The essence of product management | Christian Idiodi (SVPG)

I try to explain to people that the real essence of this job is that you wake up on behalf of someone else to solve a problem for them. You have to do it well enough that they give you something back in return. That's kind of the real essence of it, and that's what I always call like a certificate of appreciation, you know? It could be in the form of revenue, engagement, loyalty, reference—all of those things.

That's the real essence of this job. You know, if it's not fun, you're probably not doing it right. If it's not hard, you're probably also not doing it right.

Today, my guest is Christian Edot. Christian is a partner at Silicon Valley Product Group alongside Marty Kagan, who, when he introduced us, called Christian the most interesting man in the world. After meeting him, I tend to agree.

After a long career in product, Christian now spends his time working closely with companies big and small, implementing and improving their discipline of product management. In our conversation, we discussed why the product management field is so often disliked and what you can do to avoid becoming a product manager people don't want on their team.

We spend a lot of time on coaching—how to get better at coaching your reports, how to get better coaching from your manager, and some really clever tactics for building trust with leaders within your company. Also, Christian shares his one favorite go-to method out of all of the discovery methods out there for figuring out what to build.

We also spend some time on the great work that he's doing in Africa to help product builders and founders build great companies. That and so much more. Christian is awesome!

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Christian, thank you so much for being here, and welcome to the podcast.

Thank you for having me, Lenny. It's a joy to be here.

It's a joy to have you here! So, Marty Kagan introduced us, a colleague of yours at Silicon Valley Product Group, and the way he described you is he considers you the most interesting man in the world. Did you know that that's how he thinks about you?

I didn't! I mean, I consider him one of the most interesting people in the world too.

You guys are so kind to each other! I wanted to start with this trend I've been noticing in product management and the perception of product management. It feels like there's this trend of people just not liking product managers.

There's a trend of founders feeling like they should wait a long time to hire their first product manager. There are a lot of teams that wish they didn't have a product manager on their team. They think, "We could just do this without someone telling us what to do."

I'm curious why you think there's often this dislike of product managers. And then for PMs listening, do you have any advice for just how to not become a product manager people don't like and don't want on their team?

I think most people don't like product managers often because they haven't experienced good product managers. The core of product management is competency-based, meaning there is someone in an organization that represents the customer the best. They have a deep knowledge of the customers and your users, a deep knowledge of your data, your industry, your business, and the product itself.

Because of this competence, you kind of trust them to make decisions. If you have a problem that says, "We want more customers," it makes a lot of sense to go to the person that is an expert in customers to say, "Help me solve this problem."

What you see happening in many organizations is that there is kind of this misplaced influence and mistrust because of poor competency. People feel, "I know more about the business, or I know more about the customer or the data, so why shouldn't I tell you what to do?"

I think people fail to understand that this role is a team sport. They are part of a team of people working together to discover a solution—what to build and in a way that works for a company.

When I think through the companies I've worked with, where I see this discipline really eroded is where there is just not a competent level of product management. The way I describe it to a CEO is, I'll ask him, "Tell me who you trust in your company to make a decision on what markets we go to, what things we do?"

They always have some senior leader, some VP, some person. I say, "Why?" They say, "Oh, you know, Bob has been here a long time. He knows everybody. Everybody loves him and trusts him. He understands our business."

I often say to him, "Well, Bob is a product manager." It's often interesting to executives when I try to explain it that way. See, that's the competent level that we're talking about here. Imagine if you had Bobs on every team—imagine how much you could accomplish!

So, I don't really think it's a hate for product management; it's a hate for the understanding of what they have experienced in product management, which are people that are not able to deliver results that help them meet the outcomes they want.

If I were advising product managers, I often say, "Look, when we see sales or executive-driven product management, when we see this alternative product management, it's not a cultural knock or a leadership knock; it's really on the individual."

The discipline has to elevate itself to a place that it earns the right to make a decision on what we do.

I have exactly the same perspective. When people say they don't like product managers, I tell them, "You just haven't worked with a great product manager." A great PM makes everything easier for you.

If you want to be a PM people would hate to lose on their team, is there something they could do or change to become that person?

I was just joking with someone earlier. I've only seen great product managers come out of two places: one, either a series of massive failures in their career or experiences that have been bad, or from learning from great product leaders.

The reality of this kind of role is that you have all kinds of ways—maybe you're like a quarterback on a team—you need to practice product management to be good at product management. You're not going to get mastery by avoiding some of these elements.

We've kind of clearly defined what you need to represent to a company for them to trust you. So, there is this period of humility that I challenge all product managers to have—a period of learning, recognizing what you do not know and what you do not have is the trust of an organization or over yourself that you know the customer, the business, or the data better than anybody else.

What you need to do is quickly try to accelerate that. You're going to find the loudest, most influential person in your organization—the person that everybody knows, knows everything, is in every meeting—and you're going to ask them to teach you.

You're going to challenge them, and if they don't have the time to teach you, you're going to volunteer to help them. You know, "I'm going to intern for you." You're going to get permission from your manager, saying, "Look, I want to spend time with Lenny. He's the head of sales, he's the head of operations, and I just want to learn from him."

Now, what you're doing is extending that person's trust to yourself. You're also building a relationship with that person, but more importantly, you're learning what is driving that person's influence, which is their competence in the business or the customer.

After you've done that, you have to keep doing discovery because what's going to be different now is that person knows they've taught you everything they know. But everybody now sees you learning every single day.

At some point, people will recognize that you might have more insights and more data than anybody else, and they will only know this because they've seen you learn from the best and they've seen you continue to learn.

So, I always practically advise product managers in this kind of scenario: build relationships with people. You earn the trust by asking them to do two things: one, you're either going to teach me, or I'm going to help you. You're going to build relationships there, gain experience with them, and you've got to immerse yourself in a deeper understanding of the business and data.

Wow, there's a lot there! Let me try to summarize because this is awesome. This is exactly what people want to hear: how do you become better and how do you become more trusted and respected?

So, things you're recommending to PMs that want to become better, less disliked, and more successful: one is there's a sense of becoming more full-stack in the company—understand the business, not just, "Here's your one product and here's your one goal."

Then this idea of just always learning, which is both you are learning things and also people see that you're learning and see that you really care about a lot of the parts of the business that maybe you would naturally be inclined to understand.

That also helps you build relationships. And also just this really important point: if you know more than anyone else, people will innately trust you and respect you and want you on the team because you happen to have a lot of answers.

Awesome! Kind of on a similar thread, something that Silicon Valley Product Group has is a really good definition of what a product manager's job is. I thought it'd be cool just to spend a little time here. There are kind of these four attributes you guys like to share. Can you just talk about that as a little foundational?

Yeah, I kind of mentioned before, a product manager is in a team sport. They work as part of a team to uncover a solution—what to build. Every time you solve a problem, there's inherent risk involved.

There's the risk of, "Will people buy this?" or "Will they choose it?" or "Will they choose to use it?" which is all a value-type of risk. There's the risk of, "Can they use it?" which is a usability-type of risk.

There's the risk that we can build it or have the skills to build it or the time to build it—that's a feasibility risk. And the risk of it working for our business, which is a viability risk.

I kind of call out the product manager competency as really trying to drive the first and the last one, which is value and viability. A solution—what building something people will buy, choose, or use, and one that works for our business.

That's at the core of what product teams do: solve a problem in a way customers will love and in a way that works for our business. It's why the product manager gets all the wrap-off. If everything goes great, it's a great team effort. If everything goes wrong, they blame the product manager.

It's because people hold them accountable to results. You know, it's kind of nobody wants to work on something nobody wanted in the first place, and your job is to ensure that we are working on something people want in the first place.

It is such an amazing role. I try to explain to people that the real essence of this job is that you wake up on behalf of someone else to solve a problem for them. What an amazing job!

There's just no greater, you know, I cannot think of a better discipline. We search inherent permission to solve problems on behalf of someone, and you have to do it well enough that they give you something back in return.

That's kind of the real essence of it, and that's the—I always call it like a certificate of appreciation, you know? It could be in the form of revenue, engagement, loyalty, reference—all of those things.

That's the real essence of this job. You know, if it's not fun, you're probably not doing it right. If it's not hard, you're probably also not doing it right.

Wow, I love that frame of reference of you're giving something to customers, and your success is measured by do they give something back in return, which is basically do they pay for your product. Such a beautiful way to think about that!

Oh man, okay, so just to summarize these four elements: there's value, usability, viability, feasibility to understand if the product you're building hits all these attributes.

