ethically-cheat-your-way-25m-mikal-lewis-launchpod-final-v2
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Mikal Lewis: [00:00:00] Basically ethical cheating is if there is a solved problem, cheat, and most of the problems that we have are solved. And if you have the willingness to apply some abductive thinking to find out what industry has this same problem, what periods in time may be historically had a similar problem or similar challenge, and how did they solve it?

Jeff Wharton: Welcome to Launch Pod, the show from Log Rocket, where we sit down with top digital and product leaders. Today we're talking with Mikel Lewis, a digital product leader at Whole Foods, who's driven hundreds of millions of dollars of additional revenue over his career. In this episode, Mikel talks about why you should absolutely cheat to drive outsized returns for your products, his framework that allowed him to drive over a quarter billion dollars of additional revenue at Nordstrom.

How to use the four types of luck to drive opportunity in your career. And how you can build a quiet portfolio so that you can pick your career moves and not the other way around. Here's our conversation with Mikel Lewis. Alright. Hey Mikel, how you doing? Thanks for joining us today. 

Mikal Lewis: I'm doing great, Jeff.

How are you? [00:01:00] I'm doing great. I'm 

Jeff Wharton: stoked to have you on. Uh, I think this could be a good one because you don't have necessarily the most common background for PM or you know, you got here in an interesting way. You're from Baltimore, worked your way up and started in a non. Product setting, but I guess you wanna talk through that.

I know you came from Baltimore and that kinda defines a lot of how you view, how you've pushed through to get here. 

Mikal Lewis: Yeah. I joke and I say sometimes my approaches are a little bit uncommon. I promise if you pull all the African American product leaders from Baltimore, my approach is very common for that demographic, as you mentioned from Baltimore.

And every city has its own personality, and I think one of those kind of key elements of, uh, being from Baltimore is, uh, just blue collar ethic and this understanding that for all the challenges that you may face when you turn and speak to the next person. They are going through the same thing or perhaps even more.[00:02:00] 

And it's this kind of quiet understanding that you really just need to continue to iterate your way and work your way forward. And it's a day by day. And that is the measure of progress. And originally from Baltimore, went to Florida a and m for undergraduate and graduate school and business, and that was a really great experience, but also as a part of the that process.

You get a number of experiences before you graduate, and I found myself fast approaching graduation and looking at my experience and saying, I want to get into tech, but I have no tech experience. How am I gonna make this happen? So I took what to me, seemed like a very rational approach, and I partnered with some friends and started a college textbook exchange for the FSU Florida a and m.

Tallahassee community college kind of market. It learned a lot about how to do [00:03:00] software wrong. My first kind of deep experience did a digital marketing strategy and, but a funny thing happened is Microsoft was recruiting at that time, staffing up their search team for really paid search account management.

And here I am with a resume that highlights leading marketing programs and diving deep into S-E-O-S-E-R-P and SEM in order to launch a textbook exchange. That was a really great kind of fortuitous entry point that kind of, I think taught me early on that there's benefits in just like working the problem.

Jeff Wharton: Yeah, no, it's funny because that's a very fortuitous situation, but at the same time. I think there's a lot of, a experience is always, I learned how to do things by doing it wrong. I feel like it's so much of experience. Second piece of that is you have in general, a really kind of interesting take on types of [00:04:00] luck and looking at it more than just, oh, I got lucky, but there's a structure.

How you think to luck. Maybe let's go through that. 'cause I love the four types of luck and how that works into career here. 

Mikal Lewis: Yeah. 

I came across this book. Called Chase Chance and creativity by an author James Austin. And as I came across it, it made sense backward looking for some of the elements of my career, but I really gained a lot of value when I started to apply it forward looking.

Mm-hmm. And the way to think about it is that there's any outcome that happens. There's a degree of success that is far outside of your control. You can break it down, and the author is this physician who talks about all the advancements that they've uncovered or been a part of and tries to pinpoint like the source of what happened.

One of them is from like their dog and dissecting lymph n lymph nodes or something along those lines. And that led to an, that was a wrong pass that led to a breakthrough like later on. [00:05:00] But he is really dissecting and trying to get to the root, and he found out that there's these kind of four sources of luck.

