2024-06-28--t03-44-39pm--guest725114--josh
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Jeff: [00:00:00] Josh, thanks for being on the show, man. Really appreciate you coming on today.

Josh: Thanks, Jeff. I'm so glad I get the chance to be here.

I'm just gonna kick in here. It's been a big year for you guys over at Optimizely, huh? You racked up a leader in the Gartner MQ, leader in Forrester Wave, a couple leaders by IDC, and you guys hit 400 million in ARR. It's been a banner H1. Thanks for having me.

Josh: Another Tuesday for Optimizely. We're always, no it's been a delightful time for us and it's really a reflection of a lot of the investments we've been making over the last 18 months to come and get so many of those. But yeah we're very proud as we're talking today we just last week got another leadership acknowledgement.

So I know I'm on the commerce division of Optimizely across Optimizely. We've actually got more than 10 leader positions right now across Forrester, Gartner, and IDC. And with my team, four of those are there the B2B Forrester evaluation, we're a leader B2B commerce for IDC, we're a leader.

IDC just last week named us a leader for headless commerce. So yeah, the Commerce Division [00:01:00] where I sit we're on a roll, but across Optimizely, I think we're really getting the market to recognize the investments we've made and the ways we're making the world easier for marketers.

Jeff: I love it. You guys are rocking and rolling. I'd love to dig in a little bit here. Cause like I think you, you've written a little bit about some of these awards and then there's some detail around analysts in general that I'm always curious. I think it's super interesting. So just to go into a right you posted after the Forrester wave came out a quick analysis of why you think the commerce team achieved so well.

One of the things you hit on surprised me a little bit. I'm gonna be honest. The B2B sales experience of the team. What did you mean there? , how does that kind of fit into product excellence and being a leader that front?

Josh: I'm glad you called that one out because in the world of SaaS commerce or SaaS software in general there's what hits the media and what is commonly seen or what the stories out of Silicon Valley are. And those capture a limited set of typically Martech [00:02:00] technology or cutting edge AI that is typically B2C focused, that has these dimensions that make it more story worthy or newsworthy.

But in some of the places where we work, for example, For instance, B2B commerce, when you're selling B2B commerce, you could be selling to a distributor of piping. You could be selling to somebody who is supplying retail stores with all their products from warehouses. Or you could be selling to the manufacturer who's making the clothes, but isn't the retailer.

The story that gets told is that retailer. And so what gets missed sometimes in the books about software is this people element that is still very real, especially with these businesses where they literally talk to us about a handshake matters. And of course we can't shake their hands. We're on zoom, but what we do to get that.

virtual handshake is we bring people in from their industry. We bring people in who speak their language, who know what their concerns are. And so, as I talked about, part of the reason we're able to win this is we hire people for our B2B sales. And it goes [00:03:00] beyond that as well. Our customer success members are typically hired from industry so that we can actually have conversations, whether the, you are the manufacturer of clothing, whether you are a major retailer.

Or whether you are a distributor of car parts we have set up people to be able to actually speak to you about how your business works. And I think in a world of scale, and did you get a million eyeballs, sometimes we forget that would be to be. It's sometimes more important to have that real person to person contact and relationship.

And so as a product person, I have to see beyond just what does the code do and to how are we delivering the total experience. And so it really is part of our success that we think about how our people come into play and how that makes our customers have a better overall experience through their lifetime with us, the years that they spend with us.

Jeff: Oh, it's the view on the entire product experience, right? The product experience goes beyond the thing you actually use in the computer. 

Josh: Yes, exactly. Exactly. And we think a [00:04:00] lot about that on our site in the commerce division at Optimizely, we are in regular engagement, very tight connection with customer success, the support org, sales org, and then product and engineering and design. And that, that connection, the regular weekly touch points, the fact I just flew back from Minneapolis earlier this week, where we flew in 12 of our customers, customer advisory board, and we had representations from these different groups so that as we're talking to them about what do you want to see in the product?

We're also getting them to talk about was support able to answer your questions about that part of the product or when it Came out did customer success help you understand how you might use that? So that we're seeing that better overall life cycle.

Jeff: nice. No, that's also why a lot of these, awards take into account execution as well. It's not just. What is the product? Is the product innovative? Is it good? But it's also how are you selling into the market? How are you getting there? And that, that kind of thing is so important.

It's interesting. We just had Susan Stavitsky on the show. She's over at CarMax [00:05:00] in product. And they similar, semi similarly, they actually on product teams will pull members who had been working at individual kind of stores who had elevated up and raised up. To get the same feel of like, how do you understand the CarMax members who were in there, but also the customers who are there, the end users.