That's right! You're trying to uncover a solution, and you know you've solved the problem when you get those two things: something customers love, they give you something back, and our business can support it in some ways.

I'm calling out like these are the different risks in our kind of taxonomy—how we call the things you have to tackle. It's a team sport, and so there are these four risks: should we build it? Will people use it? Will people buy it? Will our customer support it? Or will our business support it?

You're trying to answer those questions with a designer and a product engineer. Of these four—value, usability, viability, feasibility—where do you think most new PMs fail most or should spend more time?

Oh my goodness, value! Value is probably the most important and the most overlooked. The big driver for that is often because of the operating model of teams.

Teams are often given roadmaps of projects and features to go build and deliver. If that's the case, you actually really don't need a product manager because they're going to assume value.

If the boss told me to build this, I cannot say, "Should we build this? Is this the right thing to build? Is there a better option? Is this what people will buy?" You just assume it's valuable.

So, you know, often when people ask me why does the product manager seem to kind of play like a call leadership role on a team—like almost like the quarterback—it's not that they are most special in solving the problem that the designer or the engineer, but they're answering a question that determines if we should be working on this in the first place.

So, value is often the hardest thing to solve and the most overlooked. We often see bad patterns where companies will say, "Yes, we ran a test, and you know, with 300 users, and they all scored it 84% or 90%. They love it!"

I said, "Well, just because somebody can use your product doesn't mean that they will buy it. Just because they can use it doesn't mean they will choose it. Just because they can use it doesn't mean that they will actually use it."

What people say is often different from what they do, and our job is to actually solve the problem, which is what the core of value is in a meaningful way.

It's often overlooked because, you know, we checked the box on a roadmap item. So, the most important because that's the—to the point of the certificate of appreciation—what you get in return, that's the ultimate outcome, really: value.

You once gave a talk along these lines around discovery, and it was this talk of like, "Here's all of the things you can do to help understand what to build to make something valuable."

There's like a billion frameworks for every step of the discovery process—press releases, story mapping, opportunity solution trees, fake door tests—all these things. And you're like, "If we had to pick one thing, if there's one process or approach that you recommend most," your answer was essentially finding some number of reference customers to work with and helping them and working with them to design the product.

Do you still see that as the one? If you had to pick one approach to figure out what to build, and if so, can you just talk about how you recommend going about that?

The Holy Grail of product work is really a reference customer. This is somebody that has used your solution or your product, loves it enough to tell people about it.

I kind of describe the work of the product team as to solve problems in a way that customers love and a way that works for our business. The ultimate definition for me today of the love that somebody has for our product is they're willing to put their reputation on the line by telling people about it.

If we think about it, you do a lot of interviews with founders and entrepreneurs, and you know you're going to have people that find a market with an idea and they jump in. But if you think at the core of some of these founder-inspired businesses, where the founder says, "Well, I had a problem," you know, and it was their problem, and they focused on solving the problem, and then they got their friends on it and stuff.

It's almost like this idea that if they were their own first reference customer, they were so close to the problem, immersed in the environment of the problem, solved it in a compelling way enough, "Well, I would like there to be more people like me."

You know, it's like if I said to you, "Lenny, let's go to a steakhouse. Find me a new steakhouse around you." You might go online and Google, and you see a steakhouse with one review. You know how you feel about that?

I don't know, maybe other people don't want to try it. If you see two reviews, you're like, "Maybe it's the chef and their spouse or something." The question is, how many positive reviews would you have to see to jump and say, "Let's go try this one?"

There are some things inherent in kind of if you look at Jeffrey Moore's adoption curve and those kinds of models. Most people don't want to be the first to try things, but you're likely to try things if other people that look like you have accepted it or defined it as good.

So, the whole essence for me of this technique is to create those first people—those reference customers. If you think about how companies make the shift to becoming sales-led or operations-led, almost all companies start product-led.

The product is first. You kind of build something, and then it's like, "Yeah, it's good. Let's hire salespeople and marketing people and operational people to do it." What's really happening is that the product team created the first customers, right?

Now a group of people have to capture the value that was created. So, what's happening here is that it is constantly the job of product teams. The reason they lose influence is because salespeople are having to sell a product.

So, they like forcing back, "I need this, and I need this." But if you came to me and said, "You know, I want to buy steak," and I say, "Let me show you 20 people that look like you that recommend this steak," my job as a salesperson is very easy.

I'm just like, "Hey, you should eat here! Everybody that has like you that loves steak, they all eat here." So, product teams fail at that contract to an organization when they don't create powerful reference customers.

So, it's by far my favorite technique. The way this technique works is you want to discover and deliver and develop who has the problem—the customer. I want to discover who has the problem at the same time discover and deliver a solution to this problem.

The idea here is that if you really want to solve a problem, you need to get out of your building, go spend time with someone that has the problem, and don't leave until you solve the problem.

People talk about why we had such a record time to the COVID vaccine. Sure, technology has improved, our research has improved, but if you think about it, we had the highest number of volunteers for vaccination in the history of any vaccine.

Why did we have to look for someone with COVID? No, they were literally all around us! We were all like—the research was immersed in the environment of the problem.

They could start, and this is often what I call it's almost like a pressure-cooked discovery in some ways. If you truly, truly want to solve a problem, get out of your building, take—get out of the assumptions, get out of the opinions, immerse yourself, find someone who has the problem, stick with them until you discover a solution for this problem.

The part of why I love this technique—the two biggest reasons, I think—the first is if I cannot find a certain number of people that have this problem, my goodness, it may not be a problem worth solving.

I have never had a product failure using this technique. If I were to credit, I think at last count, I'm up to like 205 products I have worked on or participated in creating in my career. I try to build a new product every year from scratch.

It's kind of a crazy thing about me. My friends know what I want for my birthday is a problem worth solving, and I like to go from idea to revenue in a certain time. I test all of these techniques in this way.

Everybody knows my favorite technique is if we find a problem worth solving, we need to uncover a solution. For B2B, I want six to eight references; for B2C, I want maybe 15 to 25 references as an indication that we've achieved product-market fit.

Just to be clear, you said you still work like you build products yourself and you've built—okay, what's like a recent product that you built?

I didn't know this! So, I do a lot of work in Africa now. I work in Nigeria, like a job board that helps people. We do kind of a job board, hit replace placement, and advisory.

I'm actually even working on another app around the NDA and protecting high-asset individuals in some ways. So, you know, kind of every year I find a problem worth solving, and I practice doing the work of discovery with a team of people.

That's amazing! I see this unraveling of the most interesting man in the world happening little by little. We learn more and more about you.

Okay, amazing! So just to kind of summarize some of these points, which are really great, and I've never heard it described this way before.

So basically, a really effective way to understand how to build something people actually want and solve real problems is this idea of picking reference customers. I really like this word "reference," which is not just they're going to help you build a thing, but they also become a reference to future customers because they end up loving it because you built it for them.

You said find six to eight in the B2B space, 15 to 25 in B2C, and the reason there's a number here is if you find just one or two, you never know—they might be just the one or two that have this really weird problem no one else has.

I think that's usually the flaw in this approach is you end up building it for a small number of people, and nobody else really wants it. It sounds like in your experience, this is a good kind of number where probably a lot of more people will have this problem.

Yeah, there have been studies to validate some of these numbers. I think IBM kind of struggled selling those supercomputers, and you know, if you're buying a million-dollar computer, someone says, "Hey, do you want to buy me?" You're like, "I don't know. I mean, do I build it? Is it anybody else that has bought it? Should I be the first?"

There was this common question of, "What would it take for you to buy it?" Someone says, "Hey, if I see five or six people that look like me already have this, then I feel confident making the argument to my company we should jump on it."

So how do I create the first five to six? You can see a lot of the validation on B2C in some of the things you might see in the App Store, on like Yelp or those places.

My idea here is if you found a steakhouse with 25 five-star reviews, you're likely to adopt this. So in every app I've ever put on the App Store, on the day I launched the app in the App Store, there are 25 five-star reviews.

I will never launch an app and be like, "Let's hope Lenny loves it. Let's see who the first person to download it." On the very first day of launching the app, I need 25, and that's then.

So I will know I am not ready until I have achieved 25 people that have told me, walked with me, and said, "I am now ready to put my reputation on the line."

Sometimes I might need to work with 30 people or 50 people because, you know, the output is 25 reference customers.

