Mikal Lewis
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[00:00:00] 

Mikal: Tess, Tess, Tess.

Jeff: Test, test, test.

Mikal: Yeah, one moment.

Jeff: Nice. Yeah. My, mine gets filthy. Cause it's like right where my thumb goes to open my screen all the time. And I've realized it's just like always got stuff on it. Nice.

Mikal: Actually, random question. Oh, sorry. Are we, um, is it video as well as audio or just audio? [00:01:00] Makes sense. Sounds good.

Jeff: That, sorry, real quick. This reminded me, um, you don't want to say whole foods. What, what's a good intro

Mikal: You can say, you can mention anything in my resume is is fair to be [00:02:00] mentioned. It's more, I won't be, um, diving into experiences from Whole Foods.

Jeff: guys. We can say you're currently, you know, your current role at whole foods. Okay. Okay, perfect.

Mikal: more like sharing stories and the like.

Jeff: hundred percent. Okay. That, that's a very rational, uh, policy they have then of like, you can say you work here, just like if you're talking about what we do here and we want to repeat that, okay, perfect. Thank you. All right. McCall, how are you doing today, man? Thanks for joining.

Mikal: I'm doing great. How are you, Jeff?

Jeff: I'm doing Graham. I'm stoked to have you on. Uh, it's gonna be a fun

Mikal: pause? Sorry, really quick. Uh, name is pronounced Mikkel and I'm

Jeff: Mikkel.

Mikal: just, I'm just, no, no, no, no, no. I'm just. Just saying it so that, like,

Jeff: No, thank you for pointing out right now. Mikkel.

Mikal: it compounds, [00:03:00] yes, like Mick Jagger, Cal Ripken, Mikkel,

Jeff: Yes. Yeah. Yes. Yes. Yes. Mikkel.

Mikal: no, it's all good. It's all good.

Jeff: I got it.

All right. Hey, Mikkel, how you doing? Thanks for joining us today.

Mikal: I'm doing great, Jeff. How are you?

Jeff: I'm doing great. I'm stoked to have you on. Um, you know, I, I think this could be a good one because you don't have, you know, necessarily the most common, uh, background for PM or, you know, you kind of got here in an interesting way. Right. And you know, you're from Baltimore, worked your way up and, you know, kind of started in a non product, uh, setting, but I guess you want to talk through that.

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

Mikal: Yeah, I joke and I say, um, you know, uh, sometimes my approaches are a little bit. Uh, uncommon, [00:04:00] but I promise if you pull all the African American, uh, product leaders from Baltimore, um, my approach is very common for, uh, that demographic. So as you mentioned from Baltimore, um, and every city kind of has its own personality.

And I think one of those kind of key elements of, uh, being from Baltimore. Is, uh, just blue collar, uh, collar ethic and kind of this understanding that, uh, for all the challenges that you may face, uh, when you turn and speak to the next person, they are going through the same thing or perhaps even more.

And so it's this kind of quiet understanding that, um, you really just need to continue to iterate your way and work your way forward. And it's a day by day. And, uh, that is the measure of progress. And so originally from Baltimore, went to Florida A& M [00:05:00] for undergraduate and graduate school and business.

And, uh, that was a really great experience. Um, but also as a part of like 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 going to make this happen?

Um, 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& M. And Tallahassee Community College kind of market. Um, it learned a lot about how to do software wrong. Um, my first kind of deep experience, um, did a digital marketing, uh, strategy.

Um, and, but a funny thing happened is Microsoft was [00:06:00] recruiting at that time. Uh, staffing up their, their search team, uh, for really paid search account management. And here I am with a resume that highlights, uh, leading marketing programs and diving deep into SEO, SERP and SEM. Uh, in order to, you know, launch a textbook exchange.

So, um, that was a really great kind of fortuitous entry point that kind of like, uh, I think taught me early on that there's benefits in just like working the problem.

Jeff: Yeah. No, it's funny because, you know, that's a very fortuitous situation. Um, but at the same time, I think there's a lot of, you know, a experience is always kind of like, I learned how to do things by doing it wrong. I feel like it's so much of experience. Um, but you know, the second piece of that is you have in general, a really.