So I'd love to see this kind of view of how do you get a better view of the customer from their perspective? And there's multiple ways to do it and you nailed one.

Josh: I love that. And you've now got an extra listener for that particular episode. And anybody who's listening to my episode is probably going to want to go back to that one because yeah, I love that. And really pulling from this wealth of people that you have across an organization to make sure you're bringing the perspective.

Like every product group everywhere is we're customer centric. And that's true. We all know we need to be there, but how to get the right feedback from customers. You've got to have telemetrics. You've got to have the data coming in. But you also still so often need that human touch, the human synthesis.

There's still things that data can't inherently [00:06:00] tell you, or you're not asking the right questions of the data. You've got to have the people who understand that to really come in and make sense of it to tell the story of what's happening there. And so I love pulling from inside and pulling broadly to make sure product does the right things.

Jeff: exactly. And then, even you, if you go far enough back in your career, have sales experience do you think, and this has been a common theme of the show, is analyzing where product leaders come from. And it's, I'll be honest it's a pretty like big spider web as you go farther out, but I think you're the first I've seen with a lot of like path second, maybe with a lot of past sales experience.

But do you think that helps you be a better product leader and understand the customer viewpoint a little bit better?

Josh: Absolutely. And you've got me laughing a little bit over here because somebody once told me said, the most likely first thing you'll ever hear from a product leader if you ask them about their career is they'll be like, I know it's not normal. I haven't had a linear career. It's not just that, right?

And it's so true. And there's a [00:07:00] couple of reasons. One of it is just history, right? Product hasn't come into its real fruition. 40 years ago. And so you don't have people who came into their career. You've had to pull them. But what I hope is stays true about this with product going into the future is product is a center point of trying to say, what is the engineering solution, but also what's the design.

And also how do we make sure this gets customers and have you done it in a way that it'll sell well. And once it sells, are you going to keep the customer on it? And so by pulling people as leaders who have had that breadth of experience we talk about polymathic product people are some great talks or blogs out there about these multi talented sometimes they're called a generalist.

That's a diminutive term polymathic,

Jeff: It is now. It didn't used to be though, but like it definitely is now.

Josh: Yeah. And no, and it's, but it's so important. One of the books that I really love is called range and it talks about how having experiences in these diverse areas actually leads to more creative problem solving because you've got more patterns, more experience to pull from.

And I think you see that as you [00:08:00] talk to product people, a lot of that background for me specifically I've worked with Disney building exhibits in Disneyland and Disney world, which gave me a lot of focus on the customer experience from a very physical visceral point, working with Imagineers, you get that perspective.

I've worked in sales and business dev trying to actually figure out what is it that gets somebody to the point where you say, yes I did a digital transformation work for an. Older company so I had to get in and figure out what do you do with technology to make it easy to adopt? Easy to accept when you've got a hundred year old company.

That's like we've been doing things right for 80 years Don't come tell us how to do it Also, really, you guys should be using a CRM. And so it's the variety of those experiences that allows me to say, Oh, in this case, I think our customer needs more of that adoption, hand holding, or an easier path. Oh, in this experience, what we should really be focusing on is no matter how good that feature is, if it doesn't meet this dimension, it won't sell.

We've got to set our salespeople up and across the board, product people need to have. [00:09:00] That broader view. I know there's a real desire for people coming up in product to be kind of product purists, that there's a model, Marty Kagan or in empowered product teams, side note endorsement, some of the best book inspired empowered like these are great

sources of learning about it, but also we want people who have had that breadth of experience because we're having to pull together decisions.

across this variety of different problem statements or different solutions, whether it's the customer's problem statement or also the business's problem statement and need. So yeah, I, I often think that my eclectic background really serves me well as I try and solve the problems of how do we make sure this product as a total experience, not just as a pile of code really delivers for our customers.

Jeff: It's fine. I didn't realize the Disney thing, but the more and more I dig in, more people who have, but Disney is famous for thinking about creating these just amazing experiences or thought through from end to end. And if you want to be great at product, it's the same [00:10:00] thing. It's how do you. And I've talked to now so many product leaders who talk about, the mandate is not just making a great digital product.

It's we talked to butcher box and she talked about, it's even the packaging you deliver it in once you're shipping and all that. The breadth of the product experience is wide and far. It strikes me, you look like you probably play an instrument. Are you a musician?

Josh: Yeah, you tuned right into that. I sing primarily, but that meant I learned to play the piano and the guitar to make sure I could accompany myself.

