 Hey, hey, this is Carlos. I'm the CEO at Product School and today I'm here with Jeff Cho, who's the CEO at InVision. Hey, Jeff. Hey, Carlos. How are you doing? Good to have you on the show. Again, it was fun to have you on the stage at ProductCon New York a few months ago and want to continue the conversation because InVision is one of those iconic products that have been around for a very long time, very much loved by product people, so excited to learn more about your own trajectory. So let's start from the very beginning. I see that you are the CEO, but you kind of grew into that, right? So what is your story? How did you grow from your first PM job all the way up to CEO? Yeah, first of all, thanks for having me and it was a blast at ProductCon. A ton of fun just seeing all the amazing product leaders coming into one place. Yeah, my personal journey is, I don't know if it's original, but it's definitely had its twists and turns. I started my career very entrepreneurial, so right during the dot-com bust, actually, right? 2000 after graduating school, I started a company and basically I went on to being a little bit of a serial entrepreneur. I co-founded and exited several startups, one in the marketing automation space, another one in mobile advertising, and then another one in consumer space. So real diversity of interest and I really kind of honed my product sensibilities and skills by attacking many different problems to solve there. And then I worked at a lot of scaled companies, right? And so I led product for Google Play Newsstand at Google and then that is now known as Google News. And then I also led product and product design at TripAdvisor, their core business unit. So a lot of great experience now from zero to one startups to kind of release at scale opportunities. And around three years ago, I joined InVision and I served as the chief product officer and worked closely with our founder and CEO, Clark Volberg. And then six months ago, I agreed to take over the helm as CEO. This is very refreshing and validating for a lot of other product people out there. Recently we saw how the CEO of YouTube was a former chief product officer. You were the chief product officer at InVision. It's really amazing. I call it product CEOs because I've been explaining that a lot of the skills actually can transfer and you can treat your company as a product in a good way. So I want to ask you, since you are also now a CEO, there's been a lot of misconceptions around, is this product manager the CEO of the product? So in your own experience, what are some of those pieces that stayed true and what are some of the pieces that now you realize as a CEO, not just InVision but in your previous entrepreneurial journeys, that are actually quite different from being a PM? Yeah, absolutely. I always kind of pause when people say product manager is the CEO and you definitely want to approach things more holistically but then if you squint, it's kind of true. Product managers and the great product leaders solve problems and they look to deliver business impact. The way they have to do it is to take many different cross-functional teams, pull them together to create magic. I think that's all about setting pace, solving problems and being probably the best communicator of those business imperatives such that they get everyone aligned and everyone participating in solving those problems. So what I've seen through my career is that the product as CEO definitely is true. Generally speaking, it's for companies where the product is the business more or less. If you're at one that has more supply chain, other things that are more holistic, then maybe not but ultimately as a product manager grows into product leadership, they take bigger and bigger responsibilities but their muscle that they're creating is the same, right? Better communication, better problem solving, if holding in disparate leaders, setting pace. I've seen a lot of product leaders turn into GMs of business units and then ultimately turn into CEOs as well. So it is not an atypical kind of track. One thing I noticed since we started our company nine years ago is that product management is not a secret anymore. We went from people asking, what is a product manager? How do I become one to, okay, it's very clear that product is important, that there's a product team in many companies that achieve product officer and now this needs for more clarity in terms of what is that career ladder? What is the actual role of product? Is this like a nice to have or is it a must have? One thing I noticed as we've navigated multiple crises that you mentioned in the pandemic, there's been a potential recession is what would be a good way for product people to actually show value beyond just being the advocate of the user. Many of the people who are working in product today, they've never lived through a recession. They've only been in companies that are in hyper growth mode and now they are forced to make other types of decisions. So what's your take on that? Yeah, no, I mean, I think that's a really great point. We are in one of those amazing moments in time where we can kind of let go of the previous generation traits of like join the rocket ship. This is amazing. Oh, I can't wait. Boom. And really, the value of a product manager is delivering business impact with all of the facts, right? And the facts today are that everyone needs to kind of figure out how do you kind of communicate that the value, the imperative, the business impact, potentially you have to go to switch really quickly from growth at all costs to path to profitability. These are all things that while it is a