 Hi everyone, thank you so much for joining today. My name is Frank Tisilano. If you're a product manager with a background in design or software engineering, and you're looking to up level your business skills, this is the talk for you. Today we're gonna be talking about the Cynical PM framework, which is just a cheeky name for a business-first approach to product. Quick background on me. I was born and raised in New York City. I'm currently the product management lead for Google Slides. I've been doing PM for over 10 years during which time I've managed or mentored over 50 PMs. And what you're gonna hear in this talk is a reflection both of where I see the most room for growth and the folks that I've managed or mentored. And frankly, in an area where I've needed the most growth in my own career. So this very much comes out of my personal experience, both in the folks that I've worked with and for myself. Before we get into the meat of it, I should just disclaim that any opinions I expressed today are purely my own. I do work at Google, but none of these are Google's opinions. In fact, I'm gonna talk about a Google product. I created this talk when I was not working at Google. So none of this is based on any kind of confidential information. All of this is totally public. And again, all of my opinions are just mine. But let's get really into the talk here. Which actually starts when I was starting in product management. When I was starting in product between 10 and 15 years ago, the companies I admired most were building consumer products that I was using. And what I was hearing from their founders was things like focus on the user and all else will follow. I was looking at companies like IDEO that are doing user-centric design thinking, hearing things from some famous CEOs. Like design is how it works. And so I'm hearing design, design, design. And I'm really thinking about the craft of building products. A lot of the software I was building even before I started my career was just for font and out of passion and out of love. And I wanted to bring that sensibility to my working life. I wanted to bring that level of craft because that's how I thought I was gonna deliver a lot of value in the businesses that I was working in. I quickly found out that although it's great to be focused on design and that having a good sense of craft is important, it's not sufficient. That as a PM, your job is actually to think about three distinct areas and maximize the overlap between them as much as possible. Now, first and foremost, your job is to deliver for the business that you're working in, which to me was not totally shocking, but the reality of it definitely hit me in a way that I wasn't expecting. You also need to be an expert in your team's capabilities, whether that's in what they're capable of today or what they need to be capable of to deliver on your business goals. And of course, of course, it's really critical that we deliver for our customers. If we're not delivering for our customers, we're not gonna be meeting our business goals for very long. And so you do need all three of these because if you have only two, obviously if you only have any one of these, you're not gonna be successful. But even if you only have two, you run into these anti-patterns where for example, if you are optimizing just for your business goals and the capabilities of the team, you're probably not gonna solve the right problem and by optimizing directly for those business goals, you're gonna actually not meet them. If you optimize for those goals and for what your customers need, you're gonna have great ideas that just never get built because you're not aware of the capabilities or you produce a suboptimal solution because you're thinking too narrowly about how to solve those needs or what the business goals are. And finally, if you think too much just about what your customers need and what your team capabilities are, you don't miss the move the business forward. And for me, those were the two buckets that I was focused on. And so at some point in my career, I realized, all right, I need to turn this on its head. I need to really start thinking about that top blue circle. I need to get cynical. I need to start thinking more like, for example, the sales leaders in some of the early businesses that I worked in who were really fully incentivized to focus on the most important business goals on acquiring new customers or retaining them or expanding within them. And so just as a thought experiment, let's think about, let's imagine that our job is mostly a vast majority of our focus needs to be on this top one. What does that end up looking like? Well, it changes your perspective from that craft focus perspective where maybe the product or the design is an end in itself. It's like this beautiful piece of furniture that you've crafted and you're proud of the end result and the design of it speaks for itself and the design is the thing that sells it. Let's change our mentality from that to one in which the product is actually a means, it's not the end. It is a tool for the business to use to meet its goals. Now, what are those goals? Well, there are many different formulations of business goals but fundamentally every business cares about one or more of these three things. Every business cares about acquiring new customers or new revenue. They care about retaining those customers in that revenue because it costs a lot more money to acquire a new customer than it does to keep the ones that you already have and for the same reason they care about expansion especially in much more mature markets where there's a lot of competition, you can grow by growing within your existing customer base much more easily than you can by acquiring lots of new customers because each marginal customer becomes more and more expensive to acquire. And so for somebody who's really craft minded like I am, like I was, it can be easy to look at these business goals as separate from your product but for a cynical PM it's important to look at these business goals as jobs for your product to do. Now, many people are familiar with the jobs to be done framework with respect to our users. Our users are hiring our product to do a job for them and they're gonna stay around if the product successfully does that job. We don't talk about