PM - Ryan Johnson
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Jeff Wharton: [00:00:00] Ryan, thanks so much for joining today. Really appreciate you coming on and great to get to talk to you 

Ryan Johnson: Yeah. Thanks for having me on today.

Jeff Wharton: I think today, you know, we want to talk about just over your career you have been, well positioned through a couple of companies to really be able to define your career, at least the past 10 years of it by quickly scaling companies as a product leader.

Most recently you're at CallRail right now as the chief product officer before that you were at Banjo which I remember reading about in Wired Magazine, actually, . Most recently, like I said, call rail uh, scaled quickly, you know, you 10 X revenue , since 2017.

What we really want to talk about today is how do you make sure that you are maintaining that great customer experience that speed of scale? And how do you scale and keep things organized? Throughout that.

Ryan Johnson: Yeah. I think, every company is definitely different when it comes to. Their growth and how they scale. I think some of the uniqueness with CallRail was really the founding of the business. It was very bootstrapped, didn't raise a lot of money. So there was not that innate need [00:01:00] to grow at all costs.

So I think we're, we've seen that change over time now, where companies have to be profitable and and sustainable. And I think at CallRail, what the founders , instilled. With growth is Hey, we want to grow fast. We want to grow. Efficiently, but we're going to be more thoughtful about it.

And I think, the best indicator was when I joined almost six years ago the organization was made up of homegrown for the most part, product managers that came from different parts of the business, which typically are the best product managers, right? The ones that come from support and success and sales and understanding customers But it was, their whole reason for bringing me in is to like, okay, we need to scale.

We need to continually deliver software, faster than what we were before. We need to continue to deliver value. And we need to do it in a manner that doesn't kill the startup mentality and the culture, but has like rigor and predictability and all those types of things. So I think, for me, I've been fortunate enough to [00:02:00] have people.

That support me at the top. I think that's half the battle. Cause there's changes that you need to do in order to accommodate that growth and it could be from hiring, how you organize teams, how you plan work, how you do roadmapping what tools do you have in place for metrics and success and all of those types of things.

I, I. I've been fortunate enough to be with some really good companies that have supported that and, really spend my time in focus of like, how do you continue to grow the business at a faster pace, but while, delivering, incredible product and value to your customers.

Jeff Wharton: Yeah, it makes sense. And, we were lucky enough to have you do a spotlight interview with us as well. Couple of months ago now looking through that, I think you specifically pointed out a couple things cause correct me if I'm wrong, but you talked about, the product.

That is call rail has really increased in scale quite a bit in the time you've been there. You've added capabilities, but one of the big selling points has always been that great ease of onboarding, simplicity of [00:03:00] use. So how do you add more capability while maintaining that? And you talked about how do you listen to customers?

How do you innovate on product and a couple other things? Can you maybe go through. How do you use that data and how do you leverage that to continue to grow the product, but not mess up what's important.

Ryan Johnson: Yeah. So I think at the core probably not shocking to the listeners is like listening to the customers. And that becomes difficult as a company grows and CallRail, you mentioned it. , today we have almost, 200, 000 individual businesses, 36, 000 like billable companies.

Cause we have like the one to many thing and that's a lot of voices, and a lot of. Diverse voices, right? Customer base is, anywhere from a marketing agency to a plumber to a real estate agent, to an attorney, to a physician's office on and on and on. And it's paramount to continue to listen to your customers as you grow.

And making sure, the secret sauce in the early days of CallRail was really a lot of that self service, being able to get set up and allow these, small, [00:04:00] medium businesses to get to value very quickly. So you have to listen to them. You have to understand, Hey, these are busy individuals.

You got to show them value as quickly as possible. And continue to get that data in, whether it's ad hoc, You know, talk to as many customers as you can, whether it's LinkedIn or talking with friends and support to, hop on calls with people to kind of more sophisticated looking at customer behavior and then triangulating, okay, they're saying this, but they're doing this in the app.