Jeff: so I, I'm a drummer and I'm going to stretch this metaphor really far, but I feel like being in product is a little like being a drummer where everyone looks at and goes, I can do that and wants to go up and play and bang on the drums and most people shouldn't but they can do it and they can, rattle away a couple, four, four beats or something like that.

But to be really good at it, like anything else takes practice and time and all that kind of stuff, but you come, people coming at it from a diverse side. Product is, yeah, anyone can walk into it and, maybe talk about some requirements and [00:11:00] that kind of thing, but to be, really to operate at the level, like optimize and it's been operating at takes, much more refinement and envision and pushing and understanding a broader scope of it.

Josh: As a singer, it's really hard for me to admit this, but I think your drum analogy is actually better than most of the music analogies I use for product. And here's why. And I don't often say that the drummers are actually the people that I'm gonna lean to, but no The drummer is such a great example of this because one Like you said everybody's like I could pick up a stick and hit a thing And they're right you can like you can And there's great opportunity that doesn't even mean that's not the right way to enter the room and to get started like grab that bongo and just hit some basics or the what's the wooden box that you sit on?

That you drum there's starting points where you can with very little experience get in But when you think about the truth of drummers in an actual band situation or a symphony or wherever they're at Everybody else is depending on them laying down the correct path because they're all tying [00:12:00] into it So there's one of you are this hyper critical center point of what's occurring and you're also expected to understand how to do the embellishments And so what people don't think about drummers are using their feet as much as they're using their hands Drummers having to keep two or three potential beats going simultaneously And they're sometimes making spontaneous choices about where you hit the hi hat or where you like there's so much that goes into that and so Being excellent at drumming is so far beyond that and entails so many different multi threaded multi pathways while also continuously carrying the responsibility of if the drummer goes off beat, everyone is off beat.

That is the end of hitting the beat. So I think it's actually a very apt analogy. And I think it's scary that you have me recorded saying that I think drumming is better analogy than singing but there it is. 

Jeff: Well, I'm going to make sure to send this to all your friends now, so, But I'm glad that worked because it hit me as we were talking and couldn't help. Okay. I want to get back to the analyst stuff because there's, [00:13:00] this is one of those things that I think a lot of people are interested in.

It's important, especially in the B2B space. And I think it's an area that a lot of people don't fully understand. One of the things you also listed in here Was composability, right? And I have heard this word probably more in the last 18 months than in the entire 18 years of my career preceding that.

So I guess, first of all, I feel like it gets thrown around a lot and can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people. You tout it as one of the reasons that Optimizely has been really successful. What does composability mean to you? 

Josh: mean, for the first 18 years of my career, it meant sitting down with a score and trying to compose some music.

But, 

today as we get into it it's right to call out. This is a term that, , has gone through or is going through hype cycle. And that means that it ends up getting dramatically overweighted with definitions and beliefs.

For optimizely, I'm just going to focus in on how we see this. And I think it's a vision we see resonating with market, which is why you're seeing us win more of these analyst scores as more of the market recognizes this [00:14:00] composability. is empowering our customers, be they developers or marketers.

We look at both sides. You write code or you use the interface. Both of them should be able to make choices about how their tools work together. And our belief is we go one, one beyond that. In some ways you could say composability is just, can you put pieces together? People talk about Legos a lot with composability.

It's a great analogy, but what they fail to finish the analogy Is anybody can take two lego bricks and put them together, but that's not what most people buy a lego set it has a picture of what the Best thing that you could build or a best practice is it has an instruction book that walks you through It has pieces organized into bags inside of it so that you know how to go through this process And in the end you can end up with this beautiful thing Or you can end up with something completely different because it is Legos.

But what's missing around composability conversation is most people don't just want a box of Legos with no instructions, no [00:15:00] picture, no guidance. That can be fun sometimes, but in the business world, we want to know that there's a total product, but we want to be able to add things onto it, take things out and have that instruction manual that tells us where is the point that I would do that.

And so when. Optimizely focuses on composability, we are still trying to actually deliver the majority of the product in a finished, pre composed state, that simply has the ability for you to say, I want to reconstruct a part of it, or I want to click something else onto it. And I think that's the conversation in composability that's, been missed.

There's, there was so much focus coming out of microservices. Oh, look, microservices, the technical solution, allows me to just build anything I want, because I just grab all these services that we fail to realize. Most customers don't want to create out of nothing. They want to have something they're working from that they can then add to or manipulate.