how our product needs to do a job for our business also as much. And so that's what I'd encourage you to do today is to get cynical with me and think about what is my product's job or my features job for my business. And I will stop there for a second to say you may be hearing this and saying I don't own a whole product. I own a set of features or a problem space. That's okay. This all fully applies in those situations as well. Your feature may be an acquisition focused feature or maybe an expansion or retention focused feature. It's really critical for you to know which one it is. And that's a key part of the question. Which one is it? Turns out that that's a really hard thing to do is to get the business aligned around which one of these jobs your product needs to do. And misalignment about that job actually makes your job really hard. When you don't have clarity about your product's role in your business it can be really difficult to have productive conversations about positioning, about development prioritization about how to measure success. I'll give you an example. If you've ever been in a situation where you're a sales team if you're in a B2B product they're insistent that you commit to some new feature to close a specific deal. It's easy to write off the sales team is not caring about the craft of the product as being like totally short term revenue obsessed and you kind of build this almost caricature of sales people in your mind and I think that's actually not the case. I think what really is the case in that situation is that you as a PM most of your interaction is with your existing customers. You think like oh it's so obvious all we need to do is these five things and the market which in your mind you're anchoring on the customers that you already know about will love it. And of course we'll get a lot of new customers from this but in reality what's happening is you're just misaligned. The sales team thinks about acquisition. They're thinking about acquiring customers and so they're trying to get you to prioritize features that are acquisition focused whereas you as the best representative for the voice of your existing customers are probably thinking more about retention. And so it's not like some fundamental personality difference or something deep like that. It's really about are you thinking about the job for your product in the same way? Now let's take a look at how understanding the job of your product can help influence your prioritization decisions, your positioning decisions and even how to measure your product success. We're gonna do a couple case studies here. Let's talk about prioritization first. So back when I first started in product management one of the most popular and one of my favorite products was Dropbox which is still obviously incredibly popular for doing file sharing. Now Dropbox at the time had a very famous landing page that made it really easy for users to understand this pretty unfamiliar idea of automatic syncing of your files across many computers. Now this is totally common. All of us are totally used to it but back then novel idea had a great explainer video and a really simple way of acquiring new users and so their product was actually built to make it super easy to download, get started, log in, all of that in a very short period. So get to the value very quickly. They also priced their product in a way where you got the first couple of gigabytes for free to get new users to start uploading files as soon as possible. And so Dropbox is kind of the heavy hitter on the block even though they're a startup they're definitely the most well-known of these file syncing file sharing products and they're really complete like feature complete product, right? They have cross-platform support. It works on Mac, it works on PC and I'm pretty sure it worked on Linux also. They had an API and so it was really extensible and really fully featured. And so imagine you're the new kid on the block, your iCloud Drive, your Apple's trying to kick off another attempt at file syncing at the time they had done a couple of tries before and Apple's thinking about, okay, Dropbox has this big mark they're doing pretty well. We want to deliver a file sharing product too. How if you're the iCloud Drive PM how do you think about prioritizing your first couple of features? Are you thinking about cross-platform support and granular permissions and sharing through the web? No, of course you're not because we are all intuiting what Apple's strategy is. We're all intuiting the job of iCloud Drive. The job of iCloud Drive is not to acquire net new customers for Apple. The job of iCloud Drive is to help Apple retain and expand within the existing customer base that they already have that they've acquired through iPhone purchases and through the Mac. And so, whereas for the same kind of product the Dropbox PMs are thinking about how do we make it as easy as possible to onboard for brand new customers that never have used Dropbox before and then of course retain them so that we can eventually start charging them. For the iCloud PM, it's really about retention only. They are thinking about how do I serve Apple's broader business not about how do I create a whole separate file sharing and file syncing business outside the walls of the Mac and iOS ecosystem. And so, the kinds of features that they prioritize end up being very different, right? They're thinking about deep OS integration just with the Mac and with iOS. They're thinking about making it look invisible and making it super easy to cross sell to existing Mac and iOS users. We've already got a credit card in iTunes at the time. All you need to do is click this button when you do your upgrade to Lion or whenever it came out and you're now using iCloud Drive and it's just happening behind the scenes. You're not even thinking about it. Those are the kinds of features that they're prioritizing not acquiring net new windows users that are not using Macs. So deeply affects your roadmap. Okay, let's shift gears. Let's talk about positioning. But first I should describe what I mean by positioning. Positioning is defining in your customers and your potential customers minds where your product stands in relation to other products or other solutions in your market. Let's compare how a company like Datadog arguably the