Michael Park - LaunchPod
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Jeff: [00:00:00] All right, Michael, thanks for joining us today, man. I'm really stoked to have you on the show. You wrote a really cool paper on six lessons to scale product from zero to 25 million ARR. I got a whole bunch of questions I want to ask you about that, but first of all, just thanks for coming on the show.

Michael: Oh, thanks for having me. I appreciate to be here. So

Jeff: Yeah, this could be a blast. We always like to start with a little bit of a warmup before we jump into it. So my favorite question, this has been one of my kind of favorite experiences I get to do. I'm sure you have somewhere in your family, right? Maybe an uncle or an aunt or a grandma, or like maybe you have kids who don't also have that background in tech and product, I'd say is even a little bit harder to describe at times in marketing.

So like, how do you describe to that non tech person in your life? What product management is what is product? What do you do?

Michael: Sure. That's a great question. First of all, I do is I take tech out of it just to begin, I'm like, I build things. I build widgets, cause they understand that in the conventional way I had in my career. The first part of my [00:01:00] career, like at least getting my feet wet, I built hard goods, so first I start with builders, I support builders building a product to get to market. It happens to be a digital product. So don't let that freak you out, aunt Carol, and And so once, once she can, once aunt Carol can understand about the widget that I build I get to actually talk about the technical side of it, how unlike a hard good, when I used to build hard goods and publishing products, I used to have inventory out in the warehouse.

And so my general manager would say. Say you made a mistake. You ordered too many, what you thought was hot, or you listen to that buyer who led you down the wrong way. You have too many widgets in the warehouse. I start to talk about the kind of the fun of digital, like how do you, what is the equivalent of too many in the warehouse in in, in the digital space, right?

I think that's a fascinating concept, what's over inventoried in tech, and so basically to answer your question simply is, my job and my team's job is to [00:02:00] prevent those who build things from building the wrong thing. When I do my job the best they're building the right thing and we can get into what the right thing is and preventing the wrong thing or over inventoried in the warehouse.

Jeff: I think that's a good way of putting it, right? It ties it to something real that people can understand really well. We had Akash Gupta recently he's a thought leader in the product space. He was, came up through product and now writes about product and makes content.

And he had, A similar way of looking at it where, but he was describing it to his kids in his version. And it was great because he related it back to, the apps you play on the pad when you, we get let you do that once in a while. And I always feel like the best way of describing this is tying it back to the person's context of their life. 

Michael: It's a little bit negative because it's like building the wrong thing. And then it elicits the question. What's the right thing? And that's a great conversation. How do we define the right thing in tech? And we talk in the weird thing tech debt always comes up to cause that's the wrong thing. And it has implications. Again, last time when I was in hard goods, we had a plan [00:03:00] Z and that was like TJ Maxx, when everything failed, we closed it out to the discounters, 

Jeff: Yeah.

Michael: who is the TJ Maxx or the Ross, for tech, and it's the engineers who really feel the blow of Are bad decisions, so yeah, I, I really get that. 

Jeff: Yeah. To carry the metaphor forward, right? Like if you buy something wrong, like in your retail or physical goods and you make something wrong you order too much, you can sell it down to a discounter. You can, there's ways to liquidate your inventory. I feel like the problem with digital is your inventory is more about time than anything else.

And last I checked there is no way to, liquidate out the time that you spent wrong. It's just gone forever. So it's, not higher stakes, but it's definitely different stakes. And there's no kind of way to, to slightly absolve the

Michael: And Jeff, don't you see not just the time spent in, let's say coding in the simplest language, but also the proper care and feeding infinitum until you make the hard decision to cut it, it's both directions. It's time, and my goodness, to be an engineer who [00:04:00] has to care for something. In the code base and there is no passion behind it first with customer or business. That's a burden that is really a burden and often relegated and also and probably so people resentful, like I'm caring for this code base that has no joy or certainly from the marketing side, I don't see it on the glossy flyer, what the heck I get that.

Jeff: Yeah. No, we can talk about a little bit later, but I always go into one of our big tenets here in LogRocket is, money you can raise you can, fix problems, but we are huge on focus. Because you don't get more time. The only way to get time is you can step function do it by hiring people, but that's expensive and has its own problems.

But like with your set team, you have X time. You cannot buy more. There is no privilege that will get it for you or money that will make it appear. So time's valuable. So I love that thought. 

But one other thing I always like to talk about is, I feel like product has gone from this thing that was you and I [00:05:00] are have been doing this long enough to remember like Tom from the movie office space and he was, a product manager and just a joke.

He was a joke of the movie. Now it has become this really hot area to work in and, everything's product driven, product led, but with that has come, product is a hot topic to talk about. Everyone has theories and takes and opinions. And with that, I always like to ask what is one thing in product going on now or a topic or belief or process that people are holding or pushing that you just think is wrong or what's something that you would change in how product is done that you think is just broadly, counter to the best way to do things that you preach and maybe it's counter to the popular opinion.