You know, because if Lenny is like, "I don't love it enough," or "I don't feel comfortable," you know, I'm not going to customize for Lenny. I'm going to find my single target market, talk to more people.

If I get 25, I have achieved product-market fit.

So interesting! It basically kicks in this word-of-mouth flywheel that everyone's always looking for: how do I get people to talk about it? Build it for them, their problems, tell them that it exists.

So you mentioned a bit about how you understand if it's actually—let's call it product-market fit. If you have product-market fit with these people, do you ask them if they're going to leave you a five-star review, for example?

I guess what do you consider this is good? I got one more person that's really happy with this. What tells you it's got product-market fit with a person?

If I were thinking about how I would do this, so I mean, pick the problem to solve. First of all, I have to know who I'm solving the problem for in some indication, and I want to validate that this is actually a problem you do have.

I'm looking for a certain type of person. You know, early adopters in our world are broken up into technologists and evangelists. You know, a technologist could be, "You know, I love the new iPhone 16 that's coming out, and it's going to have five cameras," and I write an article and tech review, "Oh, super fast, super slick, all the design."

That's you just love new technology. You always jump on new technology. An evangelist could be someone that says, "Oh my, I look great with the iPhone 15. It has three cameras. I will look phenomenal with the iPhone 16, so I'm going to go stand in line at the Apple Store for three hours or overnight because I just can't wait to get my hands on the iPhone 16."

They may feel a little irrational, but those are the kind of people you're looking for—people that believe they have a problem.

So what it's like, you would try any steakhouse in my example. You're just like, "I love steak. I don't care if there are reviews or not. I would try it."

What I'm trying to do here is I'm saying, "Okay, Lenny loves steak. He wants to try a steakhouse, and I'm going to see Lenny. I'm trying to build the best steakhouse here. If I create a menu that you absolutely love, are you willing to tell people about it?"

That could be, you know, video testimonial, write a review, stuff like that. And you know, it's okay, Lenny, if you don't love the first iteration of it and stuff like that. I want to hear your feedback.

I want you to walk with me in ensuring that I build the best steakhouse here, right? And that's kind of the idea.

So I'm going to walk with 25 people that look like you, and I'm going to keep tweaking in this sense, reading on the product and the menu until then it's like, "My goodness, this is the best steakhouse in the world!"

You know, it's like, "I'm just going to write about it."

When I get 25 people that have all eaten at the steakhouse, they love it enough because this is where you really get the shift in value.

Because if I say, "Let go write me a review, a five-star review," you're like, "I don't know if I feel comfortable about it." You say, "Why not?"

You see, I'm really going to get deeper feedback because people will say or do anything just to avoid hurting our feelings or for us to get out of their face.

So be like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'll give you a five-star review." But when I say do it, you're like, "Well, you know, I have this hesitation."

Why? That's really where great discovery comes, but it's hard to do in a silo. You have to be immersed with the person that has the problem.

So product-market fit is when you've kind of iterated in this discovery. You have discovered and delivered something so meaningful that these customers that are your target customers are willing to put their reputation on the line and be a reference.

That's my indication!

I imagine, though, Christian, so charismatic comes to me and says, "Hey, Lenny, would you leave me a five-star review for this product I'm working on? I'm trying to figure out if people want it."

I would be like, "Yeah, of course! I'll give you a five-star review." What do you do to kind of avoid that just like, "I just want to be nice"? Like, I don't care, I'll leave a five-star.

Well, it's part of why I need 25 in B2C, you know? And don't get me wrong, if I can convince 25 people in there, I may have a marketing product and a charismatic marketing product.

If that's all I needed to do was a good message and charisma to get people on it, the good benefit of this is that you can tackle risk very early because you can involve many other parts of your organization—marketing, sales, legal, finance.

You know, people often ask me, "How do I come up with the marketing spiel or the description?" I'm like, "I don't make that up."

You know, if I ask you, "What do you feel about this product?" and you say, "Well, it's cool, and it's sleek, and very nice," the marketing department, "Ah, we don't like those terms. Those are too—we want to call it comprehensive."

When you go out to sell your products, people are going to be disappointed because the expectations are created by what's on the box.

I only market exactly what customers tell me. I have never been surprised about what customers will say when I release a product because in this technique, I already get their feedback.

So I'm going to put exactly what Lenny said on the box: "Hey, this product is cool and sleek and easy to use."

You know, I've only launched a product that says, "Super fast but difficult to read," because the technology team said there was no way to change the font on something, and it was just going to be difficult to read.

And you know what everybody did when they got the product? "Oh my goodness, it is super fast! All right, it is also difficult to read."

It matched their expectations in some ways.

So what I do here is I learn how to sell the product with this technique. I learn how to market the product because I have real people that are the—we're not making assumptions.

What's the best way to market this? I will ask Lenny, "How would you find this? Does this language resonate with you? Does this properly describe the menu?"

See, so that's kind of what you're doing when you use a technique like this. It feels heavy to people, but that's kind of part of the practice of it.

You know, if you do this a whole lot, you get really comfortable at involving your working with your customers to solve it.

But for me, the fact that I have—you will not have a product failure because you have a natural pivot out. Meaning if I can't find 25 people that love steak, why in the world am I building a steakhouse?

So if you don't find enough people that unlock this problem and are willing to work, you're just like, "This is not a problem worth solving."

But more importantly, you really start to get—it's the fastest path to product-market fit. The clearest definition for me because I know when my product is ready.

You know, when I've dotted those I's and crossed those T's in that way.

I think your point there—recruiting is itself a huge signal—is really important. Like, can you find people that have this problem and care enough about this problem that they're going to talk to you and spend time exploring this thing that doesn't exist yet?

I think that's super interesting. And then I think another key part of this is it's one solution that solves many people's problems. It can't be like a bunch of different things for a bunch of different people, right?

That's right! That's right! If one person says, "I don't want this," and another person wants this, you don't do it. That's how you know you do the minimum right.

All 25 have to want the same thing. If one person says, "I don't want this," you just don't do it at all.

And the reason that's powerful is because if I come to you and I say, "Hey, it's missing this feature," I said, "Well, you have 25 people that look like you that are very happy without it."

You see, that's how—if you think about what you do in a review, you see the five stars, and you instantly like, "Oh, that's good enough."

But if you have a question, what do you do? You cannot double-click on the review to read, and that's how people get convinced.

There's this social influence of like, "Well, you know, I mean, Lenny in school, he likes the steakhouse. I should like it. You know, he's fine with this not being there, so I should be fine with him."

So your references are super powerful in more than any company in influencing consumers on what they should choose or not choose.

Basically, Stripe builds new products exactly this way. They find new customers that have a problem, and they work with a very small number of customers to build a product for them, and that's a lot of their new product.

I think Rippling works like this too. So I think this is a really good lesson for everyone listening who are trying to build something new.

Is there an example that comes to mind that would be, I don't know, interesting to talk about? Some you built that you worked through this process?

Oh boy! I tell the example of U kind of solving a problem when I was at a staffing company, Snagajob. They do hourly jobs and help people find kind of their first job or an hourly job.

I actually get a call here from the head of global staffing at Starbucks. Now, he called to me—you can see the benefit of this technique because, you know, I'm the person he calls when he has problems.

I've used this technique with a previous company. He didn't even know I was a new company, you know? And he calls me up and he says, "Christian, I have a problem."

I said, "Well, don't we all have problems?" He said, "Well, you know, we just bought a bakery in the San Francisco Bay Area, and as we're doing the paperwork to kind of take over this company or this acquisition, we realize that close to 800 of the employees may be undocumented workers."

I said, "Wow, that does sound like a problem." He said, "Yeah, imagine if this breaks out in the news and all of that, but more importantly, we still need to get all your paperwork so all these people are going to quit, and we will have a new bakery without employees."

I said, "Wow, you have my attention. I can go to my CEO and tell him to call." I grab a designer and an engineer and just say, "Hey, look, I would love to work on a little project with you all if you have some time."

I kind of debrief them on the call. Now, the first thing I have to do is to try to define the problem—identify the problem. What really is the problem going on?

Yeah, we're breaking it down. We're talking through this. We say, "Well, at the end of the day, our box needs to hire like 800 people quickly because, you know, we can't fix getting everybody's paperwork, but they're going to lose these people, and they need to hire those quickly."

I said, "Well, who else has this problem?" You know, we're trying to try out guess. I'm like, "What are we talking about?"