Does that make sense? Does that not make sense? In refining it from there, I think, know, data becomes a really critical part of it over time, I think. With a lot of technology startup companies. A lot of it is gut feeling and intuition. And that really works out well for the best founders and early employees.

But over time you have different types of people in the company that maybe don't have that mentality that are Mary more methodical on the data sense. So how do you bring in tools and [00:05:00] processes to get data and. I can tell you in some cases it's, the easy part is yeah, we have the data.

The hard part is what do you do with it? Where is it accessible? How can I do it at scale? How can I cross reference it with this other data? And certainly. Things like if you think of engineering product design and the data that we have about user behavior and comparing that to, support tickets and those types of things.

It gets pretty complicated. So you really have . To grow efficiently there and use tools and get the most value out of it that you can, that makes sense for your organization, which can be really tough. There's a bunch of tools out there, so you can get shiny object syndrome a little bit on the latest and greatest.

So you have to temper that. And then I think the other thing that we talked about is really like what is happening in the market and what is happening to our customer base that we can help from an opportunity perspective. What new challenges do they have? What new opportunities are they seeing?

[00:06:00] And really trying to, as you build and scale that platform. figure out, okay, here's new value that is ancillary or directly connected to your core platform. But you're kind of meeting them where the market is going. And it's really tough, right? And one is you don't really know. And two, again, you have a lot of voices.

There's a lot of activity, especially in The SAS Martech space especially within the last year with all the advancements of AI and everything else there, there's a lot of noise. Continuing to monitor the market and understand where things are going so that you can make sure that, you've scaled the product and the team to be able to support that in the future.

Jeff Wharton: Yeah, the Martek space has, I think the scaling of that over the past decade has been wild, right? If you look at, the graphs that kind of started with what seemed like now a very tame , hundred companies on now have thousands of orgs and how do you keep abreast of what that means for your customers?

Ryan Johnson: That's right.

Jeff Wharton: It's marketing over here. It's always been an aggressive feat to try and just keep [00:07:00] abreast of, how do you not get shiny object syndrome? How do you not, how do you, focus on the things that matter? But also I think you mentioned a couple of minutes ago, right? Like you started with a homegrown team.

You didn't come in and hire a bunch of seasoned PMs. You didn't walk into a team of people who had been doing product for years and years. It was people who were passionate, who wanted to understand the customer and what you at CallRail could do better to serve them. But how do you scale with that?

Like the problem you run into is you have the passion, you have the love of the product and the understanding, but maybe. Some of the organization or frameworks, like you said, you were brought into scale. So how did you foster a culture in the prod team , to build, you know, the things you needed to grow the org and grow the company while at the same time, maintaining that passion and maintaining the things that made the org great when you walked into it,

Ryan Johnson: I think it started with trust to, to be upfront like, Hey, some things are going to change and these are for the better, and it's going to be difficult. I'm here with you on this journey. I was fortunate. enough to my first hire was someone I worked with before that was [00:08:00] seasoned.

Bringing him in helped out where they're like, Oh, okay, here's someone that has been a product manager for a number of years. Seeing that behavior, at least with one individual really helped out as well too. But I think it's just resetting expectations and defining, it sounds silly, but I think still today.

Some organizations are like what does a product manager do? Like we're still in that phase of defining like what we do for a living sometimes. And so I think that's the first part is culturally saying this is what a product manager does. I call rail. It's someone that is innovative that.

Wants to have an impact on the customer and on the business. They're not a project manager. They are a product manager and they have to work cross functionally with go to market teams and listen to customers, all those. So I think, step one is. here's the expectation, and then we're going to help you get there.

And that, by the way, it's a good thing that you don't have all this experience because you may be bringing bad habits as well, [00:09:00] too. And so, I always refer to this story at a company I was at over almost 10 years ago now called Vitru. I was actually on the engineering side as an engineering manager.

