 Hi everyone, thanks so much for joining us for another exciting fireside chat this time I'm here with Jeff who is the author of forever employable among other greater tits Jeff. Thank you so much for joining us today My pleasure Ellen. Thanks so much for having me So I'd love to know a bit more about you Can you maybe get us? Give us a bit of info on your personal story and how you got started in the crazy product world Absolutely. I was a broke musician in the 90s I toured around the US with some bands trying to be a rock star And while that was awesome. It was also Very very Brows I was very very broke didn't didn't make any money. And so in the late 90s I decided that my rockstar dreams were not going to Pan out and in the late 90s due to the original comm boom If you could spell HTML in 1999 you could get a job and so I could spell it I could write it and so I got a job as a web designer in 1999 building websites and web 1.0 Shortly thereafter became an information architect and then a UX designer I spent a decade doing that and building design teams in various size organizations And then was it really interesting was that about 10 12 years ago? I was trying to solve the problem of UX design and agile software development with my team and some other colleagues and friends in New York and around the US and we stumbled across a way of working that made sense and We called it lean UX and I wrote a book about it called lean UX and I booked it very well continues to do very well and in fact is just got published in its third edition, which is pretty amazing 10 years later and since the publication of lean UX I have been working as a Trainer a consultant a coach and a public speaker Helping organizations build really customer-centric digital products Great product management teams and organizations and really just better companies that are focused more on Customer needs than just sort of building features and making money Amazing and the companies that you work with in in product management We're always talking about being obsessed with the problem and not the solution When you're working with these companies, what are the problems that you're trying to solve? These days look, I generally speaking I work on process problems rather than product problems So if you think of my services as a product or as a service, right? the problem that it solves is organizations trying to be more customer-centric organizations trying to be more agile organizations trying to be more cross-functional and collaborative and helping them take advantage of What it means to be a software based organization these days and generally speaking I work with a lot of large companies And so they don't they don't tend to think of themselves as software companies they think of themselves as banks or insurance companies or retailers and I Help them think Reposition themselves as tech companies. And then what does that mean for their ways of working? Mm-hmm. And without calling anyone out obviously or divulging inside a secrets What are some of the main other mistakes? Are these companies making like what what are the what the things that they're not getting quite right when you when you come To join them look the the main the stories are generally similar across all these organizations I tend to work with large organizations large large organizations are successful and Because they're big and successful and they've been around for decades They believe that they know what's best for the customer and they believe that they can dictate that to the customer And there was a point in time where that was true But that's no longer true this idea that you can simply conceive of a product or a service or an offering Create it market it and people will buy it is incredibly risky and it's unnecessarily risky Because we have the ability to learn much more quickly today Whether or not we're building products of value and that's what you're seeing with with the digitally native organizations that are sort of You know crushing the markets these days the Amazons the Googles the Netflix's of the world, right? They don't think like that. They don't think like companies who say we're gonna build this It's gonna be awesome and you're going to love it they test and they learn all the time And so the biggest challenge with these legacy organizations that I work with is frankly teaching them humility Teaching them to recognize that they don't have all the answers that they don't know exactly What's going to work in the marketplace and that they need to ask more questions talk to more customers and Ultimately be humble enough to change course in the face of evidence that contradicts their original opinions Mm-hmm, and maybe on the flip side of my last question Is there anything that these companies that don't consider themselves tech companies? Is there anything that they're doing that they're getting right that maybe tech companies could learn from? It's a really great question. I mean look there's there's deep deep deep subject matter expertise And I think that that's hugely beneficial when it comes to thinking how to better serve customers Right, there's a sense of what people want and how they prefer To to use these particular products and services to where digital native companies don't have at least those decades of Data and in insight and analysis. I think the other thing that look there are Situations where a Simple straightforward Planned upfront project management is advisable where there's low risk There's high certainty and and you have a high level of confidence in a particular initiative Big companies are good at those kinds of