Let's go out! Everybody jumps in my car, and we start driving around. This is where we're doing our product work from. You know, we're talking in the car, just out of the building.

We see a new construction site for a new McDonald's kind of coming soon, and we know we're curious. We're like, "Well, let's go find out."

We start talking to people on site. Fortunately, the operations director is on site, and we ask him. We say, "Tell us about opening up a new McDonald's."

He says, "Well, do you know we need like 120 people on opening day?" We're like, "Whoa, for McDonald's? I mean, really, 120 people?"

He's like, "Yeah, do you know that most of the people in this industry don't show up to work on the very first day? And every day we're in construction, we're losing money."

So the second the bathrooms, restrooms are done, we want to open up. We're like, "Wow, we didn't think about this."

New construction, a new store opening—they need to hire a lot of people quickly. So I said, "Thank you very much." I give him my business card; he gave me his.

We jumped back in the car, and we just kept driving. We went to the mall; we started talking to people there. We talked to a manager at Macy's, and she said, "Ah, look, we hire 20,000 people in the holiday season."

I mean, yeah, it's like nights, weekends, shopping, stuff like this. We start hiring in the summer because of how painful it is.

Now, all we're doing here is just validating that this is a real problem. You know, like other people will have the problem.

So we go back to the office; we bring something like, "How will someone even go about solving this problem?" We're thinking this was like—we're not really sure, but like that McDonald's guy was very desperate.

I have his business card. We start throwing some ideas. So I call up the McDonald's person, and I said, "Look, we just met with us."

He's like, "Yeah, we would love to help you solve the problem." He said, "Well, what do you have in mind?"

I said, "Well, we've been talking. What if we just sent you some people to interview? You know, and if you like them, you will hire them."

Like, "That seems fairly easy." He's like, "How do I pay for this?"

You know, and we took a swag, like maybe you pay us for everybody that you hire. "Oh, I don't see much risk to that. This is great!"

We like, "Oh, okay." I mean, we have no sense of what to do. We are literally Googling, "How do people find a job at McDonald's?"

We go to colleges; we are sticking up flyers; we are putting ads in the newspaper back then. We are looking at different techniques to try to get people into a funnel and interest by like posting on Craigslist or things like that.

You know, at the end of the week, we get about 40 people that are interested to come to the interview. We're like, "That feels good for a first try!"

You know, we call the manager up and we say, "Look, on Monday, we will send you 40 people to interview."

You know, "Oh, this is great!" You know, Monday, I take my designer, my engineer; we are on site with the manager at 9:00.

We expect like three people to show up for interviews. Nobody shows up. You know, 10:00, another three—like one person shows up.

I mean, we go to the end of the day—less than 20 people show up. This man only has like four or five people. We're like, "We suck at this! This is terrible!"

You know, we go to the manager like, "Let's go and apologize for wasting your day and stuff." He starts to laugh.

We're like, "What's going on?" He said, "Look, I forgot to tell you folks in this industry don't even show up to interviews."

This is like, "We are McDonald's. We pay minimum wage. People will leave us for 25 more cents an hour. They will leave us for a job that is one block closer to their house or like less than a mile closer to their home."

Now, we—you know, the engineer is without, and he's thinking about like this is really interesting. About half of the people show up; he hired like one.

If you really want to solve this problem, like playing lots of averages, we probably need to send this man like close to 200 people. I mean, we need to go bigger!

So, yeah, we're storming the office. You know, we called the McDonald's guy again, like, "Can we try again next Monday?"

And he's like, "Do I only pay for the people I hire?" We're like, "Sure!"

He's like, "Oh, go ahead and kill yourself."

I mean, it's a pain! We've been trying all kinds of things for years now. We start doubling down our efforts.

We start calling back all the people that didn't show up for interviews, like, "What's going on? Did you get lost? Don't you want a job? I mean, what's wrong with you?"

We start figuring out what worked well for us the last time, you know, what was the cost to acquire a person.

And you know, we spend a week doubling our efforts on those channels. We probably have about 120, 130 people on the list.

The Sunday beforehand, we start calling them up, you know, like, "Please show up! Don't embarrass us! Don't you want a job? Come do you need an address? Should I call your reminder? Set your alarm!"

I mean, we tried all the techniques to try to get more people there. We go the next day, and at the end of the day, he hires about 45 to 50 people.

He comes to us; he shakes our hand. He's like, "Whoa, the quality was excellent! All my recruiters were engaged. The day was smooth, and look at how successful we are!"

It's like, "I want to use you for every new McDonald's I open in the area."

Now, I don't know I have a product; I just know I was able to help one person at McDonald's. But I feel like I have enough learning.

So I called up my friend at Starbucks, and I said, "Hey man, I remember the problem we saw about." He said, "Yeah."

I said, "I would love to help you solve it." He said, "Oh, okay. What do you have in mind?"

I said, "Well, I think we need to send you about 3,000 people to interview."

He said, "3,000 people? I told you I only need 800."

I said, "You know, in this industry, most people don't show up for interviews, right?"

He said, "Oh my goodness! You know how our industry works!"

I like this! I'm going to tee this up. I think we'll give you this contract.

I take my designer, my engineer; we go to San Francisco. We're out there recruiting because this is where it was based.

I mean, we have to get a whole hotel, hire people. We are working all the channels we knew worked in here.

Remember, we don't have any software, no technology. The designer—we're doing this manually, Excel spreadsheets, phones, emails in that way.

In one week, Starbucks hires 784 people. I get an email the next Monday morning from the contact at Starbucks.

He copied Howard, the CEO of Starbucks. The email read, "This guy just saved our BT." I sent it to my CEO.

But then I said, "You know what? I only know that I can help a McDonald's and a Starbucks, but that doesn't mean I have a product."

You know, but I now have enough of problem definition. I reached out to the head of marketing, the head of sales.

I said, "Tell us who has this problem you've come across because we need to work with more people to try to uncover a solution that is scalable, maintainable, reliable, or works for our business."

You know, weirdly enough, the next opportunity we had was the Los Angeles International Airport. They were opening up a new terminal, and they said, "We need like 200 people to manage all the stores in the new terminal."

And we're like, "200 people? We just hired close to 800! We got this!"

You know, we go to LA for the briefing with their staffing group, and they tell us the people that work at an international airport have to match the demographics of the travelers.

You say, "Say what?" Yeah, we have 13% Chinese-speaking travelers; we need 13% Chinese-speaking employees.

We say, "Sorry, you know, we got 5% Korean-speaking." I mean, my team is in LA, in Chinatown. We are speaking, trying to recruit people to come and work at an airport.

If we expect like 10 people to show up, only one person shows up. We start calling job seekers up like, "What's going on? They say, 'Do you know what it means to work at an airport? First, I wake up at 5:00, I drive to the employee parking lot, I get into a bus, then I go through security.'"

There was not like TSA pre-check back then, you know? Then if I want to break, I go through security again, and then you pay me minimum wage.

You know, it took us close to three months to staff this. We had to negotiate with the union to raise the price to like $15 an hour to attract people.

When we come back from that, you know, we're saying that is not our customer. Never again! We are never doing efforts.

That's a pain! You know, around this time was the holiday season, so we reached out to the person at Macy's.

We told them about our work with McDonald's, saying, "We should try this out." We started working with them.

You can imagine through this, the engineer is thinking, "How can I use technology to improve this?"

I always tell this to people: I never wrote the requirements documents. I never wrote a story. I never told the designer, "I was thinking how can we improve the end-to-end experience?"

Okay, we need a recruiter experience, a job seeker experience, we need a funnel. Oh, we need to build a screening tool so that they can scale the interview.

Oh, what about notification? Maybe text message? Oh, we can send them a map so that they can know how to get to—

I mean, all of these things because they were involved from the very beginning in defining the problem. They were immersed in the solution to the problem.

It takes us about eight and a half, almost nine months to build this. When we launched this product in its first 90 days, it booked $32 million in sales.

Why? Because, you know, you got McDonald's probably to today using this product to open up every new store.

When Starbucks went to the global contract, we said, "Well, we've only done discovery in the US, so I only know where it works in this market."

You know, and we started firing—if you look at NASCAR, some of these big sporting events, they have to bring a lot of people together very quickly for a short amount of time.

You know, and this is the same kind of product they use to do that high-volume hiring in a short amount of time.

If you think about it, I was discovering who had the problem and developing the customers that have the problem at the same time. I was discovering and delivering a solution to that problem.

