 We are live Yes, yep, do you want to just go live since we're late anywhere? Yeah, let's do this Well, let me let me close other distractions. So this is life. This is life awesome. We are like guys Sorry face on technical challenges Let's see people like join us. This is awesome Hello, hello, hey guys, this is dr. Nancy Lee welcome to product insider today We have a special guest Ari Papparo and he's the ex there senior director from Google and currently CEO of launch science he has a lot of insider tips for all of you guys so let's get started today and and quick introduction regarding what we do on this podcast Hey guys, this is dr. Nancy Lee and passionate about all things product career girls and non-profit I'm on a mission to help people create amazing product that impact millions people's lives While getting the water balance you deserve welcome to product insider shy away from the real talk No way we're covering everything from impose a syndrome people management and various facing the product leader of tomorrow We're joined by fan level pack leaders to get a low down on what's hot right now And I'm your host dr. Nancy Lee I moved to the US with $800 in my pocket and became a director product within four years now I ran part manager accelerator courses and make my management careers available to everybody Are you ready? Welcome to product insider? Awesome. So how are you Ari? I'm great. Thanks for having me dr. Nancy Lee. This is really exciting Opportunity and the interesting podcast Yeah, thank you for Spending your valuable time to join us as well today's today's podcast actually focus on product launches and actually put a manager job Doesn't stop at a product launches I know you're the expert of launching product and based on my research about your background I know you're actually a serious entrepreneur and Started many startup and the souls you'll start out to fortune-finished companies like Comcast and also join Google And they don't became the senior director at Google and now you are as an expert upon launches Because it just are your own startup teaching people and actually providing their software to help companies to launch their product called Launch science. So Ari, can you give an overview about your background? I know this is only like sketch of Everything you have done. Yeah, tell us more regarding your background at audience learn about you Yeah, so I have been in product management and leadership roles for about 20 years I was part of the team that sold double-click to Google, which was a $3 billion acquisition and then Google I've been an advertising technology specialist for most of my career My most recent stint was with a company. I founded called beeswax that was a very API driven ad tech platform think of it as like stripe for ad tech and That was sold to Comcast in 2021 And I yeah, it was it was great Comcast is a great company people underestimate how much tech is inside Comcast In addition to being I think this either the largest or the second largest media company in the world And then about a year ago based on all my experience every single company I worked at small and big has a very undefined and ad hoc process for launching products the go-to-market It you it could be good, but it's they invent it from scratch every single time and Who owns it sometimes product management sometimes marketing sometimes there's a separate group called product operations It's very it so the processes is undefined the people who are responsible for it vary a lot and there's no tooling there's no Sass software for product launches, which is crazy when you think about it So based on that experience, I started a new company about we've been doing it for about a year We've been in stealth until last month and it's called launch science and it's the first Sass platform for helping companies to launch Their products and features more effectively This is awesome. So I really touch a really good point regarding There's no set process and each company's definition of launching a product is different And who's responsible or responsible for it's very different. Let's talk regarding bigger companies first Yeah, so what's the process of launching a 100 million product and why launching product is The hardest part of management life cycle it's from the top first the larger. Yeah, sure so at a larger company usually it's a team that is jointly owned by the product manager who faces inward mostly and the product marketer who faces outward and the and they will Be the heads of the team and then they'll bring together Sort of a smattering of people from different groups sales service documentation legal finance all those sort of things and For a big launch if you want to maybe a hundred million dollar product, you better have enough time That's a really an issue people don't put enough time into this They think that you know the day the code ships is the day that we launch So that's just should not that is a bad way of doing things. You need time Far far away from real lunches. I think it really depends on who you talk to the talk to engineers I'm dying shift my code then talk to marketers like Yeah, there's no sales so marketers doesn't doesn't count the launch right So for a big launch maybe two months, maybe three months in advance You're really working on this it could be longer in different industries if you have regulatory requirements Or if you have a lot of enterprise customers, they need an adoption title. Maybe it's even longer And you're and you're working that whole time and you're figuring out what documents need to be created training Communications approvals, you know, you can't just write a press release at a big company You need it needs to go through 20 different levels of approval translations for different markets and that that workflow is Cross-functional, which makes it difficult. It's undefined