Michael: So Jeff, I'm going to answer this probably maybe in an unusual way, just a little bit of context for my life. I stepped away, I exited BombBomb in the summer of last year for what I needed was a hiatus, like a sabbatical and I had been now this was my fourth startup and launching. And so your question is [00:06:00] almost.

What I was trying to get some perspective in my sabbatical was this topic, this kind of search for the answer. And yet in my career I'm, sitting in the audience of onstage at Sastr and I'm hearing some of the companies that we respect the most.

And I'm hearing the founders, of course, it's their fourth time, which in and of itself is. Noteworthy. So somehow failure is part of failure is part of success, which is fascinating, not a surprise, but not often, captured. Cause I don't know how that would go but I felt like in the last, eight years, certainly before and during COVID. I felt battered by this, the latest book or the latest podcast. I felt fatigued and I just will say, I'm not separating myself. I jumped into it. I participated, but I got tired of, you know, I just needed some perspective and wanted to get back in my career with, it's some of the motivations on why I wrote this, what, what works, I love this saying.

That [00:07:00] the young and however you want to do that, whether that's age or career or thinking, but the young are very good about things that change and the old are very good about the things that don't change. I love that. And so I took a year off from this topic, like purposely in the middle of that.

Talking about another thing. I have a close family member beginning the process of dying. And so this question, it's just a very, interesting question to me because I've had some time away from the tempo, the thought tempo that I participated in, and I put books on the desks of my team out of the desire to grow both our team and our thinking and our, and of course our revenue.

So I guess in a way, I'm just the answer to your question. I've been away from it from, I don't know, a period of time. And I realized, my goodness, that's a a task master of sorts a standard upon which I always was disappointed that my team or myself or the business wasn't growing to and last thing [00:08:00] on this.

And I'd love to get your comments. Sorry. And I don't mean to be obtuse about answering the question but I always felt like once I jumped in, let's say it was product led growth. By the time I got a modicum of tempo of some sort of quasi mastery. I felt like there was a thought that had was, it was contrary to some of what the hard work that I just got the momentum and just recovering from fatigue, on, on this topic, what do you think about that?

Jeff: the general pace of the amount of kind of information not flying at you from a job in product, but actually about the practices of product itself and how to do it best and how to keep up, a little bit of almost keeping up with the Joneses. So it's really interesting.

I'm gonna, I'm gonna. Relate this back to an experience I just had. , this has been one of those kinds of things that I think in general I've felt and been unable to articulate what kind of what you just talked about is there is constantly talk about , the best practice or the way of doing something or a technique and it took me years of [00:09:00] operating Before I understood this and it's the same in marketing.

There's always some new tool or some new thing or some new technique, right? At first it was, product lead growth and , near bound selling and ABM and and I feel like marketing and product really parallel each other now at log rocket for past six years. I have had the chance to work closely with our product team as well.

I feel like I've been sucked into the hole you just described. We did an event in New York a couple of weeks back with a whole bunch of product leaders from across New York. Just incredible group of people. I was really, super lucky to get to talk with all of them, but we had Jeff Charles from ramp.

He's the VP of product over at ramp. Come in and talk and, famously one of the fastest growing startups in history, if not the fastest, and just there, Velocity and product and their focus on solving problems in such a great way. Is one that everyone there and knew about. And what I found to be the funniest.

Or the most enlightening was people kept asking about specific practices or, Are you agile or you know semi agile [00:10:00] or all these kind of nuances about technique and things you would learn in books And his answer consistent was just like I don't care. I don't know. i'm not sure man.

Like We're focused on solving user problems. We want to discover what are the most important things our users are facing, and we want to solve those problems. And we want to do that quickly and effectively, and we want work to be high quality. And that's what we do. And we think that works really well.

And what was great though, was you saw almost this like burden lifted from the shoulders of so many people as if I actually talked to non you who's the head of product over at linear and he was on the show a couple weeks ago and he was there that night as well. It's fine. I caught up with him after this talk.

And one of the main things he said is listen, ramp is a thousand people you know, linear is about 60. And he was like, it's great to hear because what he's describing is how we operate right now. At, 60 people. And it's great to hear that this is something I don't need to worry about.

What we're doing now can scale to a thousand people. As long as we focus on solving [00:11:00] user problems. And that's great because now I don't need to worry as much about. Am I doing these things right? I can focus on solving user problems. And I think that's the biggest thing, it's just solve the problems.

Michael: resonate so deeply with what you just said. And one of the things that guides me in this process and it would guide a team, I'll just, I'll read you this quote, cause I think it really speaks, it's, it says the secret is there's no secret

Jeff: Yeah.

Michael: consistency.

Over intensity, progress over perfection, fundamentals over fads, over and over again. There's parts of that I could pull apart, as we should, but I think some of the things is that, Is there, there's a real, there's a real energy in what you just said. And some of this language to keep going and to keep solving and stay focused on the primary target.