Kind of interesting take on [00:07:00] types of luck and, and, you know, looking at it more than just like, Oh, I got lucky, but there's a structure, how you think to luck. And, um, I feel like this plays into what, you know, maybe you would, you would talk about, uh, as maybe type two or type three, but maybe let's go through that.

Cause I love the four types of luck and kind of how that works in a career here.

Mikal: Sounds good. Can I have one moment? I'm going to look up the, I just want to make sure I get the book author right.

Jeff: Oh yeah.

I didn't realize it was a book. I thought you just made it up.

Mikal: Uh, no, it's a really relatively dense, um, gotcha. Um, yeah, so, um, I came across this book called [00:08:00] Chase Chance and Creativity, uh, by an author, James Austin. And as I Came across it. It kind of 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 for looking 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.

Um, and one, you can kind of break it down. And the author is kind of this, uh, 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. And like one of them is from like their dog and dissecting nodes or something along those lines.

And that led to an Uh, that was a wrong path that led to a breakthrough like later on, but he's really dissecting and trying to get to the root and he found out that there's these kind of four sources of luck. One is just blind [00:09:00] luck. Um, I call this just luck from being in the game like you are alive. Uh, there's a certain amount of luck that sometimes happens.

You know, the meeting gets canceled, um, that you're not don't feel prepared for or, you know, um, just it just happens.

Jeff: Matthew McConaughey gets discovered in a bar in Texas just because he's good looking.

Mikal: exactly, exactly, exactly. Uh, and the second, um, type of luck, I kind of think of, there's this band called Cherry Wine, and they have a song, um, uh, I think called Street 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, then when people talk about like some percentage of luck is just showing up, that's that type two. Type three is when you kind of develop a subject matter expertise and a perspective about something that allows you to have [00:10:00] judgment, to recognize when luck or when something has shifted so that you can find luck and find opportunity moments, um, just from that. Uh, 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, uh, they intentionally seek you out. So you kind of end up with a disproportionate amount of those opportunities on your doorstep.

Jeff: So this 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?

Mikal: Yeah, yes, um, now that I think about it, I mean, when I was approaching it at the time, it was really type 2, which is like, I want this outcome, I don't know what the best path [00:11:00] is, so I'm going to do something. And the something that seemed the most sense was, uh, since, since, I don't have tech experience. I'll hire myself to give myself some tech experience.

And, uh, that just ended up, um, uh, being aligned with what, uh, Microsoft strategy at that time. So it was really, really interesting.

Jeff: so from that, I think, you know, we, we obviously chatted a little bit before, uh, before today, and one thing that struck me is kind of your journey through your career has been focused on now that you've kind of catalyzed around this, um, 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?

Um, maybe, 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?

Mikal: Uh, I love this question, and I'm actually going to answer this question by first [00:12:00] starting with the product because I actually I find that, um, applying this type four luck to my products is, um, is has really been, um, a strong kind of, uh, 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, um, how can I make my products?

A track luck, like in that luck being outsized returns. If you think about in any work environment or just in any marketplace, there's a, 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 Uh, come down to often. How well have I been at moving the needles for my product? So the first element of my [00:13:00] career and kind of how do I move it forward? I want to have lucky products, products that, uh, deliver outside results, um, 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 Um, I kind of wrote out a statement of kind of like an area of exploration and diving deep that I would do. Um, and so I kind of wrote, I'm exploring technology at the intersection of design business. I've done some, um.

Additional coursework in design work with great design teams earlier in my career at Microsoft business. That was my foundation. But I added this element of philosophy, um, to that mix as well. And I had not studied kind of much, if anything, a philosophy at the time that I wrote this statement back in the arts.

But what that gave me was a clear area of focus, and I like dove [00:14:00] deep and knowledge and kind of lessons from there. And what that uncovered was because not many people in a product management discipline were pulling insights from this intersection. I was able to, um, find insights and bring to my product that were, um, Uh, from the domain of philosophy, like what is good, um, as opposed to the domain of science, um, like where there's an explicit right or wrong, or like you can actually use, uh, 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 kind of tried to seek out. Where there were right answers, like where there could be a successful product that the industry had a blind spot and was ignoring. And a lot of that came from my foundations and kind of, uh, highlighting philosophy.