And it's some of it's quite hard Right. It's not not easy to figure out You know, why is this feature or this product actually important to the target consumer? And how do you communicate it in such a way that really brings them to the table? That's that's a that's where a soft-coms issue, but it's all part of the same effort, right? Yeah, especially when you mentioned this different company had different process and different people involved and Actually, I speak to my own pain point and two years ago I helped rise and to launch the first 5g edge computing product in collaboration with AWS and Azure and at the time not only internally we need to launch it and Externally, we need to work with smart for different companies and you're right all the legal standpoint and also who do you talk to the messaging is different and When you talk to customers, do you prioritize certain segment or you want to make it broad to make it to everybody, right? So very different. So yeah, please continue. So we talked about the people involved and messaging is different Yeah, what are the process involved in launching like hard and big product? Yeah Well, so I've spoken to maybe 30 40 companies at this point and in-depth interviews to find out how they do it And so step one is triage. It's we have to all agree. Is this a big release or not? There's actually a big problem where sometimes the product every product manager is ambitious and they want to they want their product to be the one that people talk about in the Wall Street Journal and And that's not the case. So there there has to be alignment because sometimes marketing will say to product management This thing that you're dedicating your life to it's not that important. We're not spending money on it. Sorry You know, that's that's a tough one So which means everyone has to be on page Cool So which means that company had different priorities in in terms of how much marketing budget they put on different products So some like small ones you don't you don't get enough support when you launch a product Exactly. And so the best practice is that at an executive level you agree on sort of a tiering system What does large mean? What does medium mean? What does small mean and how much effort to each of those take and let's look at the roadmap for the next 12 Months with product management and put a little LM and or S next to each one of those things so that we don't get We're not disconnected So that's step one step to create the team I already talked about that Cross it's always cross-functional and you need people who have the time and effort to do things the biggest mistake Especially it's more of a small medium-sized company is you assign a task that's vital to the product Launch to someone who sees it as sort of an extra credit assignment Like some support guy some support guy or girl is given the job of writing writing the release notes for the Documentation Center and they have a real job. They're just doing it cuz like hey, that's fun I'll do that. That's no it Well because sometimes you don't have a dedicated person Maybe there isn't like sales training would be another example not every company has a dedicated L&D learning and development team And so you need to train the sales force. Who's gonna do it, right? So very often someone will raise their hand some ambitious younger person will say oh, I'm in sales I'll do the sales training They need to have the resources necessary to do the job Exactly this reminds me so funny. So when I launched the The 5g edge computing product and as well as the smart cities product for Verizon years ago I was one day training and I Saw there is learning and development center even in Verizon. I thought it's like they're gonna take it over But one day, but it's not It's not They took it over after it is really mature After it's very very mature. They know everything about messaging But at very beginning when we need to sell to let's say a few beta customers and I train my sales guys It yes, I think training I see and then nobody teach me how to train sales guys to figure out myself Yeah, that's right. That's right. And that's a sales is actually a big Problem pain point in this whole process because sales as it has its own momentum, you know sales people are also ambitious They want to make their number they want to sell things and you have it's very easy to have misalignment Where they try to sell things that are not the right things to sell like wrong customer type for the product But they but they want to make money. So they try to fit it in or the opposite They don't realize where the opportunities are So the go-to-market process needs to really work through some of these nuances And unfortunately it very often is that either product marketer person or product manager who has to do the legwork to figure out What the mechanisms are that will make sales successful because sales leadership may not really be staffed or operate that way So so the kind of next stage is you do the work like you're creating documents creating trainings You're getting alignment Etc that could take a while right and that is where you also have a lot of Approvals a lot of legal a lot of partnership approvals a lot of back-and-forth. This is like the prod project management problem from hell basically and And so what we found is you know when we talk to customers to do it, you know Everyone uses a spreadsheet Google doc whatever to keep track of all this stuff. Yeah, it's really a Gantt chart It's really tough and that's one of the things our product does but that's one of the things you have to do You tend to do weekly or bi-weekly meetings with the whole team like that team of five to ten people who's in charge of the launch You're meeting every two weeks going through the list. How you doing one of the blockers? How can we how can we move you forward? Right and then kind