And so for us, composability is how do you create modules? We don't talk in microservices because we build things much larger than that. But [00:16:00] modules that have function, that are pre composed to start with, they're already a built Lego set, but that you could take a piece out or add a piece on.

Jeff: And that, I feel like that's where partner ecosystems also come in and are helpful is because it's almost, you have right to completely just continue down the Lego metaphor path, because apparently we're just doing big metaphors today. And I love Lego. So it's almost, you have, the world of my kids are watching a lot in Jago recently.

So I'll go with that, but you have the world in the Jago and there's individual sets, but they also be combined really well and play nicely together and 

Josh: They play nicely together. that's. 

Jeff: exactly. It's like how optimizely you can optimize experiences. And there's a lot of AP testing and a lot of other really good stuff. You can, work it together with something like log rocket for understanding what happened and why in the session replay part of it.

And you get, they play nicely together, composability, right?

Josh: Yeah, no, that's exactly right. And here at Optimizely we don't have that session replay, we don't have some of the telemetrics that you have. We don't try and solve for that because that's another Lego set. But we [00:17:00] want to be built in the Ninjago world, to further weight this analogy, so that when those two play together, not only can you click them together, But they look right.

They feel right. They interact right. This is partially about how do we make a marketer's life easier day to day when they come in if they've got 12 systems to log into and they all one has navigation on the right and one has it on the left. One doesn't even have navigation. Like it becomes this overwhelming, like existential maze that they're trying to navigate in their days.

And when we actually can take products like yours, products like ours and make them better. Yeah. Work in similar ways and cleanly connect to each other. We're making efficiency and we're really decreasing that cognitive load because what do you want to market or thinking about? Certainly not. How do these two technical systems work?

It's how do I make things better for my customers? So the more we can get out of the way your and our products together, the more we're making life real for those marketers taking what they know best and maximizing on it.

Jeff: [00:18:00] Yeah, there's nothing worse than having to like copy and paste an ID from one and go to the other. You know they integrate, but the integration is let me copy this over here and create a new report and before, you forget what you're doing halfway through. 

Josh: Showed me an integration that was essentially a script that copied something, pasted it to an Excel sheet, and then copied it to, or pasted it to another. And I was like, I'm so sorry that the tech world has failed

This is not how life should be.

Jeff: And that's what composability is for people who are wondering.

So, Now the, again, we talked about this has been expanding a lot. Do you have a hypothesis on why this had become the buzzword in the past, 18, 12, 18 months? I feel like there's been a lot of macroeconomic changes, post Zerp.

But what do you think is driving this?

Josh: Yeah, I agree. There's a lot of changes. I'm going to focus in on just a few that I've seen really come about that have influenced this one is rewind in time. And let's look at the rise of the ERP, the rise of the ERP or said even more broadly, the monolithic software that tried to do everything.

came from a real problem statement of I've [00:19:00] got all these softwares and they all work. What if I just had one place and I knew that software just did everything? And so the 80s came, the early 90s, we built these things. SAP comes, Oracle comes yay, everything's great. Except suddenly people realize I'm now stuck forever on this thing because now that I've put 12 systems into this one place, you can't just get off of it.

And so there's lock in. And then of course let's talk about who do you think is innovative in the world? It's not the ERPs. Um, And so people have gotten stuck in that place. So composability partially came in because people said, I can't get locked in. If I'm going to react to the future, if I'm going to be responsive to how the market changes, I can't be locked into these huge structures that require three years of development to move off of.

That's insanity. So we definitely need things broken up that way. Another one we've touched on microservices. People came up and really thought about the technical solution of, did you realize APIs are these amazing things? Amazon internally was just saying, how do we make all of our product?

All of our engineering teams allow the goodness that they've created [00:20:00] to not yet recreated. Let's just make them talk to each other. So you get this fantastic opportunity of really being able to come in and drive A technical solution around APIs that allows you to break things down and create these different modules that are in there.

And there's another reason that this is coming up that isn't about developers or breaking down the code. It's about how marketers are engaging with the world.

If you look at the Martech 5000 that is now, I think, like 10, 000 companies. It started out as, let's look at the top 500 Martech companies. And it's just exploded. And honestly this is a good thing because what we've realized is there's so much we can do to enhance the customer experience. There's the, there's tracking what's happening on the site.

There's presenting personalizations, there's chatbot agents, there's being able to do product recommendations, and there's just these wealth of opportunities, but it's also made. The field look very intimidating and difficult to navigate. Composability presents a world in which you can have a stable center, a Lego set that has [00:21:00] most of what you need consistently in place, but you can tag on one of these 5, 000 other things you might be interested in without over committing into it.