And so what that allowed me to do is, [00:15:00] um, uh, Early in my career, I wrote some strategy papers, um, during my time at windows media center at Microsoft advocated very strongly for the shift towards, um, internet television. It was during a time like right when YouTube was kind of taking off long form television was not kind of like present prevalent in a streaming capacity.

But these kind of insights came from Uh, it's building out the skill sets of finding right answers that might have been otherwise ignored. And from that, um, developed a number of product successes and a number of product wins. Um, but I kept with that sharpening. Angle that like my skill set is, uh, delivering atypical success in challenging environments.

So finding the products that were kind of, um, either underdeveloped or facing [00:16:00] challenging circumstances and finding the opportunities both in strategy and aligning teams to deliver those to, to outsize return.

Jeff: Now, I'm curious to get your take on this. Cause, um, one thing, you know, my background is more in marketing and, and, you know, I realized kind of, as I've worked in a product focused 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 kind of like fits with how I've looked at this, but at least there I've found oftentimes. You know, the, 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're able to figure out are right, or, you know, the areas where maybe someone thinks it's right.

And we realize what everyone thinks is right is actually wrong. And there is a different right, but, you know, almost like when there is a too much agreement as to something being [00:17:00] right, the effect drops off. I think it's. You know, Andy Chen, uh, wrote a paper about this idea of like the law of shitty click throughs, which is as more and more people do something, it becomes just less effective.

Um, how does that fit into this? Like, do you, I know you separately have this idea of, you know, kind of. Ethical cheating. Uh, I think you almost call it. Um, and you know, separately, my father in law, uh, will always say like, you know, cheat to win, uh, jokingly. Um, and you know, I worked for a CEO long, long ago who used to say like, don't, you know, 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 kind of 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 like being different and you know, what the industry thinks is right. You know, maybe that's not the right answer always.

And how do you get outsized returns?

Mikal: I love this because, uh, as you're saying it, um, these are perspectives [00:18:00] that aren't. Uh, 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 Kano analysis, which is like, you take all these different features, you place them in a quadrants into like, uh, 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? Table stakes means basically, as long as you. Uh, achieve at about the industry benchmark or this customers are satisfied and you can move on. But there's this quadrant of delighters where actually there's no up, up a detected upper limit to how satisfied you can make a customer with this thing.

Um, and so that's an area where if you take this concept that you're kind of hitting on and that the I'll kind of share more about ethical cheating, you're saving time on these areas that don't matter where there's a solved solution, [00:19:00] like the, the table stakes, you're saving time, energy capacity debates, team friction from there and really over indexing.

Same investment on the delighters, the things that actually move the needle. And so, uh, I think I was reading this book called, uh, reading how Google's work works a while back. And, um, I think Eric Schmidt had this comment that the outcome of any organization today needs to be improving the quality of its output.

Um, and the pace of its output. And so how do you increase the quality and the pace of something? Well, you deliver more value faster. And a simple way to do that is through, um, making sure you're spending your decision friction and your decision challenges in areas where it really has impact. Um, so to take that back to the concept of, like, ethical cheating, uh, this is like one.

Way of [00:20:00] thinking about that concept of business design and philosophy was saying, I want to learn from the best and these domains. I want to learn about strategy. I want to learn about human computer interaction and interaction design and philosophy and the management sciences behind it. So that I can cheat off of them when I face, when I face their everyday challenges that they've already solved day by day by day.

And so, um, basically the ethical cheating is if there's a solved problem. Cheap 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 of saying like lateral thinking or creative leaps To find out what industry has the 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 [00:21:00] did the losers do? And you kind of 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 outsides returns are, and maybe even some lessons about why it didn't work or, or why it should. And I think that, um, uh, really being.

strong at, uh, cheating, um, off of the past, off of related industries to solve the problems that you face today, or to even change your frame of reference for the pro today so that you can truly use your team and, uh, insights to, uh, solve the unsolved problems.