of the last sort of step or time is like the the real Like crunch time the one or two weeks or it could be longer depending on how complex your org is Where you're you're ready to launch and now you're doing the sales training and you're getting the feedback and you have the beta Customers and you're getting that feedback and that is can be very intense because you could go off the rails very easily and find out Oh, no, we forgot to you know do this legal compliance issue or someone brought up this major issue with you know The way we bill it and and that's where you could you could delay the launch Which no one wants or you just have to work even harder and have those those people kind of coordinated very tightly Like working as a McKenzie consultant Basically, it's a full-time job, right? Yeah All right something interesting when you talk about this no standard process, but Clearly when you launch a company you make sure that people follow your process because you learn it from the best, right? But this is also very interesting quote earlier when I discussed with you regard. Hey, do you learn it from Google a lot of that? And you said it Google actually the worst in terms of launching product organizing everything so tell me why I sought It is from Google then you put it to launch signs, but this was the worst so tell us more what's going on Yeah, so I love Google first a lot of some people think I don't like Google because I criticize them But it's because I love them. I love Gmail. I love their ad products I'm not a Google hater, but my god, man. They have some real problems. I Mean, yeah, so I agree I think fundamentally It's incentives problem, which is that Google product managers and engineering managers are Evaluated based on their shipping products, right? They when their annual reviews when their promotion cycles come up What you ship what what would you ship and they show the big ship they show like oh We released a new messaging app and it was announced on stage at our conference and everyone's excited about it And they're much less incentivized by you know, hard business results and And so the ship is the whole thing and then a lot of times people move on product manager ship something like off to the New thing the whole thing languages and doesn't have the follow-up. It wasn't really right for the market They don't have cross system cross company, you know alignment And I think it's a good contrast of let's say Amazon because Amazon is also very distributed You know, they have that to pizza rule. So the teams are very small And they are also very incentivized by shipping things But at Amazon, they're very they're so money oriented. They're so focused on revenue that like just shipping isn't good enough They want to see the results, right? They want to see the revenue coming in and and that kind of you know Yin and yang on on the launch process kind of keeps people in mind from launching too many stupid things They can still launch stupid things where they could bring it back where the kill is fast throwing things over the transom I mean, I mentioned messaging apps because it's just such a joke at this point How many messaging apps they've had and how many problems they've had with that another example is close to me as an ad tech so, you know, there's this whole move towards privacy and ad tech and Apple three years ago announced their solution called ATT They announced it at their event and launched it, I think 120 days later where they basically cut off a lot of data to advertisers for privacy Yeah, and people don't like it, but they went from now. I hate it 120 days, right? Yeah, I hate it too Google on the other hand launched their they launched they announced they were removing cookies I think we're about two and a half years ago and They announced their sandbox, which is their no cookie solution to privacy two and a half years ago And it's still not there, right? And I think that's just a clear contrast in the way these two companies do business I see because the KPI is very different and no, yeah No wonder actually this news Google actually shut down six of their product in 2023 It's like first quarter they took down six. It's crazy. So now Ari Would you be able to tell us how? Should in real life how should product launch be measured was a success metric So it looks like for example, as you mentioned Google is based on the number of products they ship That's why people just ship with our business impact and Amazon to be frank. I think Amazon has very good Revenue generation culture and machine. I heard the culture was like Bottom 10% out if you're not generating enough revenue for things for the company is very KPI driven So what do you think it should it should be the right way to measure the KPI of product launch? So this is another thing I've learned in my interviews and best practices The most important thing is to agree on what the KPI is right in advance of the launch And you'd be surprised how many people don't So well before you're launching the product or feature you should You're as the it varies if it's product manager or marketing. It's usually product management, but sometimes marketing You should establish. What are you expecting to get out of this launch? Is it higher higher revenue from a certain segment? Is it lower churn? Is it, you know lower cost there? You know, what is the KPI? Why are we doing this if you can't define the KPI? it's probably a problem and And then you should get You could get Consensus around what the KPI is so it's not good if the product group thinks the KPI is a certain thing and then the marketing group Especially up at the CMO level is measuring something totally different. That's a pretty big disconnect, right? Yeah, and then finally you should actually Retrospectively measure it. I was speaking to a CMO of a pretty big HR company and they have a single