Composability allows you the flexibility to try it and let it go. Run an experiment, get data, Decide which one works and move on. And so I think it's that combination of getting away from that buy in problem, that being stuck microservices created this technical environment that made this possible.

And then this huge desire to take advantage of the explosion of MarTech solutions that really led us to this word that is now the biggest hype word out there, except for AI. Let's give credit where

Jeff: Just wait until you have composable AI and

Josh: right there. I bet if you Google that right now, somebody's already on it.

Jeff: I'm not going to. I'm too scared, actually. Given the success, that we're talking about the analysts here and we got really deep into it. But, I've been in marketing for 20 years now. I've spent a lot of time with the analyst community success with that. In that area is not an [00:22:00] accident.

Like you don't accidentally stumble into being a leader in Gartner's MQ and Forrester's Wave and several IDC reports, et cetera, all the accolades you listed. So as far as, you're concerned in product where do you sit in this world of interacting with analysts? you know, Are you talking to them?

Do you see them as stakeholders where you get feedback from them, or are you just hands off and your AR team takes care of it?

Josh: Yeah, , we as product are relatively engaged with the analyst world. We do have an analyst relations team and AR team and all credit to them. Anything that I say in here, please hear at the end of the sentence. And my analyst relation team makes that possible. but, 

there is a reality that one.

These analysts talk to all the other vendors and yes, the information they get is biased and yes, they aren't getting necessarily the full customer perspective. But who else do you know that's talked to every one of your competitors and to a number of your customers and to a Number of their customers so we for sure try and take opportunities to extract insights or get perspectives from analysts and that informs things We don't try and use an analyst score as a [00:23:00] motivator to create anything but I will also say that we do think of the analyst Objective as its own objective, when we set out to win with the analyst, we do actually not just say we've got a great product.

I'm sure you'll realize this. Here's a link to a demo. We do get in and say, let's think through this. And some of the things that I've seen, if you're a product person you're just starting in with analysts. Two of the most common mistakes that I've seen are one, my product speaks for itself.

It may with your customers, it may with the, it's ICP, but your analyst isn't your ICP.

So you gotta get in there and actually explain and show things. So don't let your product just speak for itself. Make sure you give it a voice. And secondly, I often see them come in and say, this is just a sales call. We're coming in and doing the exact same thing we would do with the customer. And it's not because that analyst doesn't want to buy and has no pressure to choose one or the other system and doesn't have a list of criteria that are, that has money behind it.

What you have to think about instead, as you go to the analyst [00:24:00] is, this is somebody Who more than anybody else out there wants you to capture the why customers need you to understand the why, but you don't necessarily sit down and talk to a customer and say, this is the why behind this. This is why it's going to matter in the market.

This is why you come into the customer and say, this is your particular problem. Help me understand your pain. Here's how we're going to solve that. That doesn't work for an analyst who has no pain around this. What they want to look for is. Are you actually making the right choices in the market?

Are you solving for numerous customers? Are you actually processing the information, the competitive data the new technologies, the feedback from customers. So focusing everything towards, and that is why this matters. Here's this great new AI feature and here is why that matters. Here's the thing that every one of our customers uses every day and every night and it's not even on the evaluation because it's so obvious that you didn't even think to include it.

But here is why that matters, is always what you need to come to when you're talking to the [00:25:00] analyst because they don't want to buy from you. And they sure as heck aren't going to let your product just speak for itself they need you to come in and give that voice of reaching in. Here's what the motivation is Here is why this is going to make a difference.

Jeff: it's interesting. I've seen with the analysts. It's one of the few places where they want to understand how your product works and why it does that way. But also what do you see in the market? Because it's a two way street. They're also trying to learn from you what's going on in the market because you're in the trenches all day and talking to customers, whereas they.

Have limited access. So it's always a funny dichotomy of, you know, you're trying to communicate some knowledge to them. Convince them that you have the right view on it. Convince them that this is how the market is looking at it or, it's multi threaded communication.

Josh: It really is and it's a nuanced communication that I really think sometimes we have forgotten as we've gotten very good at sound bites or very good at here's the sales pitch Or here's we get we forget that sometimes you need to meet with somebody who you aren't going to convince You But you need to go through the [00:26:00] process of convincing anyway and, difficult conversations around beliefs or politics sometimes get into this, how can we both be professionals, respectful, agree with each other, and I am probably not going to move you, so this isn't a sales thing, but I am going to come in here and show you why I am convinced, why I have seen this, and I think It's super valuable.