And that is to surprise and delight customers or the future customers, wherever we are in the, in our life cycle, 

Jeff: yeah. There, there is no tool that's going to magically solve it. There's no book that's going to [00:12:00] magically solve it. It was actually just to stay on this topic for one more minute. I have a colleague who I talk to, very regularly. And one of our big discussion points is there's these couple companies that always appear that.

Have growth above and beyond anything else in the market. Just come on the scene and, like ramp is one of them, right? They came on the scene and just out of nowhere, zero to a hundred million in error are, and then 200 million. And just what seems like almost zero amount of time.

And you look at and go like, how did they do that? And we had this consistent. argument back and forth, me and this person about how and their gut feeling was like they, they found one channel that really worked well and they were able to sit there and throw money into it or throw resources into it and really just scale it.

And I, that didn't hit with me. I don't ever think there's a magic bullet that didn't. Make sense to my brain. And the great part was having Jeff there and talk about this. I think I realized it definitely wasn't that he talked about how deeply they're obsessed with, every deal they lose, they go [00:13:00] through and understand why they lost it, how did it relate, what happened, what was it feature was a sales process, et cetera.

And then they bucket these things and look at their product every month of like, how do we solve these user problems so that they don't, so we never lose that way again, and it's just. I think the magic bullet is like you said, it's consistently caring and grinding and just keeping on top of that and just iteratively getting better over and over. 

Michael: Let's go a different direction. So like we're using as we should, I am not naive revenue or pace of revenue as a success metric as we should, we hear it for business, but what about the business who grew not as fast, but is cashflow positive. And their focus is on their team.

And that, how about the business? Let's say I call it blue collar SaaS. Where about blue collar SaaS that if you, that it may not grab the attention of most, but the engineering team, the product teams are content and growing in their career and their tenure is breaks the norm, right? It [00:14:00] isn't in the one to two years it's in the four to six years.

I think if we were to hear that someone would be like, what's wrong with those employees? Are they not go getter? So I love the revenue as a metric, but what about contentedness? What about growth? What about the feelings? I believe we I believe the best employees I've worked with in 25 plus years are those who feel and see directly their contribution To where the business is moving or the founder's moving, we could use all of these interchangeably.

So that, that's another thing that speaks to this. And so when we look at, back to my point, fads and books and the latest topic. Does have the ability to fatigue the ground troops, the builders, and we as leaders have a responsibility to prevent out of our own, maybe idleness and yeah, for just that, that we need to grow.

We need to grow. I just, I've learned through hurting. The feelings of people, people can only go as fast as they can go, and when a new [00:15:00] book comes in, I remember a PM of mine where a new book came in and the look on her face, I thought was going to be like, thank you so much. It was resentment.

It was resentment. And. I have a responsibility there as a leader to hold my, what I think is the next good idea and really think about that deeply. Because there can be fatigue there.

Jeff: I think this goes back to right when you're, to goals. It's okay if the goal is you're going to build a company that's going to be great to work at and you're going to, build a little bit slower maybe, but it's going to be, fantastic work life balance and you're going to get to the same point.

Or your goal might be, we're going to build the fastest growing startup in the history of the world. Neither of those are bad goals. It's just. You got to have a goal you got but I think the biggest thing is how do you communicate that to the people you bring on so you bring on the people like you bring on the people who want that, um, not to keep going, but so this was a very recent event and Jeff was unbelievably impressive and had some great things to say, but he talked about when he's hiring people in part of it is being [00:16:00] really communicative, almost anti selling.

This is going to be hard. We expect this is pace. If you want those things you want to achieve really fast and be just super driven and obsessed. Come here. If you don't, this is probably not the place for you. And I've tried, that's something I've tried to do historically as well with hiring our SDR team being, or, growth people or anyone in the marketing being very clear about.

expectations. And you can, as long as you're hiring the people who want that, you can't make people want those things, but you can hire for the people who want the same things that you do.

Michael: Remember when we heard years back, 10 years back, I've got, it's probably even longer, but remember when we first heard the Zappos model where they paid employees to leave, because. It wasn't about paying people to leave, which it was, but it was about it's the spirit of what you're talking about.

It is this, rather than selling in, it is like selling out, and as a result, I guess that really challenged the predominant MO, and it really said, really use this type of language to get people who are clear on the vision. And [00:17:00] also there's a part of them that goes, yeah, I want that, let's go, so that's, I love that.

Jeff: It's the same way, right? Where again, Jeff from ramp saying, Oh, we don't care about that stuff. We're not worried about the latest trend of product or like agile versus semi agile. We solve user problems. We're focused on doing it quickly and high quality. That's all we care about. And just seeing the burden lifted from all those people at the event going Oh, it can be that simple.

It's the same way. Where it removes the stigma of, opting out of a company. Cause one of the big stigmas is money, right? You don't have a job. You don't have the money to pay for your life. If you're not, in the very fortunate position to be able to take time off without pay. So it removed that downside risk or that stigma.

It made it okay to opt out if it wasn't the right place for you which I thought that was genius.