business imperative, every product leader, if they can infuse that why and what of the business to their team and have them solve those problems, they are directly aligned to driving that impact, right? So for an example, at Envision, we have a product called Freehand, right? And it is a great visual collaboration platform that we are driving towards getting everyone to work a little bit better together. And there's an amazing user value, right? We have hundreds of thousands of users who are telling us how great they love it and they're really excited about the next features that we're unlocking. But one thing that we've been really pushing on is not just a customer value isn't just user delight and user value, but what is the business value, right? And one area that we're working through is talking about the buyer value, right? And how do you understand ROI? If we're really unlocking cross-functional behavior, how do you actually articulate that and then manifest that within a feature set that can deliver the same impact for the user but also really solve the actual problem for a business? So we're talking to a lot of IT buyers. And IT buyers, as we know today, are really constrained on their budget and they're trying to figure out how to manage their SaaS spend, right? And now you're actually switching to trying to articulate the same value but to a different audience. So a lot of different switches for leaders, especially in product management. Love that concept. We've been implementing that internally as well because I think sometimes the terms of user value can be misunderstood as being the enemy of sales or being the enemy of providing actual business value in the short term. And I think it's time for product people, for product teams to really step up. And even if you don't own P&L directly, to really have an eye on how certain features are really impacting the bottom line. Because ultimately, if that business value is not connected to... If that user value, the P&Ls are building, it's not connected to business value. There's just not enough time for sometimes, in a specialist status scenarios, for those P&Ls to have an opportunity to show. And it's kind of a blessing and a course at the same time. But I think it's an opportunity for a lot of product teams to show that this is just not a nice to have. It's not just for high-tech companies that really care about customers. It's really for everybody. And P&L product needs to be really driving business value, not just user value. 100%. And in fact, the reason I'm so excited about this kind of age that we're living in right now and kind of that level of rigor and discipline is product leaders are going to grow so fast now. You know, before you could say like, I ran an AB test, it was up 3%. I did my job and I'm done, you know. Now you actually have to... You are now the keeper of a large cost center where you are going to engineers and designers and user researchers and copywriters and everyone else and saying like, hey, if you are successful in articulating the business imperative for your organization and getting people to really solve it, you are cascading the problem-solving to many different very specialized disciplines who are going to help you solve that even better. And the best product leaders that I've ever worked with are the ones who can translate that really quickly and when they do, magic happens, right? Before it was like magic is like, oh, that was a really delightful UX change, but now it's like, okay, it's not just magic, but you can actually tie it directly to a P&L, right? And that is a huge opportunity for every single product leader out there. So for you, Jeff, I know Invision has been around for a long time, even before there was a dedicated category for product technology. I remember, I am a user still, like way back when, even before I started the company, I was using Invision and I remember it being just that A product, mostly focused on designers. Now as you mentioned, it's a platform, it's a portfolio of products and it's clear use cases for product teams. So I want to learn more about that evolution, like how do you go from one product to a portfolio of products, including different type of customers? Yeah, 100%. I think you mentioned product school has been around for nine years and I think we've beat you by a year or two, so that's the great opportunity. But yeah, Invision has been around for over a decade. What has stayed true for us is our mission, right? And our mission has always been to help teams do their best work together. And so you're right, it started with design and design practices. But the value that we were providing is how do you bring and get a designer to have a seat at the table and work collaboratively with product engineering stakeholders to kind of do the best work possible to have design and digital transformation really be the imperative. And so we've taken that mission and really pushed it forward and through the pandemic we realized that a lot of teams are starting to use us, specifically Freehand, beyond just kind of the EPND groups, right? And so we took that signal and ran with it and now we are really pushing beyond that to full organizations. And with Freehand, we're helping thousands of our enterprise customers empower their teams to brainstorm, ideate and act really cross-functional work. And so when we think about product suites and product portfolios it's really all about staying true to your mission and thinking about the most outsized impact you can have on that mission. And I will say our core mission is cross-functional work, right? And if you think about it, the entire history