metric which is It's called like employer engagement. It's like a hybrid metric they made up which is like do the employers Like it's a mixed metric that they calculate internally That is about like how many jobs you post and how many how many interviews you do stuff like that So it's their own metric. They have it. I don't know what it is It's their metric But the important point is the CMO told me that she actually has a Report for every single major product release they've done over the last 12 months about how it moved that metric up or down And so and so when the CEO goes to her and says like why should I approve your budget? You know you you need five product marketing people We all agree this is the most important metric in our company and I increased it by 7% based on my work, right? Awesome. That's a best practice. I Do like that, but I think Depends on size of company for example the larger they are the more silos they are in they have in the company I have personally experiences from my career. I work for several fortune-free companies and not mention which name But one of those fortune-free 500 companies. I did earlier in my career. I discussed with my boss regarding. Hey What's the KPI for product manager? So who gets Promotion faster who who get bonus more it is based on revenue He said no and then He's also direct level that him he gave back the reason was because he said if we are product management teams If we are held accountable for the failure of our sales marketing team is Not going to incentivize To actually work harder because what he said is if we build amazing product with the customer interviews We let engineers build it we ship it and then sales marketing They didn't sell it well enough and then we don't get bonus. We cannot do it So actually it's from the top. It's a fortune-free company from the top. They've been saying no product team Mm-hmm. Not not revenue-driven. It's based on Ship or product which equals to Google. Yeah, I don't know. I don't agree with that I think if it's a good product It's pretty rare that your sales and marketing would be so bad that it would tank it. I mean, it's possible certainly but I Think it there's a leveling question here It's pretty hard to hold a junior product manager like an associate product manager to a revenue goal Because they're not they're not at a level where they really control everything relating to a product Yeah, you so so at the highest level if you're the CPO And I have been a CPO of a public company if you're the CPO you should be aligned with the company's goals Everything in the company company success at the CPO level if you're as you go down You know if you're the product manager who has a to fit a line of product that rolls up to you And it is for profit then revenue probably is a pretty important metric that you should be looking at Revenue maybe at VP level your revenue and profitability because you see more of it But you should be somewhat aligned with business goals and if you're in a situation where you're shipping great products and they're not selling You're probably there's probably a bigger problem than your product management work. I Think so I think is if for that reason first of all as a product manager will be a little bit feel sad about I Build a baby. Yeah, nobody likes my baby. It's very cute. But nobody want to use it, right? I think internally we will feel sad about what the purpose of doing the job as a PM I personally believe that the loss of read lots of people out there They choose the profession of being a product manager was because they'd love using technology and creating products to change people's lives Actually, like yeah, yeah, so they're also they're also very useful metrics like NPS scores, right? If you're if you're in a business that's running NPS and You know you as a product manager make the NPS go up. It's pretty important It might not be the ultimate business goal, but it's a it's a proxy metric. Yeah, awesome So Ari will mention regarding the KPI first of all you mentioned the team should just align on KPI And then you gave us example of the NPS Do you have any other metrics you think people can use to measure success of launches? Well, it depends on the business, right? If you're in the B2C They're pretty obvious metrics around daily active users and monthly active users and cost of acquisition in B2B You know, I think it's you know revenue customer attention, you know NPS are usually the common ones Usage is important Especially if you build a new feature within a product suite. You want to see usage of that feature Usually it's a little hard sometimes to connect a feature in B2B to a business metric because you know Who knows like there are hundreds of people in the pipeline at any time and you know Did you really increase new revenue? Especially with the enterprise sales source? It's kind of hard to tell Mm-hmm. Yeah, it is actually which also goes back to the Responsibilities of senior leaders who define what's the true success metrics for the company right? That's right I had a boss who who used to say, you know revenue solves all problems. I agree with that one I I like you get to the point and say yes, that's it. Nobody wants you If you're in a sales, you don't want to really own it, but it's true from the company's vision perspective. Yes Revenue is Might be messy people might not love your product, but if they're paying for it, that's a pretty good sign Yeah, you see a fine for a product market fit. Awesome. Yeah cool, all right, and I Do have a personal question regarding the definition of when prolonged should get started But you saw what you describe am I did I did I understand what you said correctly product launch sounds I start from code is finished all the way until Customers start to use it and generating revenue. It's a it's a correct So it should align with the sizing so I