It helps you think about your thinking, and it gives them a chance to respond back with what they don't buy, and you should let that challenge you and let that come in as, okay, are they right, or do they have a perspective that's valid here?

Jeff: now if you were talking to a product leader who is looking to push their AR initiatives further or their analyst relations further, what are some quick tips you would give them on how to better frame this?

Josh: Yeah. One is think about it as a relationship with the analyst. This is not, Oh, there's this one time a year where we show up for three hours and do this thing. You should be having some sorts of conversations along the way so that you're prepping them to understand your context. So you're understanding what they're talking about.

So make that an ongoing relationship. And then the other thing is, [00:27:00] Treat this as its own thing, not a sidebar to your sales process or a sidebar to your release notes. You should be thinking specifically about how do we present to the analyst? It is an audience and we as product people know how to speak to different audiences.

That's our job. Make them their own separate audience. Doesn't mean you need to build product for them. This isn't about make them an audience that you're trying to deliver features for. But it is an audience you are trying to speak to. Treat it that way.

Jeff: that makes sense. It's great feedback. All right, let's shift gears a little bit because I LinkedIn stalked you a little bit. I'm gonna, I'm gonna be honest. Uh, and a while back you wrote something that resonates with me. It's something I, so we've been hiring a lot of SDRs lately. And I do a lot of phone screens with our SDR team.

It's such a critical function of our go to market that, I like to often take the first call. And one of the questions I ask them is basically like, why do you want to go into B2B tech? No one [00:28:00] when they were a kid ever said, I want to go into B2B tech. And as I'm going through, I found you actually, you wrote about this exact same thing.

Like people ask you, why are you so enthusiastic or how are you so enthusiastic about building B2B SaaS products? And it's a fair question. No, no one grew up thinking like this sounds like a great place. I grew up wanting to be a musician or maybe a basketball player which ill fated I'm six feet now.

And that's as tall as ever. God, six one. So that's, that was a lost dream. Like you, what did you want to be when you were growing up as a kid? Yeah,

Josh: hard enough, you might find some old clips of me in musical theater. I did it under a different name and I am not going to reveal that one just to give myself a little bit of protection and decency here. But no, I grew up thinking about musical theater.

I legit believed I could become an astronaut. I thought the astronaut program is going to just explode and, we're all going to be able to do this. And a novelist cause I wanted to write [00:29:00] things that made people change their mind. And and yeah, I had all these visions of what I was going to be.

And nowhere on that list, even through the top 10 was B2B SaaS product manager.

Jeff: yeah. You were going to take the EGOT and put a P on it somewhere for a 

Pulitzer as well. So they, 

but yeah, I love your perspective on this is, you, your answer, I'm going to read it. Cause it was really well put, Is I believe that everyone has a superpower and my job as a product creator is to clear the way for more people to spend more of their time in their superpower or said another way, my product should let people spend more of their life in flow and it's remarkably concise and put and I love that I'm gonna like print this out and put it up somewhere.

But how did you come to this? Like where, what was the inspiration that turned the light bulb on that? 

Josh: There's a couple of things that, that hit it. One is, I have always been driven to create. Novelist, musical performer. There's an element of creation, of generation that's part of that. And as it turns out, [00:30:00] generating product or generating software that is a product satisfied that same creation push.

And so I was able to quickly say, I'm actually hitting on the same dimensions. And that made me then reflect on, What was it about being a novelist or a musical theatre person that really satisfied me? And do I have those same satisfactions coming into it? And what it started to reveal was, yeah, no, when I create, what I'm actually wanting to create is something that betters the lives of the audience.

The people who get that. So that was the starting point. And then my partner, Allison is a software engineer and she came in and she was like, do you ever feel like, all of this stuff that you're doing is just not very valuable. And she works on backend code and sometimes upgrading versions.

And so she struggles, like, where is the meaning in this? She challenged me and she's you work on B2B SaaS software. Where do you find your desire? And as, as we got into that, what I realized was, I care so much about people. And about creating things that allow people to be better to be more of themselves, to live a better [00:31:00] life.

And yes, that can be done. You can live a better life in all of the creative passion ways. But we spend so much of our day at work. Why not spend your life making their work life better? And as I thought about, what is it that I'm making better for their life? Whatever it is they're doing, They should be able to spend more of their time doing the thing that they're best at this goes back to This idea we talked about with marketers shouldn't be spending their time figuring out technical integrations Writing a script to copy something into excel and paste it from excel.