Michael: Absolutely. Totally

Jeff: It was so smart. So Michael, I'll be honest. I could go on and on about this forever. But you also wrote this paper that I really want to talk about. So let's we're gonna we're gonna switch gears on this and dive right in because there's six points.

I don't think we're gonna cover all six. But there's a couple in here that I [00:18:00] thought really hit home with me. And I want to hear more about them, please. So a For everyone who's listening, you wrote the paper called six lessons to scaling a product from zero to 25 million ARR. Who'd you write it for?

Is this for the new product leader? Is it more for people who maybe are like on that path, but want to get to be leadership? And was this knowledge you wish you had going into your first product leadership role?

Michael: I think after the fact it, I discovered a lot of different audiences, but initially like what was the impetus that created like the front end momentum to write it. It was for me, it was out of my insecurity. I'm on sabbatical. I've been very focused in my career and building my career.

And I find myself, I'm a on a self imposed. Sabbatical and hitting the wall of, Oh my gosh, did it matter? Honestly. And I think it's important as a leader, as a chief product officer that to communicate absolutely same [00:19:00] insecurities, what do I do now? My goodness. You hear about this. I walk, I got, I get the job of walking the dog in the morning.

So I, I meet up at the park with a couple of retirees, and I found myself going, when you retire, did you lose your mind? As we hear people do, but to go from on to off, especially in. That kind of zero to one startup culture tempo. It's almost like a, it's a, an adrenaline, so I've, I started to dip a little bit and remember I talked a little bit about the fads and so I started to ask the question here, what do I know for sure?

What do I know? And again, not as a kid. I can't be the one who said there is no secret I that's not my intention. I wanted to speak it very introspectively What worked in my experience? That I can Rebuild a little bit of confidence that what I did mattered because I think it always comes back to people And who did I help and who did I serve whether it's customers or those on my team?

And so that [00:20:00] was the motivation After getting it out there and having response, I've had product founders who are in the process of saying, is this the time to bring in the new product leader? When is the right time? I've had product leaders saying, I love product, but I can imagine being maybe doing ahead of product.

What, where do I begin? So that was secondary and tertiary, but the first was really to really step back because it's, listen, it's a privilege to be off and have a sabbatical. I know that everyone has that. And I didn't want to squander the time and I wanted to say, let's just do some reflection on what I think was successful and what I found to be true.

So that, that was the motivation on it.

Jeff: Nice. Cool. With that, lesson one gets right into it, right? There's no intro here. There's no fluffy kind of broadness. You are right into lessons. And number one is transitioning from founder to new product leader and product market fit. And maybe this shows just the type of company I've been at or my background [00:21:00] of where I have had my experience, but is this something that, that you see commonly where a product leader is brought in pre product market fit?

I've always. Thought of this and maybe it's my own bias thinking here, but I've always thought part of the job of being a founder is, you are the owner of that vision. So don't bring anyone in until you've got PMF. If you're not there yet, you're not gonna be able to hire someone who's going to get you there better than you can.

Michael: Yeah, and you're right there, by the way I think that, but I think, listen oftentimes when a product leader is brought in, At least in my experience in my, I can't speak, but in my experience, there's a little bit of fatigue and resentment in the founder in the entrepreneur.

It's like a key ingredient I'm looking for. I love parts of it. I'm being told, and we'll probably get into this when we talk about founder mode. I'm being told by my board or even my close or even my, my, my CEO group. I'm being told going back to that fads and expectations. I'm being told I should do this.

And there [00:22:00] lies in what I was trying to get in the article is how do we keep the very best parts of the founder? How do we keep this vision that you spoke to? Let's just call it the heart as a placeholder. How do we keep the heart? And yet the place that they find draining and taxing how do you supplement, not take over, but supplement, and that's the key verb difference,, it is just to add to, and yes, I agree with you.

The founder who. Was initially motivated by the idea, but also I think even more important is the closest in that moment to the customer. Thinking almost like this ability that, you could ask. So what do you think the customer is going to do? Either they were the customer, either they're one of those very skilled entrepreneurs who can have that sixth sense of it.

We've all met this, he or she who can like to smell what the customer is. But I think it's all the same. It's their proximity and understanding of the customer is very close. So to remove that from the organization, to the product, especially the building effort, marketing efforts. That would be a [00:23:00] miss.

And my question to you is what is PMF? First of all, when do we know we have it? Okay. That's the first question in it. And my article was talking about what do you do when you're bootstrapped? What do you do when you're, when funding's limited, how do you know that you're on the right path, whether it's the founder or whether it's the early product leader?

How do you know? Because I have been able to get to the point of data maturity that can say, which was a glorious day, but it took a long time. Years to say, now they're going to come in the funnel here and they're going to try these three things, which if they continue to do these in this, in a span of 30 days, we know that they're more likely to not churn and to retain.

That is really sophisticated. And the moment you do it in Excel, you're going to have someone on the finance team, even someone on the engineering team say, how do we know that though? We know that.