That's insane! You said you made $30-something million the first year of launching this thing?

Yeah, that's unreal! I love how this is the epitome of doing things that don't scale. You're going hiring McDonald's employees and then Starbucks employees.

Wow! You do things that do scale, and they do things that do scale, right?

And it's so powerful when you discover how to do things that don't scale when you actually know, right?

Because it's the power of technology; it's just the beauty of what it can do at scale.

And to that point, it's easier said—like a lot of people talk about doing things that don't scale. Many people don't actually do anything like that. They're like, "Nah, let someone else figure that out," or "Let's just actually think about the future of this versus just doing it and solving and finding problems."

I love that! Also, you didn't do any of these other things we were talking about. There's no fake door tests, there's no opportunity solution trees, there's no user interviews.

You know, you're talking to people. It wasn't like a research interview. "Come sit down, have questions."

I said, "There's nothing better in learning how to solve a problem than trying to solve the problem."

You know, just—you will get all the answers, the research, the failure, the mistakes, you know, all the evidence, you know, the difference between what people say versus just what they do.

You validate and test. I mean, because at the end of the day, you know what is statistically relevant.

Like, you know what solving the problem is the clearest indication that we've solved the problem. Now we know how to solve the problem.

Then you—and so, yeah, very powerful technique.

I love that you didn't really know exactly where this was going to lead. It was just kind of this exploratory, "Let's see if there's something here," and you just kept following this, like, "Huh, there's a problem. Looks like we found a way to solve it. Let's just see where else this can take us."

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I want to shift to a different topic. You spent a lot of time helping product leaders get better at coaching, get better at building relationships, get better at building trust with their teammates.

Marty Kagan actually shared this quote with me. Let me find it. He said that you can build trust with executives and product leaders faster than anyone else he knows, and the people you coach adore him like some kind of rock star.

He's literally on speed dial for several of the CEOs of the largest companies in the world.

Okay, so let me just ask you, what's your secret to coaching, to being a great coach, and how can people listening become better coaches to their reports, maybe colleagues?

This topic is probably near and dear to my heart because I mean, there are many ways that I think our corporate structures have failed in creating high performance and stability in people.

I think one of them is actually in the role of leadership. And by leadership, the key component I often point to is coaching.

This idea of what truly is the job of a leader. I tell people, "Yeah, it's context and culture at the highest level—like where we are, where are we going, how do we organize ourselves to get there, what's important, those kinds of things."

And the environment in which we do it, but there's a people element because you recognize that you want an outcome, and you need people working together to that outcome.

So I now have to staff those people. I have to hire and train them and equip them and then point them to what those things are.

But many of those things are one-off, like meaning I create a vision, I create a strategy. You know, there are some things, you know, I hire a person, they do something that is every day, and that's coaching.

That's like the day job of managers. I mean, if I think about high-performing teams in the world—and you can pick sports as one of those—artists, they have coaches and managers.

Like, this is an everyday thing. The idea is that, you know, when I explain this to people, I say, "You know, doing product management is a product manager's job, but getting better at product management is the manager's job. It's the coach's job."

People tend to misunderstand how that dynamic works. You see, if you're playing a game, you're in the game; the coaches are on the sideline watching you play the game and getting you better at playing the game.

Your job may be to kick or pass the ball and get—you know, you need a competence level, but somebody's job is every day looking for ways for you to be better at your job.

The number one reason most people don't give good coaching is because they've never experienced good coaching themselves.

Most people cannot give to other people what has been given to them, what experiences they've seen.

I was in an executive meeting with a CEO, and he gets up in the meeting, and he just starts screaming and cursing at everybody, just like throwing up.

I said, "Whoa, whoa! Can we talk outside?" I take him outside. I was like, "First of all, I don't even think I can walk with you anymore given this environment you're creating, but I need to understand why you were talking to your team like that."

He says to me, "Christian, well, you know, my boss used to scream at me like this, and look at me! I'm now a CEO! I got it! I understand it! They are grown-ups; they can understand it too."

I said, "Well, tell me what you're trying to communicate." And he explains it to me and stuff, and I said, "Is it okay if I show you an alternative way of communicating?"

He says, "What do you mean?" I said, "Well, you know, is it first of all safe for me to do this with the team?"

So I go back to the team. I say, "Look, I'm going to try to see what the CEO was trying to say again. He's given me permission for you to speak freely and candidly. I want your honest opinion as to what was more effective and why."

And I took a stab by kind of representing what he was trying to say, and I asked at him, and it's like, "Yeah, it's the same kind of message, but you know, when he tells us this stuff, we just go do it. We get it; we go do it. But the way you described it right now to us, I can think of four other things I need to do.

I even understand some other things that may be missing that we need to or now go tackle."

And you know, the CEO is kind of like really taken aback, and it's kind of in some ways he has never seen an alternative, and he's never seen if an alternative be effective.

Most people need to see something; they need to do it before they can even teach it in some ways.

The biggest examples now—I'm teeing this off because I need to make a very strong argument for people understanding coaching.

In some ways, I probably did not know that I was probably good at coaching. I coached my kids in soccer for like eight years, and we always like won the championship, my boys' team.

I had like a long waiting list of people, and I thought I had a fundamental flaw in understanding it. You know, because when my kids were all like four years old, you know, when you have the kids run around the soccer field just kicking the ball anyway, my team always had like plays.

They all had strategy. I mean, so, you know, yeah, winning games like 10 to zero, you know, other kids.

And I thought, "You know, I'm like, ah, maybe I was born in another country. I didn't know you were just meant to let them play."

And I was like really coaching kids, and I was treating four-year-olds like adults. You know, we were watching video, watching tape, having real—you know, people like—but it's so funny when you see them execute on the field.

But I've kind of always had this mentality about the truest form. It's like companies cannot care for people; people care for people.

The representation of what is acceptable in an environment or what we do is by the leaders. Now, there's some different dynamics to why that's not happening with how we promote people and the whole poor structure around that.

But fundamentally, trust is a key part of doing this. And I think when I tell this to people, I said, "Look, most people don't know that you know something until they test you."

We do it a whole lot in our environment. You know, I ask you a question; I see how you answer it.

And it's like, I might ask, "What's 1+1?" Like, "It's two." And now I know that you know 1+1 is two.

I don't care when you learned it; I just need you to know that it's two to do my work.

So, you know, it happens in everyday environments, and what people fail to do is do the learning, so they get the question wrong, and they lose trust.

So people don't—you know, and trust is based on competence and character. There are other values like communication and concern and care, but most corporate environments, it's a competency thing.

That's why you see so many companies accept, you know, people with bad communication, bad care, bad because they are very good at their job.

So, you know, if you can demonstrate competence, you will earn some trust—at least the trust of competence from people.

So I kind of explained to people a whole lot that the real core of their job at first is to learn to seek to understand before they are understood—to know what you don't know, that humility and ego only last a small minute.

The most powerful way I have found to get trust with many people is to have them accountable for an outcome of mine, which is to them.

So if I wanted to accelerate trust with learning, I will ask learning to teach me. Now, you know, and I see it as like an emotional intelligence black belt technique here.

But you know, many environments, they—you know, if you get into an environment, it's very quickly for you to identify the power in an environment. You know, who's influential, who has the loudest voice and all, and there's something behind why they are powerful.

Yes, it is title, but if you think about why someone is called a CEO, it's because there's some competence that made someone give them the title.

You know, they are great at growing businesses, whatever it is. So what you do to build trust is you want that person to trust you, okay?

But the only way that person would know that they trust you is if they test you. And unfortunately, many environments, they do that publicly.

I'm in a meeting; I ask any question; he bumps a presentation like, "Oh, product managers, I use that person doesn't know anything."

So here's what I do when I want to build trust. You know, if Lenny is a new hire in my company, I take Lenny to the most loudest, most influential person in the company, and I say, "Look, I just hired Lenny. Super rare, did all of this, but you know, he knows nothing about our business, nothing about how we work and stuff.

I would love for you to teach him some things." Now, you may be like, "I'm super busy. I'm involved." I say, "Look, Lenny should just hang with you for the—you know, I've played his calendar for the whole week.

He's just going to sit in meetings, be quiet, observe." Just by observing you, he will be your rock star. No stress, nothing to give.

Now, it's impossible for this leader to sit with you for a whole week without saying things like, "So where are you from? What do we do? Tell me about yourself."

What have I now done? I forced a relationship between a very powerful, trustworthy, influential person and somebody else that doesn't have it.