And our VP of engineering hired all different types of engineering manager. I was never an engineer, but I was an engineering manager. Managing engineers, another engineering manager was really good at project management. Another engineering manager was a developer in the past And so I saw like, Hey, we have all really different backgrounds, but we're in the same role as an engineering manager. And it was profound at the time, but our VP said, listen, Your goal is to deliver software. You're not allowed to come in here and say like, well, my PM is weak or my designer is weak.

And we can't get it done. Like you have to deliver software. You have to figure it out. You have to figure out where those gaps are and help grow these folks. And by the way, you may be the weakest person as well, too. So they need to help growing you. And so I think that [00:10:00] mentality of taking a diverse set of people and then, getting them under the, like your responsibilities to deliver software, like really upfront made it very easy cause we knew the expectations and I think.

Same thing at CallRail. It's just here's the expectations of the PM, but like each individual that has all this different, wonderful background, like that was a positive. So let's lean into that stuff. Let's make sure, you know, if you're really good at UX, that you're on a UX heavy product, don't put you in a backend only, tools product.

Does it make sense? Or if you really, really. Good and passionate on integrations, make sure you have integrations really hard to understand. And so really scaling and building the team philosophically. I'm like, I want them. I'm most diverse set of people out there. And, set these expectations of what we think success is.

and it's pretty amazing what you can do. It's not easy. There's certainly lots of challenges that go along with that with having people with such different [00:11:00] backgrounds sometimes. But to me, that's the more fun part of it. And it's certainly figuring out how to be a product manager that scales is fun.

And I think, the last point here is, it's very difficult at a lot of organizations to go from. That homegrown startup mentality of this is the way we do it. And like, how does that role change over time? And it continues to today, right? It's no different. Where their role is evolved from a year ago.

There's more people to talk to. There's more people to bring in when it comes to launching a new product. The support team's bigger. The sales team is bigger. There's new people. It's people with domain knowledge that aren't around anymore. So it's always evolving and then, take on AI like, okay, great.

We're building AI products, but how are you becoming a better product manager? Utilizing these things that are out there to help you be better at the craft and focus more on, on the craft of delivering incredible products.

Jeff Wharton: It's [00:12:00] funny you mentioned part of it is matching. Matching the right project, the right person. It's interesting. I heard a couple of weeks ago one of the CPOs I got to talk to through all of this, she described the role of the CPO as finding opportunities and matching those opportunities.

To the right people. I just thought it was such an elegant way of talking about leadership, especially in product. It's just by hearing that recur with you.

Ryan Johnson: Absolutely. I always joke and I'm only half joking. I'm the worst product manager at CallRail to this day. SDPL really am. But to me that's a measure of success. Cause the team that we have of wow these people are aligned to their skillset and they're really good at what they do and they should be much better than me.

Jeff Wharton: Yeah, no it's, that's the goal, right? Every day I meet with the marketing team across log rocket and they're bringing stuff forward that I've never thought of. I've never could even fathom how we get there, but, I try and make sure I'm the worst marketer we have here.

And it's worked pretty well. [00:13:00] I don't tell, I don't tell, I don't tell our CEO that I feel like that would get me in trouble,

Ryan Johnson: keep that out of your annual review, right?

Jeff Wharton: But that kind of goes back to it. Between all the data you guys are collecting and the focus on, how do you. Maintain great customer experience, but you want the product to do more.

You need it to do more over time and expand. And this great kind of culture you've set with innovation and this kind of team of homegrown people evolved. Maybe you can walk us through what that looks like. From a result standpoint, what's, a feature you've launched that came from, this kind of insight from these great people and the kind of data you've been able to pull out of customers and analytics and all that kind of stuff.

Ryan Johnson: Yeah. I think the most recent one happened about this time last year. We had gone through considerably strong growth from a volume perspective. So if you think of the amount of , phone calls and conversations that happening have dramatically gone up over time. And the first experience that you're hit with as a customer is for lack of a better word of what we call the call log.