projects as well and you tend to see that sort of the newer companies Struggle with that kind of kind of work a bit more So now finally, let's talk about the book forever employable What was the inspiration behind forever employable? There it is. There it is there it is Forever employable was a direct response to sort of if you think about it from a product perspective It was a direct response to customer requests. So I Have been writing and teaching and speaking on the topics of product management and design and agile and lean ux for a Long time and I've built a business for myself and I've spoken in conferences. I've written several books And almost on a weekly basis. I get a couple of inbound requests from folks Hey, Jeff, how did you get that speaking gig? How'd you get that? You know, how did you get to speak at mind the product? How did you get the book deal? You know, how did you get to interview that particular person and? There was a point in time with these with these were coming in on such a frequent basis I was gonna start writing responses to them individually and then I thought about writing responses for them on media Maybe a lengthy post and then I decided you know what? There's a story here, and I'm gonna write a book about it. And so really it was a response to a bunch of inbound Requests right what we call it pulls on the system right people are are asking me for this content And so I wrote forever employable Which is essentially it's my story About how I built this business With examples for many other people who have built similar and significantly larger businesses than my own so it's semi-autobiographical and It starts roughly when I was 35 and then moving forward from there in time Does it have the bonus chapters about when you were a broke musician took during the US because I would read that It starts with it starts with that story for sure I mean, I mean and there is that and look and there's tremendous value that it's interesting at the time when you're living You're living that stuff like all you care about is is rock and roll and your friends and having a good time And maybe trying to make it as a musician, but in hindsight Bands are startups Right, you're building a product your you and your buddies get together And you have this crazy idea and you think it's gonna change the world right does that sound familiar? and then you pour everything you have Into that idea you pour all your money all your time all your effort you sleep on floors You eat ramen, you know, you sleep a to a motel room somewhere in Pennsylvania, you know in the middle of nowhere because You're trying to make this a thing that people love that they follow that they pay you for that they tell their friends about Right all the things that we try to achieve With products we're trying to find product market fit with this and I did this for a long time with with a couple of different bands I did this for about six or seven years and In hindsight that experience was tremendously valuable In a modern product context because it taught me how to be an entrepreneur and I didn't think I was an entrepreneur Right, but being in a band means you're an entrepreneur It taught me how to you know, how to look for our audience how to do product marketing how to you know How to you know position Products right because you know one of the bands that I toured with was very easy to describe right? It was just basically melodic southern rock right very easy, right? But the other band I toured with very difficult to describe We played all kinds of music and weird time signatures and you know I learned a lot of that people don't people can't dance to odd time signatures You know and so that gets a little frustrating for them as well And so that experience turned out to be extremely valuable and not only was it a great time? And those guys are still to this day my best friends. I talked to them almost every day on chat But I learned a tremendous amount about product product management design product positioning marketing entrepreneurship It's it's a it's a fantastic experience. I think that's such a testament to sort of the patchwork quilt That is the product industry and the tech industry where you can come from any sort of background And you can make product work from you because I know we have a lot of people in our community Who are aspiring product managers who are looking to get in for the first time? But they think I'm not an engineer or I've I've not done design before how am I going to make it work? And if you can be a broke rock star who makes it in the product management world well And any but any background could be made to fit Absolutely absolutely look I mean again, it's it's it's it's super interesting because again It doesn't seem relevant, but if you're out there producing something Doesn't matter what it is and someone is in theory going to consume that thing, right? Then you're making product of some kind and it's a great way to look at it I mean you can think about it from very the literal sense like you know if you had a cupcake business in high school Right, you were a product manager You you're making product and selling it to an audience and trying to fit You know get fine product market fit so it's really it's really an interesting perspective on stuff We've done in the past to your point Very true work definitely words of wisdom in there So you've mentioned what we've talked about forever employable and you mentioned lean UX But I know that there's another two that you've written as well if someone wanted the complete set of your books What are the other two? Ask my wife No, so lean