The essence of product management | Christian Idiodi (SVPG)

Christian Idiodi: 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, 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, I always call it a certificate of appreciation. And it could be in the form of revenue, engagement, loyalty, reference, all of those things. And that’s the real essence of this job. If it’s not fun, you’re probably not doing it right. If it’s not had, you’re probably also not doing it right.

The Most Interesting Person

Lenny: Today, my guest is Christian Idiodi. Christian is a partner at Silicon Valley Product Group, alongside Marty Cagan, 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 discuss 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.

Also, we spend some time on the great work that he’s doing at Silicon Valley, Product Group. He’s been doing a lot of great work on the product management field in Africa to help product builders and founders build great companies. That and so much more Christian is awesome. With that, I bring you Christian Idiodi, after a short word from our sponsors.

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Why Product Managers Are Unpopular

Christian Idiodi: Thank you for having me, Lenny. It’s a joy to be here.

Advice for Product Managers

Lenny: It’s a joy to have you here. So Marty Cagan 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?

Christian Idiodi: I didn’t. I consider him one of the most interesting people in the world too.

Four Risks for Product Managers

Lenny: 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, I don’t know if this is new or if it’s always been around, but it feels like there’s this trend of people just not liking product managers. There’s trend of founders feeling like they should wait a long time to hire their first product manager. There’s a lot of teams that wish they didn’t have a product manager in their team. We don’t have this person telling us what to do. I’m curious just 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?

Christian Idiodi: 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, that has a deep knowledge of the customers and your users, that has a deep knowledge of your data, your industry, your business and the product itself. And because of this competence, you kind of trust them to make decisions because if you have a problem that says, say 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 misperception displaced influence and mistrust because of the poor competency, meaning I feel I know more about the business or I know more about the customer or the data. And so why should I not tell you what to do?

And I think people fail to understand that this role is, it’s a team spot. They are part of a team of people working together to discover a solution we’re building and in a way that works for our company. And so I think 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, 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.” And they always have some senior leader, some VP, some person. And I say, “Why? Oh, Bob has been here a long time. He knows everybody. Everybody loves him and trusts him. He understands our business.” And I often say to him, I say, “Well, Bob said put up manager.” And it’s often interesting to executives when I try to explain that way. I say that’s the competent level that we’re talking about here.

Imagine if you had Bob’s on every team. Imagine how much you can accomplish. So one, I don’t really think it’s… I often say it’s not the 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.

So if I were advising product managers, I often say, look, when we see sales or executive driven product management where we see these alternatives to product management, it’s not a cultural knock or a leadership knock, it’s really on the individual and the discipline has to elevate itself to a place that it earns the right to make a decision on what we do.

Where New PMs Fail Most

Lenny: I have exactly the same perspective. When people say they don’t like product managers, exactly what I tell them is, 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. I would never want to lose Christian on my team as a PM. Is there something they could do maybe or change to become that person?

Christian Idiodi: Well, I was just joking with someone earlier. I said, “I’ve only seen great product managers come out of two places. One, either a series of massive failure in their career or experiences that have been bad or from learning from great product leaders.” The reality of this kind of role, it’s kind of like if you have all kinds of… maybe you’re like on a sport, 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.

And 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, this period of learning, recognizing what you do not know. And what you do not have is the trust of an organization or even in 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 stuff, 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. I’m going to intern for you. You’re going to get permission from your manager and say, “Look, I want to spend time with Lenny. He’s the head of sales, he’s the head of operations and stuff. I just want to learn from him.”

Now, what you’re doing is you’re 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 that they know, but everybody now sees you learning every single day. So 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 continuing to learn. So I always practically advise product managers in this kind of scenario, build relationships with people. You earn their trust by asking them to do two things. One, you’re either going to teach me or I’m going to help you. And you’re going to build relationships there, gain experience with them. You’ve got to immerse yourself in the deeper understanding of the business and the data.

The Ultimate Discovery Method: Reference Customers

Lenny: Wow, there’s a lot there. Because this is awesome. This is exactly, I think what people want to hear is 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, more successful. I just took some notes as you were talking. One is there’s a sense of becoming more full stack in the company, like understand the business, not just there’s your one product and here’s your one goal. And then this idea of just be 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 wouldn’t naturally be inclined to understand. And that also helps you build relationships. And also just this really important point of 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.

The Power of Immersive Discovery

Christian Idiodi: Yes.

Core of the Reference Customer Method

Lenny: 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. And I thought it’d be cool just to spend a little time here. There’s these four attributes you guys like to share. Can you just talk about that, as a little foundational?

Early Adopters: Tech Enthusiasts and Evangelists

Christian Idiodi: I kind of mentioned before, a product manager is in a team spor., so they work as part of a team to uncover a solution, what to build. And 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. The risk that we can build it to have the skills to build it or the time to build this, that’s a feasibility risk.

And the risk of it working for our business, which is a viability risk. I cannot call out the product manager’s competency. It’s really to try to drive the first and the last one, which is value and viability. A solution worth building, something people will buy, choose or use, and one that works for our business, which is at the core of what product teams do, solve a problem in a way customers will love and a way that works for our business. It’s why the product manager gets all the rap of, if everything goes great, a great team effort, if everything goes wrong, they blame the product manager.

It’s because people hold them accountable to results. 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. And 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. And what an amazing job. There’s just no greater… I cannot think of a better discipline with such 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 the real essence of it, and that’s the, I always call it a certificate of appreciation. And it could be in the form of revenue, engagement, loyalty, reference, all of those things. And that’s the real essence of this job. 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.