Mm-hmm. One is just blind luck. I call this just luck from being in the game like you are alive. There's a certain amount of luck that sometimes happens, the meeting gets canceled that you're not, don't feel prepared for or just, it just happens. Uh, and the second type of luck I think of there's this band called Cherry Wine.

Mm-hmm. And they have a song, I think called Freak Gospel. And the chorus goes, you gotta be there to be lucky. And that's what crosses my mind, like the type two luck is like when you show up, when people talk about like some percentage of luck is just showing up. That said type two, type three is when you develop a subject matter expertise and a perspective about something that allows you to have judgment to recognize when luck or when something has shifted, so that you can find luck and find opportunity moments [00:06:00] just from that.

And then the fourth type of luck is the luck that comes from luck finding you. So this is when you are so well known or you develop such an innate skill and a reputation for that skill, that luck has a tendency to find you because people who are in market for either that skill. That type of luck that you have, they intentionally seek you out so that you end up with a disproportionate amount of those opportunities on your doorstep.

So it's kind of matching between you working with search marketing and everything like that, and Microsoft recruiting around that same topic. That's probably more like the type three there, huh? Yeah. Yes. Now that I think about it, when I was approaching it at the time, it was really type two, which is, I want this outcome.

I don't know what the best path is, so I'm going to do something. And the, something that seemed the most sense was, since I don't have tech experience, I'll hire myself to give myself some tech experience. And that [00:07:00] just ended up being aligned with what Microsoft strategy at that time. So it was really interesting.

Nice. From that, I think we obviously chatted a little bit before, before today, and one thing that struck me is your journey through your career has been focused on, now that you've catalyzed around this. Kind of idea, how do you build more in the category of type four? So how do you set yourself up for more Type four luck?

Maybe talk about that a little bit. Like how have you worked through your career intentionally to give yourself more chances there on the type four category? I love this question and I'm actually gonna answer this question. My first starting with the product because I find that applying this type four luck to my products has really been a strong catalyst to other parts of my career.

So one way that I think about type four luck as it relates to product is how can I make my products attract luck? Like in that luck being outsized returns. If you think about in any work environment [00:08:00] or just in any marketplace in a role like product management, there's a greater number of people who want to be product managers who actually have the foundational skills to be product managers than the industry will hire at any point in time.

So the difference between myself and another product manager is going to be come down to often how well have I been at moving the needles for my product? So the first element of my career and how do I move it forward? I want to have lucky products that deliver outside results relative to my peers, relative to the industry, relative to the competition.

And when I thought about this, I thought about it with some intentionality and mm-hmm. I wrote out a statement of an area of exploration and diving deep that I would do, and so I wrote, I'm exploring technology at the intersection of design business. I'd done some additional coursework in design, worked with great design teams earlier in my career at Microsoft Business.

That was my foundation, [00:09:00] but I added this element of philosophy. To that mix as well. And I had not studied much, if anything, a philosophy at the time that I wrote this statement back in the aughts. But what that gave me was a clear area of focus, and I like dove deep in knowledge and kind of lessons from there.

Mm-hmm. And what that uncovered was because not many people in the product management discipline were pulling insights from this intersection. I was able to find insights and bring to my product. That were the domain of philosophy, like mm-hmm. What is good as opposed to the domain of science, like where there's an explicit right or wrong, or like you can actually use the scientific method to reason into a right or wrong.

And so what that allowed me to do is with many of my products, I tried to seek out where there were right answers, like where there could be a successful product. The industry [00:10:00] had a blind spot and was ignoring. And a lot of that came from my foundation's highlighting philosophy. And what that allowed me to do is like early in my career, I wrote some strategy papers during my time at Windows Media Center at Microsoft, advocated very strongly for the ship towards internet television.

It, it was during a time, like right when YouTube was taking off long form, television was not like present, prevalent in a streaming capacity. These kind of insights came from building out the skillsets of finding right answers that might have been otherwise ignored, and from that developed a number of product successes and a number of product wins.

But I kept with that sharpening angle that like my skillset is delivering atypical success in challenging environments. So finding the products that were either underdeveloped or facing challenging [00:11:00] circumstances and finding the opportunities both in strategy and aligning teams to deliver those two outside of return.