UX was the first was the first book and the one that really kind of changed my career Dramatically because it was such a such a big success that people really began to To ask me not they asked me less To design products and services and work on products and services and more to teach the stuff in the book What was really interesting is that in the process of teaching lean UX I? Started to get some insight again market feedback on it and every time I taught a class lean UX and it happens to this day We finished the course and somebody in the course inevitably says Jeff that was amazing. I wish my boss was here Right because my boss doesn't work this way and my company doesn't let me work this way And when you hear that enough times over and over and over again, that's inbound signal right? That's pulling on the system That's market feedback and so my co-author Josh Sidon and I saw that as an opportunity To write another book and the book is called sense and respond and it's a business book Which was a really interesting challenge for us because neither one of us thought of ourselves as business book authors And it was a business book published by Harvard business review press And it was a conversation for the bosses for the leaders for the executives that made a case Basically, it has to it's a two-part thesis in the book The first part of the first half of the book makes the case that you're in the software business So the thing we talked about before it's designed for you know Somebody who's been a banking executive for 20 years Right and so the first the first half of the book really tries to make the case that you're in the software business That's how the market works. This these days. That's how we scale product. That's how we reach our audience The second half of the book makes the case that if you believe that you're in the software business Then managing and running a software-based business is fundamentally different than you're used to and here's how and here's how to do that so that's what sense and respond is about and then in between sense and respond and Forever employable. I wrote a short book. It's a very short book. I think it's only 6,000 words. You call it a long essay really and it's called lean versus agile versus design thinking and this book came out of a conversation with a client who said look I am Teaching my teams all of these things. I've got my Product folks learning lean and lean startup. I've got my design folks doing design thinking I've got my engineering folks doing agile and it's not coming together this beautiful synergy of process and productivity and Efficiency and customer centricity and agility none of that stuff is happening. Everybody's going in different directions I thought I was doing everything right and so this short book lean agile design thinking is Designed to reconcile those three processes in a very clear way that says look they are they use three different sets of language Or three different vocabularies But fundamentally They're the same same idea like met, you know philosophically They're all attempting to do the same thing and what's interesting about that particular book is that that book was an MVP It was an experiment For for potentially starting a book publishing business So I was learning how to self-publish books. I was trying to see if there was a market for self-published books I was trying to see if there's a market for very short business books or practical short business books And that book was also very successful And so based on the back of that again Josh Sidon and I we launched a business Called sense and respond press that we ran for four years and published 20 short Business books by other authors on topics for like product management design and agile all those types of things And running that business was that as you say the same as running What we would think of as a more traditional tech industry business like a Something that has a digital product was the process the same or were there like slight differences It's interesting. Um, it it was in many ways not particularly Modern because book publishing book book book publishing is interesting, right? It's evolved It's evolved to the point where they're like for example, you don't need to have inventory Today, right? So when we published lean ux back in 2013 You know, they would print 3 000 copies of the book ship it around the world some to amazon and then when those Were exhausted they would print another 3 000 copies But if you don't sell those 3 000 copies You're sitting on top of you know 2 950 copies of the book that you have to send back or eat the cost of So one of the benefits of modern book publishing is there is no inventory. Everything's print on demand or it's digital or it's audio So that's really nice And look and and if you wanted to make updates to your self-published books Because there's no inventory You could update as much as you want. There's some cost and some effort to that but not too bad Aside from that everything else is the same in the way the way it's always been because To publish a book, right? Like so this is self-published But at some point Right there There's a there's a you have to say that's enough Right, it's done. It's a snapshot in time. You like there's there. There's a clear definition of done Right and that done means publishable And then ultimately published and so there is still that that element to it which unlike software Right, you're you're continuously improving on a much shorter time scale Right theoretically, right we could publish updates to the self-published books You can do it every week if you wanted to