Jeff: I'm sure we,

Michael: Do we, how sure are we on these numbers? How, do we have user data and sales data connect?

Just do we have financial data and [00:24:00] user behavior connected really though? And so it depends what hardening of product market fit do you ask? And I was trying to really get to what does someone do in the beginning to take heart and to keep going and keep building in the right direction.

I

Jeff: think it's fair. There is a point at which. You need a product leader and I read this in the context of almost, you can bring in an outside one, or I've had been to companies where actually the founder brought in a CEO so they could focus on product, but then they also brought in a product leader, like a VP of product.

And that job was more about the operational running of the product team, not. The vision I think that back to our early conversation, like there is no magic bullet. It's right. If you're focused on solving user problems, what's the org that's going to set up to, to do this the best way. And that might be bringing someone to help you run product.

It might be, bring in a CEO kind of executive head to help you run the company. I think it's gonna be different for everyone. And probably the core [00:25:00] thing is how do you look at what you need and understand where your strengths and weaknesses are and, What allows you to crystallize your vision that clearly got you to where you are and keep the company going forward.

Michael: To synthesize. It is a really important time in a scaling business when the founder, she comes in with the vision. She's has the relationships with the customer. She has built a product that customers are renewing, and now for whatever the reason She believes that she needs to take parts of the product role and needs to bring someone who can care for it exclusively Allowing her to get on to other parts of the business.

I think what we're saying though you have to be very specific very selective on your choice here Because I tried to capture it in that article. You have engineers who are in a lot of ways, the technical founders in that scenario who have developed a very strong working relationship with her.

And so if you come in and do that [00:26:00] unwisely you might attrit, some of the people who know the code base the best, and it's not about knowing the code base, which is important. It's about. Being able to get to quick solutions for customers the fastest and not having this long tail, so it's a really precarious time and something I encourage founders.

To have , some criteria on. And I discussed that in the article for the sake of time, we'll be getting it. But one of them is bounce back factor. So this new product leader has to have this bounce back factor that I've seen early founders and entrepreneurs. They just have this innate ability to lose and bounce back.

There's not a long post mortem. And so there's some key personality traits that you want to look for in a leader to help basically achieve your goal of, I want them to tackle parts of this while I do other parts of it. So I'm a big advocate of that. The right hire in that moment, no professional manager in that moment, taking it over.

I would wonder why the founders retreating anyway, that would actually be a red flag for me. Why is there a retreat in the early phase of the business from this in a [00:27:00] way I should expect as a product leader to have to, wrestle with you in a one on one taking parts of it away. That's more common.

And I think that's health. In that.

Jeff: So right there brings us to, you brought professional manager and that I think is a good segue into one of my, favorite topics to, to push on lately. , the idea from Paul Graham and Brian Chesky and that whole crowd of like founder mode. And does this kind of concept of bringing in a product leader, especially that early in the org.

Does that kind of run counter to that idea of founder motor? First of all what is your thought on this whole idea? Before you even get into the applications in this context.

Michael: I'm more positive on founder mode from my experience. But again, there's such nuance in it. It's a language topic, right? Mostly in my experience in the phases of business that I've worked in, which is, it would be in the front, this is just, This is something that I have seen for me as a benefit, is this in every aspect of every department involved.

And again, going back to my earlier comment, there's an easy way Letting go of the reins to a [00:28:00] professional manager, first of all, in my experience, that doesn't happen a lot. It happens maybe like you said, maybe the CEO, maybe it is if they're kind of a sales and marketing driven founder, they might, say, Ooh, we, I got us here through hustle.

But I need some process. I don't understand, it depends, but usually that's the motivation. It's structural, right? So it's more, could we call that maybe more head, and they have the heart. And first of all, when a founder is. Aware that there's a shortcoming, or maybe, like I said they've failed a couple of times in business and promised themselves.

I will not delay. I will supplement where I'm weak. First of all, there's tremendous self awareness and strength there. That's someone who I want to follow, but I've always been a person who still invites the founder. Never struggled with it.

I've seen the power of it. But as a professional manager. I've always welcomed that input because it is my rocket fuel in the first, I don't know, year of being a product leader to get some momentum because they [00:29:00] have pretty good instincts. Now, what happens, and I discussed this in the paper is when there is some efficiency in the product team. The founder begins to, I've seen a couple of times in my experience, retreat from the customers or voice of customer begins to diminish. And I think this is the real concern. And now you're like, what is your, what's your system within the organization now for bringing voice of customer into roadmap, basically.

That's really producty terms, but what are the customer sayings and how do you know that they want what you're building? And I think this is where the retreat of the founder, I get a little sensitive because someone needs that and we need to make it a process. And what happens when your product team has seven teams running, and a hundred engineers how do we do that again?

That's a little overly simplistic, but those are some of my concerns that I've seen.

Jeff: my problem with the general essay was it's a little too binary and a little too reliant on, the Brian Chesky level founder. Yeah. You're Steve Jobs. You're Brian Chesky. Yeah. Yes but how many of us have [00:30:00] had the fortune to be born with those skills or that, be in a position to develop those skills.