Jeff Wharton: Now I'm curious to get your take on this. 'cause one thing, my background is more in marketing and I realize as I've worked in a product focus company that a lot of how I've thought about building marketing teams and marketing systems has been very product oriented. Uh, so a lot of the thinking like.

Fits with how I've looked at this, but at least there I've found oftentimes the opportunity isn't always in the things that we know are right, but it's in the things that either other people think are wrong, that we are able to figure out are right, or the areas where maybe someone thinks is right and we realize what everyone thinks is right is actually wrong and, and there is a different, right.

Almost like when there is too much agreement as to something being right. The effect drops off. I think it's, Andy Chen wrote a paper about this idea of the law of shitty clickthroughs, which is as more and more people do something, it becomes just less effective. How does that fit [00:12:00] into this? I know you separately have this idea of ethical cheating.

I think you almost call it, and separately my father-in-law will always say, cheat to win. Yeah. Jokingly, and I worked for A CEO long ago who used to say, don't, don't rebuild the wheel every time. Like you can look at what's working other places and just. Use that. And it seems like that's the idea here is like gaining insights.

Maybe what's right somewhere else can be right here. So I guess what's the view on being different and you know, what the industry thinks is right. Maybe that's not the right answer always. And And how do you get outsized returns? 

Mikal Lewis: I love this because as you're saying, these are perspectives that aren't commonly held or held as norms, but they actually lay at the foundation of even a lot of product management tools.

So you take something like a conno analysis, which is you take all these different features, you place 'em in a quadrants into how well you're doing and how much customers care about it. From that, you identify, there's some things that are table stakes where what does table stakes means basically, as long as you achieve at about the industry [00:13:00] benchmark of this, customers are satisfied and you can move on.

But there's this quadrant of delighters where actually. There's no detected upper limit to how satisfied you can make a customer with this thing. And so that's an area where if you take this concept that you're hitting on and that I'll share more about ethical cheating. You're saving time on these areas that don't matter whether there's a saw solution like the table stakes.

You're saving time, energy, capacity, debates, team friction from there. Mm-hmm. And really over indexing that same investment on the delighters, the things that actually move the needle. And I think I was reading this book called How Google's Works a while back, and I think Eric Schmidt had this comment.

That the outcome of any organization today needs to be improving the quality of its output and the pace of its output. Mm-hmm. And so how do you do increase the quality and the pace of something you [00:14:00] deliver more value faster and yeah. The uh, simple way to do that is through making sure you're spending your decision friction and your decision challenges in areas where it really has impact.

To take that back to the concept of like ethical cheating. This is like one, uh, way of thinking about that concept of business design and philosophy was saying, I want to learn from the best in these domains. I wanna learn about strategy, I wanna learn about human computer interaction and interaction design and philosophy and the management sciences behind it.

So that I can cheat off of them. What I've faced their everyday challenge is that they've already solved day by day, and basically the ethical cheating is if there is a solved problem. Chi and most of the problems that we have are solved. And if you have the willingness to put, apply some abductive thinking, a fancy way, way of saying like lateral [00:15:00] thinking or creative leaps to find out what industry has this same problem, what periods in time maybe historically had a similar problem or similar challenge, and how did they solve it?

What did the winners do? What did the losers do? And you come up with this palette. Of kind of opportunities with some data behind them as terms of. How hard is it to walk this path and what the outside returns are and maybe even some lessons about why it didn't work or why it should, and I think that really being strong at cheating off of the past, off of related industries to solve the problems that you face today or to even change your frame of reference to the approach today.

So that you can truly use your team and insights to solve the unsolved problems. 

Jeff Wharton: So, so far, I think what I'm taking away from our conversation is work hard to be lucky and cheat, to be lucky, but in ethical way. I, I, I love the framework. I think it puts together a [00:16:00] lot of good ways to look at how you accomplish a lot quickly, is don't spend too much time on solve problems.

I think non you over at Linear, we had him over on the show, uh, a little while back. He talks about he was at Everlane, which kind of parallels your time at Nordstrom. He talked about basically like figure out one or two things that are really gonna move the needle and that's all you need to worry about.