If you are walking around the company with this person, what is everybody going to say? "Oh my goodness, you're friends with that person! You want to know Lenny because you know we can never get him to agree on it."

So if I know Lenny, I'll be close with him. Lenny is more accessible; he's new. But how?

Let me break in. I'm extending somebody else's trust to you now by also making that person share in the accountability of training you or co-teaching you in some ways.

I am not making them accountable for your growth. It's impossible two months from now for that person to say, "Oh, Lenny doesn't know anything."

Why? Because it makes them a bad teacher. So they are always going to defend like, "Oh yeah, Lenny, let's have a conversation. Don't do it like this in this way."

They will prep you because it makes them look bad if you're not competent.

Now, this technique accelerates relationships and trust. It's a help-me-teach-me type of technique.

It also allows them to observe the dynamics within the company, but it accelerates relationships because it's impossible for you to be in a meeting with a leader all the time without the person saying something like, "Oh yeah, hey folks, let me introduce you to Lenny."

Now that person is now the one introducing you to more connections within the company.

The fastest way to build this now feels like it's expensive, but this is the job of a coach. You are designing a very specific playbook to help people achieve the outcomes we want, and that's by getting them competent at their job and then their potential where they need to go next.

Those are some Jedi ninja tricks right there! I love that! I've never heard this advice before. It makes so much sense, and it's so easy to implement.

Yeah, amazing! For someone that maybe doesn't have a Christian around as a coach or a manager that isn't at this level, what advice do you give people that are looking for a coach or someone that could help them along these lines to learn to build trust and learn to, you know, just generally improve?

Boy, you know, I like I say with everything, you don't get mastery by avoidance. One of the things that good coaches do that, you know, most—when I say corporations fail companies—is don't create space for practice.

You know, I see people complain to me about people all the time. "Oh, this person is not good. You know, they presented this; it was terrible."

And I asked them, "What did they do at practice?" They said, "What do you mean?"

I said, "When they were practicing this, what did they do?" So they didn't practice. I told them to prepare this.

I said, "Think about what happens at practice. Any practice of any sport, any game, you can stop, you can make corrections, you can give feedback. What you do at practice, you do in the game. Product management, you say, 'What time? Game time?' Kind of roll every day is one. So when do people practice?"

And so what I tell people, like in the absence of getting good coaching, you need to find practice arenas.

You know, it's kind of like if you don't—you know, you're learning a new sport or basketball, you kind of go to the gym or stuff. It's a practice arena. You can play and shoot around, and maybe some people have pickup games that you join and stuff like this.

In some ways, I always advise product managers, like you need to join a lot of pickup games, which are kind of low barriers to entry, low evaluation, low risk type of thing.

Go volunteer at a nonprofit, working with a team. Go volunteer, you know, your community event or church or whatever you go to, kind of go party.

Now, what am I trying to do with these things? Find places where people do collaborative problem-solving.

Where they do—what is what you're doing as a product team? It's more likely in a high-performance environment you'll find a good coach.

You will find like somebody out there, but what you're also doing is you're observing other people play. Most people learn a lot of skills by—you know, you watch TV like, "Oh, I like that move," and then you go to the gym and you practice that move.

You see what you're seeing, then you're doing it in some ways. So you need to see good product work so that you can do good product work so that you can teach good product work.

So if you don't have the benefit of having a good coach directly, you've got to find environments where you see good coaching happening.

And a good indication of good coaching is actually good outcomes over and over again—winning teams, you know, winning performances, great products.

Great products come from great product teams. They probably have good leaders or a good leader in a bad culture.

Yeah, so essentially it's get a bunch of reps in is a big part of this advice. Just get reps in.

And I think what you just said is such an important part of it: collaborative problem-solving is the key thing to look for.

I was going to ask you how you recommend people get into product management. I imagine this is a very similar answer. It's just find opportunities to collaboratively problem-solve.

That's right! They—and I differentiate that because, you know, they all those guys that are, "I know I like to change a light bulb," or they can walk individually or thinker and stuff.

And I kind of differentiate that problem-solving from the people that are very good at working with other people to solve a problem.

And there are so many of those pockets. You're getting reps in. You know, when talking to—you've heard those people that just tell you stories of them working in a problem, and you can—I can see how they will help me.

Okay, they know how to use data; they know how to use insight; they're not afraid of talking to people.

How are you going to get those reps? Because you come into my company, I ask you a question like, "How?" I really don't know where to find, but if you've done the problem-solving with a team, sometimes you may not even know how to get the answer, but you know who to go to to get the answer.

That's a gift too!

I love that so much of your advice comes back to being the person that knows the most or has learned the most or even looking like they are spending the time to learn the most.

Like, which makes so much sense! The people you want and trust are the people that happen to have the answers and will know.

Yeah, it just makes sense! Something else you talk about is people getting promoted too early—leaders getting promoted too early, not doing well, then blaming others when really they were not actually ready for this new position.

Can you talk about why you think that happens and then just how maybe as that person that might be in that position right now feeling like, "Oh [ __ ]! Maybe it's not my fault," I don't know how to make an appeal to corporations in this one.

It's probably this—it's a similar appeal in the light of coaching too as well. You know, most people are promoted to a point of incompetency or stuff.

But I kind of describe the dynamic this way. It's kind of like, you know, Lenny is a fantastic engineer. You know, if you think about it, he wins engineer of the year awards.

If you go to the office, his picture is on the wall. Everybody knows him. He’s highly—he's feeling good.

But it's like one year, two years, maybe eight years in, Lenny is feeling like, "Am I really growing in my career? Am I really challenged in my career?"

He looks at the engineering career ladder. The next role, you know, from his senior engineer role is engineering manager.

You know, the leadership team, HR, they look at the same thing. They say, "True, we love Lenny. We don't want to lose Lenny. We need to promote him."

And the next step is engineering manager or product manager manager, however you want to roll here.

And so we do what we promote Lenny. It feels good at the moment. "Yeah, congratulations! Your promotion!"

He posts a nice post. We're like, "Yeah, we're going to keep Lenny there for a long time now because he's present."

Now, Lenny has never been a manager in his whole life. He's never interviewed people, fired people, coached people, done any of these things directly.

You know, after a couple of months, Lenny starts to recognize an interesting pattern: nobody is clapping for him in company meetings anymore.

Sure, they've taken down his picture from the wall because he's no longer an engineer; he's a manager.

So he's now somebody else. He's now the engineer of the year, clinging in meetings. It's like, you know, he doesn't feel recognized or seen anymore.

He's just the guy now behind the scenes in that kind of thing. Then, you know, a couple of weeks go by, then they have a big engineering problem.

And you know what Lenny does? He jumps in and he solves the problem. Lenny did not recognize that his job has changed.

His job is no longer to solve the problem directly but to get a team of other people good at solving problems.

This is because you're a great engineer but not a good manager. This story or this dynamic I've told is probably the most common origin story of what people see or deem as micromanagement.

In many cases here, this individual knows how to do engineering; they don't know how to do engineering management.

They don't see the shift in their dynamic being changed. We see bad patterns where it's like the second you become a manager or a leader, you cannot say things like, "I don't know. I'm not sure. I need help."

Are you saying, "Who told us those things?" But it's like such an expectation that our leaders must have the answers, must know the right things, must do the right things.

And so what do we see people do? Rather than letting them ask for help, he goes to Google and searches, "How to do an interview? How to write the review?"

Are you seeing? He reads different articles like, "This one looks cool." And then he does it, and nobody dies; nothing breaks.

So he thinks it's a good framework and a good pattern. And you know, we have this dysfunctional culture of everybody doing different things, whatever works for anybody.

And that is the cycle that repeats itself. Now, a person that works for Lenny sees that he used this framework and thinks it must be a good framework.

My boss did it, and you see how that cycle repeats itself because Lenny didn't actually get coached to be a manager.

You know, if you ask anybody that works with me, they come to me and say, "Oh, I need to get promoted to be a director." You know what I say?

I say, "Go be a director! You don't need a title! Let me tell you what the director does, and you're going to work with me over the next couple of months to do those things because I am promoting you to do the job, not to learn the job."

You see where it falls apart in promotions? We promote people, and it's like, "You're now a VP. Do VP things."

And you're like, "I have never done VP things before!" But I cannot tell people I've never done VP things because it makes me look incompetent.

But I see the job description. I should do some VP things. What did my last VP do? Those things are—are you saying?

