 Hey, everyone, this is Carlos. I'm the founder and CEO at Product School. And today I'm here with Scott Belsky, who is the CPO at Adobe. Hey, Scott. Hey, Carlos, how are you? I'm happy to have you on the show. Can't wait to dive in into all things product. Before we start there, I just want to learn a bit more about your initial story. How did you get that first PM job? Well, my first, I suppose my first PM job was as a founder. I had studied some design as an undergraduate. I had always used design as a mechanism for communication, even in a job out of college in an investment bank. You know, I was using Adobe Illustrator to show Rava Vintel and always thinking about the organization of information. And to me, product is about organization of information and helping people navigate an experience of something, information of all kinds in a different way. Behance started in 2005. It was an effort to organize the creative world at work. And that was certainly my first foray into literally building and leading a product team. So for someone who's so creative and thinks about product as an organization of information, I just find very interesting that your first job in that sense was in finance, like in Goldman Sachs, right? Because that doesn't come to me as the most design-driven type of industry. Yeah, not at all. Well, it was back in 2001, 2002 when you wanted to go into business. That was the way you got started. I had a traditional sort of finance type role and then I, about a year and a half into I went to my manager and I said, listen, this is really not for me. And she said, well, there's one other job you'd want to have in the firm. This was Goldman Sachs at the time. Where would you want to work? And I said, well, I'd love to understand how the organization is run. I'd love to understand how leaders are developed. Like, I sort of gave an answer that had nothing to do with finance. And I thought I was going to therefore clearly lose my job and move on. But she ended up telling you about this role in the executive office that was focused on leadership development and also kind of helping teams through problems and ended up having an interview with that team and joined them and stayed for three more years doing a lot of this stuff that was more related to developing leaders and helping teams and also companies that were clients of ours overcome like problems. And so if you think about it, products solve problems. Like that's what products do. And I think products are as much about psychology as they are about the actual technology and pixels that represent the technology. And so in some weird way, I felt like my three years understanding team issues and people problems helped me get that sense of empathy that I really feel helps as a product leader. So then you go out there and build behinds which is mostly focusing the creative industry, as you said. And I'm glad that you recognize that as a product job because I think the title of Founder CEO or anything it's not so much about that label but really the type of job that you do. And tell me more about how was that journey from starting with an idea all the way to being acquired by Adobe? Yeah, it was quite a journey. And it was, so we were bootstrapped meaning we didn't really take on any third party venture capital for about five years. We were venture backed for almost two years. So it was a seven year journey of trying to organize the creative world. And we took a bit of a mission centric medium agnostic way to do that. We had a conference called 99U that was all about the execution of ideas as opposed to the ideation part. We had a paper product line that was intended to help creatives be more organized. And then of course we had the Behance Network which was an effort to organize the creative world at work and help people get attribution and credit for the work that they had done. And that became a very powerful yet and sophisticated product. Because if you think about it the users of Behance millions and millions of creators around the world showcasing their work which was always multimedia. And back in 2006, 2007, to build a platform that allowed you to post audio, video, text, imagery in any way, shape, or form you want and have that project always be presented in the best way possible across any format that you consume it in. That was a really big technical challenge. And so we had to build an incredible team on the engineering and the design side to do that. And those were the early days of Behance. There were a lot of fits and starts, a lot of lessons learned the hard way. I think we launched a Behance that was more complicated in 2007 than it is today. So a lot of it was about subtraction which we can talk about. But that was quite a journey and the journey continues. And the journey continues which I find really incredible that you join Adobe as not only the VP or the CEO of Behance eventually you've grown up to become the CPO for the entire organization. Yeah, that's right. I joined in 2012 and pretty quickly took on some other responsibilities in building out our creative cloud services like the things beyond just the desktop products as well as the mobile products. And then fast forward, I did take some time off to be a full-time investor and then I came back in this role of chief product officer. And so the last four years it's really been about bringing our products to the web, making them more accessible and easy to use for more people, bringing artificial intelligence and a lot of data-driven advantages into our products and also exploring new mediums like 3D and immersive and preparing us for the world in which we live in these immersive experiences we work within these immersive experiences. We're gonna need to have them filled with like amazing creative interactive three-dimensional content. Otherwise, the meta-verses that we talk about are gonna be really boring to be in. And I also like that you are there for your own merits and also as a founder, as an investor. It's not the typical career ladder I would say for a public company executive. And I know because I know people from Adobe that they're feeling the impact that that has in the culture beyond the product team like trying to create a product led culture for the entire organization. I think ultimately is what this is all about, right? This is not just for the engineers and designers. That's right. I mean, I think that everyone is a stakeholder of the product here because that's what we do. We make and sell product at the end of the