Lenny: 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 they’re building hits all these attributes.

25-Person Validation and Product-Market Fit

Christian Idiodi: 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. And I’m calling out, these are the different risks in our kind of taxonomy, how we call the things you have to tackle. And it’s a team sport, and so there are these four risks of should we build it, will people use it, will people buy it, will our customers support it or our business support it? And you’re trying to answer those questions with a designer and a product engineer.

Lenny: Of these four, so value, usability, viability, feasibility, where do you think most new PMs fail most or should spend more time?

Driving Marketing with Real Customer Feedback

Christian Idiodi: Oh my goodness, value. Value is probably, it is the most important and the most overlooked. And 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.

And so often, when people ask me why does the product manager seem to play like a core leadership role on a team, almost like the quarterback. And it’s not that they’re more 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 must be overlooked. We often see bad patterns where companies will say, “Yes, we ran a test, with 300 users and they all scored it 84% or 90%. They love it.” In that way. 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.” And what people say is often different from what they do. And our job is to actually solve the problem, which is what core value is, in a meaningful way. And often overlooked because we check the box on our own item. So the most important, because that’s to the point of the certificate of appreciation, what you get in return, that’s the ultimate outcome. Really, value.

Recruiting Is the Signal

Lenny: You once gave a talk along these lines around discovery, and it was this talk of here’s all of the things you can do to help understand what to build to make something valuable. There’s 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, you just talk about how you recommend going about that.

Christian Idiodi: The holy grail of product walk 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 described the work of the product team is 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. And for me, if we think about you do a lot of interviews with founders and entrepreneurs and you’re going to have people that they 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 will say, “Well, I had a problem and it was their problem and they focused on solving the problem and then they got their friends on it.”

And so 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 where it was like, there are more people like me. And it is 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. How do you feel about that? I don’t know. Maybe other people don’t want to try this. 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, if you look at Geoffrey Moore’s adoption curve and those kinds of models in here, most people don’t want to be the first to try things. But you are likely to try things if other people that look like you have accepted it or defined it as good.

And 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 it’s like, yeah, it’s going, 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. And 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. You see? So they’re like forcing back, “I need this and I need this.” But if you came to me and said, “I want to buy steak,” and I say, “Let me show you 20 people that look like you that recommend this steakhouse,” my job as a salesperson is very easy. I’m just like, “Hey, you should eat here. Everybody that loves steak, they all eat here.”

So product teams feel, at this contract to an organization when they don’t create powerful reference customers. So it’s by far my favorite technique. And 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 in the history of time.

Why? Did we have to look for someone with Covid? No, they were literally all around us. The research was immersed in the environment of the problem. They could study… and so 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, get out of the assumptions, get out of your opinions. Immerse yourself, find someone who has the problem, stick with them until you discover a solution for this problem. And you’re going to do that. 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 might not be a problem, but solve it. I have never had a product failure using this technique. If I were to credit… goodness, I think last count, I’m up to like 205 products I have worked on or participated in creating in my career. And I tried 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 bad day is a problem worth solving. And I like to go from idea to revenue, and the setup, and I test all of these techniques in this way. And 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.

Case Study: Starbucks

Lenny: Just to be clear, you said you still work, you build products yourself and you practice this and you’ve built… okay, what’s like every recent product that you’ve built? I didn’t know this.

Discovering a Larger Market

Christian Idiodi: So I do a lot of work in Africa now. WorkNigeria is like a job board that helps people. We do kind of a job board HR replacement and advisory too as well. I’m actually working on another app around the NDA and protecting high-asset individuals in some ways. So kind of every year, I find a problem like that worth solving and I practice doing the work of discovery with a team of people.

Lenny: That’s amazing. I see this unraveling of the most interesting man in the world is happening a little, bit by bit. We learn more and more about you. Okay, amazing. So just to kind of summarize some of these-

Okay, amazing. So just to 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 pick reference customers. And I really like this word reference, which is not just they’re going to help you build a thing, but they’re also become a reference to future customers because they end up loving it because you built it for them and they love it.

Your advice is find six to eight in 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 that no one else has. And 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. And it sounds like in your experience, this is a good kind of number where probably a lot of more people will have this problem.

First Attempt: Painful Lessons

Christian Idiodi: Yeah. There’ve been studies to validate some of these numbers. I think early, IBM, kind of struggled selling those supercomputers. And if you’re buying a million dollar computer, someone says, “Hey, do you want to buy?” And you’re like, “I don’t know. Is there anybody else that has bought it? Shall I be the first?” And there was this common question of what would it take for you to buy it? And 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.” And it’s like, so how do I create the first five to six? And you can see a lot of the validation on B2C in some of the things you might see in the App Store on Yelp or those places. My idea here is if you found a steakhouse with 25 5-star reviews, you are likely to adopt this.

So in every app I have ever put on the App Store, on the day I launch the app in the app store, they are 25 5-star reviews. I will never launch an app and be like, “Let’s hope Lenny loves it. Let’s see who the first person.” On the very first day of launching the app, there are 25… so I will know I am not ready until I have achieved 25 people that have told me, worked with me and said, “I am now ready to put my reputation the line.” Sometimes I might need to work with 30 people or 50 people because the output is 25 reference customers. Because if Lenny is like, “I don’t love it enough” or “I don’t feel comfortable,” 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.