but it's crazy, right? It's a book. There there needs to be some some Longevity like why did you write a book? if it if it you know if it goes out of uh, like if it starts to be wrong within a week of publication Right shouldn't have been a book if if it stops being true after a week or two weeks or three weeks um, and so There's a lot there's a lot of benefits to the digital the digitization of book publishing But um a lot of the old ways of working the editing the reading the When is it good enough is super subjective, right like okay? It's good like we've worked on it enough. Let's ship it and see what happens, right? All of that is is pretty much the same And how did you come to that decision when you realize? This is ready I'm ready to be published because I know that there is some People who struggle with the same thing You have to stop working on the thing and you just have to launch it. So how did you come to that decision? Well, that's the biggest risk of self publishing, right? So if you're working particularly if you're working by yourself Without any kind of accountability to anybody. I have a friend who's been writing a book for a long time and and He's continuing to write it because He can he can edit it forever, right? When is it done? So it really really helps to have some kind of accountability partner whether that's an editor or A ghost writer or a friend or somebody who says look ship it. It's it could be it could be a writing partner That's really helpful as well. I've written a lot of books with josh siden. We work really well together And it's and the nice thing is that we we have this nice push and pull relationship where he He'll always want to work on it a bit longer And I'm always impatient to ship it sooner And so it really balances out because you know, I speed him up and he slows me down And then at some point we're like, okay, that's it. We're shipping it. It's it's done, but there's no there's no It's it's subjective, right? It's it's your opinion or your editor's opinion or your publisher's opinion That that it's done. There's no Real market validation for it. I mean you can publish tweets you can publish short blog posts or medium articles With content from the book to get a sense of what resonates and how well it resonates But that that only tells you whether there's a market for the book It doesn't tell you when it's actually done. And so at some point You have to ship it and I would just I would push very very hard for external Validation that it is good because look, we all love our own ideas and we think our writing is awesome, but It's good to get some external opinions I'm sure that's very helpful by anyone who's got write a book on their new years or 2020 2022 goals list I'm sure they're very helpful Uh, so I'd love to spend the next few minutes picking your brain on all things product management First of all, what do you think are some of the major myths and misconceptions surrounding product management as it is today? I was just dealing with this with a client recently. So I'm helping to build a product management training Uh, basically a school if you will it's a large client's like 10 000 employees, right? And they they're trying to build an in-house product management practice They don't really have an official one And so they'd like to build an in-house training program that'll kind of get folks Into product management both in existing employees and new hires As well and one of their misconceptions And this is one that I see all the time is Because this has become a very popular theme Despite it being refuted multiple times is that product managers are the CEOs of the product We hear that a lot They're you know, there's a very popular essay that speaks to it and and there's this perception that product managers need to be The the CEOs of the product and the reality is that CEOs have authority They have decision-making capability They can hire they can fire they can make absolute decisions based on Wims or whatever they want. There's no product manager in the world. I can do that Right product managers have to convince they have to storytell. They have to the lead laterally They have to to encourage and excite people to come along with them They have to sell the vision and and really kind of bring the organization and their teams With them and bring them to consensus rather than dictate decisions to them And that's a huge misconception I think in many organizations that we're minting a bunch of mini CEOs of the product and if you set those expectations for people And then they go to work and they say great. I want to make a decision Right. We're not building this feature. We're going to build this feature And then somebody comes in and said no, no, you got to build that other feature the boss wants it Right, you realize very quickly. You're the CEO of nothing, right? And so it's a much much different type of leadership, right? You're still Managing the vision. You're still managing the product But the leadership style is much more collaborative. It's much more inclusive It's much more I want to say democratic and I think it's I think it's democratic to an extent Right at some point you've got to make a decision and and if there is no consensus, maybe you do get to make a call But that's not that's not your go-to sort of default management and leadership methods and so there's I think it's a huge misconception Definitely. It's my favorite misconception to debunk as well. Yeah So we we touched a little bit on in that on the topic of leadership Which is something that as a community a product where we were talking about all of last month