day. But historically, a lot of companies have sequestered the product organization from the rest of the company. And I'm really excited about an era where everyone really is more involved in that process. I also think that my role as both an investor in a lot of early stage companies, it helps me keep my finger on the pulse of what's coming. It helps me see the creative tools that the next generation of companies are using. And I hope to bring a lot of that experience and that exposure back to my teams. And it's part of my job here as Chief Product Officer is to drive the innovation agenda and keep us on our toes. So what else is part of your job? If I were to zoom in a little bit into your calendar for let's say the next two to three weeks, like how do you usually think about the time you spend? Well, a lot of my time is spent with teams at either the concept level where they're trying to set their goals for the flag that they wanna plant for the next year and the next three years. And I don't think you can bifurcate those discussions. I always encourage teams to come in with a very clear flag planted for what they want their experience to be for their customers three years from now and why. And then let's focus on what you're gonna accomplish next year as part of that three year plan. And so that is one round of meetings that I have with a lot of different product teams all around the company. And then the second really important meeting I'm oftentimes having with the product teams around their committed project plan. So now that we're all aligned on that flag that's planted, how are we gonna build the road to get there? What underlying services do you need that we don't have? What are the risks? What are the bottlenecks and the long pulls that I need to help clear for you? That I can go into battle and try to get for your team the resources that you need in order to accomplish those goals and making sure that we really have an aligned plan. So those are that's one set of meetings. I think another set is when I go into the labs and I meet with all of the research and development teams that are exploring things truly on the edge of AI in each segment, whether it's the future of video on the imagine a Photoshop that's completely AI first and rather than you do things, you're more of a conductor of the machine doing things for you. All sorts of visions of what the future might be like and then poking holes and asking questions and ultimately finding ways to bring those innovations back into our products. And so that's the second. And I would say the third is all around alignment. My job is to make sure that everyone knows where we're going and it takes a lot of resuscitation. It's a lot of repetition also, resuscitation and repetition to keep that strategy alive, to keep people aligned and we have a very big company. There are thousands of people to get on board and I enjoy that process as well. And did you enjoy that process when you were a founder or did you have to learn to adopt all of those new skills at a different stage? Yeah, certainly a lot of learning through trial and error along the way. I've always tried to be very reflective of what has and hasn't worked. When a launch is successful, I'm the person who thinks, well, why didn't we launch that three months earlier? And I'm perpetually dissatisfied with all of my products because I know what could be done. And I know that the human potential and bureaucracy and everything, everything's just holding us back from the ideal state. So I'm always trying to absorb those lessons. I'm trying to get a lot of feedback from my peers and my team and try to always have a better process going forward. So that process, that part never ends. I agree with you, I feel you. Somehow you also make time for writing. I follow you on Twitter, you're very active, you've written books like the messy middle and you've also written a really awesome article or medium that is, what is seeing the matrix for a product reader? So let's start from there. What is that inspiration from matrix? Well, I love that scene right at the end when suddenly Neo, the main character, realizes that this whole construct that he's in is more in his control than he realized. And he puts his one hand behind his back and with the other kind of picks these bullets out of thin air as if they're these like little cute, curious things. And I was trying to think about some of the insights that I've observed from others and also learned myself for product. I was asking myself the question, what's the equivalent of seeing the matrix for a product leader? Things for example, like recognizing that data can help you iterate, but only intuition can help you find an entirely new terrain to explore that data iteration will never get you to. There's a lot of these like things you realize and what you start to understand is like an intuition around which mode you should be in, in that instance at least. So I put together a series of maybe 10 to 15 insights, but writing for me is a way of synthesizing my own ideas and frankly reminding myself of things I wanna not forget. And is this something that you are intentional about? Like do you block time for writing or is this something that just come up? Yeah, this is something that happens at moments. I remember there was a moment in January of this year. So right in the beginning of the year where I started to see all of these dots connect as it relates to this whole NFT phenomenon. And I wrote a little article about, I called it the furry Lisa, but it was basically what I'd learned from watching Behance members start to try to monetize their own talent through this notion of an NFT as a scarce object with provenance. And in that article was for me a really helpful way like getting into that space, meeting founders and even developing Adobe strategy to help creators in that space. It also became kind of like a really widely read piece of analysis around the possibility of the NFT market. So I think they just kind of hit me at moments and I just forced myself to sit down and lock myself in a room and do it. So as someone who is an investor who knows what to build and is kind of living in the future how do you balance that with the core business? What's working today? And make sure that you can introduce some of that future without really forgetting about the core. Well, I've always had this construct or framework around product strategy, which is that I always believe you should have a short-term, medium and long-term aspiration