LaunchPod - Oji Udezue V2-1
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Emily: [00:00:00] Welcome to LaunchPod, a product management podcast from LogRocket. Today our guest is Aji Udezwe, an AI product expert, author, and an innovation focused multi discipline business leader. Aji has had an extensive and successful career spanning his time as CPO of Typeform, Head of Product for Creation and Conversation at Twitter, CPO of Calendly, and Head of Product at Atlassian.

On today's part one of a two part episode, LogRocket's VP of Marketing Jeff Wharton talks to Aji about his upcoming book, Building Rocket Ships. The complexity of product management due to its multidisciplinary nature, requiring skills in engineering, design, psychology, and economics. And, talks about the zone of benefit concept, which [00:01:00] helps assess market disruptiveness and emphasizes the need for a high value to price ratio to drive change in customers.

So, here it is, the first part of our conversation with Adjie Udezwe. 

All right. I know it feels like every one of these I say I'm excited, and I am, but I have been waiting for this one for weeks and weeks at this point. So Adjie, welcome to the show. Thanks for coming on, man. Thank you. Thank you, Jeff. I'm excited to be here.

Seriously. Nice. Now, I am, I am going to try and keep us to time, but I wrote an outline that was like five pages long. I edited it way down. You got the third edit, I think, at this point, so I'll try and behave. But, uh, there's just so much cool stuff here. Let's dive in. I guess first and foremost, you had a book that you're writing, huh?

Yes, I am. I'm writing a book with my partner and we've had an incredible journey as PMs from PM1 to become executives. And we have such a passion to give back. We know that this [00:02:00] game, we do many things, but we're mostly product people at this point. And we know that this is a hard and very ill defined profession.

And so we want to help with that, help give people more definition, more style. stuff, more frameworks, more tools to be excellent. So yeah, that's what we're doing. It's fine. You say product people are mainly just product people, but I feel like product is one of the main roles where the best are rarely just that you come from a different background, it was engineers, UX people, you bring in a lot of psychology.

I feel like it's one of those things that the whole thing is solving problems and getting you from A to B and the better you can do it, the better you are. And it's rarely just one discipline. Is that accurate from what you've seen? No. It's almost a renaissance job every day when I'm a great product person, I'm an engineer, I'm a designer, I'm an anthropologist, I'm a psychologist, I use the principles of behavioral economics, uh, leadership, communication, writing, negotiation, it's just [00:03:00] so much that goes into being really good at this because one of my favorite sayings is that we are the center, if you're in a really good company, And you care about providing value to customers.

And that's the way you make a lot of money. Then product people are your biggest weapon. They actually increase your return on capital if they're really good, but you know, there's no school for it. It's the last thing in EPD without really great schools and great pedagogy at the college level. And so we're trying to help solve some of that.

Yeah, I do feel like that's something that is needed in the market is just better education. There's a lot at the kind of very young. level or very junior level, but there's not a lot to help people continue to ascend. It's funny that you bring up it's at the center, right? Because I feel if you look at a lot of startups and successful startups that have really zoomed up, it really hits on a lot of those ideas that to be great at product, you're coming from multiple different angles and it is the product that matters.

And so many of these companies are [00:04:00] Flying high, but they have the thing in common that their founder is still the CEO, but it's still the product visionary pushing them forward. And that's, I think, an interesting kind of thing I found that you've talked about coming. That's going to be in your book is some of these frameworks around.

Picking ideas, where to fish, ideas that you put really well that I've been thinking back in my head about how much better you have to be. And my team will tell you in general, I love frameworks. I love a good framework. I think it just helps catalyze a team around an idea and helps communicate so much better.

So can you maybe, before we dive into some of the details of some of these frameworks that you're going to discuss in this book. Why are frameworks so important to you, do you think? Why do you think they've been so powerful throughout the years? I think you just hit on it, right? Like, frameworks are useful in several different ways.

So first of all, just a quick and dirty definition of framework is essentially like It packages truths, right? And approaches in easily digestible sizes. And they're useful for the content of, [00:05:00] is it true? And is this approach the right approach for this problem? But it's also a tool for leadership, right?