Lenny: So interesting. It basically kicks in this word of mouth flywheel that everyone’s always looking for is how do I get people to talk about it. Build it for them, solve their problems, tell them that it exists. You mentioned a bit about how you understand if it’s actually, let’s call a product market fit, if you have product market fit with these people that you ask them if they’re going to leave you a 5-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?

Iteration and Breakthroughs

Christian Idiodi: If I were thinking about how I will do this, pick a problem to solve, first of all, I have to know who I’m solving the problem for. And in some indication and I want to validate that this is actually a problem you do have. And I’m looking for a certain type of person. These early adopters in our world are broken up to technologists and evangelists. Technologists could be, “I love the new iPhone 16 is coming out and it’s going to have five cameras and I write an article in some tech review board. Super fast, super sleek, all good design.” You just love new technology. You always jump on new technology. And 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 Apple 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 it’s like you will try any steakhouse, in my example. You’re just like, “I love steak. I don’t care if there are reviews or not. I’ll try it.” And what I’m trying to do here is I’m saying, okay, Lenny loves steak, he wants to try a steakhouse. And I’m good to say, “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 a video testimonial, write a review, stuff like that. And 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 work with me in ensuring that I build the best steakhouse here. And that’s kind of the idea.

So I’m going to work with 25 people that look like you and I’m going to keep tweaking, in this sense iterating on the product and the menu until Lenny’s like, “My goodness, this is the best steakhouse in the world.” It is like I’m just going to write about it and when I get 25 people that have all, it’s not the steakhouse, they love it enough. Because this is where you really get the shift in value. Because if I say, “Lenny, go write me a review, a five-star review.” You’re like, “I don’t know if I feel comfortable about.” 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 they’ll be like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’ll give you a five-star review.” But when I say do it, you’re like, “Well, I have this hesitation.” Why? That’s really where great discovery comes. But it’s hard to in a silo. You have to be immersed with the person that has the problem. So product market fit is when you iterate it in this discovery, you’ve 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.

Lenny: 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 this, I’m trying to figure out if people want it.” I would be like, “Yeah, of course. I’ll leave 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 review.

Facing New Challenges

Christian Idiodi: You. It’s part of why I need 25 in B2C. And don’t get me wrong, if I can convince 25 people in there, I may have a marketing product and a charismatic marketing products. If that’s all I needed to do was a good message and charisma to get people on it. The good benefits of this is that you can tackle risk very early because you can involve many other parts of your organization, marketing, sales, legal, finance. 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.” If I ask Lenny, “What do you feel about this product?” And he says, “Well, it’s cool and it’s very sleek and very nice.” The marketing department will say, “We don’t like those terms. We want to call it comprehensive.” And when you go out to sell your product, 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. And so I’m going to put exactly what Lenny said on the box. “Hey, this product’s cool and sleek and easy to use.” 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 [inaudible 00:31:39]. 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 we’re not making assumptions.

What’s the best way to market this? How much 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. If you do this a whole lot, you get really comfortable at involving, you’re working with your customers to solve it. But for me, the fact that 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 love this problem and are willing to help you, just be like, this is not a problem worth solving. But more importantly, you really start to get… is the fastest part to product market fit, the clearest definition for me because I know when my product is ready, when I’ve dotted those I’s and crossed those T’s, in that way.

The Product Creation Process

Lenny: I think your point there, recruiting is itself a huge signal, is really important. 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. And it can’t be a bunch of different things for a bunch of different people.

The Essence of Leaders and Coaches

Christian Idiodi: That’s right, that’s right. If one person says, “I don’t want this,” wants this, another person wants this, you don’t do it. That’s how you know you do the minimum. All 25 have to want the same thing. If one person’s out, 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 say, “Well yeah, 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, Lenny’s cool, he likes the steakhouse. I should like it. He’s fine with this not being there so I should be fine with it.” So your references are super powerful in more than any company, in influencing consumers on what they should choose or not choose.

Lenny: Basically, Strive builds new products exactly this way. They find new customers that have a problem and they work with very small number of customers to build a product for them, and that’s how 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, if they’re trying to build something new. Is there an example that comes to mind that would be, I don’t know, interesting to talk through, of something you built that you worked through this process?

Why Most People Cannot Coach

Christian Idiodi: Oh, boy. I tell the example of solving a problem when I was at a staffing company, a snag job. They do hourly jobs and help people find their best job or an hourly job and I actually get a call here from the head of Global staffing at Starbucks. Now, he called me, you can see the benefit of this technique, because I’m the person he calls when he has problems. I’ve used this technique with him at a previous company. He didn’t even know I was at a new company. 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, “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 realized that close to 800 of the employees may be undocumented workers.”

And I said, “Wow, that does sound like a problem.” He’s like, “Yeah, imagine if this breaks out in the news and all of that. But more importantly, we still need to get all their paperwork. So all these people are going to quit and we’ll have a new bakery without employees.” And my first question to him as a product guy is like, “Wow, would you give me a million dollars to solve this problem?” And it’s like, “No, seriously?” I was like, “300,000.” I’m throwing out numbers. He’s like, “Maybe.” I said, “Wow, you have my attention.” I go to my CEO, I tell him to call. I grab a designer and an engineer. I 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 problems. 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, Starbucks needs to hire like 800 people quickly because we can’t fix getting everybody’s paperwork. But they’re going to lose these people and they need to hire those quickly. And I say, well, who else has this problem? We’re trying to throw out guesses. I’m like, “What are we talking about? Let’s go out.” Everybody jumps in my car and we start driving around and this is where we’re doing our product work from. We’re talking in the car, just out of the building. We see a new construction site for a new McDonald’s coming soon and we’re curious. We’re like, well, “Let’s go find out.” We start talking to people on sites. 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? 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, the 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 lots of people quickly. So I said, “Thank you very much.” I gave him my business card, he gave me his. We jumped back in the car. 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, “Oh look, we hire 20,000 people in the holiday season.”