that's clearly defined. So for example, with my work with my teams at Adobe in the near term, I see major improvements we could add into our products to drive retention and success in the first mile experience. These are things that we can achieve in the near term that will really make a dent in the business, right? In the medium term, for us it's like bringing things like collaboration into the products and really making sure that our products are as much about creativity as they are about collaboration. And then in the long term it's about these future mediums like AR and VR and the role of 3D. I think that every one of you that's listening to this and building a product should have a short, medium and long-term set of aspirations. And if you're running a business that's an active business or in my case a public business with a quarterly cadence of reports to Wall Street, you wanna be able to make an impact on all three of those phases. Every quarter you wanna be able to update, these are the things we did to move the needle for the business this quarter in that short-term. We made inroads in our medium-term objectives and in the long-term we also made progress. I think that's what we wanna hold ourselves to. It's not sufficient to only focus on the long-term or the short-term, right? It has to be a combo. I agree. I follow a similar framework I got from McKinsey. They talk about these three waves and what I try not to forget is that in order to make progress on the future, like the third wave, this also has to be something that we do on the short-term otherwise it's all going to be reaction to what we need to do today. Yeah, and I think that people have to, there's also a lot of psychology, right? To leading a product team and to keeping a team motivated and oftentimes progress begets progress. There's a woman that I studied under at Harvard Business School named Teresa Mabley who studied creativity in organizations and the connection between creativity and motivation. And what she found by having like thousands of people journaled their own feelings every day of motivation and progress and creativity was that it really is about, it's like this chicken and egg thing. I mean, you have to feel like you're making progress to make more progress. And I think as product leaders, we always have to be helping our teams understand the progress they're making. Alongside like some of the dissatisfaction with, oh, but look what we could be doing. And I always try to, I always like to say that I'm very optimistic about the future and I'm always pragmatic and pessimistic about the present. And I feel like there's like a good balance there to strike. And how do you think about building a product team? We come from a world where back in the day we'll think that engineers and MBAs are the classic persona for that role. And now we are in a different moment where we see creatives, we see people from marketing and some sort of roles, even outside of tech who can also make a really good contribution. So for Adobe, is there any particular framework or process that you follow? Well, there are a few things I'm thinking about these days for product teams and how we build them and get the right DNA for a product team. First of all, I think most of product, great product sensibility comes down to an understanding of people. So I'm always looking for people who have demonstrated a history of empathy. I mean, that's also why I believe designers are such great product leaders because design is a very empathetic discipline. It's all about understanding the person suffering the problem. I think that product managers that I feel have been less successful are more product program managers, but they're not really tuned into customer needs and deep empathy. And so they have a good sense of who needs to do what and they're really good at managing a roadmap and keeping the team organized, but they're not really helping us understand how the customer is perceiving the experience and where they're failing. So building a team that has a group of people that have some psychological aptitude and empathy, I think is really important. People that have a value for design and aesthetic, I think is also really important because most products these days grow out of surprise and delight, as much as for the core functionality of the product and the whole product-led growth model, means that you have to have an appreciation for that. And I think then people that are also willing to roll up their sleeves and have a debate and have very different experiences that they pull from as they debate a solution to a problem, which is the case for diversity in a product team. You wanna have extraordinarily different extraordinary people in order to have the best outcome. Yeah, I heard that in a different way. I used to say imperfectly perfect people. Yeah, people that use one, innovation happens at the edge of reason. And what I mean by that is, what's fully reasonable to me based on my own background, if I just surround myself with people like me, we'll all believe that the same things are reasonable and unreasonable. But if I bring in people into the team who have a completely different standpoint of what they've seen and what they believe is possible, based on their own experiences, what they think is unreasonable will push me, right? Or sorry, what I think is unreasonable but they think is reasonable will push me. And that's how through that socialization and debate through a diverse team, you end up at the edge of something that will someday become the center, right? That's how you invest in something that's not obvious yet. I just think you have to stack the deck in your favor. And you mentioned surprise and delight of customers. What do you mean by that? And how is it different than meeting customer's needs? Oh, it's a great question. And it's, I mean, listen, people don't rave about a product doing exactly what they expected it to do. People rave about a product doing something they didn't expect. So it could be the Easter eggs and the games and the dashboard of the Tesla. It could be the animated gifts in Slack when it first emerged in hip chat was the leading, team chat product in our industry. Whatever it is, it's typically something you didn't expect. Now it's interesting, that's obvious to us, right? Except when I'm in my group, in my team meetings with my product teams that are trying to get all the table stakes of a professional creative product nailed so they can launch it. The last thing they wanna do is