Since they're truths, right? They are easy to launch. Their package, they're easy to launch into, uh, a team. They're easy to help people focus on the right problem. One of the first things I do when I join a new company is always to find the right frameworks for the workflow and for the problem we're trying to solve.

Yeah, so I think they're useful because they're dense. One thing that I encourage people to do though is don't just stop at the framework. You gotta figure out. Why the framework works, like what, how, what are the first principles of this equation that you just received because then that allows you to modify it, change it and adapt it to the problem you're trying to solve.

Yeah, that's the thing, right? You can go company to company and you can't just port over. The playbook from one to the other. So I guess you've had a lot of career changes. I mean, you've been at Cal only, you've been at Twitter, you've been a Microsoft. Companies are fairly different, if I may say [00:06:00] so. So how do you enter an org and look at it and discern what am I going to do to move the needle here?

Like, how do you pick from that library? Or adopt what you need to and adapt it. Yeah, look, I think that leadership, especially when you change context like a company, is really about first diagnosis. It's about figuring out, what is the problem I need to solve as a leader here, in order to create the most change and the most profit, or whatever it is that.

You're facing and part of that is what are the frameworks that work for the things that we're working on? Because you have to communicate that to people. Like at Twitter, I remember like for the first six months I was just distilling. I was like, what is the flywheel of Twitter? What is, how does it really work?

Like, not the obvious stuff. Oh, people are tweeting and following and liking. Like, how does this machine actually work? How do you turn the crank faster? And honestly, my process is like, what framework works? There are two things I think about the workflow. What workflow are we solving for the people, for the planet?

What problem are we solving? [00:07:00] The different, you know, take on the same idea. And then I say, okay, what workflow, what frameworks work. And frankly, if I can't find something, cause you know, you have to, one thing about facing a problem is you have to be parsimonious, meaning that you have to create simple, but accurate hypothesis.

And you have to try and tailor it very closely. If it's too loose, if it can fit 10, a hundred companies, and it's not tight enough. Right. It needs to be something that fits this. And I remember at Twitter to create the right frameworks, I had to create some frameworks myself. And then I pulled in from other relevant ideas.

One of the people who inspired me actually was the creator of TikTok. And some of the things he said were so insightful, so deep, and I found that very useful. So you just nailed on what I was going to ask next, which was how often, cause I've talked to a lot of product leaders to talk about frameworks are great, they're nice, but.

Over time, what I've had to do is take the ones that I like and figure out how to take this half and piece it together with that and hodgepodge it and create a multi headed beast almost. But then [00:08:00] you fit it in the right way. How often have you found that you're going and creating something new or hybridizing something maybe?

versus can just think straight through. Yeah, it's not very often, right? Because the point is, frameworks have to be truthful, right? And since they are truths, they shouldn't change very often unless the environment or the people change dramatically. If your competitive environment changes or the world itself changes, COVID was a huge change, and so some things needed to change in terms of how people viewed the problem and the frameworks they used to attack it.

When a company grows really fast, that's also a change, right? A company's life cycle of growth actually qualifies as a change. Because growth itself causes external factors to change revenue, people that you attract, professionals that need to power the company, competition, market environment. So you do have to draw on maybe different frameworks over time or change the parameters of the framework over time.

But it's not wholesale because. If a [00:09:00] framework doesn't sort of encapsulate truth, then it's not worth the papers or not. That's fair. I guess it's more the tactics that they're driven by. The findings change more than the fundamental structure, really. We just went through an exercise. Here, SDRs report into the marketing team.

So into my team, one thing we tried to boil down to is what are the kind of key levers that we can just pull and what are the main drivers, right? Like, how do you break it down to just the most elemental pieces? And there's a few things that comes down to, but they're not going to change company to company, right?

Like how do you focus on the right accounts? How do you get. Yeah, and that's, those are things and how you pick which ones you go after, how you attack that is, is what's going to change company goods. So that's a good point. But close to that execution level, it's not going to change very much because workflow.

Marketing is a thing that you can break it down into maybe four or five really high level workflows. Sales, same thing. Like, The stuff above that, the conceptual stuff, who do you go after versus how do you tackle it when you go after them? Why are you going after them? [00:10:00] What is the underlying thing? Those can change over time as the growth cycles through.