Jeff: So, so far, well, 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 love the framework that was like, it's a very. As much as it kind of sounds, you know, funny and obtuse when you say it that way, [00:22:00] um, you know, I think it puts together a lot of good ways to look at how you accomplish a lot quickly is, you know, don't, um, don't spend too much time on solve problems.

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

Everything else can be duct tape, but figure out that one or two thing. And that's what drives luck at some level, almost a perilous conversation is like pick the one or two things that are vital to user experience or outcomes you need everything else. You can just leave it alone and just make sure it's table stakes done.

And that's what drove success over there. So kind of same idea here is right. Build your luck by. What are the few things you need outsize returns on and then, you know, cheat by learning from others who've solved this problem in other ways. And how can you, how can you port it over? Um, [00:23:00] so we started to cover this, but you know, you, you got into, um, Microsoft on the back of, uh, this company that you had started.

You wrote a paper that Bill Gates read and passed around the exec team, which is insane at, you know, I think the number of years of experience you had at that point, which seemed really minimal. And yet, despite all this, they still said, you know what, uh, Mikkel, we're not going to give you a product role cause you don't have like CS experience.

Um, but you did ultimately end up in a product role there. So like, take us through, how did you kind of, again, you know, build yourself into position, uh, to, to lock into a role like that.

Mikal: Yeah. Uh, I discovered through kind of the winds and as you mentioned, I think week paper and even my time at Florida A& M that I had truly had a passion for this space and something that I've really loved about technology is the opportunity to [00:24:00] deliver an increment of delight to millions of users. So the scale that like, if you improved it, the scale that that could happen, I just truly found joy in and so, um, well, I'd written a think we paper and had a, uh, It been submitted, uh, accepted and distributed.

I think I was at the company less than 18 months. Uh, 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, um, I did that. Like, uh, that was kind of some, uh, uh, a bold take to do, but it just seemed very natural. At the time, but at the time, Microsoft kind of reserved their product management discipline for people with technical backgrounds.

And so as I shaped this experience to say, Hey, I feel pretty good. I've done this. Uh, and I was like, Hey, can I move into this product management discipline? Um, and the reply came. Well, do you have a computer science [00:25:00] background? Well, no. Well, no. Sorry. Uh, keep it moving. So I found the next closest proxy. I found this role called product planning, which I kind of describe as product management, but time shifted for 3 to 5 years out.

If you think about windows and office development at the time, uh, these engineering processes and tools were building products for a world that didn't exist yet because you start delivery and you start development. Men. On one day and the world your products going to exist in starts the earliest three years out, probably closer to five, and it's going to live in market for at least five years.

So you're kind of talking about what is the world going to look like in a 5 to 10 year horizon after your product. So I really enjoyed that role, but one of the things that I really found challenging was, um, when I was not exposed to the consequences of my decisions, so I could write the [00:26:00] greatest. And it seemed like it made all the sense in the world to me.

Um, but I didn't get to experience the lessons and experience that comes from if it failed, if I implemented a strategy and a fail, um, or if it succeeded. And so I kind of, um, took that experience and said, all right, I've done this approved strategy and role. I know how to navigate the company. Can I, uh, do this product management?

Um, thing. And do you have a computer science degree? No. All right, cool. I left and I started a company again, uh, with a former Microsoft GM, um, uh, and someone who I greatly respect, John Pincus, um, a meeting software company. And we, uh, did it, uh, did the run. Um, it was founded in a really tough time. So wound that down and kind of look 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 [00:27:00] work with engineers and are like, uh, well, do you have a computer science degree? No. Uh, well, we kind of like your experience. So we have this closer related role is supportability product manager. Uh, so you can do that, but you until you have a computer science degree.

Yes. So I did that. Um, and at the time I'd seen this is the type three luck I'd seen the industry shifts, uh, working in windows, windows. I'd seen, um, the revitalization of the Mac product, um, and the compounding returns that Apple was having from their design centric approach. 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. Um, the way, you know, I kind of live by that philosophy that, uh, a process is perfectly designed to deliver its outcome and our products did not look great because our process was perfectly designed to [00:28:00] deliver products that did not have that great, uh, uh, human care built in.