mentioned the triage and sizing process Almost all companies use a like a t-shirt tires large medium small tiny Yeah, some companies have their own there is the bring in consultants and come up with names for them like impact You know whatever, but it doesn't matter large The amount of time is directly correlated to the size And so large you probably need like three months medium one months or two months small Like a couple weeks or even less for small depends on how small small is So so that's the first question then the second question is when should you launch? Like you want to work on the launch back to the prep time, right? And you should choose when to launch based on what has the biggest business impact for you So Apple being the obvious example they launch everything once a year, right? Yeah, they do a really big event and they launch everything once per year And that is in September or October I get I'm I'm gonna be pretty confident that Apple's already working on the agenda for that Right now a year in advance at least right and and so if Apple which is literally the best product marketing company on earth If they're giving themselves a year to prep for their once-a-year launch Maybe you should take some time, you know, maybe maybe you need a little more time than you think you do So you know everything perfect, but it for us non-applers, you know, maybe it's a sales conference Maybe it's an event. Maybe it's just a good weekend Maybe you have a tie-in with the Super Bowl and you want to launch three weeks ahead of times You get the buzz going then you have your big Super Bowl commercial. It's a it's a when to launch is kind of an art and You should take that very seriously and you should not base it on when the code is done Right the code code being done is the minimum date to launch Actually, you could launch in advance of code being done. You can talk about you pre-launch. Sure. Yeah Right, but the important point is like you have the calendar You have you know what's coming from the product engineering group You have it as large medium small and then you just kind of have to think be a little creative like Oh this one and this one if we launch at the same time that might have a really big impact or Maybe we want to have a steady drumbeat one new feature every week for the next six weeks because people don't think of us as an Innovation company, so we're just gonna like do small ones every week and send out an email And that's that's kind of I enjoy that I think it's a fun fun exercise and it makes a really big impact Wow, wow, we just learned so much from you regarding different ways to launch product So already let's let's ship ship a little bit You gave us many good examples regarding what's the right process? What people should have done. Do you have a product? They'd be like this suck when launch your product and big failure So tell us the product though had the biggest failure and what's one wrong? So tell us right in terms of launching like GTM. Yeah. Yeah, there's one that comes to mind It's very topical which is Twitter blue So So I'm a $8 right away. I'm an avid Twitter user. I love Twitter, but my god is it being screwed up? so Everything is possible wrong with Twitter blue from but I'll try to break it down So first of all, you know the basic hypothesis that Elon and his team has is that they need to have subscriptions So first of all that's not going from the customer out That's going from their needs in like they're like I need subscription revenue So I'm going to charge people not asking that's typical woman by the way. It is. Yeah, go ahead. It is Elon is like many sort of very smart product oriented people which is they pick the destination and work backwards, right? Which is good. That's a good technique, but he takes it a little too far So his his end goal is I want to charge for subscriptions and I want to get rid of bots The way to do that is with charging. So we're good. We're charging people, right? What he doesn't do is he doesn't Care about he knows but he doesn't care about what people actually think of what the blue check mark means It has meaning currently. Yeah, he ignores that. He's like that's garbage. We're throwing that out of the window It's corrupt. He's the word corrupt. Okay, so he misunderstands his customer and His new thing is all internally focused. He's not caring about what the customers want. He's caring about what he wants, right? So already we're pretty much primed for failure Then the launch process to the extent there was one was he pre-announced it on April 1st Which is the worst possible day to launch a product all year. So we talked about timing never launch on April 1st Because everyone thinks it's an April Fool's Day, right? Yeah, right. So there's one day a year you should never launch things April 1st. Yeah, so he picks April 1st to launch And and it wasn't really a launch. It was just he was gonna he was really a punishment He was gonna punish the existing customers the most loyal best customers of his for for having a check mark on April 1st Okay, great. I'm looking forward to this launch where I lose my check mark sounds great Then he April 1st comes and goes and nothing happens. So he misses his launch date after he pre announces a launch date Then misses it. This is you know, I'm just astounded at this point as to what's going on And then he finally gets around to it I think on April 20th. So the 420 joke, which is not really funny anymore and and they just botched it horribly where they basically You know start turning off people's check marks. The only people who do get check marks are right-wing lunatics and And he starts abusing people on Twitter He starts giving it to free to like LeBron James who didn't ask for it It causes a whole new media kerfuffle around it and I'm sitting here I have $8. I could I love Twitter and there is zero chance. I