your employees, right? And to consider the ideas.

And not always the best, but there's always gems out there and you have to encourage it, the flow. And so that's what I believe.

Jeff: No, I think that makes total sense. If you're not going to listen to someone, probably maybe hire someone else.

Oji: People hire smart people and then don't listen to them. That's the problem.

Jeff: No, that's a, that's a huge waste of money at that point. I like to say, I want to completely subject jump here because I have a bit of a hot take. I think you're opposite. I'm curious to see where we land on this one. You are really bullish on PLG. It's covered in your book, or it will be covered in your book.

I've been through several PLG companies. I do think it's not going anywhere, but honestly for me, the shine has fallen off a little [00:13:00] bit at times, not completely, but like I see other paths. Like what's your thought on given where the economy is right now? I think situationally is more I'm talking about right now.

I've seen Some companies are a little more hesitant to move that way and they want more protection from up high or a little bit more executive decision maker involved before they're pulling the trigger on things that maybe historically would just been a credit card swipe. What's, what is your view here?

Oji: Yeah. So I think the, probably the reason that you think we're on opposite sides is because our definition of PLG is different. Uh, and I think once I define what I think is PLG, I think you probably on the same side, but I will, before I do that, I will, I call it a tactical time that we're in, where like in the middle of multiple forces, we have, they expect it.

Yeah. recession slash soft landing going on, business tightening. A business tightening environment doesn't really favor PLG very well, right? Because it's literally the opposite. What favors PLG is growth and people scrambling to drive growth. [00:14:00] And therefore they are procuring the tools they need to drive growth a little loosely.

They're doing what they need to compete in the marketplace that is crazy. In a tightening environment, people are like, pruning their tools, trying to save money. And so the permission to grow all costs to find the tools needed to create productivity isn't as. And so purely PLD techniques can suffer, right?

But remember it's a business cycle, right? This is going to turn around and the other thing is going to come about. And so it's not wise to just say that there's no cycle that something's working or not working. What I try to do is in the book and otherwise is to get beneath why it works in the first place.

And so here's where I define PLD. PLD, frankly, is Two things. One, you focus, it's not just the front end. It's not the go to market flavor. I don't think about it that way. I think PLG has [00:15:00] to go through the bones of a company. And I think part of it is product led, not necessarily the growth part. You have to have a company that focuses relentlessly on customers and creates products that customers love.

And a company that thinks of product not just as the widget. What has everything that touches the customer, every experience, every customer experience, including the product is probably 90 percent of it. Growth is a touch point. Support is a touch point. Management is a touch point. Sales can be a touch point.

Is that they prioritize. a perfect or near perfect customer journey through all of that. That is what I consider PLG, really, not just the, how do you sign up and whether you throw sales at it or you throw growth at it and so on and so forth. I'm about to say something that might feel insulting to some people.

I don't think that's the full understanding. PLG, frankly, is adaptive. It's like, how do my customer, mine, want to [00:16:00] purchase this product? What is their psychological mask when they're thinking about this problem? And so in that case, If sales is the biggest lever for creating the bridge that gets them to say yes, then that's what we're going to deploy.

What is wrong is when salespeople do not understand that the product is a center and they promise features that will never deliver, or they try to optimize for one deal, then it's a totally different thing. Atlassian is like one of the creators of PLG. They have a sales team. Why? Because they understand the business cycle.

But of course, anyone can sign over a certain type of people with the right qualified leads. Then it's a sales process. And so they have to govern which way it goes. But they have both tools in their tool set and they can use it properly.

Jeff: I, I should have just phrased that question differently because I should know that you were going to put it in a way that sounded really intelligent. Yeah, that's, that's, I, I said that when I said it and was immediately thinking like this is not quite what I mean because from our [00:17:00] perspective, uh, and my perspective, the product is the most important that you can't, I tell my team often, you can't sell someone something they don't need.

Oji: I know that about you guys. That's why I knew that we're not different. I know that about you. Yeah, no, seriously. I, so I knew, I knew immediately that we're not off on the same page. We're literally on the

Jeff: Right. Because delivering a great product and being centric about the, the company's about how do we deliver a solution that's going to solve problems. And whether it's sales or when you swipe, swipe a credit card is, that's part of solving the problem of how you need to buy it.

Oji: It's almost a smaller problem. Yeah. And you know, to be honest, you have to realize that a lot of companies are about what can we do to make revenue. What you need to think, what can we do to solve customer problems and make revenue? That's the central difference between PLG companies and non PLG

Jeff: Yeah. And oftentimes if you're solving the problem very well, the revenue is gonna be a lot easier to figure out how to do versus if you're trying to optimize for revenue, then throw a solution at it. And so that's, if that's product led, that's exactly, I'm on [00:18:00] board.

Oji: Yeah, yeah,

Jeff: Or I worry a little bit about, yeah, okay, we're on the same team.

I love it. All right, LG, we can be friends again. I'm, I, I, I'm sorry. I tried to put up a rift between us. Oh no, but that, that's exactly the key, right? And this is something I feel like people forget about PLG so much is they look at how do we growth hack this onboarding or the signup flow or this other thing, and it's, how do you solve the problem?