And it's very simple, [00:14:00] like what's happening on these phone calls. It's a log. But if you have tens of thousands of phone calls that are happening across tens of thousands of hundreds of customers. And they're all accessing it daily at the same time. It starts to put pressure. So we started to see a metrics like, Hey, for some of our , biggest kind of agencies in this type of stuff, like they're going to our, main page of value and.

It's not working like it used to before. And it was really concerning. It was like, Oh my gosh, like it's causing other scaling problems within the platform, but it's also their experiences degrading from something that was just automatic and super performant and all that. And so very quickly, we had always had this project.

We called it the dashboard. Like they should come in and have more of a rolled up, eloquent. Dashboard that has notifications and things that they should take should take action on or items that they should know about a new feature that launched those types of things. And so we [00:15:00] had this out there.

It was de prioritized for some time. And I had a team come to me that says, listen, , we can do this. Like we can reduce the pressure to this page, which is overall better customer experience. But now here's all this value that we can give to our customers that they weren't getting before.

It's much more delightful to look at if you think of dashboards and those types of things versus a single kind of graph or log. And they deployed something within like less than 45 days. It w it was wild. And so from a data perspective, you see the platform get to a really healthy level cause you're not stressing this page out that didn't make sense anymore.

You've delighted the customers cause now they're seeing things that they didn't see before. So they're seeing like these rolled up metrics and different types of visual kind of widgets, if you will. And so that was like delightful of 

and then I think what was amazing, we had this silver lining of way, this little area that was. Notifications that customers that they should take action on immediately. And we've had these via email and browser extensions, all that, but you know how that goes, you ignore the [00:16:00] email, you dismiss the browser extension, everything else.

We noticed really quickly, our customers in their business needed more phone numbers In their marketing programs to basically keep up with the attribution, maybe their website had too much volume or those types of things. And so there's an alert that says, Hey, if you want to capture all the, the attribution of these leads, like you have to do this.

And within the first two weeks, like thousands of people did this before and like a huge spike. On the graphs and we're like, Oh my gosh this is like something we didn't intend. It just happened to be the loudest alert and now we put it in front of eyes in the right place. And now it's beneficial for the customer because now they're actually able to take immediate action to make sure that they don't miss that valuable attribution.

So it was a very. Bottoms up team innovation, let's figure out this problem. We see all the data, we see the challenges. But then it had all these other positive benefits to the customer as well.

Jeff Wharton: does the team go through and figure out, [00:17:00] right? What's the most important, what these customers want to see, what do they need to see what's actionable what went into kind of figuring out the nuts and bolts of what that dashboard is going to look like versus kind of. 

Ryan Johnson: yeah, I think, one is looking at data of, Customer behavior. So what reports are they looking at the most often? And the volume of these other things besides the call log, cause if they continually are going to the same report, okay, put it in their face make it easier for them to access.

So kind of like basic. Data. I think we would all look at it was customer interviews and listening to support calls as well to say, Hey, this customer really only wants to see this at a high level. And yes, we have this report, but it's a big pain in the butt. Open it and filter columns and all that.

Like really, they just need this. And if you can throw it in a graph, they'll love you. And so I think that was the second aspect of that is listening to the customers. The third aspect was it had to be time box, right? This was a thing of. We had this North star of what this magical [00:18:00] dashboard could be.

We didn't start on it, but now we have this forcing function of like, Hey, some of our clients are experiencing a degraded performance and it's not getting any better and we don't have any other solutions. So here's a time box. So Then they took those two other components and said, okay, what can we do in 45 days?

What has the biggest impact? And then we can go and build on that, which, which of course we've done and we continue to do that. But I think those were like, The forcing functions of data what are they accessing all the time from a behavior, talking to those customers, both proactively and, reactively as they come into support and hearing those things, and then finally saying okay, this is the hand we're dealt, like we, we really need to do this.

So how do you fit it into 45 days? But you're still pointed to that North star mission and in the longterm.