will ever use it So he had he took the most loyal Customers and turned them 180 degrees around against his new product. So it's just astounding like epic levels of failure It is crazy. Hey, did you notice on April 1st? He also changed the logo of Twitter to doge Yes, that's funny. I'll give him that. That's funny. Whatever. Yeah So in the same day and it's like, well, let's launch something and I was like, huh, okay Okay, so which one is real? So he is Yeah, which one is real so maybe forever. Yes He also there's even more nuance here. So he also launched something which I think is kind of innovative Which is this badge idea. So his idea is like there'll be an organizational badge like ever all the new york times writers could have the new york times badge And okay once again, that's actually maybe a good idea He he charges a lot for it. I think it's a thousand dollar entry point and and he Apparently didn't like do any pre-sales. So he wasn't able to launch and say, you know A lot of times when you launch you want to have reference customers You want to say like, hey, this new thing's coming out and guess what? Nike's using it already Like that's that gives a lot of credibility. He doesn't do that He just launches it like the all-in podcast is the only one that has it and And he starts once again, like berating people like that the reason, you know Someone one of his henchmen was saying like, oh, you don't really need to pay the eight dollars because your company will pay for it And the companies are like, I'm not paid for that. Why would I pay for that? Yeah, because what is the benefit like give me a benefit late name one benefit Besides have just having a stupid badge next to your name. All right. Anyway, so I'm sorry I ramped it on your video, but like it gets we kind of worked up how bad this is I know This can goes for hours. And so let's do that. Let's let's learn from someone better So what's your favorite product that launched so successfully for the right methodology have a great impact What is it did right this time? Yeah, um, so one one idea that came to mind. Um, I think in general there's this movement towards plg product led growth and The and product growth has a lot less of a aggressive launching. It's more like pr and a lot of email But what's important is that you You find the niche that really needs your product and you really Address it to them. So one product that's been coming up a lot under the radar or starting to raise the radar is called linear and linear is a is a ticketing tool for engineers and product groups And you may think there are a million of those. Everyone has jira. Everyone has Trello, there's a lot of them. Uh, but what linear is done is like put design first and made it incredibly You know elegant the way the whole process works And they're getting quite a bit of traction in the market and and I think that um, what's very smart about what they do is most of the other product Most of the other product development engineering tools are really oriented towards the managers or the The the reason you use jira is not to help the engineers. It's help the engineering managers keep track of things And I think uh linear's kind of flip that and really focus on small teams Bottoms up plg And it's really going to their benefit and most most kind of newer startups are using it So I really like the strategy there. I mean, it wasn't so flashy that they did a big, you know announcement or anything But the strategy is very sound Okay, so let's let's break it down a little bit Because they target they want they want to find people really falling in love with the product Yeah Target at Individual engineers first before they push over to their manager and have the manager pay for Yeah startups. They're going bottoms up from startups very small teams and then growing with them I think the realization is that it no matter how good your product is It's very hard to get someone to switch off of jira Yeah, if you're ready, you're using jira and you have hundreds of tickets and all this customized work It's very hard to switch so Instead what you have to do is is go for the next generation of startups Um, which and uh company new one get them when they're start. Yeah, completely new Ah So like next google or next whatever different maybe your company Right. Yeah. Yeah. And then those will start grow. So we grow with the company together So how long has the company linear been around? Oh, I think a couple of years. I'm not that familiar with them personally The they come up because I've just it seems like every startup I talked to is using them in some form. So they they seem to you know Percolate up. Uh, I guess the other one that's coming up a lot is uh, you know, obviously chat gbt had an amazing launch So what they what's interesting there is like, you know, um, the product being just mind blowing, right? You know, so it's easy. It's sort of easy to launch when you have a mind blowing product But um, in addition to the mind blowing product They've actually done a pretty nice job of having a steady drum of additional releases. So they didn't just do chat gbt They announced within a week. I think of it a subscription product So which has grown to over a hundred million dollars already And then they've they released 4.0 and then they released whisper. There's kind of audio transcript transcribing I'm actually a really big believer as a product person that um Having more announcements is very good Rather than fewer now. I know we talked about apple once a year. They do everything once a year But that's kind of a spectacle Especially for b2b thing of customers. I hear this over and over again The customers love it when they see the incremental progress like oh that bug I reported two months ago Finally got fixed great Like they believe in you more if they see you're working on things because if you if you've