So, um, I went back to school at University of Washington and taken some, uh, grad, uh, courses in design. Um, and at that point in time I had, uh, proven myself in strategy in the business. I had the technical. Acumen and competency in addition to some additional, um, side projects that I've done with colleagues at Microsoft kind of getting deep into data intensive applications and the third I had kind of 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 products with that design embedded in. And so they needed a different type of product manager, one that could kind of, uh, factor in the product feel, um, [00:29:00] converse with designers and have strong business strategy.

And so at that point, I ended up with kind of more or less, uh, the pick of my opportunities. Um, and so. Uh, it was a fun wave, and the thing that I really take away 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.

Jeff: Well, I mean, you really had to work to manufacture your luck there. Um, you know, I think some people would not even call that luck necessarily, but I get, you know, where it's, it's making your own luck almost at that point. Um, but it really is, you know, I think there's something to be said for not, you know, 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, you know, that is popular right [00:30:00] now, because it's already there. People have already figured it out. It's already ahead. It's kind of like, you know, in marketing channels doing the thing that's really, really big right now.

Everyone's doing it. It's, you gotta be ready for, if you can be first or close to first on the next thing, you're going to, like you said, you had your pick of the roles. So you got in, you got the PM role. And then. You, you decided to depart for a entirely different experience, um, where you stepped into, I think what you've called the, the real world of, of product management and kind of experienced this new, new world of product that you, that was probably more common.

Um, where your, every need was not met the second you had an idea, but you had to, you kind of work through problems yourself. So you went to Nordstrom, uh, tell us about it and what, what drew you in there?

Mikal: Uh, yeah. So, um, a time at Microsoft was great. Uh, I believe that great product managers, uh, learn the craft by working alongside [00:31:00] and or being mentored by great product managers. And I got that foundational experience at Microsoft. Um, 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, um, as I did during the many roles that I had, uh, during my time at Microsoft.

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

Um, but because of the scale, uh, like you're kind of, you know, You [00:32:00] have a bounding box

Jeff: It's impacting hundreds of millions of people.

Mikal: Exactly. Exactly. And so I was described myself looking for a curveball. I was looking for an opportunity where I could really expose myself to kind of the outcomes of my decisions of my perspective.

And at the time, Nordstrom was kind of building out its digital product management team, and, uh, 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 going to end up with some big numbers on my resume.

Um, kind of as an outcome of this, if you know, I'm able to deliver results. And I, I really was fascinated by that opportunity to kind of have, uh, connected. measurable outcomes between what I do and what I deliver. I joke about my time [00:33:00] during windows and saying, like, what was I going to do? Sell the billionth and one copy of windows with my feature.

It's really you. I was kind of, um. Isolated from the impact of kind of the decisions that we're making. And during Nordstrom, uh, in addition to the company culture of, you know, obsessing about the company and obsessing about, um, that customer experience, uh, it really brought me close to the customer in a really tangible way.

Um, and I value that.

Jeff: Well, I love how you thought about you, like the move of, you know, throughout you have this kind of concept of a quiet portfolio behind. What you're building in a career where, you know, you, you did your, um, you know, the company kind of started in school, you parlayed that into experience at Microsoft and getting, you know, all the exposure you could there, you went and got, you know, design experience from an academic background, you got into product finally with all this other experience, but throughout this, you were building intentionally [00:34:00] this, you know, it's not an outward portfolio like a designer might have, but it's a quiet portfolio that exists that's building this type four luck for you.

Because you are drawing it 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. You know, that's being really intentional, but how you build towards, maybe you don't know what you're building towards, but you know, you're building towards the ability to, to pick what you want to do and, and, you know, move forward in your career in ways that are interesting to you and you're building just the capability to, to make those choices and to own those choices.

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

But in the event I don't surface anything through [00:35:00] 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 at the time, the e commerce landscape borrowed its designed and product metaphors from literally the catalog.

Like you have a homepage, think of it as like the cover of your catalog. You go into a browse experience, which is, you know, the catalog grid. You click on something that has details and then you add it to your bag and you kind of complete your catalog ordering process. And from my experience, um, at various on various products at Microsoft, but particularly in my time, um, in office, I had this experience working on products that were designed for productivity for, uh, like as applications.