Everything else can be duct tape. So we started to cover this. You got into Microsoft on the back of this company that you had started. You wrote a paper that Bill Gates read and passed around the exec team, which is insane at, I think, the number of years of experience you had at that point. And yet despite all this, they still said, you know what, Mikel, we're not gonna give you a product role 'cause you don't have a CS experience.

Well, you did ultimately end up in a product role there. So take us through, how did you, again, build yourself into a position to to luck into a role like that? 

Mikal Lewis: Yeah, I discovered through the wins and as you mentioned, the think week paper and even my time at Florida [00:17:00] and m that I had a, truly had a passion for this space.

Mm-hmm. And something that I really loved about technology is the opportunity to deliver an increment of delight mm-hmm. To millions of users. Uh, so the scale that, like if you improved it, the scale that could happen, I just truly found joy in it. I had written a thick queen paper and had it been submitted, accepted and distributed.

I think I was at the company less than 18 months, and so less than 18 months out of grad school when that happened. And it didn't even seem foreign to me, like, oh wait, I did that. That was, uh, a bold take to do, but it just seemed very natural at the time. Um, but. At the time, Microsoft reserved their product management discipline for people with technical backgrounds.

Mm-hmm. And so as I shaped this experience and hey, hey, I feel pretty good. I've done this. And I was like, Hey, can I move into this product management discipline? And the reply came, or do you have a computer science background? [00:18:00] No. Oh, sorry. Keep it moving. So I found the next closest proxy. I found, uh, this role called product planning, which I've described as product management, but time shifted for three to five years out.

If you think about Windows and office development, at the time, these engineering processes and tools were building products for a world that didn't exist yet. Because you start delivering and you start development on one day and the world, your product's going to exist in Starts Ed. The earliest three years out, probably closer to five, and it's gonna live in market for at least five years.

So you're talking about what is the world gonna look like in a five to 10 year horizon after your product. So mm-hmm. I really enjoyed that role. Um, but one of the things that I really found challenging was when I was not exposed to the consequences of my decisions. So I could write the greatest, and it seemed like it made all the sense in the world to me, but I didn't get to [00:19:00] experience the lessons and experience that comes from if it failed, if I implemented a strategy and it failed or if it succeeded.

And so I did that experience and said, all right, I've done this, approved it strategy and role. I know how to navigate the company. Can I do this product management thing? And do you have a computer science degree? No. Alright, cool. I left and I started a company again with a former Microsoft G and someone who I greatly respect.

John Pincus, a meeting software company, and we did it, did the run. It was founded in a really tough time. Uh, so wound that down and looked for the next opportunity. And I came back and said, Hey look, I have this strategy experience. I've, uh, learned the code. I know how to work with engineers. And they're like, uh, do you have a computer science degree?

No. Like your experience. So we have this closer related role as supportability product manager. So you can do that, but until you have a computer science degree. Yes. So I did that and at the [00:20:00] time I'd seen this is the type three, look, I'd seen the industry shifts. Working in Windows, I'd seen the revitalization of the Mac product and the compounding returns that Apple was having from their design centric approach.

Mm-hmm. And our product development processes at Microsoft at the time were not designed in a way in which it was possible for a well designed product to make its other way out the way I live by that philosophy that a process is perfectly designed to deliver its outcome, and our products did not look great.

Our process was perfectly designed to deliver products that did not have that great human care built in. I went back to school at University of Washington and taken some grad courses in design, and at that point in time I had proven myself in strategy in the business. I had the technical acumen and competency in addition to some additional side projects that I'd done with colleagues at Microsoft getting [00:21:00] deep into data intensive applications.

The third, I had the credentials of design programming in addition to like my own product intuition and design intuition. And at that point in time, Microsoft was really trying to figure out how can they start to build, uh, products with that design embedded in. And so they needed a different type of product manager, one that could factor in the product feel, converse with designers and have strong business strategy.

And so at that point. I ended up with kind of more or less the pick of my opportunities and it was a fun wave. And the thing that a really takeaway is appreciation is the challenges that it took for me to get into the product management discipline became the foundations for what has allowed me to experience success since.

Yeah. 