But at that level of resolution, honestly, frankly, it's just execution workflows, and they're pretty consistent. Exactly. Now, one thing that I found interesting, and you've talked about before, Kind of thinking of again, product is the center. And so you're going to market, you're bringing maybe a new idea forward.

I love this. You had the idea of like zone of benefit as a framework that you talk about. And it's something I, I. Thought of I couldn't quite catalyze and you just put it so perfectly. I was really jealous. I gotta be honest. It was really well done. But can you explain how this idea of zone of benefit and what it can mean?

Maybe especially today's economy. I feel like this is really, really pertinent. You know, one of the things that I see with founders and investors is that we're very excitable. I've been both. So that's why I'm saying we and some of the rookie mistakes people make are like, I love this thing. I feel this problem.

I got to solve it. The question really is. A, are there like 10 million of you in the economy? Because you could be completely isolated And [00:11:00] so you're never gonna make a lot of money from solving that problem that you have And i've made that error trust me, so I know exactly what i'm talking about The other thing is is this thing existential for a lot of people, right?

So like the idea of zone of benefit is the idea that when you're focused on disrupting a market or workflow, then you have to just deliver much more benefit, right? And more value than the alternatives. And the alternatives can be competition, or it could just be like nothing, because nothing is also like a viable alternative sometimes, right?

Even if it's a virgin space, you have to deliver way more, right? And that's Now, usually you want to deliver a lot of benefit at a very affordable price. But of course, if your premium price is your strategy, you can also deliver a lot of benefit at a premium price. That's a business model thing. What I did try to understand is the thing you're battling is switching costs.

Right. And switching costs. are really two things that can be [00:12:00] hard costs or they can be just psychological and change aversion. This is where you get into the philosophy of human psychology. People don't like change, right? And so to lure them out of that change cave, you have to deliver something like three X plus benefit at a very affordable price.

If you don't, people are like, Oh, it's better. It's two times better. It's the one and a half times better. Oh, it's just better. And you're like, Oh yeah, people are going to pay. No, they will not. You have to understand that you're battling something more primal than just a little better. And that's what Zone of Benefit is about, is like, whatever you thought you could do, you have to do just a little more to make it so obvious.

Because it's that obvious 3x of productivity. Think about Canli for a second. Canli, just like, you, you're a marketing person, the salespeople around you, because it's go to market. Getting one meeting can be so hard. Right. You email back and forth, but that kind of just solves it in like 10 seconds. That's an order of magnitude [00:13:00] of productivity, right?

If you're using that tool. And so for people who use it in a mission critical way, it's 10X better. All right. And that 10X, they're like, I'm going to pay for it. I'm definitely going to pay for it. That's the momentum that makes a company big. That's the momentum that unlocks revenue very easily for you.

And if you can't create that emotion in people, it can be very difficult. You know, it's a slog. Now, do you think that's, I've heard a lot of explanations for this, right? One, people have a big fear of being wrong, right? No one wants to be on the hook to say we changed, you know, it's much better to say we stayed with what we were doing.

That doesn't work that well, but you can't really blame me. We're just doing it already versus I changed this and it didn't go well. Do you think it's more fear based or is it real actual cost of change? Or what do you think drives this? Very few humans in the world like change, to be honest. And it's not just like in the business arena, it's just.

This is human psychology. And so the way to do that is the thing that, that inspires change has to be very attractive. That's zone of benefit [00:14:00] attractiveness. It's like three X is very attractive. It's a gravitational force. The other thing is that you have to reduce the opportunity to be wrong. People are like loss aversion, change aversion, a huge, like in psychology, loss aversion is like a huge idea.

People would rather make a buck than, they don't want to lose a dollar. And they will prefer not to lose a dollar than to gain ten bucks, hypothetically. And that's the thing you're dealing with. So the other thing is reducing the cost of that loss. For example, if I give you a product that's 3x better, but it has a free plan, or it's freemium, it has a trial, you can just check it out and it's no cost.