We’re like, “Macy’s.” Yeah, it’s like nights, weekend, shipping, stuff like this. We started 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, like other people will have the problem. So we go back to the office, we’re brainstorming, like, “How will someone even go about solving this problem?” We’re thinking this was like, we’re not really sure, but McDonald’s guy was very desperate. I said, ” I have his business card.” We start throwing some ideas. So I called the McDonald’s person and I said, “Look, you 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, “We’ve been talking. What if we just sent you some people to interview. And if you like them, you’ll hire them.”

He said, “That seems fairly easy.” He’s like, “How do I pay for this?” And we took a swag like, “Maybe you pay us for everybody that you hire.” He was like, “Oh, I don’t see much risk to that. This is great.” I’m like, “Oh, okay.” 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 posting on Craigslist or things like that. 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 our first try. We call the manager up and we say, “Look, on Monday we will send you 40 people to interview. This is great.”

Monday I take my designer, my engineer, we are on site with the manager. At nine o’clock, we expect three people to show up for interviews. Nobody shows up. 10 o’clock, another three, one person shows up. We got to the end of the day, less than 20 people show up. This man only has four or five people. We are like, “We suck this. This is terrible.” We go to the manager, ” 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. 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 less than a mile closer to their home.”

Now, the engineer is with us and he’s thinking about it. It’s like, this is really interesting. About half of the people showed up. He hired one in five. If you really want to solve this problem, playing the laws of averages, we probably need to send this man close to 200 people. We need to go bigger. So we are storming the office, we called the McDonald’s guy again. I was like, “Can we try again next Monday?” And he’s like, “Do I only pay for the people I hire?” We’re like, “Sure.” It’s like, “Oh, go ahead and kill yourself on this.” 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? What’s wrong with you?” We start figuring out what portals worked well for us the last time, what wasted our money, what was the cost to acquire a person. And 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 like, “Please show up. Don’t embarrass us. Don’t you want the job? Do you need that address? Should I call you a reminder, set your alarm.” We’re trying all the techniques to try to get more people. There we go the next day and at the end of the day he has about forty-five 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,” [inaudible 00:41:17] how successful we are.

He’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, remember the problem we talked the about?” He’s like, “Yeah. 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 3000 people to interview.” He said, “3000 people? I told you I only need 800.” I said, in this industry, most people don’t show up for interviews, right? He said, “Oh my goodness. You know our industry well. I like this. I’m going to take 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. We have to get a whole hotel, hire people. We are working all the channels we knew, working in the area. 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 hired 784 people. I get an email the next Monday morning from the contact at Starbucks. He copied Howard Schultz, then CEO of Starbucks. The email read, “These guys just saved our butts.” I sent it to my CEO, but then I said, “You know what?” I only know now I can help on McDonald’s and a Starbucks, but that doesn’t mean I have a product. 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, and works for our business. 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 200 people to manage all the stores in the new terminal.” And we were like, “200 people? We just hired close to 800. We got this.” We go to LA for the briefing with the staffing group and they tell us the people that work at an international airport have to match the demographics of the travelers. We say, “Say what? Yeah, we have 13% Chinese-speaking travelers, we need 13% Chinese-speaking employees.” We say, “Sorry? We’ve got 5% Korean speaking.” I mean my team is in LA, we’re in Chinatown. We are speaking, trying to recruit people to come and work in an airport. If we expect 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 five o’clock, 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. Then if I want to break, I go to security again and then you pay me minimum wage. 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 what we’re saying, that is not our customer. Never again. We are never doing airports. That’s a pain.

Around this time, it was the holiday season, so we reached out to the person at Macy’s. We told them about our work with McDonald’s. They say, “Oh, we’ll try this.” 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 a requirements document, I never wrote a story. So the designer is thinking, how can we improve the end-to-end experience? Okay, we need a recruiter experience, a job seeker experience. We had a funnel. We need to build a scheduling tool so that they can scale the interview. Oh, what about notification? Maybe text message. We can send them a map so that they can know how to get to the… 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 got McDonald’s probably until today using this product to open up every new store. Well, Starbucks went to the global contract. We say, ” Well, we’ve only done discovery in the US so I only know where it works in this market.” And we started finding, 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. 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.

Lenny: That’s insane. You said you made thirty-something million dollars the first year of launching this thing.

Finding a Practice Arena

Christian Idiodi: Yeah.

Lenny: That’s unreal. I love how this is the epitome of doing things that don’t scale. You going hiring McDonald’s employees and then Starbucks employees.

The Value of Collaborative Problem Solving

Christian Idiodi: That’s right.

Leaders Promoted Too Early

Lenny: Then airport employees. Wow.

Practice Leading Before Becoming a Leader

Christian Idiodi: You do things that don’t scale and then you do things that do scale. And it’s so powerful when you discover how to do things that don’t scale, when you actually know. Because it’s the power of technology is just the beauty of what it can do at scale.