top cloud monitoring company positions their product relative to how Google Cloud, for example, positions their native built-in cloud monitoring. When I think about positioning, there's the core definition which is how your customers think about your product. There's also a company's attempt to shift that thinking in their customers minds. And I think probably one of the most distilled ways of understanding how a company wants their product to be positioned in their customers mind is by looking at the simple text description on their search results page. So for Datadog, they do cloud monitoring as a service across lots of different platforms. Datadog's product, its job is acquisition, retention and expansion. That is the number one product in their business for Google Cloud. Less so, we're gonna see how in a second. So for Datadog, for them, they've gotta get people in the door. The only way they're gonna do that is by being the most and the best at everything. And so you see it in their positioning. Any stack, any app, any scale, anywhere, any, any, any, any. This is a business that is about completeness because if you're a standalone monitoring product, you're not embedded in the cloud ecosystem, Datadog's gotta have a compelling enough value proposition to capture market share from folks using all different clouds including maybe on-prem solutions. Google Cloud Monitoring, a little bit different, right? They're not thinking about acquisition in the same way that Datadog is. Google Cloud Monitoring, they're probably thinking about integration. They're thinking about cross-sell. They're thinking about expansion. They're thinking about retention. The more operationally embedded our various products in cloud are, the more likely it is for a customer to stick around with us. And so Google Cloud Monitoring is integrated. It's in context, in, in, in. So Google Cloud is really, Google Cloud Monitoring is really about expansion. It's really about retention. Finally, probably the most difficult area, the most important area impacted by what your product's job is is by how you think about measuring its success. And those other things, the prioritization, the positioning, they all come out of that success measurement. Let's go back to our friends at Apple. For folks in the know, Apple's long been a company about selling very premium products that are high revenue and high margin products. That is Apple's business. When you think about the iPhone, the iPhone is probably the most perfectly distilled version of that strategy. The iPhone is a very premium product that is pretty high cost and certainly high margin. And so the goal for the iPhone is customer acquisition. The iPhone is a vehicle for getting people into Apple's ecosystem in a very high margin and high revenue way. And so it's easy to think that all of Apple's products should fit into the same strategic framework as the iPhone. Well, as you can probably guess, they have other products that don't fit into that strategic framework. Think about something like iMessage. iMessage is the anti-iPhone. It's probably really expensive to run. It has a billion users. It probably costs Apple many billions of dollars a year. It actually has negative margins. It's free for users. And Apple makes no money on it. And it's only on Apple's platforms. It's only on iOS. It's only on the Mac. It's for Apple customers only. And when you think about how stark the difference is there between iPhone and iMessage, it's like, why are the... If Apple just charged every user $1 a month, think about how much more money they could be making. $10 billion more a year, even for Apple, that's a lot of money. But Apple knows that iMessage is not about... Its job is not acquisition. Apple knows that iMessage's job is retention. Apple recognizes that iMessage is a way of adding a lot of value of creating a network effect that is not replicable on other platforms, that they fully control and that they know that it is a vehicle for keeping people around in the ecosystem. Another cool example here is Apple recently, within the last couple of years, made it possible to do FaceTime calls with folks outside the Apple ecosystem. That too is about retention. And maybe that's a little bit about new customer acquisition too, right? It's about making sure that people continue to use FaceTime and not switch to some other more cross-platform video conferencing solution for their friends and their family by enabling folks from outside to come in. SMS already... On the texting side, we already have that with SMS so they didn't need to do anything extra there. And so iMessage is the ultimate retention product. And actually it's like sneakily an acquisition product too, because as you build loyalty to an ecosystem in a family, for example, when your kid starts growing up and they're ready for their new smartphone because of iMessage and these other services that Apple offers that do help with retention, they actually end up spurring acquisition too in the long term. Okay, so we were super cynical, right? We talked just about business goals. Of course that is not our only job. It is a really important part of our job. It's at least one third of our job, if not more. But of course, if we don't continue to deliver value to our users or our customers, we're not gonna be able to meet our business goals for very long. I present this cynical framework as a counterbalance to what I see as like the strengths of most PMs is to be really user centric. And so it's just a way of encouraging us to think a little bit more about the business side. The reality is that we really need to bring all three of these areas into as close alignment as possible. We want this Venn diagram to be a circle. We wanna maximize the overlap. We wanna make sure that we are able to deliver lots of value to our business for a really long time by delivering incredible products to our users that are really well designed, that do have a great sense of craft. We wanna do all of these things. So thank you for hanging with me. Thank you for getting cynical with me. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me at frank at ft.io. At any time, you can go check out the Cynical PM article on my blog for a little bit more detail. But thanks for joining today and I look forward to hearing from you soon. Take care.