Then your boss isn't going to be mad at you because you make this huge, big decision and make this huge commitment. Now we're cooking with gas. That, yeah, I think that nails it, Reyes. How do you protect the downside? Yes. Really excited to move, increase the upside potential and make it undeniable and protect your downside.

That's really what it's about. Love it. And then you've talked about another one and we'll go through this quickly. I got so much I want to talk to you about, but I [00:15:00] love this idea of also frameworks for looking at a product or a problem you're going to solve, or maybe an expansion and you get into kind of like it's since people use a lot or they don't use often high frequency, low frequency.

Everyone kind of niche and can you go through maybe, you know, I'm a founder. I'm thinking of, I brought you an idea. We're discussing it. And this is how you think it through, right? Is that the right kind of concept of where to use this? There are three people who benefit from this framework. It's like founders, because they have to calibrate their time and what they're spending, the problem they're spending time on.

I've built a company and not, doesn't know what I wanted out of it. And so that was like, Two, two and a half years of my life and mm-Hmm. , if I had, it's expensive. Yeah. The timelines, if I'd had this filter framework, it would've, would've been so much better off. And that's why I created it. 'cause I like, it was something I went through.

But also investors, what should you invest in, in terms of yield and return? And if you're an employee. And you're looking for a job, you should be able to assess the companies you're going as a significant investment of your life force as well. This idea, I called it the unicorn framework. And it's really, I think it's [00:16:00] much more specific to B2B, but I'm sure it's more generalizable just so that I didn't do the run the numbers and the validation for other things.

But it's really this idea that you can use a simple framework to predict how successful and the revenue and growth potential of a B2B SaaS company based on very simple information. Maybe. How often do people execute the workflow that you're targeting with your technology and your product in their day or in their week, in their month?

How often do they execute that workflow? And the other idea and simple information is whether that workflow is a broad one. Does it cover most people in the enterprise? At Lansing, we used to talk about team communications as going from the doorman to the CEO. Right? That's a very broad use case. They all need to use it.

Like email is broad, right? And, or niche. When a single department or a single person, like stuff for HR, stuff for sales, or stuff for Mar MarTech and so on and so forth, it's sort of niche. And you can take information on whether it's high frequency [00:17:00] or low frequency workflow execution for a person, or whether it's niche or broad, and calculate.

The opportunity. And the idea is it goes into a quadrant four by four or two by two. I love a good two by two. The Bain group just gave the world this devilish tool. Oh, yeah. But, uh, yeah, it's high frequency. Everyone workflows are the most valuable. And then high frequency niche workflows are the next most valuable.

So frequency is basically the uber factor, and then you have a low frequency niche and low frequency everyone workflows, and low frequency, everyone is better than low frequency niche. And these strategies, these workflows, I believe that the world is workflows, even like waking up in the morning is a workflow, going to work is a workflow.

So I don't do use cases anymore because a workflow encapsulates a larger, broader goal. Right. And it can involve multiple transitions. In fact, a job to be done, a workflow is actually multiple job to done linked [00:18:00] together. And I think that's how the resolution that companies and PMs and marketers should think about, because that gives the most scope and actually it gives a lot of scope to customer discovery in it.

But that's a whole other thing. No, I love that idea. That's smart to widen the aperture. Cause you look at something like a ramp, which is huge, obviously super successful. You could say finance people that close the books. That's What, that would be a few people and kind of infrequent, right? Is that kind of accurate?

You close the books once a month. It's niche and it's infrequent. Yes. Right. But they've gone from now they run credit cards. Yeah. They've reached across the entire, you know, everything that touches finance and every employee, credit cards, travel, and they've really done a great job of just hitting everything.

And it's just so it's everywhere and high frequency, right? Yes. So actually you can navigate this frequency boxes. Usually people can start in niche high frequency or in infrequent everyone. And the idea is to navigate your way from low [00:19:00] frequency to high frequency, to everyone. That's a path of travel.

Anyway, using this framework, you can literally. figure out how big a business will be. The biggest people in our industry, the Googles and the Microsoft, play in high frequency everyone basic productivity because it has the most yield. You can charge three bucks per user and you're still rich. You're still making billions, right?