But the best place to learn how to be a VP is when you're not a VP because this is—that's where you practice being a VP.

That's when you get feedback on because then when you become a VP, you have done those things before.

It's like, why is the first time you've done an interview when you're now a VP? Come in and do an interview with me. Observe me do an interview. Ask questions. See what works. Get feedback.

You know, that's why I love those group product manager roles or group—because those are actually meant to be designed as ways for people to make a decision if they want to be a manager or they want to just stay in the discipline.

But people use them as, "Why would you give somebody four direct reports if they have proven there's no evidence they can manage one?"

So what I do is I give you one. You might tell me, "I hate people." That's okay; we can talk about that.

But it's like, "Let me give you four, and you're just going to practice the bad behavior in four."

You know, so this is what often happens in companies. We promote them into incompetence. It's not their fault because we are not coaching them.

What we need to do is create a safe environment for people to practice leadership before they become leaders. Before we promote them, we have to have good coaching programs for leaders to say, "You know, if there's a succession plan, I want Lenny to be a new manager."

I don't wait until it's time

Okay, if they come back from the class and they punch you in the face, they're like, "Why did you punch me?" The class taught me to punch you in the face. You paid money for me to learn how to punch you in the face.

I say, "Go to the communication class with the employee because they're going to need to practice communication." So you learned what they're learning, and both of you now will practice together so that you can get better at communication.

A communication class doesn't get you better at communicating; communicating better is an indication that you're better at communication. You need to practice it, and I need to create a safe place for you to practice. I need to give you feedback that you're communicating better.

These are all patterns in coaching that many leaders just don't have the tools and techniques to do. So I do teach a lot of leaders how to coach. I do a lot of work with leaders. There's not a singular product problem; you know, people hear me say all problems have people problems.

There's not a singular product problem that I have not seen coaching address. So what I hear is essentially the biggest burden is on the manager to be a great coach to their reports. For a manager to get good at this, essentially a coach is a really good method.

Bring someone in that can work with you one-on-one on a lot of these things. Awesome, that's very actionable, very solvable. Everyone's always going to ask, "How do I find an awesome coach?"

Difficult, I guess. I don't know. What do you tell people to go find a coach? Is there anything you could recommend, just like how to go find a coach? You know, you got to find people that have generated good outcomes.

I don't know how you know people, like how you find a good consultant. I get people teaching people a lot that haven't done the job. Don't get me wrong. You know, if you look at American football teams, you have some coaches that have played the game before, and you feel good that they can coach you.

There are also some coaches that have not played the game, but if you look at the pedigree, they've learned from good coaches. So, same thing with product. I said there are only two parts.

A good coach is someone that has played the game before and has generated good outcomes. The second is that they've learned from good product coaches. So you want to find people with a strong pedigree.

You see them, you know, "Oh, you worked at Amazon this year, you worked at this company, or you worked at Stripe. Did you look at good results? How did you do that?" "Oh, my environment was great, the culture was great."

"Who taught you? Who coached you?" Do pickup games with the people that they coached. They will tell you what patterns their coach told them.

So what? How do you do that? My coach told me to do this, and you're going to learn from them. I say, "Oh, you know, important things."

Amazing. Okay, the final area I want to spend a little time on is the work you do in Africa. Marty said that you're the foremost expert in introducing product and technology into the world's developing countries.

I know you spent a lot of time in Africa specifically. Can you just talk about the work you do there and also just maybe the opportunities and challenges you run into when you're working with folks there?

Yeah, I mean, I have an African background, and my family is there. I used to have this false notion that the things we've done in North America or Europe or Asia, like the problems we've solved, have been solved in this market.

I remember talking to someone in Africa years ago, and he said to me, "Oh, I said, 'We just got a new job.' Where did you find the job?" "Oh, I found it in a newspaper." I said, "The newspaper? What do you mean?"

I remember participating in solving that exact problem in like 1998. I was working with the team to solve that, and I had this false assumption that because I solved it here, of course, it's solved everywhere.

I started to see patterns like this in Africa where they just—two things were trending. One, the poor use of technology and enabling technologies to solve problems.

Two, the difficulty in actually solving problems in these emerging markets. One of the things we take for granted, you know, I always tell people the government is probably the biggest public-private product platform in the world.

In all countries, they all have this public because they provide the infrastructure and the architecture that is enabling for people. You know, imagine if you were trying to code and you didn't have power.

Now you're thinking there are markets where you have to solve the problem of getting power before you can get access to a computer and then getting access to the right type of software to be able to code something.

I mean, look at all the different things. So you have to solve many problems just before you can start to solve the problem in a meaningful way, and this is a very big reflection of the dynamic in Africa.

The second pattern of what we see is because of this challenge, I see two things. One, people make a lot of money on a problem than from solving the problem.

You know, this is a whole society where people are very good at walking around problems. You know, we've got an electricity problem; we'll just buy generators.

We got a road problem; we're going to buy bigger cars. I was doing a talk at a conference, and I was driving up. I saw a Tesla with a portable generator at the back of it.

You know, they will stop and charge the Tesla, and they keep going on the road. In some ways, that's a whole society, but it's never been a society that didn't have creative people—just an amazing, tremendous amount of talent.

You know, and it's a very young population. I talk to people all the time. I said, "Look, someone told me, 'Well, Africa, you know, seven of the eight most underdeveloped places in the world are in Africa.'"

I said, "Well, you know, they were talking about the discovery of the Internet. It's like less than 30% of Africa has discovered the Internet."

I tell them, "Wow, and we created seven unicorns from that. Imagine if 50% or 75% discovered the Internet."

Like, we need to understand the opportunities—the youngest population, the fastest-growing, some of the fastest-growing economies in these markets. Some of the problems are so basic, and the opportunities are so huge.

I had to kill all these assumptions: one, that I needed permission to come in to solve problems there; and two, that we didn't have the means to equip and educate people.

So we don't have a talent problem or a resource problem. What the biggest opportunity I found is to really empower a continent with enabling technology and the mindset and the skills to be able to leverage technology in solving problems.

So this led to me starting a nonprofit in Africa, the Innovate Africa Foundation, and we are committed to this education of people on the continent, this enablement with technology.

We did our first conference last year, the Inspire Africa Conference. It just blew my mind. I'm so humbled when I could see a thousand people from 31 different countries in Africa come with a hunger and an eagerness to learn how to do product work.

I mean, it's not cheap by any means for them to do that. What moved me the most is looking at the future generation. We had a 13-year-old and an 11-year-old in the workshop.

You know, the 11-year-old was a robotics engineer, and the 13-year-old was a CEO of a small startup that keeps healthcare records.

I'm like, if I can help these people learn how to do product well, this is the whole generation for Africa. This is the future of people that want to leverage technology in a meaningful way.

So I spent a lot of my time in Africa coaching, advising, and teaching teams how to use technology, how to do product, how to organize themselves as product teams, how to solve problems, and really to create a boldness within the continent for them to go after problems and solve them.

Then, you know, walk around the problems, make money on them. If people want to learn more about this, maybe support the work you're doing, what's the best way to find out more?

You can visit the nonprofit website, it's innovateafricafoundation.org. You can follow our work on svpg.com or the Inspire Africa conference.com.

I know I will be doing a lot more next year. In January, I am going to be launching a fund, the Innovate Africa Fund, and I want it to be a fund funded by the product community for Africa.

It's an angel investment fund. One of the problems I recognize is that so many of the startups are not ready for institutional investment, and they are forced into it.

In some ways, they say, "You know, people are giving up a lot of equity when they just need cash flow." So I really want to focus on a fund for the community to enable people to get product-market fit in those markets.

So that will be launching in January. I will probably do an announcement about it. I'm super excited about that work and to really try to promote more of a product-centric thinking on the continent.

Amazing. You should call this fund "Reference Customers" or something along those lines.

Yeah, the goal is to help them find product-market fit. That's right; they'll be learning a lot of that.

Christian, is there anything else you wanted to share or leave listeners with before we get to our very exciting lightning round?

I've always been an advocate for the product community to really have a sense of what they do beyond the job of a product team or product manager.

I always try to encourage people to see that at the very core of what you do is really solving a problem. When you do that, you create value in the world. You're making a dent in the world.

People that participate in trying to make things better or trying to solve problems should not shy away from that definition of our job.

It might feel like a fluffy one; it might feel like too lightweight, not meaningful. But I think when people take to heart that that's really what the essence of product work is, they bring to work a different passion.