Jeff Wharton: I love that the the time boxing and how do you get it done in a concise amount of time? It's worth as much I'm struggling to remember , what company it was that said this, but someone again a product leader I was [00:19:00] talking with recently talked about, they don't assign things points in that they don't look at it backwards from, we want to do this and we think we can do it in this long.

They look at it from a standpoint of. We are willing to spend this much time on it. And if we can't then we're not gonna spend more time. , if we think it's only worth 15 days of commitment, we're not gonna spend 45 days doing it. So I, I love the 45 day, what can we ship to do this and help people here in 45 days?

Time is our most limited feature everywhere. You can raise money, but you can't, can't raise time. so that's great. You were able to look at the data you guys had work with the team to figure out what you could do.

Jeff Wharton: And it made a huge difference. And I think that's a recurring theme that I've seen the market is, we talked about the Martech market just exploding, there's , probably a thousand X vendors than there were 10 years ago and same in for product and same for, analytics and what we've seen is.

It's not really a matter of people don't need more data. I think people are overwhelmed by the amount of data they have. It's how do you help them action? How do you show them, like you guys saw, what are the things that are actionable [00:20:00] right now? And people were drawn to that. It sounds like, so how do you continue to do that?

And it's something we've seen a lot of luck with too, is how do you find, the signal and noise and how do you help people not have to sit there and be data analysts, but just be able to pull the insights out there to be most actionable. So Kind of in that vein, continuing that down that vein talking to customers, looking through analytics, all of that can easily become overwhelming. You could, I'm sure you guys have what you said, 300, 000 customers.

Ryan Johnson: , about 200, 000 customers. Yeah.

Jeff Wharton: Yeah. So, I'm sure you could have your entire product team do nothing but talk to customers in full time all day long.

And not even touch, a majority of them, or you can always go down a rabbit hole of analytics, right? That's something people seem to still be struggling with is what's the most important bits and what's just extraneous. We went through a couple of minutes ago the long list of how you guys look at all this stuff, but how do you actually build structure around it?

How do you set it up? So you have a consistent vehicle to go talk to customers or a consistent way to use analytics and how do you prioritize that data? So you're not, [00:21:00] over maybe overweighting one or the other, or just spending all your time talking to your 200, 000 customers, for instance.

Ryan Johnson: Yeah, that's a good point. I think it's a something that continually evolves. , I feel it's just never ending. And there's things outside of our control. For example, at CallRail, we have a BI team and they have systems and data that's there that's important to us on the business metric side.

And then, here we have all the product, activity side. And so I think. So much of it is just getting an agreement of people saying, this is what we're going to do, right? And you've seen a lot of times of these ad hoc, I really want to know what's going on here.

Someone goes off and does it like, shoot, they may even go direct to the database and get the data. And that's fun. And, we've all been there to, to get that, but that doesn't scale right. And the people that. a lot of reasons you should not do that. And so I think, you know, a piece of it is as an organization understanding, okay, this is our source of truth.

These are the things we're going to use and being open because they all have shortfalls in some way, right? There's always something that [00:22:00] this one does really well. And this one does okay. And vice versa. And so I think a piece of it too, is the getting out of the utopia of.

It's going to solve every types of users desire in your company. The information that the PM wants is very different than the information, the CEO, but we've all been there where we're like well, yeah the, PM can have this. And then the CEO has these, pretty, you know, rolled up executive things and it all works and they all use the same thing and you should consolidate it. doesn't happen most often. And it's really aligning the organization beyond, so people outside of EPD to say, Hey, this is what we use to look at. to look at performance data, to look at user behavior and what we do with user research, looking at replays of people's, activity and behavior and then being open and honest of what it can and cannot do.

And then continually to refine that, to say, Hey, if it's important to the. [00:23:00] Organization. We should go invest in that kind of like anything else. So it's almost like an internal product team or thought process to basically make the business case, right? You may need other people's help. You may need more storage to, to access all this type of data.

And so I think, the alignment makes such a big difference. Cause I think we've been at a lot of companies you go in and it's like, okay, this person's using Google analytics and this person's using this thing over here and it doesn't make sense. And then they're putting it in presentations to the whole company.