Coaching Is the Key to Everything

Lenny: And to that point, it’s easier said… 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, the things we talked about. There’s no fake door test, there’s no opportunity solution trees. There’s no user interview. You’re talking to people. It wasn’t like a user research interview, come sit down, ask questions.

Christian Idiodi: I said, there’s nothing better in learning how to solve a problem than trying to solve the problem. You will get all the answers, the research, the failure, the mistakes, all the evidence. You know the difference between what people say, this is what they do. You’ll validate and test. Because at the end of the day, what is statistically relevant? Solving the problem is the clearest indication that we’ve solved the problem and that we know how to solve the problem then. And so yeah, very powerful technique.

Promoting Products and Tech in Africa

Lenny: And 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. It looks like we found a way to solve it. Let’s just see where else this can take us. Amazing.

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I want to shift to a different topic. You spend 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 Cagan actually shared this quote with me when he joined, 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 being a great coach, and how can people listening become better coaches to their reports, maybe colleagues?

Nonprofits and Education Empowerment in Africa

Christian Idiodi: 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, and I think one of them is actually encro 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. And I tell people, yeah, it’s context and culture at the highest level like, why are we here? Where are we going? How do we organize ourselves to get there? What’s important?

Just 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 and I have to hire and train them and equip them and then appoint them to what those things are. But many of those things are one-off, meaning I create a vision, I create a strategy. I hire a person. There’s something that is every day and that’s coaching, that’s like the day job of managers. And if I think about high performing teams in the world, and you can pick sports is one of those, artists, they have coaches and managers like it’s an everyday thing. And the idea is that when I explain this to people, I say doing product management is a product manager’s job, but getting better at product management is the manager’s job, is the coach’s job. And people tend to misunderstand how that dynamic works.

You see, if you are 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 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. And most people can only 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 a meeting and he just starts screaming and cursing at everybody, just throwing up And I said, “Whoa, whoa.” I said, “Can we talk outside?” They pick him outside. I was like, “First of all, I don’t even think I can work with you anymore given this environment you’re creating, but I need to understand why you are talking to your team like that.” And he says to me, he says, “Christian, well 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 grownups, they can understand it too.”

And 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 that?” He says, “What do you mean?” I said, “Well is it first of all safe for me to do this with the team?” So I go back to the team and I say, “Look, I’m going to try to say what the CEO was trying to say again. He’s giving 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 at kind of representing what he was trying to say and I asked the team and it’s like, yeah, it’s the same thing kind of message, but 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 now go tackle.

And the CEO is kind of 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 then they need to do it before they can even teach it, in some ways. Now I’m saying this all because I need to make a very strong argument for people understanding coaching. And in some ways I probably did not know that I was probably good at coaching. I coached my kids in soccer for eight years and we always won the championship, my boys team and I had long waiting list of people and I thought I had a fundamental flaw in understanding it because when my kids were all four years old, when you have the kids run around the soccer field just kicking the ball any way, my team always had plays, they all have strategy.

So winning games like 10 to zero, other kids, I thought I’m like, maybe I was born in another country. I didn’t know you were just meant to let them play. And I was really coaching kids and I was treating four-year-olds like adults. We’re watching video, watching tape, having real… [inaudible 00:54:05] But it was so funny when you see them execute on the field. But I’ve kind of always had this mentality about the truest forms like companies cannot care for people, people care for people. And the representation of what is acceptable in an environment or what we do is by the leaders. Now there’s some different dynamic 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 these people, I say, “Look, most people don’t know that you know something until they test you.”

We do it a whole lot in our environment. I ask you a question, I see how you answer and it’s like I might ask you what’s one plus one? It’s two and now I know that one plus one is two. I don’t care when you learned it. I need you to know that it’s two to do my work. So it happens in everyday environment and what people fail to do is to do the learning so they get the question wrong and they lose trust. 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 people with bad communication, bad care, because they’re very good at their job. So 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 know. So if I wanted to accelerate trust with Lenny, I will ask Lenny to teach me. And I see this like an emotional intelligence, black belt technique here, but many environments, if you get into environment, it’s very quickly for you to identify the power in that environment. Who is influential? Who has loudest voice and all? And there’s something behind why they’re 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, they are great at growing businesses, they have a good stride, 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 will 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 Lenny a question. He bumps a presentation like, oh, product managers are useless. That person doesn’t know anything. So here’s what I do when I want to build trust, if Lenny’s a new hire in my company, I take Lenny to the loudest, most influential person in the company. And I say, “Look, I just hired Lenny. Super rockstar, did all of this. But he knows nothing about that business, nothing about how we work and stuff. I will love for you to teach him some things.” Now he may be like, “I’m super busy, I’m involved.”

I say, “Look, Lenny should just hang with you. I’ve played his calendar for the whole week. He’s just got to sit in meetings you are, quiet, observe, just by observing you, he will be a rockstar. 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 Lenny, where are you from? What do you 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. I want to know Lenny because we can never get him to agree on it. So if I know Lenny, I’ll be close with it. Lenny is more accessible, he’s new, but how did Lenny 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 teaching you, in some ways, I am now making them accountable for your growth. It’s impossible two months from now for that person to say, “Oh, Lenny doesn’t do anything.” Why? Because it makes them a bad teacher. So they’re always going to be friendly, be 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 the 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. Fastest way to build is, now feels like it’s a expense but this is the job of a coach. You are designing a very specific playbook to help people achieve the outcomes reward and that’s by getting them competent at their job and then their potential where they need to go next.