of technology has been solving functional work, right? To design, to code, to sell. And there's a lot of like collaboration layers that have gone on top of that where people can review and comment. But if you take like two steps to the left of that process is the messy work, right? That's where, and again, this is where product managers really kind of live and breathe is like, okay, well, what is it that we're going to design? What is it that we're going to code? What is it that we're going to sell? And that usually is a bunch of people sitting together to brainstorm and ideate and solve that. And so we don't think that that's actually been cracked and we think that is the most transformative opportunity for workplace productivity is getting people to do that. And the reason it hasn't been cracked is it includes psychology, right? It's actually like, how do you get an introverted engineer to understand the problem to solve but also participate in the generative moments of ideation, right? As opposed to just sitting there quietly. These are like the real key kind of things that we're looking out to solve. And it's just so hard because I've seen this, I've seen a similar movie with other companies. They cracked the code for a very specific need and a function. In this case could be designed, right? I remember I was using the interactive typing product. That was awesome, right? I was able to upload images, create some animations and quickly test my MVPs with different users. We've seen other companies that try to solve for engineers first or marketers first. And then eventually they want to become a platform that is more of a pain killer for the entire organization or for more functions in the organization. So you guys took multiple steps to grow beyond design and now beyond product. But here's the but. When you started with your first product, pretty much found product market feed. You were the leader in that space and helped tremendously. When you make another move in a space where there are other players, how do you think about balancing your resources and also your own strategy? Because yes, Freehand has a lot of potential, yet it's probably harder to adopt for other companies that already have a similar solution. Yeah, I think this is one of those areas where four leaders out there, the real opportunity here is that everyone disrupts everything all the time. I will be the first to admit that Figma did a great job disrupting envision around the design space. And we were both beneficial. Our designers use Figma, but also an opportunity where we can look beyond just design and see how we can play. One thing that we've realized is that when we talk to our users, including design users, what they really value us about is having that democratized space where they can get all their work both cogently given feedback but also taking one step away on those messy moments to expand. We listened to our customers and we said, okay, what we want to do is make sure that we are expanding this. So designers around the world are using us to not just prototype and get feedback on their hi-fi designs, but are doing what all the other design disciplines have. It's about the user feedback loops, it's about the journey maps, it's about working through the requirements and getting those user experiences down pat. What we're realizing is the white space and this is about all of product leadership navigating this is unless you're innovating and challenging, it's really hard to succeed. And so with Freehand, what we've realized is there is an opportunity because most of our competitors have started out as being departmental tools. So highly complex, they've gotten the facilitators or you've got toolbars on every single axis of the experience. But what is cross functional leadership participation need? You need the most inclusive experience where anybody, even the most normal knowledge worker out there can split second, pick it up and not feel scared, right? And so we are actually the number one easiest to use visual collaboration tool by G2 because we've done that intentionally. We want anybody cross-functionally looking to work, they should be able to participate directly. I believe that I think one of the things that make you guys unique is the fact that your founding team had a really strong background in design. The other companies that I've seen around come from a technical background or product background business but having that eye for design is huge and I'm not surprised, it's an easy to use product. Here's the thing, as you're branching out, you're having bigger conversations, you move up market. Invasion was doing product lead growth even before product lead growth. I remember signing up for free and inviting people to use the product. Creating or expanding that experience so hopefully some of those champions, right, designers, PMs can involve other people within your organization and not just increase the usage of a specific feature but potentially branch out into adopting net new products. Yeah, you know, I think there's like a really interesting aspect around product lead growth which is everything's about nuance now, especially nowadays, right? You know, we have this amazing go-to-market team, right? Probably what I would say is the best customer success team, the best sales team and they build these amazing relationships directly with customers, buyers, decision makers and then we have a product lead growth engine where we're meeting the needs of users throughout the organization. Now, by design our product is cross functional, right, solving very specific business processes where you have to invite