And you're at last year and you're making like two, three billion, right? It's high frequency. That niche, and then everything else is below that. So it's a really good first filter on figuring out opportunity for yourself as a founder, as an investor, as an employee. And it seems not as obvious as it seems, even though it's pretty simple.

And I've done the back checking on revenues and market cap to figure this stuff out. I love that you did the, you ran the back data. You back checked your data. That's great. I mean, I could not possibly be happier about that because that was the first thing I would do is pull a bunch of public columns and go check.

So that's sweet. Cool. And you, so I know we touched on before, but you've got a book coming out that touches on this [00:20:00] and covers a lot of this stuff. Is there a timeframe on that yet? Or? Yeah, it was just very quickly. It's a book for really senior product people, right? Like senior product managers, principals and above up to the CPO.

And actually it's because You'd be surprised at how many people in the C suite don't really understand product. And so it's for them too, right? I was going to say, I'm going to read this book. To understand how best to collaborate with product managers is really good, but also maybe even to inspire them.

Some of them don't even know what they're supposed to be doing. So there are three parts to it. It's called building rocket ships because it's really about a technology company is basically the product and the business itself. It's a three layer sandwich and it addresses all three, not just like, Oh, be a good product manager.

It's like build a rocket ship, which is build a great company. And there are three parts. The clear definition of product management, maybe in a way you've never heard about, about it before and how applying it makes you more profitable, return on capital. And there's some math just to figure out scenarios.

And then the second part is like how to do PLG. What are the things you [00:21:00] need to do to build a fast growing company, to price well, to onboard well. To deliver a great product, to be viral, to think about network effects. These are all things that you have to do to really, they all have to come together to build a really great company.

Sometimes people get lucky, but you don't want to get lucky. You want to be intentional. And then the last part is how to lead PLG. How do you lead teams that center customers while centering the business model? As well. And so those are the three parts of the book. Yeah. There'll be a frameworks aid, the story.

They are not the story. Yeah, no, it's funny. You bring up, it can be a wider read book thing. I like the aid you're going for not niche, but I want everyone there. You have to apply your own lessons. Eat your own dog. Well, drink your own champagne. Is that the new, that's a new way of saying it. But also I do think we had design thinking.

I do think product thinking. It's an important part of running a business. Like we, we look at marketing here like a product and how we think through it. We prioritize it. We look at, use a lot of the frameworks you've talked about to look at how [00:22:00] we're going to operate. I do think a lot of people could benefit from it.

You know what you guys, this is why your company is growing so fast, right? Like people don't underestimate. In fact, anytime I find like an ecosystem, Austin or the Bay area, Seattle or New York under, performing their potential is because people don't hire enough for it and they're just good ones. Early on, they hire a bunch of developers and salespeople, goose revenue, and they're tough out of ideas.

They don't know how to navigate out of that. And that's a problem. Anyway, the book is for, it's also like, Early product managers want to know what later product managers are doing. So it's going to cover the spectrum on that front. But like I said, it's also for the C suite, but they want to get a good head start and a premium version will contain models, frameworks, templates, the kinds of things that you hear are problems.

Like, how do you actually do it? What do I use? What is my tool? And so that's what we're going to do. Oh, and a part of the book will be free. So this is a free mium book. Ha ha ha! No, I'm not joking. Like, parts of it will be PDF. I want people [00:23:00] in India to download it without having to pay. I want people in Africa to download it because I want this knowledge to spread.

Zona Benefit, you're reducing the downside risk. There you go. I do love how you implement the stuff you talk about, but all right, so that's coming out. Excited for that. September. All right. Here we go. Pre orders are going up soon. All right. I'll be on the pre order list right when it goes up. I do want to dig in a little bit more.

Right. We talked about before we started recording this setup. One of the things that drove us to do this is frameworks are great, but what does that look like in real life? And I'd love to dive into a few of those with you, because you've got. some good experience. I told you Calendly was something that we've had deep philosophical conversations about Calendly and other similar options here.

And it goes on still, you know, two years later, we're still talking about kind of a couple different products we could use here. But you were at Calendly as it really was continuing to explode. And you've talked about there were a lot of other Calendar options, right? It's not like you guys just came to market with some miraculous new [00:24:00] thing.