And so I had this insight that like. Hey, the shopping experience has not yet, uh, [00:36:00] 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 to care about kind of like delivering that report on time.

And I think e commerce at the time had gotten fascinated by the fact that like, because. Uh, the, you know, their best customers really enjoyed and talked about with joy shopping. They kind of translated that all of the shopping experience was fun and it was desirable and what people liked and kind of didn't obsess as much over like squeezing out.

All the kind of mundane work of shopping. And so one experience kind of where this was, was, was kind of, uh, uh, clear to me was the process of just finding out if a [00:37:00] product was in your size. So if you're wearing. Shopping for boots. Um, and you wear a certain size. You go to a product page and you or you go to 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 isn't, uh, and not the one that you want. You replay this over and over and over again. And really what ends up happening is yeah. The dollar, as you squeeze that customer's time, the dollars get squeezed out of your kind of bottom line.

You're, you're, that customer is going to run out of time. Uh, there are kids going to come home from school. They're going to have to go and work, uh, make dinner, or they're going to get, uh, sent a tick tock, the funny video that's going to distract their attention. Something's going to happen. There's, we all have these demands on our time.

So we have to honor that customer's time and kind of like, help them through this process. And so [00:38:00] what we did was we kind of took it to the basics of the Nordstrom experience, which is like, what does a good salesperson do? Uh, if you go into the sales floor and you say, Hey, can I see these shoes in the size nine and a half?

They go to 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 give me this one? And then if the salesperson goes, cool. Well, what size are you? And you go, well,

Jeff: what are you listening?

Mikal: Yeah. And you know, and they, you might let it pass once and then you come back and you ask them to do it again.

And they're like, Well, 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, um, which was we monitored or like we kind of, uh, took inventory of the size selections that people made on the product page and using some heuristic logic, we decided when to pre select it for the [00:39:00] next product page.

So you could instantly at a glance. See, uh, what the result was and whether or not that shoe was in, uh, in your color. And we use that same information to kind of make it available upstream. So when you're shopping to browse, could you do the same thing? And the outcome of this was we did see a conversion lift, um, and we did see a reduction in kind of the time it took.

For customers to complete checkout, uh, which was a key performance metric, but ultimately it just, it just made sense. It took out the work from the customers and it was the right thing to do. Um, but that was kind of the insight that came from. Looking at shopping as a activity, um, in which someone was trying to be productive to accomplish something and really zeroing in on the friction points in that journey.

Jeff: Well, back to, you know, what you've brought up earlier. Um, one, you can look at multiple industries and kind of get a sense for it's good to reduce. [00:40:00] Time, right? Cause you know, a, like, I mean, there's a concept even in sales of time kills all deals and that's true where, you know, it's a multi month B2B sales process, you want to compact that.

Cause you never know what's going to happen. So, you know, time, time kills deals there, but that likely also applies, you know, from the standpoint of like, let's cheat from other industries. That probably also applies there where you said, you know, you can get demands from, you know, maybe your, 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.

Like the longer the stretches, you bring more opportunity for distractions. You just want to like get it done and get out. Um, and the other piece is look to other, you know, 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? And you know, 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 is like, how does this work in real life? Why is this, you know, Nordstrom was known for being a fantastic shopping [00:41:00] experience that their customers loved.

How do you mimic that? How do you steal and cheat from, you know, copying, copying Nordstrom physicals test, if you will.

Mikal: Yeah, and exactly. And how we arrived at was through the question of we're trying to have a great shopping experience to bring home, you know, the fashion of your choice, uh, to your home. So who does this the best? And the answer to that was, well, actually our stores are, if we were going to benchmark against anything like the happy path store experience and really critiquing, so what is happening at the happy path store experience and identifying, oh, if we We look at it this way.

We see these challenges that exist in the online shopping experience that are solved in store. And guess what? We have the technology and the magic of software, uh, to solve that problem and not just solve it one by one by salesperson training, but literally solve it for every new [00:42:00] customer that comes and experiences our web's experience.

And we learned some additional insights from there as well, um, including, uh, 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. Because one of the big things that we found that a salesperson does is help give people the confidence that They could pull off that shirt or that that shirt could work for their, uh, work or their date that they might have kind of coming up.