someone else to the table, right? And so, you know, one thing that we actually discovered throughout building our experience and figuring this out is it wasn't actually a feature at all that was limiting kind of the growth, it was a business model, right? And the business model that we discovered is that SaaS-based business model is a Percy pricing model, right? And the number one limiting friction for user adoption was being, considering like should we invite that person because then we might have to pay for that seat and that's completely in conflict with with cross-functional collaboration, right? You know, what we say internally is there are no toll booths to a conference room, right? So why should there be one on your visual collaboration tool? So, you know, we've actually we went from that discovery which is a product-led discovery, right? To then say like, okay, let's elevate that to a business imperative which is how do we actually be inclusively priced so that no one thinks about cost when inviting things. So we actually introduced a new pricing model where we are now 50% that of MIRROR and MIRROR, but even more importantly we actually have these new pricing models like, um, like flat rate pricing or others where it such that anybody in the organization can pick it up without a huge amount of kind of gating to for, you know, or stress from the admin that they're going to be true ups up the wazoo, right? And so, you know, I think that's a classic example of maybe product leadership where when you're really trying to solve a problem, even if you're in the growth team trying to do product-led growth, if you discover any signal that is an impediment how do you elevate that to kind of a conversation that might not be your remit in your lane but that's where I think product leadership really grows is when people start, you know sharing those signals and really getting people to think differently. I think it's a great example of connecting user value with business value like, I'm sure probably the initial discovery wasn't around, let's change the business model of the company, but there's more here than just you know, tweaking the price here and there and that's what I love about product and I want to jump into the pricing aspect to it here because I'm seeing a trend in B2B SaaS where it's more about the actual usage not so much as capping certain features, like maybe you can use a feature a little bit just to get value and then you can decide if you really want to go for the next tier. So in your case, I get that it's obviously a forever free and that there's no cap in terms of how many free team members you can bring to the platform, but at what point or what are your levels levels to bring decision maker into the room and potentially become a pain killer for across different functions. Yeah, you know, we have a tremendous amount of systems to understand where those inflection points are, but fundamentally our first principle is do not gait the user from a functionality that will get them to the aha moment right you know and we want to make sure that every what we're trying to do is disrupt different types of kind of business processes and we are not going to figure out which is the one that's predominantly should be gated or not or others people have to discover and make it their own their workflow. So we really have a very liberal sense that goes all the way through pro there there is a clear line of demarcation for enterprise organizations right highly security conscious you know we have been through the paces right every fin serve organization if you haven't gone through a security review with a fin serve organization then let me tell you once you go through you feel like you can flip a car you're so like super charged but you know we've been through the paces so that we know that like there are certain tiers of organizations as they scale and grow they have new requirements and so we basically try to align at its simplest form you know we don't want to confuse people we don't want to have this a la carte thing saying like oh this will be the next gate this will be the other gate no you keep it simple keep it transparent and so we've really kind of focused on on those levers and aspects and then just trusted that we as we're going after bigger and bigger organizations and sizes you know that's where our team can understand the funnel right like it's no longer the how many people need to hit this feature great this is a pql let's go after it right like it's plus that and now more we're really seeing like the the opportunity size elevate for enterprise team and you mentioned before that envisioning around for over 10 years probably before product management was cool and one of the other things that you guys did before it was cool was working remotely I remember you're one of the pioneers in terms of company size that was experimenting with a remote first approach and this is way before the pandemic so I want to learn more about your own experience doing that and like what are some of the changes that you did at your current scale to make sure that this is something that can be sustainable yeah absolutely you know a fun fact I joined envision during the pandemic right and so and and I actually found it very difficult because for those who had job during the pandemic when you first got into the pandemic and you had your first case of working remote it was easy because you already built the relationships and then you joined the pandemic is a little bit more difficult and one thing that I found talking to the team especially like the og you know teams at envision is they're like no no no no this