And you're like Whoa. And so I, I think the alignment on the kind of tools and processes that you use you know, whether it's requests for new data or whatever it may be. I think that's really the most important thing. Cause it's always going to be dynamic. It's always going to change.

There's always going to be some new data point that you need right now. and if you can consolidate and have agreement on what the company has agreed to. Not that everybody necessarily has to agree with the decision that was made, but you have to say Hey, this is what we are.

[00:24:00] Using I think that's just half the battle, especially as you scale and grow, cause you're not monitoring, a small group anymore. And certainly in EPD, I'm, we went from, 50 people ish to 150 people. So there's a lot of different people that now can look at things in different ways.

Alternatively, though, too, you have to be really careful not to stifle innovation on that. So you have to say this is what it is, but always be eyes wide open for new things out there. Just have a process of how we evaluate it, so that way, if an engineer or a product manager is like, wow this is really amazing.

I get this new data. I've researched it. Would we consider it? Make sure you have those processes too, because you don't want people to get really frustrated. You know, I think. Google has like the best reputation for this, right? Like the developers that have access to the best things out there, the best tools, the best data.

And so that's why people want and, they get to use whatever program, like all that stuff, that's a big reason that engineers want to work at Google. And so if you start to stifle that of no, you can't use this [00:25:00] at all. So it's just a balance between the two.

Jeff Wharton: that makes sense. Right. I think we've all seen the instances where you ask the same question from three teams and they'll give you three answers because they're using three different data tools or three different data sources and you don't want the answer to change based on who you ask it should be.

True across the company,

Ryan Johnson: That's right. 

Jeff Wharton: So actually it gets us into an interesting topic actually, which is, scale is fun. you know, The romantic version of the startup is you add a hundred people a year and you grow two X, three X per year. And all of a sudden you find yourself at some big company.

And you've been through that and you've been there, but there's risks there too, right? It's fun to grow in valuation and people and revenue and all that, but also things can get messy and things can. cause problems. What are the risks here? What do you look out for as you're growing?

What are you kind of aware to be aware of, I guess? yeah 

Ryan Johnson: examples. Experiences that I went through with here of maybe it didn't go so great, or at least it was a challenge. When I was at banjo, we raised a hundred million dollars. We were a 39 [00:26:00] person company.

So you can imagine a 39 person company. You just got to check for a hundred million and. We're working on some of the bleeding edge AI stuff. That's really easy now, if you think of computer vision and some of these other things, but this was, almost over, eight years ago early days of, being a startup.

That's one of. Amazon's biggest customers for GPUs. Like it sounds ridiculous. And so you have this pressure to grow fast. So we hired a lot of people. And as you can imagine, data scientists and all that were not cheaper eight years ago by any stretch. So you're expanding the team really quickly.

You're utilizing bleeding edge technology where the art of the possible is really unlimited. There's things that I saw every day that were just. Like mind blowing. I cannot believe this actually happened with this technology in a very positive way. And then, that elation, that snowball effect, you're growing with employees, you're doing all this.

And then eventually you hit like maybe a board meeting or [00:27:00] two. And you start looking at how much you're spending. And then you're like, Whoa yes, it's a hundred millions a lot, but we spent a lot. And then it was like, okay, go look at your AWS bill. And it was like, Oh my gosh, how did we go from 50 K to 500 K in three months?

There's no way we're using this, right? Things like that. And then you have to like dive back in and reset and be like, Oh no, like that isn't actually needed. We were just growing really fast. People had the right intent, there were things that we use for a test for some like AI tests.

We were testing, how can we detect a certain object in a video. And so it took a lot of processing and we spun up this instance and did all that stuff. And then someone forgot about it. Cause we moved on to the next one. That was still running and costing money and all that.

In that instance, I think we learned, like we reeled ourselves back in and we were pretty revenue. So we were really focused on the technology. And I think I heard this at a CPO conference. I think. We were also, especially in AI, one of the pitfalls is it's just biting off too [00:28:00] much because the art of the possible is just so big and exciting and all that.