And, uh, so there's just a lot, uh, beautiful things to cheat off of, uh, both in your own building, um, historically and across industries.

Jeff: No, I love the framework. I mean, cause like, if you look at just a realistic sense of it, right, I have multiple friends that they'll go to the store, you know, back in the day they'd go to the store and they would just look at the mannequin and go, I want that. Or you know, they'd have the set of things [00:43:00] together and you just walk and you grab that.

Online that was missing for a long time because you didn't, yeah, sure. You could look at like maybe the model wearing it and what they're, where they styling that person in. But it was like one look, whereas if you can start to see how this works and suggestions, you feel confident in branching out a little bit, maybe, or trying something newer or one element that's new and two things that you're comfortable with, um, which, I mean, for you led to, uh, I think you've talked about something in the realm of 250 million in impact during your time over at Nordstrom, which.

I mean, that's, you want to talk about, uh, putting something in your portfolio there to, to drive, you know, that kind of luck. That's something that people are going to notice and look at. Well, imagine, can we bring him on to drive that kind of thing here? So. Um, no, I mean, it's a, it's a good experience of like, how do you cheat?

How do you kind of 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? And this idea of like, anything can be a job to be done. Like shopping for a shirt can be a [00:44:00] job to be done. If you look at it that way, you can solve it a lot better.

Um, one last, one last thing I want to touch on with you before, uh, you know, before we kind of run out of time here is you have this kind of idea of professional product management and kind of non pro. And I thought it was a really interesting way of looking and maybe synthesizing everything we've talked about.

Um, cause it seems like a nuance, but it's an important one. Like what is, what is the difference here? What makes a professional product manager aside from obviously, you know, working in the field?

Mikal: Yeah. Uh, there was a book called Pretentiousness. It's more in the philosophical domain, uh, but like a part of kind of learning and exploring. And as I was reading it, I, it helped me wrestle with this challenge that I experienced, which was Not everyone in the product management craft, I think, respects the responsibility of a product [00:45:00] management, uh, product management is an outsized role that impacts engineering design. It impacts, uh, so many different people and, um, not alone our business bottom line, but our customers as well. And. Requiring it in success actually requires practice.

It requires acquiring information, reading the books, uh, doing the research before you need them. And I realized that, like, 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 kind of the professional frame.

When we think about amateurs, we often think about amateurs as someone who's like does something, but they're not paid or competent, uh, compensated for it. But what I kind of view that as the amateurs of the people who are pursuing something as not a calling. And so what they're trying to do, if you think [00:46:00] about like a basketball player on the court, uh, a pickup game and they're an amateur, what do they do?

They mimic the pros. And so what we have is, uh, some product managers who aren't embracing kind of this as a calling and a true responsibility. And, uh, all they're doing is kind of mimicking what they perceive product managers are doing. So they're trying to mimic the outcomes. Oh, this product manager delivered, uh, this success.

I'm going to copy what they did. And I'm going to kind of like, But they're not mimicking the process and the process is often diversifying your inputs. It's often kind of 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.

Um, and so that's kind of a big distinguishment that I found. And so I kind of wrote a little bit about what I felt that differences and that Uh, [00:47:00] our craft of product management, the products that we have in the world that we're aiming to solve, it really, uh, calls for more people to embrace the craft and the responsibility of being a professional product management manager.

Jeff: I love it. I mean, I think that is such a great note to end on of, right. If we think about what we've covered, it's, you know, these four kinds of luck and how do you manufacture your own luck and how do you, you know, you call it cheating. You can call it what you want. You call it from learning from other industries or, you know, picking unfair advantage where you can find it from, you know, grabbing value from other places, but it's this synthesizing into first principles.

How are you going to solve this bigger problem and recognize the size of the impact you can have, but it's, you know, how do you prepare it for the problem you're gonna face tomorrow without knowing it and, and, you know, practicing the craft and I feel like this whole thing comes together with such a tight set of themes.

Um, but Mikal, thank you so much for coming on. [00:48:00] 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: It was a pleasure speaking with you as well, Jeff.

Jeff: Thank you.