isn't remote work right this is like you're trapped and you can never see each other in person right and they would tell me these stories of how envision really really figured it out right it was is intentionally having moments is remote first right it wasn't remote only right and so it was intent being intentional to have moments to meet up it was being intentional intentional to have moments of kind of real relationship building and then all the benefits of working remote right we're being it focus not having kind of all the like stress work life stress of getting home to get your kid to the soccer practice and all these other things actually were a huge positive and so you know what we've learned is over time is one remote work is fantastic and I will never change right but you have to have intentional moments of meeting each other in person building those relationships and figuring out where you can kind of where it actually makes sense to do things in person I just believe the ratios are completely you know inverted where you can get to like an 80 20 split or like even a 90 10 split and still be way more effective than like forced the second thing is really tooling right like I do think the thing that we we have learned through you know building freehand and others is that making sure that you actually have the right tools in place to do the work right more a we're completely globally distributed right so like a synchronous work is more important then you know meetings being really mindful of giant meetings where you know slowly you see the Brady bunch and then all of a sudden people start going off screen slowly and then you're like I just lost the entire room right like these are things that you know are frankly in person issues that are just amplified remote right like I mean who hasn't had a giant meeting in person where you lose half the room and everyone starts opening their laptops it's the same thing right and so that just means you're not being an effective leader right and so like these are things that we've just learned over time in terms of making it a little bit easier to kind of work better together and now we have an amazing rhythm right like it's it's a very fluid very iterative people are really kind of black belt in communication and it's just a great experience can you give me an idea of like stats that you said you're globally distributed like countries or continents being represented in your company oh yeah that I you know I wish I could it's but you know we are we are in all the you know North America South America Europe Asia Africa you know like we have basically members in in all of the regions you know we have the general kind of clustering right in like the major cities Amsterdam UK London you know New York San Fran but you know generally speaking we really are all over the place then just to wrap up usually I cannot go without asking about AI right in the times where everybody is trying to throw AI to their product I just want to get your hot tech on how you guys are experimenting with AI yeah so we are you know so we recently introduced the concept of the intelligent canvas right and really this is our foray to say you know the future of work has to make sure that what you put on the canvas in our case to do work has to give you more value back than the effort you put in right you know today's tools are really a great unlock for having real-time multiplayer experiences but also a lot of information all in one place but what we need to do is actually have that work do the work for you as well and so we're thrilled with the work we're both doing and the opportunity so the intelligent canvas is actually offering more structured information on the canvas things are able to kind of work the data can talk to each other they can actually interact with each other so things like capacity planning or resource planning and then what we're going to be introducing is using artificial intelligence to kind of do things even more so if you think about a lot of the cross-functional work synthesis areas that are really pushing the bounds for product management I think this is one of those amazing opportunities where you know what is the superpower of a even like a senior PM or a PM right is really pushing on the aspect of like you know is your strength writing the product brief right is it really the like your ability to write pros or is it should you be spending your effort getting like the top triaging the top requirements understanding and consolidating those themes making sure they're right but then out putting into a one page that people could read and where can actually AI help and simplify those processes right synthesis for user research all these other things like all the tools that every product manager is watching this right now if you can think of the things that you do repetitively where you're just rolling your eyes being like man I just want to slam my head into the keyboard right now that's what I AI can solve right what I cannot solve is your point of view on how do you take those bodies of work where you're hearing from every stakeholder and every functional leader that you're working with and to boil that down to the thing that you're solving and the business impact it's going to have right and so that's you that's the skills that you need to hone everything else AI is going to make you like supercharged you're going to be a superhero because of it I don't think AI is going to replace the product managers by any means they can do the charge their impact for sure Jeff it's been awesome to have you on the show thank you so much for your time absolutely thanks Carlos