That is a waste of a marketer because their superpower Is caught up in their understanding of people or messaging or or how to inspire? So how do we create a path for them to spend more of their time there? And this is why I'm a techno optimist. I have no concern that the coming wave of ai is going to put humanity in danger Out of our bucket because we constantly come back and realize, Hey, if I can get these 10 things off my plate, do you know how much more I could do?

[00:32:00] We've never run out of jobs from the industrial revolution to the first computer that came out. We've only created more ways for us to engage and that's because The human capability is expansive, almost unlimited, and we just need to do peeling off the things that hold us back from flow, from our top and best, and so I can get myself really inspired if our products are clearing the path for the people who use them to be able to get the best from themselves or give the best to their customers.

Jeff: you know, it's so remarkably close to in those interviews, people ask a lot what do you love about working there? Why do you work there? What, what's kept you there for so long? And my answer is always, I have an anecdote, I tell it, it's at this point, I could almost do it in my sleep, but it relates so much back to what you said.

It's that, we have I'm not wearing it today, but often I wear the log rocket t shirts and they're purple and they have a rocket on the front pretty big rockets we're in downtown Boston. We do a lot of walking meetings and I have several times had people stop me on the [00:33:00] street when I've been wearing this shirt to tell me do you work there?

We use it. I don't know what we would do without it. It's amazing. It makes me, so much more productive, so much, it makes my life easier at work. I can, and here I'm like, this is why I work so hard at this because it's not. It's not the detail. Like you said, it's not copying a link somewhere else.

It's the fact that it helps people in a major part of their life have a little bit better of a day.

Josh: Yeah, and isn't that amazing you think about what we so many of us envisioned in our childhood I want to be an astronaut. I want to be a basketball player I want to be a drummer, which is a bad choice do a singer instead. It's definitely better but 

Jeff: I agree. You make more famous if you're a singer. 

Josh: In all these cases, you just actually hit on it.

One of the things that is an obvious and easy to click into as a kid is people would walk down the street and tell me I love what you do. What you have done is awesome or made me better if that's a song if that's winning a basketball game that made them delighted Like it's so obvious as a kid to see those people who are out in front [00:34:00] The reality is we as product managers, like you literally walked down a street and had somebody stop you to say, I love what you do.

Like that's a realization of this same the same motivation in a different more matured aspect of it. But it harkens back right to those things that motivated us as kids. And we want that. We want to make other people's lives better. And then we feel so. satisfied to realize I did that.

I am doing that. I'm going to keep doing that. So yeah, I, I love creating those opportunities through product.

Jeff: exactly. And we can talk a lot about leadership and vision and all that, but also it comes back to great teams we get to work with. And you know, we don't, you know, in in the way that some people say like, major inventions have been, created standing on the shoulders of giants. Also, any great team is, the leader is standing on the shoulders of all the people who work, with them.

And you've talked a little bit about leadership and evolution since like the 1950s, where that was seen more like a battle. And now it's, you know, modern is a lot more like servant [00:35:00] leadership is such a big thing. Thing now, can you maybe talk to us a little bit about this transition and what you think drove it and what modernity looks like now?

Josh: Yeah, no, I, great call out. And I think, yeah, historically, when I referenced that, a lot of the early writing, like people didn't write about how to be a good leader, ignore Sun Tzu, who was a little ahead of his time there but, most of the people who wrote about it early, didn't know where to go to get great examples of leadership.

You had politics, you had war, like you had militaries who had the structure, who literally. Promoted people to leader. And so it was very easy to grab from the formalization that had come from militaries and say, Oh, there's a hierarchical structure. There's a chain of command. There is, a mission objective and achievement and none of that's wrong.

But we indicated so hard on that people started thinking that is what leadership is. That's directive leadership. And there are great wins to be made with directive leadership. It is a fantastic style that we should never forget and never retire. Also, there's six others. And [00:36:00] thinking about a world, right?

Thinking about a world in which we're creating software, the need for humans to collaborate with each other, the 10x engineer can do a lot. But that's 10x, you may, at one company, you may have 10, 000. What you need is for those people to interact well. And so a collaborative form of leadership very important.

How do we sit people down and get them to connect? My style of leadership is a little bit more servant leadership. How do I take care of my people so they take care of the things that need to happen? How do I create an environment or create the opportunities or get the resources so they can do it? And I think a number of these other forms of leadership.

We're always in place. There have always been examples of them, but weren't as easy. To characterize as here's the five points of how to do that And so it took us a while to really start developing it, but i'm delighted to see how much more we've put into Thinking about how leadership works because that 1950s hierarchical directive Ended up creating an image of what a leader should be that doesn't work in a world where people can choose a [00:37:00] different job to go to if they don't like how they're being treated, or a world in which not everything is life or death.