Jeff Wharton: Well, I mean, you really had to work to manufacture your luck there. You know, I think some people would not even call that luck necessarily, but I get, you know, where it's, it's [00:22:00] making your own luck almost at that point. Um, but it really is, I think there's something to be said for not looking into exactly what is needed right now, but looking down the future and saying, how do I prepare for this future state that I see coming, and I'm going to do that and do the hard work to get there.

And usually that's where the outsized returns are. It's not. Stepping into something that is popular right now. 'cause it's already there. People have already figured out it's already had. It's in marketing channels doing the thing that's really big right now. Everyone's doing it. It's, you gotta be ready for, if you can be first or, or close to first on the next thing you're gonna, like you said, you had your pick of the roles, so you got in, you got the PM role, and then you decided to depart for a entirely different experience where you stepped into, I think what you've called the real world of product management.

Kinda experienced this new world of product that you, that was probably more common, where your every need was not met. The second you had an idea, but you had to, you work through problems yourself. So, you know, you went to Nordstrom. [00:23:00] Tell us about it. What, what drew you in there?

Mikal Lewis: Uh, yes at time that Microsoft was great.

I believe that great product managers learn the craft by working alongside and or being mentored by great product managers. I got that foundational experience at Microsoft. And to your point, I've never in my career had access to as much information, as much knowledge about our customers, about the market, about market trends as I did during the many roles that I had during my time at Microsoft.

So it was a really strong, not only playground, but a foundation for which kind of gave me to view the world. And then I was like, if I keep this up for 20 more years. I might be able to make a decision because just at this scale, it's just such a huge scale that your feature or what you're working on, it's impacting.

Hundreds of millions of people, but because of the scale, [00:24:00] like you're, you have a bounding box for what you're kind of focused on. And so I was describe myself looking for a curve ball. I was looking for an opportunity where I could really expose myself to the outcomes of my decisions, of my perspective.

Mm-hmm. And at the time, Nordstrom was building out its digital product management team, and they had an opportunity that showed up on their product page and. I could do some math, and I said, okay, $4 billion of revenue flows through this product page. If I'm even half as good as I think I am, I'm gonna end up with some big numbers on my resume as an outcome of this if I'm able to deliver results, and I really was fascinated by that opportunity to have connected measurable outcomes between what I do and what I deliver.

I joke about my time. During Windows and saying, what was I going to do, sell the billionth and month copy of Windows with my feature. I was [00:25:00] isolated from the impact of kind of the decisions that we're making and during Nordstrom, in addition to the company culture of obsessing about the company and obsessing about that customer experience, it really brought me close to the customer.

In a really tangible way, and I value that. 

Jeff Wharton: I love how you thought about too, like the move of throughout, you have this kind of concept of a, a quiet portfolio behind what you're building in a career where you did the company, you started in school, you parlayed that into experience at Microsoft and getting all the exposure you could there you went and got design experience from an academic background.

You got into product finally with all this other experience. But throughout this, you were building intentionally. This is not an outward. Portfolio like a designer might have. That's a quiet portfolio that exists. That's building this type four luck for you because you are drawing in and looking at Nordstrom, right?

Oh, I can drive outsized numbers there. I can have a really big effect with large numbers attached to it. That's [00:26:00] being really intentional. But how you build towards, maybe you don't know what you're building towards or you're building towards the ability to pick what you want to do and move forward in your career in ways that are interesting to you.

You're building just the capability to make those choices and to own those choices. 

Mikal Lewis: Yeah. And as specifically as it came to the decision at Nordstrom, the way I like to do things or think about these things is, can I look at this product and find an outsized area before I even join? Mm-hmm. Which is I'm going to start from zero beginner's mind if I decide to join and build up my knowledge from scratch.

But in the event I don't surface anything through that methodology. Do I have an insight that I have right now that I believe has some probability of delivering outsized returns? And the answer was yes, at Nordstrom, which was, yeah, at the time, the e-commerce landscape borrowed, its designed in product metaphors from literally the catalog.

Like you have a homepage, think of it as like the [00:27:00] cover of your catalog. You go into a browse experience, which is the catalog grid. You click on something that has details, and then you add it to your bag and you complete your catalog ordering process. Mm-hmm. And from my experience on various products at Microsoft, but particularly in my time in office.