Beyond that, maybe it's me in my role as a hired in executive chafing at the idea of calling , professional managers some of the best liars around. But I, so maybe there's just, 

Michael: my feelings. I hurt my feelings.

Jeff: maybe it was a little bit like, Ooh, ow, knife in the back there.

But really I think what it is, but if you find that you've hired managers who Gaslighting you and are lying and are not doing what's

Michael: You hired wrongly.

Jeff: You hired wrong. This is not I think the answer is, and this came up, we had Akash Gupta on who, who writes a lot about writes a lot about products and he was a product leader, he was VP of product at Apollo.

He came up through like multiple companies. He was a founder at one point. And we had this, and he has this great three archetypes of product leaders and I think that maps very well to other functions as well, where. It's not, I think founder mode is a good thing to have on a spectrum, but it's also understanding where you do have trusted managers and where you can pull back a [00:31:00] little bit where you have to be more involved.

And that's probably going to rotate throughout. a lot of the business, but you on top of that, you can't just be founder mode. You also have to hire in people who can help. And part of that criteria I've realized is hire people who care about the solution that you're doing. Like they want to be part of fixing the problem.

Hire people you can trust, but then also if you have found that you're the only one who understands the vision, you need to communicate better as a founder, right? You need to figure out how you communicate to these people. What does great look like? What is the expectation? What is the mission and how does your part fit in so people can make independent decisions without you?

I can't imagine that Chesky is involved in every single minute detail. There's definitely some that rely on people making great decisions in his absence. And that's where I kind of founder mode. I think the paper goes a little too binary. I think in reality, the best places.

Michael: Two things to, I think, to just to add to this, but I, we're same page here. The first thing is, , what I got from the paper and why I'm like, Oh, I'm positive. When my first read of it was, I'm positive because I saw it. [00:32:00] Initially got caught up in the manager thing because this is my role.

But I, when I thought about it, when I thought about it. I really want to go back to, I really think it's the, what I've experienced again, just what I've experienced, I don't know, I can't speak for every business, but what I experienced is there is a temptation for the founder to retreat.

And I really feel for them, they're like, you need to bring in people. And so how much they step away I have a lot of empathy. And like I said, I've seen it done well and I've seen it done poorly like a lot of things. Let's go back to one of my first mentors, Annie Danielson. Here you have someone who is running a business. She is in home decor. She is a creative professional. And she knows through this fatigue, you know, she's hearing from external sources.

She needs to begin to give aspects of her job. Away. Okay. And when Annie was a great mentor of mine when I asked her about because she had to hire me to take out some of it when I asked her, tell me what is that like? [00:33:00] And she said, because the article also speaks that, founders treat like they're, it's like they're children.

And so Annie being a mother, being a professional, being this multi layered human had such a perspective. She said, owning a business, running a business, she had done it for almost 20 years. She said, and also being a mother and having kids at that point, when she's telling me in college. She's as a parent, you go through phases of the child is highly dependent on you.

When I can remember this, I tell my friends with little kids. I'm like, I remember when my, my, my daughter, Laurel wasn't in the room. There's a problem. You're always scanning. Now I just dropped my daughter off in her second year in college. And, that starts to, if you go, if you look at those two extremes from high dependence to independence and of course, making mistakes in both making mistakes early on with too much independence.

And then of course, now, I'm like, Oh, like dad, but coming from Annie It was [00:34:00] so noteworthy that it's hard as parents, we struggle throttling what we give away, what we entrust, what we keep, let alone the parts that I like, that I love, that define me, that give me great joy.

Again, I come back to it's an art. I can't believe that there'd be one approach. I just haven't seen that in any aspect of life, but I thought that the article was trying to speak to maybe removing too much of one's parenting too early from the child, which is not the employees. That's inappropriate to call employees of the business, and the, or the product.

There's a real art there, right? What do you think when you hear that? Like parent, like the parent child versus the business founder analogy.

Jeff: Yeah, I mean as a parent of two very rapidly growing young boys. I still want to make my older one, hold my hand on the way to school, but there's no way in hell he's doing that. Like he's dad, and I get the preteen eye [00:35:00] roll.

My eight year old's riding the cusp of wine to do that. And he'll still do it once in a while. Which is great, I like the idea of the org is the actual child. And , I've been in leadership roles for a while and. I know what Paul is saying here, right?

Like you don't want to step back even within marketing teams. I've been guilty of kind of that, of like great people. And you step back and you give, not enough input maybe or not, or you don't communicate what the mission is or how things are going to work to ladder up to the big company goals.

And you do see it goes askew. I do think there's value. You want the founder involved. The people who understand that you want leadership involved in the people who understand that big mission and that big path that everything done at the IC level that flows up to company growth, you need that guidance and it's changing all the time.