A Message to the Product Community

Lenny: That are some Jedi ninja tricks right there. I love that. I’ve never heard this advice before. Makes so much sense and it’s so easy to implement.

Christian Idiodi: Yeah.

Quick Fire Questions

Lenny: 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 just generally improve?

Christian Idiodi: Boy, like I say with everything, you don’t get mastery by avoidance. And one of the things that good coaches do that when I say corporations fail companies is they don’t create space for practice. I see people complain to me about people all the time, oh this person is not good. They presented this, it was terrible. And I ask them, “What did they do at practice?” They say, “What do you mean?” I say, “When they were practicing this, what did they do?” Say, “Well, they didn’t practice. I told them to prepare this.” I say, “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 is a one time, game time kind of role. So when do people practice?”

And so what I tell people in the absence of getting good coaching, you need to find practice arenas. It’s kind of like if you are learning a new sport or basketball, you kind go to the gym. It’s a practice arena. You can play and shoot around and let maybe some people have pickup games that you join and stuff like this in some ways. And so I always advise product managers like, you need to join a lot of pickup games, which they are low barriers to entry, low evaluation reward, loan risk type of thing. Go volunteer at a non-profit working with the team, go volunteer in your community event or church or whatever you go to, go party. But now what am I trying to do with these things? Find places where people do collaborative problem solving. That 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’ll find 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 watch TV like, oh I like that move. And then you go to the gym and you practice that move, you see what you do? So it’s like 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, winning performances, great products, great products come from great product teams. They probably have good leaders or a good leader within a bad culture.

Favorite Interview Question

Lenny: 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 is 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.

Christian Idiodi: That’s right. And I differentiate that because there are all those guys that are the, 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. You’ve heard those who that just tell you stories of them working problem and I can see how they will help me. They know how to use data, they know how to use insights. 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, oh, I really don’t know where do I find? But if you’ve done the problem solve with a team, sometimes you may not even know how to get the answer, but you know who to go to get the answer. That’s a gift too.

Recently Discovered Great Products

Lenny: 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’re spending the time to learn the most, which makes so much sense. The people you want to entrust are the people that happen to have the answers.

Christian Idiodi: I try.

My Personal Life Motto

Lenny: And each person 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, they end up 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, shit, maybe it’s not my fault.

Christian Idiodi: I don’t know how to make an appeal to corporations on this one. It’s a similar appeal in the light of coaching too as well. Most people are promoted to a point of incompetency or so, but I kind describe the dynamic this way. It’s kind of like Lenny is a fantastic engineer. 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 feeling good. But it’s like one year, two years, maybe eight years in Lenny’s 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 from his senior engineer role is engineering manager. The leadership team, HR, they look at the same thing. That’s 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, I want to use the rule here. And so, we do what? We promote Lenny. It feels good at the moment. Yeah! Congratulations on your promotion. He posts a nice post. We are like, “Yeah, we’re going to keep Lenny there for long time now because he’s promoted.” Now, Lenny has never been a manager in his whole life. He’s never interviewed people, fired people, didn’t even coach people or had done any of those things directly. After a couple of months, Lenny starts to recognize an interesting pattern. Nobody’s clapping for him at company meetings anymore. And sure they’ve taken down his picture from the world because he’s no longer an engineer, he’s a manager. So somebody else is now the engineer of the year, they are clapping for him in meetings. He’s like, he doesn’t feel recognized or seen anymore. He’s just a guy now behind the scenes and that kind of thing.

Then in 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 back 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. 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 Lenny asks for help, he goes to Google and searches how to do an interview, how to write a 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 there’s a good framework and a good pattern. And 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. If you ask anybody that works with me, if 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 a 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 and those. How you say? But the best place to learn how to be a VP is when you’re not a VP because that’s where you practice being a VP.

That’s where 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. That’s why I love those group product manager roles 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 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 on four.

So this is what often happens in company. 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, if there’s a succession plan, I want Lenny to be a new manager. I don’t wait till it’s time to promote him then I teach him management because then apparently he cannot say things like, I don’t know. I have to teach him leadership and management before he becomes a leader or a manager.

On Nigerian Cuisine

Lenny: I love this idea of just doing VP things. I just picture someone walking around and, I’m doing VP things.

Christian Idiodi: I’m doing VP things. All the time, I see them live, but what’s a VP thing?

Lenny: I’m doing VP things. I think another added benefit of doing these things before you say you’re VP is that is the best way to get promoted to a VP is you are already doing the job.

Christian Idiodi: That’s right. And nobody bites you on it. You see that? And you’re not even surprised by it and it’s very safe because when you’re not in the job, you can make mistakes and nobody blames you. He’s not a VP, look at him trying to do VP things. You see? But the second you’re a VP, there’s so much leverage in the role that your mistake is serious because it impacts everybody. But when you’re not, it’s like you get coverage, you get protection, nobody’s as mad at you. It’s like, yeah, he was just trying to take a stab at it. Let’s coach him on that. But what is the best time to know those things? It’s before you’re in it. Before you’re in it

Lenny: To give companies and leaders something to do with this advice, you talk about helping them train and practice before they do this. How did you do that? I don’t know, is it work with Silicon Valley Product Group to help train and coach?