I had this experience working on products that were designed for productivity as applications, and so I had this insight that like, Hey, the shopping experience has not yet squeezed out. The elements of shopping that are just arduous, non-fun, no value add tasks that when you think about productivity software, you're always trying to to do because the person doesn't care about using your software.

They care about like delivering that report on time. And I think E-commerce at the time had gotten fascinated by the fact that because their best customers really [00:28:00] enjoyed and talked about with joy shopping. They translated that all of the shopping experience was fun and it was desirable and what people liked and didn't obsess as much over, like squeezing out all the kind of mundane work of shopping.

And so one experience where this was clear to me was the process of just finding out if a product was in your size. Mm-hmm. So if you're shopping for boots. And you wear a certain size, you go to a product page, or you go to a a catalog page and you see all the different options. You click on each one and you see all the different colors.

You click on your size and then only two of those colors are in stock. One of them is uh, and not the one that you want. You replay this over and over again, and really what ends up happening is as you squeeze that customer's time. The dollars get squeezed out of your kind bottom line. That customer is gonna run outta time.

Their kids gonna come home from school, they're gonna have to [00:29:00] go and work, make dinner, or they're gonna get sent. TikTok, the funny video that's gonna distract. Their attention, something's gonna happen. We all have these demands on our time, so we have to honor that customer's time and process. And so what we did was we took it to the basics of the Nordstrom experience, which is like, what does a good sales person do?

Mm-hmm. If you go into the sales floor and you say, Hey, can I see these shoes? And the size nine and half? They go to the back, they take back and they come back with your shoe. Okay, cool. And then you find another shoe and they go, Hey, can you gimme this one? And then if the salesperson goes, what size are you?

And you might let it pass. What? And then you come back and you ask 'em to do it again. And they're like, what size are you? You're like, wait, what is going on here? And that was what the web experience was doing. And so we just did something very simple, which was we took inventory of the size selections that people made on the product page.

And using some heuristic logic, we [00:30:00] decided when to pre-select it for the next product page. So you could instantly at a glance, see what the result was and whether or not that shoe was in your color. And we use that same information to make it available upstream. So when you are shopping to browse, could you do the same thing?

And the outcome of this was we did see a conversion lift and we did see a reduction in kind of the time it took. For customers to complete checkout, which was a key performance metric, but ultimately it just made sense. It took out the work from the customers and it was the right thing to do, but that was the insight that came from looking at shopping as a activity in which, right, someone was trying to be productive to accomplish something, and really zeroing in on the friction points in that journey.

Jeff Wharton: Back to what you've brought up earlier. One, you can look at multiple industries and get a sense for, it's good to reduce time. 'cause a, there's a concept even in sales of time kills all deals. [00:31:00] And that's true. Where is multi-month B2B sales process? You wanna compact that 'cause you never know what's gonna happen.

Time kills deals there, but that likely also applies from the standpoint of let's cheat from other industries. That probably also applies there where you say you can get demands from, maybe your kids come home or maybe, uh, someone sends you a video or someone hits you up at work and you need to pay attention to that.

The longer the stretches, you bring more opportunity for distraction. So you just wanna get it done and get out. And the other piece is look to other, maybe not industries in this case, but experiences. This is a solved problem in physical retail. Like you said, they don't come back every time and say, what size do you wear?

What size do you wear? It's solved because it's just not natural to do that in that setting. But it's a good place to go look to cheat from. It's like, how does this work in real life? Why is this, Nordstrom was known for being a, a fantastic shopping experience that their customers loved. How do you mimic that?

How do you steal and cheat from copying Nordstrom physicals test, if you will. 

Mikal Lewis: Yeah, exactly. And how we arrived at was through the question of [00:32:00] we're trying to have a great shopping experience. To bring home the fashion of your choice to your home. So who does this the best? And the answer to that was actually our stores are, if we were gonna benchmark against anything like the Happy Path store experience and really critiquing, so what is happening in the Happy Path store experience and, and identifying, oh, if we look at it this way, we see these challenges that exist.

And the online shopping experience that are solved in store. And guess what? We have the technology and the magic of software to solve that problem and not just solve it one by one by salesperson training, but literally solve it for every new customer that comes and experiences our web experience. And we learned some additional insights from there as well, including how do we present looks, or in other words, outfits to give kind of people the confidence to buy and purchase.