So you need that mission understood. I just, I think the concept is right. It was the kind of way it was described of being very binary and demonizing one half where it's more. You want to build this culture where you're involved and you're pushing people and you're [00:36:00] setting expectations and you're communicating.

But at the same time, you do have to trust, you do have to be on the road of building those skills for the team and for the org, where they can, operate more and more independently. So that you can continue to grow the org on your end as well. Like you need the room to work, you can be working in the business or on the businesses, like the kind of trite thing to say, and you need the room to work on the business, but you can't do that.

If you don't teach others how to work in the business. So it seems to be like a spectrum is the best way to put it

Michael: If I were to write the article in closing to what, again, just through my lens, through my language, through my lived experience, it would be yeah. On the top of your to do list, founder should be. What is the level of support for this business this week? And let that bring that to your consciousness and bring that to your what's appropriate, trying just like product, trying different things, loosely held ideals changed weekly, strongly held beliefs looked at weekly, you know, as we do in product.

And that would be what I would say is don't [00:37:00] just listen to the board and say, you must retreat so you can get some space back to raise capital. Yeah, in that process of raising capital, you could be doing harm to your business and as the as the org is just not ready yet to listen to voice of customer anyway, 

Jeff: I think there's a lot of opinions that can be talked about. We could, again, go on forever here. I do want to cover one last thing before we're out of time. You talk about roadmaps in your paper here, and this kind of balance between rigid and squishy.

First off, before you dive in, can you explain Rigid, squishy, what they mean, and how do you balance or solve for the right style there?

Michael: The trigger warning on the roadmaps is roadmaps, do we like roadmaps or do we not like roadmaps? That's really, am I, are they good or bad? I don't know where we are right now, as of October the fourth, I, I don't know where they are, but listen, but on the serious note.

Why is it that every org, it's the one of the first deliverables from a new product leader that they're looking for? Because I think it's one of the, it's the impetus of why they're hiring someone is we got to get our stuff together. No one knows what's happening. And that's typically it's in again, [00:38:00] talking about how we exacerbate, there's two departments.

Or two efforts, excuse me that when there is no roadmap, formal roadmap, it is the marketing team. And then consequentially the sales team going, we don't even know that these features exist. And yet we're trying to differentiate, in sales calls, so this is getting frustrating. Okay.

So that's one. Exacerbation. The other one is the, whoever supports the customer success, saying, we didn't even know this feature was built. This of course, isn't the most extreme, and so normally when they hire a product leader, which the paper was focused in on was like, that's the problem to solve, but like anything, I think this is the theme of our time together, Jeff is there's a pendulum on both sides to be an error, and this is this squishy versus rigid, let's just tackle rigid, what I really want to communicate. And I think this will help is executive driven time bound. That's a key one right there. Time bound releases have a side effect. And they are appropriate in times [00:39:00] again, when the executive team is close to the engineering team, they can.

feel and empathize with some things, but\ if that posture is too long, there are some side effects, and in the paper, I talk about some of those side effects for the side of time, I think there's an innovation drop, because the engineers don't get to participate in the solution and resentment fits in for many reasons.

So that's one idea. So when I say rigid, I mean, time bound business determined apart from the engineers in the room, the product team in the room on the squishy is usually in my experience was when we did the opposite, we had a agile was in full motion, we were shipping things, we were like, like everybody else, Oh, Spotify ships, Amazon ships every 12 minutes, That's great.

And good and Amazon, you're amazing. 

Jeff: And when you're a trillion dollar company, maybe you can also do that.

Michael: great, it's it's aspirational. We actually started shipping good stuff, seven product teams in my experience in my last effort. Every two weeks shipping great stuff and you know what, who started, it was the marketing team going, Oh my God, [00:40:00] okay, listen, I am so frustrated because There's so much stuff here, but I have no idea what's coming out, and let alone, like I said, so it, this is, it's a pendulum swing. \ But at the end of the day, it's do you need a roadmap? Absolutely. You need a product roadmap between the luster of two evils between rigid and squishy. I'm going aversion.

I'm just saying this, bring the builders into the room. Let them participate in it. I love this. A mentor said this people don't fight against their own ideas. Let them participate. People don't fight against their own ideas. Let them participate in the crafting. You're going to get a lifting contribution from the team.

The builders will have an input. You're going to get innovation better than keeping them out of the road map and what's defined. And more importantly, your supportive teams are going to know what's happening and do the best they can to really, because engineers eventually here's what I don't know if you've experienced this through marketing at the end of the day, who's going to get disappointed is going to be your engineers going, we're building this stuff, but it's not being used.

Jeff: Or we don't know why [00:41:00] we're building it.

Michael: And we don't know why we're building it. We got to solve that. That and that, that is the product leader's responsibility to make sure that's clear and that there's a process and a system behind that is, is what I was trying to capture.

Jeff: Yeah. And I think that makes sense. And there, there's a spectrum. And I would say, at the same time you started to get, you talked about getting sales and marketing kind of going we don't know what is going on. I think, the solve there is one interesting thing I've realized is product Is not just the job of product, right?