Christian Idiodi: There are many great product coaches out there. There are many leadership coaches out there. I think there’s some recognition. People have to have the humility and the self-awareness to recognize that there are opportunities for them to get better as a leader and product management, you need to see or experience, good leadership, you need the reps of good leadership and we do it in everyway. You probably talk to people about strategy and what did they do? They outsource it all the time. Tell somebody else to do it, and that cycle feeds itself because you never do it. You only know how to outsource it. You never learn how to do it. You see? And so many people outsource, oh, go get a mentor, go take a training class, and they’ll think that they’re outsourcing coaching in that way. It’s like go take a communication.

Sourcing coaching in that way. It’s like, ” [inaudible 01:12:03]. Go take a communication class.” I’m like, “Okay.” They come back from the class, and they punch you in the face. I’m 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 the communication.

You learn what they’re learning. Both of you now will practice it together, so that they can get better at communication. A communication class doesn’t get you better at communication. 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 these tools and techniques to do it.

I do teach a lot of leaders how to coach. I do a lot of people work with leaders. There’s not a singular product problem. People here me say, “All problems are people problems.” There’s not a singular problem that I have not seen coaching address.

Lenny: What I hear is essentially the biggest burden is on the manager to be a great coach to their reports, and for a manager to get good at this, essentially a coach is a really good method. Bring someone in that could 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 how to go find a coach?

Christian Idiodi: You’ve got to find people that have generated good outcomes. People are always like, “How do you find a good consultant?” I get people teaching people a lot that haven’t done the job. Don’t get me wrong. If you look at American football teams, there are some coaches that have played the game before, and you feel good that they can coach you. And there are also some coaches that have not played the game, but if you look at the pedigree, they’ve learned from good coaches, they’ve worked under good coaches.

Same thing with product. I say there are only two parts. A good coach is someone that has played the game before and has generated good outcomes, and the second is that they’ve learned from good product coaches. You want to find people with a strong pedigree. You see [inaudible 01:14:12], and you, “Oh, you worked at Amazon this year,” or “You worked at this company,” or “You worked at Stripe. [inaudible 01:14:18] good results. How did you do that?”

“Oh, my environment was great. The culture was great.” “Who taught you? Who coached you?” Do pick-up games with the people that they coached. They will tell you what patterns their coach told them. How do you do that? My coach told me to do this, and you’re going to learn from them. I say, “Oh.” Important things.

Lenny: Amazing. Okay. 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 world’s developing countries. I know you spend 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?

Christian Idiodi: Yeah. I have an African background, and my family is there, and I used to have this false notion that the things we’ve done in North America or Europe or Asia, the problems we’ve solved, have been solved in these markets. I remember talking to someone in Africa years ago, and he said to me, “Oh.” I said, “You just got a new job. Where did you find a job?” He’s like, “Oh, I found it in a newspaper.” I said, “A newspaper? What do you mean found a job?” I remember participating in solving that exact problem in 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 just two things were trending. One, so many, the poor use of technology and enabling technologies to solve problems. And two, the difficulty in actually solving problems in these markets, in these emerging markets. And one of the things we take for granted, 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.

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 then getting access to a computer and then getting access to the right type of software to be able to code something. Look at all the different things. You have to solve many problems just before you can start to solve the problem in a meaningful way. 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. There’s this whole society that people are very good at walking around problems. “We’ve got an electricity problem, we’ll just buy generators.” “We’ve got a road problem, we’re going to buy bigger cars.” I was talk at a conference, and I was driving up to it, and I saw a Tesla with a portable generator at the back of it. They’ll 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. It’s a very young population. I talk to people all the time. I say, “Look.” Someone told me, “Well, Africa, seven of the eight most underdeveloped places in the world are in Africa.”

And I said, “Well.” They were talking about the discovery of the internet. Less than 30% of Africa has discovered the internet. And I tell them, “Wow. And we created seven Unicoms from that. Imagine if 50%, 75% discovered the internet. 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. So I had to kill all these assumptions. One, that I needed permission to come to solve problems there, and two, that we didn’t have the means to equip and educate people.

We don’t have a talent problem or a resource problem. The biggest opportunity I’ve 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.

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. And 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. The 11-year-old was a robotics engineer. The 13-year-old was a CEO of a small startup that keeps healthcare records, a leader. And 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 spend 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, than walk around the problems or make money on them.

Lenny: If people want to learn more about this, maybe support the work you’re doing, what’s the best way to find out more?

Christian Idiodi: You can visit the nonprofit website. It’s innovateafricafoundation.org. You can follow our work on SVPG or the inspireafricaconference.com. I know I will be doing a lot more next year. In January, I am going to be launching a fund, the Paid 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, they are not ready for institutional investment, and they are forced into it in some ways. They say people are giving up a lot of equity when they just need cashflow. And so I really want to focus on a fund for the community to enable people to get product market fit in those markets.

That’ll be launching in January. I’ll probably do an announcement about it. I’m excited about that work and to really try to promote more of product-centric thinking on the continent.

Lenny: Amazing. You should call this fun reference customers or something along those lines, if the goal is to help them find product market [inaudible 01:21:12]-

Christian Idiodi: That’s right. They’ll be learning a lot of that.

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

Christian Idiodi: I’ve always made an appeal to the product community to really have a sense of what they do beyond the job of a products team or product manager. And I always try to encourage people to see that: at the very core of what you do is really solving a problem. And that’s creating… When you do that, 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, and we should not shy from that definition of our job.

It might feel like a fluffy one. It might feel too lightweight and not meaningful, but I think when people take to heart that that’s really what the essence of products is or 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.

