Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
Why great AI products are all about the data | Shaun Clowes (CPO Confluent, ex-Salesforce, Atlassian)
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I love that you have very strong opinion about this, which is just the state of the product management career and how most PMs are not that great. Why is it that product management is still such a relatively undeveloped discipline? Like, we're like 15 to 20 years into this. And so there's something about the current state of product management that isn't getting at the truly important things, the truly valuable other things. If we were doctors, you'd be like, "That's totally unacceptable." What's the answer, Sean? How do we solve this problem? Everything always talks from the customer's perspective, from the market's perspective, from the competitive perspective. The very small number of PMs do that. They get dragged into internal politics, they get dragged into scrum management or scrum execution or product delivery, and you just can't win that way. You kind of have this heart-take that the way AI will most impact product management is data management. Well, you've got this synthesis machine, which is this LLM thing that's going to help you do synthesis. But if it hasn't got all that data to do synthesis on top of, it's got nothing. And so that means that LLM's can only be as good as the data they are given and how recent that data is. In the future, if you can easily clone a B2B SaaS app like Salesforce or Atlassian, what happens to these businesses long-term? Do they just become, are they all in trouble? People really underestimate where the value is created in these applications, and they just kind of get it completely wrong. Today, my guest is Sean Klaus. Sean is Chief Product Officer at Confluent. Previously, he was Chief Product Officer at MuleSoft, which is a billion-dollar business within Salesforce. Before that, he was Chief Product Officer of Metromile, a public auto-insurance technology company. And prior to that, he spent six years at Atlassian, where he ran the Jira Agile and also built the first-ever B2B growth team. He also created two of the most popular reforge courses, one on retention and engagement, and one on data for product managers. Sean is awesome because he is both very tactical and execution-oriented, while also being very philosophical and insightful about the craft of product and growth. In our conversation, Sean shares why most PMs are not good, what it takes to become a good or great product manager, how he thinks about his career, like a bingo card and why he indexes towards finding very different roles for every new job that he takes, why good data is the most important ingredient in AI tools and for product managers working with AI. Also, how to build a great B2B growth team, what he's learned about doing B2B growth, and his really interesting take on how AI will and won't disrupt SaaS tools out in the wild. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes and helps the podcast tremendously. With that, I bring you Sean Klaus. This episode is brought to you by Interpret. Interpret unifies all your customer interactions, from gong calls, to zendes tickets, to twitter threads, to app store reviews, and makes it available for analysis. It's trusted by leading product orgs like Canva, Notion, Loom, Linear, Monday.com, and Strava, to bring the voice of the customer into the product development process, helping you build best-in-class products faster. 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Fast forward to today, 23,000 product teams use purpose-built AI in BuildBetter every day. First, BuildBetter uses custom models to turn unstructured data like product and sales calls, support tickets, internal communications and surveys into structured insights. It's like having a dedicated data science team. Second, BuildBetter runs those structured insights into workflows like weekly reports about customer issues, context-aware PRGs, and user research documents with citations. It even turns stand-ups into action items that automatically get assigned and shared into your tools. Plus, with unlimited seat pricing on all plans, BuildBetter ensures everyone at your company has access to this knowledge. Truly, no data silos. In a world of AI demos over-promising and under-delivery, see why BuildBetter has a 93% subscription retention. Get a personalized demo and use code Lenny for $100 credit if you sign up now at BuildBetter.ai/Lenny. Sean, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast. Thank you, my name's really awesome to be here. I've had you on my radar for a long time, and I am really excited to finally have you here. And big bonus points for having a very beautiful, sultry Australian accent that always helps with the ratings.
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