And I think we could have, you know, to, to our earlier conversation of a time box to like a value to a customer or go to market. I think that would have helped out more. We just had the elation of Oh my gosh. We can detect a fire in a video. Can we detect a water, can we detect water or a flood or can we do this over here?

How do we triangulate it with other data? And it was just very different in that scale. I feel it was like a seesaw, right? Like we, brought it back in and then, the next thing came up. And so. I think you just have to be cognizant of that stuff. And it's a balance.

And then I think, you know, my other example, I work, this is a publicly traded company Kaplan higher education. And they went through a digital transformation, this is. Almost 13, 15 years ago now where they were going from waterfall software development to scrum. And I happened to join the company and worked in tech and [00:29:00] also knew all this financial stuff.

And they said Ryan would be a great product owner. Ryan, do you want to be a product owner over this big, project we're going from waterfall software development to agile and we'll go get your scrum certification and all this type of stuff. It's very exciting.

And so that fast pace of evolving to scale the biggest mistake is they picked the most expensive product in their it portfolio to go and test this out on. It was a 5 million project and it was one of the most. Innovative projects in the whole company. And that's the one they chose to go like, okay, go implement Scrum.

Ryan, go manage all these stakeholders where they're used to these big PRDs. And we're going to get it by this date. And it's going to do all this stuff. And now you have to go and tell them like, Oh no, we only play in work every two weeks. This is what we get in every two weeks. And. It literally showed me every single way not to implement something like this into an organization.

I feel it was probably one of the biggest learning experiences for me [00:30:00] because I literally saw all the disasters that can happen. And that made it easy after that, right? , it's never easy, but it mentally, it made it easy. To say the intent is there. Their intent was to scale with a new way of doing business in new software development life cycle, but the way that they implemented it, the elation, all that, like it was never tempered.

It was never, challenged. And so, those are kind of like two examples of whoa. It's fun to be innovative. It's fun to grow and scale. But there's lots of, war stories as well.

Jeff Wharton: That's always the most interesting one. It seems like it's easy to bite off more or, in marketing, I think we have this concept of there's a lot of teams, particularly susceptible to like shiny object syndrome, where , it's never the sprint. You're not planning a two week sprint.

You're not planning the month you're just. Ongoing campaigns and then something you come along, you want to do and that, and before you know it, you have 17 pieces of work in progress. And but it's definitely, this concept and I think you talked about it here, but I've definitely found [00:31:00] the best things I've learned, like the most impactful things I've learned to running an org and how do we accomplish more is treating in my case my failures.

Where did things fall down? Where did things break really badly? What were the dumpster fires? Things go mildly bad. , you can learn a little, but the worse something goes, potentially the more you can learn and.

and why I love getting to do this podcast and talk to people like you is we run marketing here like a product.

We run sprints, we do capacity planning, we make hard decisions. But I wouldn't have ever learned that if I hadn't seen and been at marketing orgs where. We tried to do too many things and just everything goes mediocre because you do too much. Or like you said you try and do it to your biggest, shiniest, most important product and you don't test it.

And suddenly you find huge scale problems. So it's always good to learn. , I've now been able to say I'm the worst marketer at log rocket and that I learned from dumpster fires nice.

So I think that's, a great background in scale, right? You go through, you need these kinds of sources of data and people who are passionate, who can [00:32:00] really understand it, but also the prioritization mechanisms and the guardrails to make sure you don't take on too much, you go outside the rails.

But that actually, leads us into, I think one last bit we're rounding up. I don't want to have this thing go on forever, but, it's a little well known that you're a bit of a speed junkie. And you like to drive cars and I get yelled at by my kids all the time that I have a lead foot and they're always saying, how fast are you going?

And But you actually do it on a track which 

is 

Ryan Johnson: Yeah 

Jeff Wharton: first of all, if we apply a product mindset to it, what is the difference here? What's the difference between just, maybe driving a little quickly when you're on the street versus, how do you think about and structurally think about on a track and what's really fundamental there.