ever used like a big product Like a work day or outlook you feel sometimes like this piece of garbage hasn't changed in years Does anyone even work there? That does anyone even work at work day? What do they do all day? Like what what is it like to be an engineer at work day? You know And so you don't want your customers thinking that way? Yeah, I I always complain to my student who works for microsoft regarding right I use microsoft product a lot for for teaching purposes one note and like stuff I was like so what we're doing the live teaching inside of pmx editor I was like and I was like doesn't go up doesn't go out and I have a student his senior partner manager microsoft was like Uh, can you create a ticket? He was like I feel the same kind of pain as well Like don't tell us as I work for microsoft Yeah, it's it's that's like it's part of The old generation product now new product trying to take over and that's where the the Revolutions coming Yeah, and this is where you sometimes have challenges with the marketing team as a product manager So um marketing team may say like well, we don't want to send a customer email every week about products Exactly right where it gets in the way of our growth emails We send all these complex chains of emails of growth and usage and you're like, but I have new stuff to announce That's old stuff Yeah, like how do I get the new stuff out and marketing will often like push back and say like just You know put out a blog post instead and no one's going to see that right exactly So that's a kind of important Question about what is your product comm strategy and is product and marketing on the same page about that I have the realized pain point as what you described right now actually for pma ourselves We'll have so many different kind of new Launches of our own like like training program. Well, by the way, we do have Two-sided marketplace we have b2b and b2c side marketplace b2b is like recruiting services b2c is like training services and then once we have both sides We plan to launch our software product. So now we're just growing users first But because we're growing we have so many new like features on our roadmap And now yeah, every single way that we'll have a new like new thing coming out of a new job referrals And like new courses like different kind of power skills and pro vip different things And now my marketing manager always come back saying that hey Nancy, we're going to spam our users Yeah, you're right. It's like product and marketing to be aligned And this is like constant struggle we had you want to grow fast, but you don't want to spam them right right right or If you're in an international organization, you'll often get feedback like well We don't have the resources to send Multi-language announcements. It's like well, so I guess we don't care about the Korean users Like last time I checked we have an office in korea. Like are they doing anything? Like they just don't care It's great. That's why people need better organization tools regarding launching product now Everybody should make sense now. Awesome. Yeah, launch science Yeah, yes, guys go to launch science and they are accepting like beta users, right? Yeah wait for your company This is awesome. Awesome. We have a bunch of people using it. But if you sign in for the waitlist, um, I'll be in touch personally Cool. Awesome. Great. Cool. All right. I do want you a quick comment regarding google's Activities shutting down their six product in q1223. Yeah, so I know some of the product was launched Especially my favorite one was google Google side view google's review. So google's review app It started for like more than 10 years 12 years something that they they remove it. Um, I understand as a product. They're only available for two years They took it down um How companies actually decide when to take down product and what really costs company does shut down product I think it's a good discipline to shut down products I'm all for shutting down or, uh, products that are, you know, distracting that are difficult to work with Difficult to support Because you you have a bunch of problems. It distracts the marketplace. They get confused about what the products are But also internally you end up, you know, siphoning off all the all the great Engineers and product managers and you end up with products that no one really wants to work on Because they're not doing very well So so there's in a big company, especially it's kind of necessary to do that I think they'll the Danger and I think this is very true for meta facebook Is that if you do it too much and too often you get a boy who cries wolf problem Where people don't take your new product development seriously So, you know, uh, I know you bring up google, but I think meta is kind of maybe even a better example here I think so Yeah, they they announced a audio clubhouse competitor shut it down. They announced a newsletter Substack competitor shut it down, right? They go through these pretty fast And the problem is like the sub stack example. They need they need people with With mailing lists to join and why would you do that? Why would you say I'm going to put my business on meta when over and over again? They've shown that they have a pretty short attention span for these new products Right, um, and it's a it's a real problem for them. They've lost most of their credibility in the media business And that seems important to them. I think google was a little bit more like since most of their products would be to see right they It it's less risk less danger to shutting something down But if you aggregate it, it's a huge amount of effort. They've spent building these things. They have nowhere to go Exactly and especially when they build something they are the best engineer ever Yeah, right. They pay them hundreds of thousands of dollars a year Uh, and they're building