and we got into some really really juicy stuff What would you say are some of the main attributes of a great leader that sets them apart from just the good leaders? Like what does greatness look like in leadership? To me the most important quality in leadership is humility It's in short supply and there's an inverse Ratio of the quantity of humility and the job title that you have the further up you go The less humility there is and I think it's because humility is misunderstood People think that humility is the abdication of vision Or the abdication of leadership Right, and I disagree. I think that humility Is the ability to change course in the face of evidence, right? So you're going to have strong opinions. You're going because that's your job Your job is to have a strong opinion about strategically where the organization is going Your job is to have strong opinion about constraints and guidelines and budgets and and whatever else right target target market Opportunities all that kind of stuff, right? That's great. Recognize that those are your best guesses About how the company will succeed and as the organization begins to march towards those Strong opinions of yours if the evidence that comes back from the market contradicts those strong opinions You should be willing to change course That's very good advice in there. Definitely humility got to be number one every time. Yeah, that's rare And as people start sort of climbing the career ladder in product management, sometimes we hear that there's a little bit of like An inner saboteur that's telling them. Oh, you're not you're not good enough to do this You don't have the right background for this What advice would you have for people to sort of overcome their imposter syndrome and you know continue climbing the ladder? I think uh, look, I think it's just normal. I think imposter syndrome is natural I heard somebody say once that only imposters don't have imposter syndrome I think all of us feel that way at times. I mean look, I feel that way I've been I've had a decent amount of success, right? And I still feel that way particularly when you step out on a big stage in front of a couple thousand people And why are they listening to me? It's just kind of i'm gonna leave and go the other way I think the bottom line is this um, everyone's got a unique story everyone's got a unique background And uh, that's what sets you apart, right? I think and and if you can lean into your your story and your background Then you can translate that into whatever you want it to be and particularly product management is interesting because it is flexible Right product management at google is not product management at bank of america is not product management at xpedia, right? Like every single company is different And so what that says to me is that you can take your unique background And if product is a direction that you'd like to head in you can find things that you've done in the past That will help make you a better product manager doesn't mean that you're not going to go out and learn new skills It doesn't mean that you're going to try some stuff and not be good at it at first Right, but uh, that's how we learn and look I like again your your point is perfect, right? like I I was a touring musician for six or seven years and uh Became a designer and then and then a product manager and a team leader and an author, right? And and that stuff helps it and if you if you watch my talks or you read my books, right? Those stories are in there those stories of of being in the band I used to work in the circus years ago the stories of working in the circus, right? It's center Like that's lean into that background and make it a part of of whatever career you're targeting Amazing, um, and I see we're coming down to our last couple of minutes So i'm just going to squeeze in a few more fun questions What advice would you go back and give your younger self as you are getting started in the tech industry? Um, I would say to to read more. I don't believe I read enough I I think like there's a lot of like, oh, I know stuff and I'll just learn on the job There's so much out there to learn from from other people are so generous in giving away their knowledge these days online Just keep consuming anything that you can Yeah, and if that's the product school blog that's absolutely fine. I recommend it very highly I should know because I write it Um, and what's something that you're really excited for in the future of the tech industry or in the product industry rather Um, look for me, uh, I I think there's I'm super interested in the the applications Of of new technology. So augmented reality looks really interesting Uh, there is there is a future with blockchain and and crypto and all this nft stuff I don't know what it is yet. Not a hundred percent sold. We're quite there yet But there is there is a lot to a lot of value in the tech right now. We've got a solution looking for a problem I'm excited for finding the problems that these things can help solve Definitely sometimes more interesting to have the solution and you're like, uh, this is going to be cool I don't know what for but I sense that sometime soon. It'll be really cool for something Um, so unfortunately all the time we have left for is to say goodbye Thank you everyone so much for joining us. And of course jeff. Thank you so much for generously giving us your time It's been really fun. My pleasure. Thank you so much for having me on And we will see the rest of you in the next fireside chat Don't forget to pick up copies of jeff's books because they sound amazing Goodbye everyone. See you all very soon