They bring to work a different sense of empathy. They bring to work a different sense of customer centricity, and all of those things lead to good outcomes.

So I always make that appeal to people: all the frameworks, techniques, all the stuff—just think truly about what you're trying to do. You're trying to care enough about a problem to solve it on someone's behalf and do it so well that it gives us something in return.

I really love that last point of just—that's how you know if you build something people care about. They give you something in return.

One of those things could be actually telling other people about it. That's right, point reference customers.

Yes, amazing. Well, with that, we've reached our very exciting lightning round. Are you ready?

And I don't have a choice. Nope.

What are two or three books that you've recommended most to other people?

Oh boy, in this discipline, probably all of our books: Inspired, Empowered, and we're coming out with one in March, Transformed.

I see that t-shirt there. I see the promo happening. Yes, it's happening.

But it's really a reflection of so many decades of love and passion for product work. I have not found—I always told Mar that you write the books after I've gone through failure.

It's like I failed at leadership; now there's a book on it. You know, I've failed at product; now there's a book on it. And it reflects really the heart of good product work.

So I love Ben Horowitz's "The Hard Thing About Hard Things." I mean, there are some books that really describe the mindset and culture that good product work is done in.

I always recommend those to people. Just on this topic of "Transform," when is it coming out, and can you give just like an elevator pitch for the book, just so people know what it'll be about?

"Transform" is coming out in March next year. God, three months. Some people should have gotten shipping dates on their books if you pre-ordered it now.

But it really talks about how to move to the product operating model, which is really this set of beliefs and principles that the best companies work in.

We share stories of companies that have transformed into this that are not your traditional digital or tech companies that have made this transition.

We tell stories of what companies can do. If anything, it's an appeal that there is a better way of working and solving problems, and that companies can work in this way regardless of where you are on the journey.

All right, we'll have to have you back once the book comes out to get more people aware of what is happening.

Amazing. Okay, I'll keep going. Favorite recent movie or TV show that you've really enjoyed?

I jumped on the "Succession" bandwagon, and I enjoyed that. I used to love "Billions" too as well. I love good writing—kind of really just intellectual writing in those business shows.

So probably "Succession" and "Billions" would be two.

Do you have a favorite interview question that you like to ask when you're interviewing candidates?

Well, I always give them a problem to solve. That is probably my favorite question, and it's not a traditional problem.

I probably will say something like, "You know, hey Lenny, I have a friend. He's been legally blind his whole life, and he just got a new job that requires him to wake up significantly earlier than he normally does.

As you can imagine, traditional alarm clocks will not solve the problem, and I would love to give that problem to you. Walk me through how you go about tackling this or solving this."

For me, I like that question because it gives me a sense of how you think. It gives me a sense of how you solve problems.

It gives me a sense of how you know what you do not know and how you go about knowing the things you need to know to solve a problem.

There’s no magical right or wrong answer. I do a lot of people that say, "I have no clue what to do." I'm more curious because I want to know what you do when you don't have a clue.

Or people that jump straight to solutions are more engineering-centric. People that jump straight to solutions, I can kind of get a sense of who you are when I give you a problem that requires you to do some thinking.

You know, and you're doing this live in an interview. It's not like, "Go home and think about this."

No, I'm doing this live interview.

Okay, and then what's a sign that they're on the right track? What do you look for that's like, "Yes, this is what I want to see?"

Well, remember, I think about what makes a good product manager. I look at collaborative problem-solving.

You know, there are people that feel like, "I'm just going to solve the whole thing myself. This is what we should do."

We should do like no evidence, no data, no kind of stuff in there. It's very interesting.

But people that are saying, "You know what? I would need to probably work with an engineer and designer. We might need to put that."

So I look for intellectual curiosity in some ways. You know, people that have proven questions in their head.

People that are very quick to see things. I will talk to 20 of them. I said, "How are you going to do that? Do you know sign language?"

They're like, "Oh, how am I going to talk to them?" But there are people that are like, "I'm going to need a lot of help to try to figure this out."

I don't know a lot about your friend, but I know community. There are people that kind of—some people have frameworks they run to.

It exposes that, you know, if they are married to one way of working. It's more about knowing what you can't know.

I'm looking for empathy, humility in some sense. It is a competence thing because most of—I can teach, I can coach a lot of things.

But you know that arrogance, that ego, those kinds of things—those, you know, "I walk alone"—those things are very, very challenging and disruptive to a team culture.

Do you have a favorite product that you've recently discovered that you really like? Either an app or something physical—anything that's like, "Oh, this is really cool."

My eldest son is into sports. You know, he loves all kinds of sports stuff, sports apps, all those kinds of things.

He got me this app called Real Sports. It's really cool. It shows scores of different games, but it's really driven by social influence.

So, you know, like all of your Twitter posts will get there, like, "Oh my God, cool touchdown!" It's almost like real-time—more than real-time.

It's like, you know, and you're getting real-time reactions of people around you and your communities.

It's a very different way of checking on a score than I've ever seen, and I thought it was just really, really thoughtful.

I want to share a reaction to a touchdown with 50 people around the world that will care about, you know, my favorite team just scoring a touchdown.

You're all sharing reactions at the same time, and the first person that saw it, you can see it.

So it's very simple; it's like scores for games, but these days I don't check my scores anywhere else.

Do you have a favorite life motto that you often repeat to yourself or share with friends, either in work or in life, that you find useful?

Wow, boy. I've said a lot in this talk about people don't care about—you know, companies don't care about you; people care about you.

Or it's never too late to be what you want to be. But, you know, my father always told me, "Show up."

You know, show up, and you're ahead of like, you know, 80% of the people in the free world. Show up on time, and you're ahead of 85% of the people in the free world.

Show up on time with a plan, and you're ahead of 90% of the people in the free world.

If somehow you have the guts to put that plan to action with a smile, then you probably will have a great chance of success.

If you do that over and over again in every aspect of your life, it can lead to successful outcomes.

I think that's a lot of some mental definition for me every day. Amazing.

I love that. Final question: as maybe the most interesting man in the world, is there anything people may not know about you or would be surprised to hear about?

Wow, I hope there are no more surprises about me in that kind of case in that way. But I went to a gifted and talented school.

I was out of my house at 12, and I went to kind of a boarding school, and I've kind of never been back home since then.

So I've kind of been on my own, but we were kind of in the middle of nowhere—probably eight miles from any form of civilization and stuff in the middle of the jungle.

No water, no potable water, no electricity. So you kind of had to get water yourself, generate your own power.

Probably the most interesting time in my life to shape my worldview—kind of surviving at 12 to 16 on my own in the middle of the jungle.

So a very intriguing part of my life, very different from your life these days.

Actually, one more question. I think you're the fourth—you're from Nigeria, right? Your family is from Nigeria?

Yes, you're the fourth Nigerian guest on this podcast, I realized. And I always like to ask, what's your favorite Nigerian food?

Slash, what food should people seek out if they were to try to find some good Nigerian food?

My favorite Nigerian meal is super-duper cultural and native. It's like starch and efo riro. You know, you can't really find that anywhere.

It's like it has to come from mom's cooking. Mad Kagan has tried it. He came to my hometown, my parents' house, and had it.

But if you're discovering Nigerian food, you know, start with a variation of rice, which everybody has—jollof rice.

And I have people say this: Nigerian jollof is better than Ghanaian jollof. It's a war, but it's okay. We already claimed victory, and we will move on.

But start with jollof rice; it's elementary. But then you have to try a swallow, like pounded yam or fufu with a soup.

You know, there are many different variations of that. You get pounded yam, pounded cassava, and you eat that with a soup, and you will—oh man, love it.

Some controversy over here—competition, that's right, for who's got the best rice.

Amazing, Christian. I am now a huge fan of yours. I'm so happy we did this. Thank you so much for making time for this.

Two final questions: where can folks find you online if they want to reach out, and how can listeners be useful to you?

You can find me on LinkedIn. You can reach out to us on our website, svpg.com.

I tell people the best way to be useful to us is to do good work using these principles and all the things we teach people over and over again.

We care about outcomes; we care about good product work in the world. I would love your support with the work I'm doing in Africa.

I've always reached out to the product community around the world to help developing countries and communities.

So please follow our work; please support our work in Africa in building the product community.

And what is the website for that again, specifically the nonprofit you started?

Innovateafricafoundation.org. Amazing.

Christian, thank you so much for being here. Thank you for having me, Lenny. It's such a pleasure.

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