And those are.

Oji: What is the journey that I sit on? the mindset of my particular customer.

Jeff: That's in the zones of, of, of benefit, right? Like how do you make it so much better?

Oji: Yeah. What is the thing that assists their sense of value and their ability to say yes? Is it them? Is it their boss? Whatever it is, you deploy.

Jeff: I love it. That's, we're redefining PLG. If that's in the book, I'm sure it is.

Oji: I think that should be the original definition. I'm struggling here with that disconnect.

Jeff: I'm going to, I'm going to take that page out and [00:19:00] Ted Lasso with the Believe potion. I'm just going to put that page up on a door here and everyone's going to see it. All right. Last thing, A B testing. This is another one of those things that I feel like there's a lot of kind of the crowd wisdom has come full circle on or keeps going around and around where you get the growth hackers who like test every single thing.

But some level there's also understand your customers, put out a great solution. And trust your wisdom a little bit and trust your knowledge, I guess. Where do you think about A B testing and the balance of testing, testing versus someplace you just got to be opinionated?

Oji: So, the thing that I tell prior teams is A B testing has become dogma. If you're not AB testing someone, think people think there's something wrong, and this is one of those frameworks, or not even a framework, one of those memes or things out there that I don't like at all, because then people don't understand why you should even do it.

Just because you have tools like an AB testing, means you AB test everything. First of all, AB tests, surely for B2B SaaS company. Take time. I've done tests that take a month to come to [00:20:00] statistical significance. A month before I can make a decision? Are you kidding me? Like, at the pace that we have to go?

Why? And just by saying we have to do an A B test, you feel like you have cover. That's not enough cover for me as Chief Product Officer. So, you A B test things that have high uncertainty, right? If there's high uncertainty, you A B test. If it's important enough. Now, consumer technology is different.

Facebook can A B test something and get to significance in a day. And so for them, having A B test, and Twitter, we could do the same thing. So having A B testing frameworks at scale that just work, is very high leverage. But for B2B SaaS companies, you have to think about it, because the time is prohibitive sometimes, unless you're one of those, if you're Microsoft, sure.

You have millions of customers, but if you have the thousands of customers, then you really have to think about it. Now, the last thing I'll say [00:21:00] is, how do you reduce uncertainty without A B testing? You talk to customers, you get into their minds, you get into their workflows, you watch them, you observe them, you show them, and make them, Co owners of the development process.

You show them the sketches. You show them the concept. Maybe you show them a prototype, which is the things you would do anyway. But all you're doing is you're bringing customers along for the journey. If you can do some of that for the bigger things, or maybe even a smaller things, then just have confidence.

Deploy the thing. Use customer listening to refine it, right? That might be faster than just making religion of a B tests. So I think in summary, at that scale, a B test what is high uncertainty. And if it's not high uncertainty, just build it.

Jeff: Wish I thought there's been this push around, I've heard it called lightning testing. We've tried it out a bit and I've gotten some pretty good signal. I, I think I like it is maybe run the tests. Don't go quite as high of the bar because right, you can gain a lot of speed just by reducing your [00:22:00] confidence bar a little bit.

But do the research, come in really well informed. And you can bang out 10 tests, maybe in the time it takes to do one to 95 percent because you're doing make it 70 percent or 80 percent confidence,

Oji: I think of lightning tests more like research, right? It's like a barometer because the thing about A B tests, they're, they're a statistical tool. And so if you don't hit the confidence level, then you can't answer the question. So to me, lightning tests, concept testing is all tools for gaining confidence without actually doing an A B test.

And you should do as many of them as you can. So that's a framework, like. Framework is not A B testing, the framework is increasing confidence in what you're

Jeff: right? I guess that was a good last wisdom, last piece of wisdom to end on, because we're running out of time. I want to be accommodating your schedule and not hold you. I could talk to you all day, but I feel like that would probably not be the best use of your time. So let's leave it at, if people want to follow up and ask you questions or opinion or anything, is there a good spot to reach out to you on?

Is it LinkedIn? Is there a place to reach out to you on the site [00:23:00] about the book or?

Oji: Follow me on LinkedIn, usually, that works, as I try to publish on LinkedIn whenever I can. Follow me on Substack, that's where I try to drop whatever wisdom that I have from all the years of operating things like this podcast. Follow me on Twitter. I guess that's the third thing. I will also try to post shorter things on Twitter.

The sub stack will be where like you will, Twitter has a bunch of stuff. You can sign up for the book and get notified on pre order and you can get a free workbook on product led growth and building rocket ships already that we've put out there. It's a really good workbook. It's hosted on Coda. Shakir is the CEO, is a friend of mine, and I love that product.

And yeah, so that's how to. Um, my mission is to help as many people in the world as I can be great product people so that we can accelerate the making of very valuable company. So I'm working on it.

Jeff: Nice. Awesome. Thank you so much for coming on. It was a pleasure. It was a blast. [00:24:00] And hopefully we get to talk again sometime soon, but best of luck in the book launch.

Oji: Thank you. Thanks that we appreciate the luck. And it was amazing talking to you. I enjoyed it.