incorporate into the roadmap something that's just a fun thing, right? That isn't actually addressing a customer problem. But unfortunately, that's the way products grow these days. And so how do you identify what those fun things are? How do you prioritize in the roadmap? And how do you optimize and measure them based on what they are intentionally there for which is to help the product grow? And another thing you said in a different forum was that customers tend to be lazy and you have like a short window to delight and get to that aha moment. So how do you connect the concept of delighting with making sure the user does it in a short enough period? Right, well, I think I have had this theory that I wrote a medium post about a number of years ago about the first mile experience of every product and the proclamation that all of us as customers of a product, whether we are customers within a big enterprise product or consumers, right? We are lazy, vain and selfish in our initial experience of using that product because we don't have the time, you know? We don't have the, we're not gonna give a brand new product in our life benefit of the doubt. We're just gonna doubt it immediately. We don't wanna take time to learn. We don't wanna take time to watch tours, to listen to videos, to trial and error our way through how a product works. And so I think that one of the best things that product teams can do is really focus on that first mile experience of a product accommodating for the laziness, the vanity and the selfishness through the value propositions that the product makes through the onboarding. Like can we have presumptuous defaults? You know, can customers just get by default the stuff that they're most likely to want? Instead of giving them tool tips, can we actually give them templates and can we do things for them, right? Can we pre-populate stuff? And I mean, these are the types of things that we can really labor over and get right. Now here's the ultimate irony is that as product teams, we typically only spend the final mile of our team's time building the product considering the first mile of our customer's experience using the product. And yet the only part of the product that all of the potential customers will experience at the top of the funnel is the first mile because it all drop off from there. So I would actually argue that if you can have a remarkable first mile and appease everyone at the top of your funnel, anyone who gets further down, like you're already winning. Love that. I think it's such a humbling experience to sign up for your own product. Cause like I felt the same way like I'm signed up in my own product. So I kind of know how to use it and I can focus on the next fancy feature by going back to, okay, if I were to sign up today how can I really be onboarded in the proper way? Right. Yeah, that's exactly right. And even when you do get your product first mile right you have to consistently apply pressure and effort resources to making it even better and better because every cohort of new customers is different. The early cohorts of new customers for a product are very willing and forgiving customers. But then after that they become a lot more pragmatic and they require an entirely different type of first mile. And so your product will stall at a certain point unless you consistently reinvent that first mile experience. So as you think about the future of product as a profession, we're seeing more innovation you mentioned artificial intelligence hopefully the metaverse sticks hopefully there's something with NFTs that can also have other applications. Is there any other trend that you identify that are going to become huge for people who are building digital experiences? Well, I think that if I look into the future and you're talking just like generic like all products not just necessarily ones that I'm involved in. Sure. I think there's a few trends I'm really excited about. First of all, I think that this notion of communal ownership and governance over a product by the users as opposed to just the makers will be pretty profound. You know, we're seeing more and more decentralized organizations build products. I think that we'll see more products be built by a group of people that are all being compensated with tokens to contribute and therefore all have a degree of governance over the product. And I think that it's really exciting to me that notion of collective ownership that technology will ultimately have to serve its users not only for their usage and patronage but also because literally those are the owners of the product. Super interesting to me. I also think that the role of content for every company in the world is changing. These days your brand is only as good and as fresh as your content is and so I think that we're gonna see content have a role in more and more products that we may not expect. And even every small business is gonna be creating content and having a digital experience from the corner pizza shops to laundromats to everything else, especially if those small businesses are actually owned by the community increasingly. I'm also really excited about the day when a lot of these small businesses are able to kind of tokenize themselves and distribute those tokens to patrons of the business as a way of financing the business but also again, having like collective ownership and engagement of those who are customers. So I think that's a huge trend. I also think that I'm really excited about the future of interfaces. I think that at the end of the day the whole every industry is a game of interface slap a hand, where the interface on top is the one that wins. And so these days we use a product like Uber or Lyft to order a car. But if we have an audible interface and we just can say, hey, order me a car, we become agnostic to actually which provider sends that car. And so that interface on top of the other interfaces in this case, Uber or Lyft wins, right? And so I think that we're gonna see a lot of disruption of industries based on superior interfaces. And as we have new mediums like augmented reality, virtual reality that offer a more readily available interface for us there's gonna be a war played underneath between all of these different services that we currently have a relationship with but may not in the future. So I think those are a few things that I think about a lot. Well Scott, it's been a pleasure to learn from you and get a peek into the future. Thanks so much for your time. Absolutely my pleasure. Thanks everyone.