If the whole company is not obsessed with solving this problem you're probably doing less than you could, right? Like I, I meet with our product leader. Who's also our CEO and co founder at this point. Matt, I'm, I talk to him every single day. I listen to sales calls. I'm talking to prospects and customers.

I have feedback for him on product. I'm talking to product managers. I have feedback for all of them on product, to point probably of, of annoying them at some level. I talked to our sales org too and pull insights from there. , but I think , the job there is [00:42:00] distilling on the product side.

The job is distilling that as a stakeholder and making the right decisions, taking that into account, but not just blindly listening to that, you want to listen to the market, but other, but vision as well. But I do think the org here operates better because, product is We have a capital P product leader, but product is the job of the org and everyone needs to be, using their vantage point of the org to, to make it

Michael: love

Evangelism right there. Like in a nutshell, when they, when you look at a scorecard for a CPO for VP of product, it says product evangelism. That's really the spirit of it. Is for example, one of the things that's great. One of the questions you had was what is a tool that you use?

We use Cora say I, and when on an eight, we hear something with the, just a customer. They would say a code word that would instantly kick that transcript to the product team and product board that they would have to listen to. Again, that is a beautiful example of a sensitivity from the AE level to solve one of their problems.

We're not competitive on features here. So that's the problem they need to solve. Cause I'm not getting deals, but then using systems and [00:43:00] technology to get that in front of the people who decide what are we building and when are we building it,

Jeff: No I, we use gong here. Same idea, just

Michael: same thing.

Jeff: Different tool. And I've said like after having this, I won't ever work at a company that doesn't have something like that again, because, it's great that we've also built a culture where AEs surfaces stuff to me and they'll come to me and say, Hey, I just had this call.

I think this is a shortcoming. Cause they know I'll then go, discover with them. It's important push to product, but they know I'm a pain in the ass. So they'll come to me and let that, let me advocate there. But also I'm listening to calls. Like it's based on my podcast half the time when I'm not, Listen to other podcasts.

I treat that as one of my podcasts to listen to, to stay informed. But no, I think the point you made about they'll move faster. We had a woman named Nancy Wang on several, months ago. She's the SVP of product over at Hilton Grand Vacation. She talked about this actual process of moving from, I think exactly what you described is if you looked in the dictionary next to rigid, it would be what she talked about as the previous iteration, which was very like she called it led plan, build, run.

And they moved to much more kind of product led and [00:44:00] having, they're not PLG, but like product led in how they were building to build, and listening to users and customers. And. IT pushback and engineering pushback at the beginning saying Oh, this is going to take more time to be slower, but then they were bought in.

It was better features. The customers were more engaged and engineers quickly realizing this is fantastic. Like we're listening to, we understand what we're doing and why we're building it. , and, her feedback was very quickly. The whole business saw they were moving quicker. 

Michael: And that's just a Testament to her leadership. That's that speaks to Nancy's leadership and being a really gifted leader.

Jeff: yeah, and she'll say it wasn't just her, right? It was the head of I. T. who was willing to give up, that part of it. It was the CEO who understood the value is the, just again, that leisurely understanding at heart, a company is about product. , you have to distribute it.

That's, marketing. You have to sell it. You have to, there are steps you need to do, but. At heart, I feel like the point of the company's being is to solve these problems. And that's product. Michael, I'll be honest. This is what's been one of the most fun episodes I've

Michael: Really? Okay.

Jeff: I could keep going for a long time here.

Michael: Energy's good. No,

Jeff: yeah, I'm a bit of a talker

Michael: Me [00:45:00] too.

Jeff: noticed, but I think we're kindred spirits there, but

Michael: We are.

Jeff: want to not steal your entire day. Um,

Michael: Passion.

Jeff: Yeah, I love this. Like I love, how do you build a great product and the company around it to solve, to solve problems?

Like my firm belief is if you're solving problems for people, if you're distributing it, if you're doing a good job of messaging it and people understand what you're doing, why you solve their problem and you're there and they trust you and you're selling it not at a stupid price. And you're going to be successful at the heart of it.

It has to be a great product. You have to solve a really important problem first and the rest has to coalesce around that. And if you can do that. That's success. And so I love this stuff. So I'm so happy I get to do this, regularly, I get to talk to people like you, and this has been a blast, man.

We got to catch up again soon, but if people want to pick your brain more, find out a, first of all, read the paper, go onto Michael's LinkedIn, read the paper, it's there. It's great. Six lessons to scaling a product from zero to 25 million. It was a really good read. I it's quick, but it's informative, if people want to follow up, is LinkedIn the best way to find your, or how can people get in touch?

Michael: Yeah. LinkedIn is go to the park, but also personal kind of [00:46:00] CV websites. Dub, go to the park. me. Last name is Michael Park. So go to the park. Yep.

Jeff: Awesome. I love it. I love the cleverness there. I thought that was really cool too. All right, man. It's great to have you on. Thank you. Hopefully you can come on again.