stuff no one wants. Have you ever heard of the expression lick the cookie? No, what does mean? Yeah, so at google so lick the cookie means that if let's say there's a an idea people have like um Like virtual reality And if you're ambitious at google what you do is you announce or start an initiative around virtual reality So that other people can't do it because you you're doing it. It's called licking the cookie. Once you lick a cookie No one else wants it, right? So So the ambitious product managers like will say well I'm in charge of like google drive and we have a virtual reality initiative So I really need to be in charge of virtual reality and then the person's in charge of the android will be like Well, it has to be part of the phone So i'm in charge of virtual reality and everyone licks the cookie and it causes It causes like the right solution to never be reached because the right people are not in the room Holy crap So much like insider secret and dirty secret Yeah, I'll pick come come come. Oh, this is crazy. Wow I Well, well that's part of The the typical fortune finder companies how they grow I guess other non google companies non fine companies probably have similar type of Issues as well. Yeah, I'm sure it's crazy. Cool. So um, all right What's your opinion of the importance of growth mindset and investing in yourself? We've been talking about growing product and launching product Lots of time people ask me question regarding Hey, Nancy, what's your opinion on investment? And actually my response is like investing yourself I believe the best investment. So what's your opinion regarding a growth mindset investing yourself? How how it has impact you yourself for people around you Well, I think that for the most part Product managers the product management profession is filled with a lot of ambitious people And that's because um, first of all the the profession didn't exist when I started my career It just sort of showed up in the mid 90s at some point And and it tended to find people it's a hard job, right? It's not Engineering is a hard job, but it's a discipline. You go to school for it. You do it Product management is not it's uh, rarely that people have an education and product management In undergrad um, and so it finds these ambitious ambitious people in deeply ambiguous situations And so the people who get ahead in the career are the ones who Ask for help and questions and they say to their boss like what do you expect me to do in this job? Like I'm just a product manager. I could release products, but what are the kpis? Well, you brought this up earlier. What are the kpis the product management should be? evaluated on and you know, they're often also our skill gap so In there's been this big movement over the last like 20 years to make product managers more technical So back in the first generation a lot of people had more MBA type backgrounds Now product managers are expected to be more technical But that doesn't come naturally to everybody or people may have rusty skills and you need to get the skills Like you can't just sit around saying well, I'm not technical. I don't know how to use sequel, right? That's not going to help your career, right? You have to actually do it You have to have you have to invest in yourself to get the skills you need to do the job you want to do The the biggest career path for product management is to become CEOs of your own companies the best part of managers become CEOs That's um, and that's great. That's great But that's also a big leap that not everyone's prepared for not everyone can do for financial and you know personal reasons And also the risk involved risk involved. Absolutely But you know going from product management If you don't have an MBA if you don't have the business background You're more technical you go into a product and you go into becoming CEO You may not be there on the marketing and sales side You may not feel comfortable doing cold sales or schmoozing or doing all the things that are required to be a good CEO So so you need to learn those things and you know, there's only one way to learn those things Yeah continue to grow together and Ari Thank you so much for sharing all the insider tips to help everybody to grow together So one last question How would the audience be able to find you and reach out to you? I'm very easy to reach. Um, my twitter handle is down on there. It's uh, arrypap. That's probably the easiest way I'm on linkedin. I actually have my phone number on linkedin and everyone thinks i'm crazy for doing that So if you need to reach me go to linkedin you can text me. Don't call Text Okay, 3 a.m. That would be okay fyi You don't know so many people think it's a joke the the most common text I get is this isn't really you right? I'm like, yeah, it's just my phone number. No biggie. What do you want? How can I help you? Wow, wow, we will definitely test out. Um, send them Don't call text Send them text at 3 a.m. We will yeah awesome. Yes. I gonna I will I will link all the Contact information arry in the description of the show. No and everyone who watch applies through youtube live linkedin I will also put in the description as well. Okay, so now everybody So we are going to jump into private q&a with arry if you're part of product insiders Or you should already get the link of zoom link for private Insider like a talk with arry and we have a short period for his time and anybody who is Interest in p.m. Excited feel free to go to our next master class It's also in the description of this show notes and video as well We're gonna see you soon in our private discussion. Awesome. So arry So let's do this. Thank you so much for joining us Everyone make sure to like share this video and and also bring more expect prime manager to join our Insider podcast discussion All right. Thank you. Dr. Lee is awesome Thank you arry. Okay, great. Cool