And so we shouldn't keep people in a state of constant anxiety about that. We can get much farther by leveraging these other ways of doing it. And I think there's a number of people, we live in a great time for people to see the different styles of leadership to really be able to click into that.

I happen to be very focused on assertive plus kind that is the summary of how I end up lead. I'm going to push you hard to do things you never knew you were possible. Also, let me take care of you, making sure you're all right while you're doing all of that. And that works so well in, in a lot of these settings and yeah, I'm, I really think we are at this renaissance of thinking about how to lead people that we need to make sure we take full advantage of rather than falling into those older patterns.

Jeff: and then on that I have been coming back to this kind of quote lately, famously in 2021 Mark Zuckerberg at I think what was then Facebook talked about wartime versus [00:38:00] peacetime leadership styles and CEOs and basically this is in context to him saying at that point to his leadership team, this is wartime now, we're not going to focus as much on consensus.

We're gonna have to make decisions, go with them, either get on board or, you can go choose a new job. And there I do think there's validity to that where sometimes that is the answer. Sometimes you have to move quickly and you don't have the time to get everyone in agreement. And, but it is just move.

And sometimes you have the, the time and the wherewithal to do that. How do you, A, what is your general thought on that kind of quote? And B, how do you rectify that with your view on leadership and this kind of, like you said, kind, but assertive take.

Josh: Interestingly, I appreciate the motivation, the impetus of that quote, and I don't appreciate the quote itself as much, because I believe very rarely is it actually about wartime peacetime. That gets us back to binary thinking, that gets us back to an analogy that is life or death. And though there's relevant things to [00:39:00] extract from that, it is important at times for companies to react with a highly more directive manner.

And one of the reasons to do that is because you are in a fight for it with your competitor. But another case for directive leadership is you have a really new team. That just needs a much more directive or you have different cultural Approaches and so this idea of this is about wartime or peacetime.

What company is ever at peacetime? What company is ever

Jeff: Or a war, really.

Josh: for war? Yeah, and so I actually believe he's responding to a really legitimate insight I don't like the characterization because I again I think there's a different way to think about the style that applies to the situation And the other thing that I think that misses is Facebook meta, whatever its name is, X, Twitter, choose 

name of 

Jeff: refuse to change the names of either of them. I call them the same thing I always have.

Josh: I'll write alphabet Google. I forgot

but in those situations, your company is too large for you to [00:40:00] believe that there is one way for you to be leading. Instead, what you need to be saying is which of my leaders need to lean into which of their styles. I guarantee you in that exact moment. At Facebook, there was a division that desperately needed visionary leadership.

Instead of directive leadership. Guaranteed. And so you have to be able to break that down and see where are the types of leadership instead of this highly binary thinking. I do think there's time for this directive, and I think that's what he was responding to, is we need to get in here and make hard choices, make them quickly.

It is not going to necessarily be fun, but it will get us to the, to where we need to go. There's a time for that, I agree with it. But think a little bit more nuanced.

Jeff: Yeah, no, I agree there. There's, wartime peacetime is a tough analogy. It's easy because it's broadly accepted and understood, but there's probably better, less binary ways to

Josh: Yeah. It simplifies it, which we're addicted to but there are times when, especially leaders, we need to make sure we're not oversimplifying and remembering that life is nuanced and so are our [00:41:00] companies. So we've got to think about those levels.

Jeff: exactly. And speaking of our companies I think I've now taken quite a bit of your time this morning. It's end of quarter even though when this releases, we're well into Q3 of 24, but right now it's still at the last day of Q2. So I want to make sure we're not keeping you too long. Josh, this has been a pleasure, man.

This was so much fun. I love what we covered. I think really cool insights from you. I'm glad we got to have a couple of extended metaphors. Before you go, if someone wants to reach out to you and get in touch, what's the best spot like LinkedIn? Is there something else or

Josh: Yeah, no, LinkedIn is great. I try and keep tabs on LinkedIn and happy to to make connections with people or talk about your take on product. So find me there.

Jeff: awesome? Cool. LinkedIn, it is Josh. It's been a pleasure, man. This was a blast. Thank you so much for coming on.

Josh: Thank you, Jeff. I really appreciate it. I'm a little worried about what kind of comments we're going to get on my comparison of singers and drummers. We'll have to see if people talk about product or talk about the competitive nature of musicians, but I look forward to it either way.

Jeff: I'm looking forward to it. Thanks, man. Bye.

Josh: Thank you. Bye.