So how did you look at the market? When I was building my startup in New York, I ran into another team called X. AI. The whole thing was, they give you like a, a scheduling email. Basically, once you said, Oh, this person wants to schedule with me, they'll start emailing them back and forth. And until they found a good time, I think I remember that thing.

Actually, at a tail end, when I joined Cali, they started copying us and then they just ran out of money and they closed even before we got there. Like people like Acuity and a few others had been in the market. So the main thing I think was Cali was just better in many ways. So we understood that it wasn't a winner take all market.

We understood that. There were still lots of headroom in the market. At least not, I understood actually. Tope, my boss understood that. And a lot of this stuff is stuff he started, but I just helped continue. Basically, again, because of some of the things I've already learned from all my previous rodeos, a few things.

Kindly focused on experiencing a non paying customer. Most of our [00:25:00] competitors, because they focus on the person who signed up, right? But. Scheduling is a dual thing at minimum. And so we directed user experience. Our booking page was the best. It was the lowest friction. It just worked just really well. It was super fast when you compare it to the competition.

And small things just work like time zones and so on and so forth. And so what that did was that it reinforced, like once people used it, they're like, Oh my God, dude, that was just a great experience. First of all, that's a compliment. So now my 10 bucks is worth it in just one interaction. Secondly, then they signed up because it was so great.

And I created a viral loop. And then we got many difficult things, right? Time zones were a mess. If I was, yeah, if you're in a different time zone, blah, blah, like it could easily just be booking in a different time zone. Once that happens, it's a mess. It's like, it's a terrible experience for everybody. We never made a mistake there, right?

At least not after a little while, because we knew it was important. Again, we're finding pressure points. in the business, things to press. It [00:26:00] was also value price, right? And freemium. So it's a free plan. You can do it forever. You started out on a pro plan so you could get hooked on it. It's classic. And then we covered a lot of calendar types.

There are like 10 different calendars that scale in the world, right? From mobile phones to exchange and so on and so forth. And we kept covering more and more of them. So there was never a An excuse not to get counting. And then we goosed the viral engine. We knew it was a two man job to schedule. And so we created a payoff page and people, we could ask people to sign up, which people didn't do really well.

So taken together, most products just did not match these benefits that we brought to this market. And so we just want a great brand. Yeah. Yeah. That also like visually looked great and it was just easy to use, but I think time zones is a really important one, right? It's a nip. A lot of people just overlook it and say, Oh, you can just do a drop down and pick your time zone or whatever.

And people will do that. But when you're scheduling a meeting, sometimes. every click or it's high, you're already trepidatious about scheduling. Maybe you're scheduling with the salesperson and [00:27:00] that salesperson, that's their life and death right there is, is this meetings like making this stuff just work flawlessly and invisibly.

But you've talked about, you kind of rigged together a whole bunch of stuff that you were really able to take in and process customer signals and customer listening, this kind of thing. And I feel like that's the kind of insight you get from that constant. Paying attention to signals. How did that process look like?

How were you pulling in those signals and utilizing them and understanding what to listen to? And I'm sure most of you just want to push away because it's noise, right? You need to stay focused still at some level. This is a conundrum, right? I always try to, I separate two things, two separate, like.

Customer information things. One is discovery, right? Discovery is really finding big problems in the workflow to solve, and it requires a little bit of research, deep listening, asking the right questions. But if you go to business, usually on the internet, people are talking to you, right, your users, your would be users.

People who are using other competitors are also talking. The thing that a good product [00:28:00] team does is to scoop up that signal and then try to sift it and find a signal from the noise. By the way, this is a perennial problem. I was just talking to my boss at Atlassian. There was this project lighthouse. I tried to build it for all of Atlassian with a couple of PhD data scientists.

When I got to Cali, I jury rigged it. When I got to Twitter, we had 500 million people a month. And so I did something different for that. And then when I got to Typeform, I did another version of it because usually it's not actually a solved problem. The tools for whatever reason, these tools haven't been good enough in scale.

There's no figma for this problem. Although I expect one to happen in the next five years, just because AI is easier to sift the stuff. But what we did at County, like we're just super crude is that everything, whether it's app store reviews, G2 crowd, your churn information.