Ryan Johnson: yeah. Is so different. It's hard to articulate from, your normal highway to a track at velocity. And interesting enough, there are a lot of people that do what I do that are product managers that I've met. I actually, my instructor, Alex, I spent the whole day with him, and he's [00:33:00] learning, my first time out.

And I finally just said, Hey what do you do for a living? And he's I'm a product manager. I was like, Oh my gosh, like I'm a chief product officer. And so I think. Our interests in, going faster, so much involved into it, right? Because the car is a product. And there's all this data, right?

If you think of tire pressure and even temperature of your tires and the temperature outside and how it affects fuel and air mixtures and all these types of things, there's like a ton of similarities of how we think about data and inputs. And in this case, it's essentially to try to go as fast as you can in a safe manner.

And, just the dumpster fires we were talking about I've had a few myself. Luckily probably the last incident I had I was actually with an instructor to they call it a check ride. So this is the like, hey, you get to go up another level.

And experience and being out there with different run groups. And we just started we're going down this [00:34:00] backstretch. I'm probably doing 120. I let this Corvette pass me his brake line is leaking. And sprays brake fluid all over my car. And that wasn't necessarily horrible. I was able to start slowing down.

The challenge was my automatic windshield wiper that senses rain kicked on. And this caused the wipers to basically smear brake fluid to the point where I could not see out of the front of my car on a racetrack. And that was scary. It was also like, of course, this is going to happen when I'm with an instructor out there to move up the next run group.

I was able to safely pull over, finally got enough, of the washer fluid to, take it off. And then of course, you get back into the pits and they're like, you can't have brake fluid on your pain. It will ruin it. So here I am like washing my car in the pits in front of all these other like race cars and other things.

Super embarrassing. Even though it wasn't my fault. I think it has a lot of [00:35:00] similarities to things in technology and product and how we build product, how we think about it with data and that things are going to go wrong. And I think the big differences on the track, like if they go too wrong you can result in crashing your car or injuring yourself or both, which are really bad outcomes that no one wants.

And that's the principle, go out, have fun, be able to drive your car back. there's no winner in those track days. And so I think it's also that we talked about balance a lot. It's the balance of going fast and being safe. And I think, in product, it's the.

Balance of being innovative, but having like really quality product out there that works for the customers and those types of things. So I think that also has a segue into my tracking obsession of balance. Although I think the mistakes could be a little bit worse on the track, but Nonetheless lots, of parallels.

And so I'm not surprised as I meet product managers and product leaders on the track. And that we're gravitate towards that in this odd way.

Jeff Wharton: There's gotta be something there [00:36:00] about driving blind and trying to resolve product issues, blind or stuff. But

Ryan Johnson: the funniest thing is that, it would be one thing if it was user error, you know, we think in software user error, if I would have flicked on. The windshield wipers and cause it to do that. But it's funny. It was a automatic triggered design in the car to do it. That actually made it worse.

And I think there's lots of times when we develop products, the same thing, the intent was good, the intent of that is really good. I don't have to flick on my washers when it rains. Awesome. There are instances where there's something you don't want on there that make it way worse. And I think it's the same thing if you think about our users and Sass and those types of things that like the intent could be good.

But maybe this is one of those like edge cases of what happens if something that isn't water gets on there? Type of scenario. 

Jeff Wharton: seems like a good case for customer feedback for the car company. I would do what their process is. I think that's a great place to [00:37:00] end is, this metaphor racing and product. And um, I'll be honest, I I expect to take the metaphor a little bit, but you really took that one home.

So let's end on a high point. That was awesome. Thank you for taking the time to do this today, man. I appreciate it. Had a lot of fun. I feel like I learned a lot and hopefully we can talk again.

Ryan Johnson: Yeah. Same here. Thanks for having me on. It was really enjoyable and excited to do it again in the future.