A shirt that they're looking at. 'cause one of the big things that we found that [00:33:00] a salesperson does is help give people the confidence. Yeah. That they could pull off that shirt or that shirt could work for their work or their date that they might have coming up. And so there's just a lot, uh, beautiful things to cheat off of, both in your own building historically and across industries.

Jeff Wharton: I love the framework. 'cause if you look at just a realistic sense of it, I have multiple friends that they'll go to the store and they would just look in the mannequin and go, I want that. Or they'd have the set of things together and you just walk and you grab that and all mine. That was missing for a long time because you didn't Sure.

You could look at like maybe the model wearing it and what they were, they styling that person in. But it was like one look. Whereas if you can start to see how this works and, and suggestions you feel confident in, in branching out a little bit maybe, or trying something new or, or one element that's new and two things that you're comfortable with, which I mean for you led to, I think you've talked about something in the realm of $250 [00:34:00] million in impact during your time over at Nordstrom, which that's, you wanna talk about putting something on in your portfolio there to drive that kinda luck.

That's something people are gonna notice and, and look at. Well imagine. Could we bring him on to drive? That kind of thing here. It's a good experience of like, how do you cheat? How do you grab from other places? How do you look at the solved problems and synthesize that into now how do we apply that here to what we're doing?

One last thing I wanna touch on with you before we run outta time here is you have this kind of idea of professional product management and kind of non-pro and I, I thought it was a really interesting way of looking and maybe synthesizing everything we've talked about. 'cause it seems like a nuance, but it's an important one.

What is the difference here? What makes a professional product manager aside from obviously working in the field? 

Mikal Lewis: Yeah, there's a book called Protectiveness that I was reading. It's more in the philosophical domain, but like a part of learning and exploring. I. And as I was reading it, it helped me wrestle with this challenge that I [00:35:00] experienced, which was not everyone in the product management craft, I think, respects the responsibility of a product management.

Product management is an outsized role that impacts engineering design. It impacts, uh, so many different people and not alone our business, bottom line, but our customers as well. Requiring it in success actually requires practice. It requires acquiring information, reading the books, doing the research before you need them.

I realized that professional product managers, the people that I respect, the mentors that I've had in my career, they do this as a matter of principle because they treat product management as a calling, which is the professional frame. When we think about amateurs, we often think about amateurs. Someone who does something, but they're not paid or competent, compensated for it.

But what I view that is the amateurs are the people who are pursuing something as not a calling. And so what they're [00:36:00] trying to do, if you think about a basketball player on the court, a pickup game, and they're amateur, what do they do? They mimic the pros. And so what we have is some product managers who aren't embracing this as a calling and a true responsibility.

And all they're doing is mimicking what they perceive product managers are doing. So they're trying to mimic the outcomes. Oh, this product manager delivered this success. I'm going to copy what they did and I'm going to do that. Mm-hmm. But they're not mimicking the process. And the process is often diversifying your inputs.

It's often like really leaning into your customers and understanding and kind of understanding that it's your accountability to show up prepared for tomorrow's problems. So that's a big distinguishment that I found. And so I wrote a little bit about what I felt that differences and that our craft of product management, the products that we have in the world that we're aiming to solve, it really calls for [00:37:00] more people to embrace the craft and the responsibility.

Uh, being a professional product management manager, 

Jeff Wharton: I think that is such a great. Note to end on of if we think about what we've covered, it's these four kinds of luck and how do you manufacture your own luck and how you call it cheating. You can call it what you want and you call it from learning from other industries or or picking unfair advantage where you can find it from grabbing value from other places.

But it's this synthesizing into first principles. How are you gonna solve this bigger problem? And recognize the size of the impact you can have. But it's. How are you prepared for the problem you're gonna face tomorrow without knowing it and practicing the craft? And I feel like this whole thing comes together with such a tight set of themes.

But ml, thank you so much for coming on. This was fantastic. I feel like I learned a lot about how to approach problems differently and it was a real pleasure to spend some more time with you. 

Mikal Lewis: It was a pleasure speaking with you as well, [00:38:00] Joe.