I always make that appeal to product people as like, “Yeah, 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 give us something every time.”

Lenny: I really love that last point of just that’s how you know if you’ve built something people care about. They give you something in return, and one of those things could be actually telling other people about it.

Christian Idiodi: That’s right.

Lenny: To your point about reference customers.

Christian Idiodi: Yes.

Lenny: Amazing. Well, with that, we’ve reached our very exciting lightning round. Are you ready?

Christian Idiodi: I don’t have a choice.

Lenny: Nope. What are two or three books that you’ve recommended most to other people?

Christian Idiodi: Oh boy. In this discipline, probably all of our books: Inspired, Empowered, and we are coming up with one in March, Transformed.

Lenny: I see that tee shirt there. I see the promo happening.

Christian Idiodi: Yes, it’s happening. It’s happening. But it’s really a reflection of so many decades of love and passion for product work. And I have not found, I always told Maddie that you write the books after have gone through the failure. It’s like, “I’ve failed at leadership, now there’s a book on it. I’ve failed at product, now there’s a book on it.” And it reflects really the heart of good product work. I love Ben said the hard thing about hard things I love. There’s some books that really describe the mindset and culture that good product work is done in. I always recommend those to people.

Lenny: Just on this topic of Transformed while we’re on it, when is it coming out, and can you give just an elevator pitch for the book just so people know what it’ll be about?

Christian Idiodi: Transformed is coming out March next year. Oh God, just 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 model or 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 bond digital or bond tech companies that have made this transition. We tell stories of what companies can do. If it’s 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 in the journey.

Lenny: 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?

Christian Idiodi: I jumped on the Succession bandwagon, and I enjoyed, and I used to love Billions too as well. I love good writing, really just intellectual media writing business. And so probably Succession and Billions would be two.

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

Christian Idiodi: 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 see something like, “Hey Lenny, I have a friend. He’s been legally deaf or hearing impaired his whole life, and he just got a new job that requires him to wake up significantly earlier than he normally does. And as you can imagine, traditional alarm clocks will not do it, 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, what you need 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 and because I want to now know what you do, but you don’t have a clue.” Or people that jump straight to solutions, are more engineering-centric. People that jump straight to… I can get a sense of who you are when I give you a problem that requires you to do some thinking.

Lenny: And you’re doing this live in an interview? It’s not like, “Go home and think about this, and then-

Christian Idiodi: Oh, I’m doing this live in an interview.

Lenny: Live, 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”?

Christian Idiodi: Remember, when I think about what makes a good product manager, I look about collaborative problem solving. 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 it 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 probably work an engineer and designer. We might need to put [inaudible 01:26:46].” I look for intellectual curiosity in some ways, people that have proven questions in your head. People that are very quick to see things [inaudible 01:26:54] people. I will talk to 20 of them. I say, “How you going to do that? Do you know sign language?” And they’re like, “Oh, how am I going to talk to them?” 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…” Some people have frameworks they run to. It exposes that, if they’re 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 that arrogance, that ego, those kinds of things, those “I walk alone,” those things are very, very challenging and disruptive to a team culture.

Lenny: 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”?

Christian Idiodi: My eldest son is into sports. He loves all kinds of sports stuff, sports apps, all of those kinds of things, and he got me on this app called Real, like real sports. It’s really cool. It shows scores of different games, but it’s really driven by social influence. So all of your Twitter posts will get there like, “Oh my God, [inaudible 01:28:07].” It’s almost like real time more than real time. You’re getting real time with 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 in how… I want to share reaction to touchdown with 50 people around the world that will care about my favorite team just got a touchdown, and you’ll all share reactions at the same time. And the first person that saw it, you can see it. It’s very simple. This is like scores for games, but these days I don’t check my scores anywhere else but on it.

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

Christian Idiodi: Wow, boy. I’ve said a lot in this talk about companies don’t care about about you, people care about you. It’s never too late to be what you want to be. But early on, my father would always tell me, “Show up. Show up, and you’re ahead of 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. And 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. And if you do that over and over again, every aspect of your life, it can at least lead to successful outcomes.” And I think that’s a lot of some mental definition for me every day.

Lenny: 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?

Christian Idiodi: Wow. I hope there are no 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 boarding school, and I’ve never been back home since then, so I’ve kind of been on my own. But we are kind of in the middle of nowhere, probably eight miles from any form of civilization and stuff in the middle of the jungle. 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, surviving at 12 to 16 on my own in the middle of the jungle. Very intriguing part of my life.

Lenny: Very different from your life these days. Actually, one more question. I think you’re the fourth… You’re from Nigeria, right? Your family’s from Nigeria?

Christian Idiodi: Yes.

Lenny: You’re the fourth Nigerian guest on this podcast, I realized. And I always like to ask, what’s your favorite Nigerian food slash which food should people seek out if they were to try to find some good Nigerian food?

Christian Idiodi: My favorite Nigerian is super-duper cultural and native. It’s like starch and [inaudible 01:31:06] soup. You can’t really find that anywhere, it got to come from mom’s cooking. Marty Cagan has tried it. He came to my hometown, my parents’ house and had it. But if you are discovering Nigerian food, [inaudible 01:31:18] is a variation of rice, which everybody has, jollof rice, and yes people, I’m going to say this: jollof rice, Nigerian jollof is better than Ghanaian jollof. It’s a war, but it’s okay. We already claim victory, and we’ll move on. But start with jollof rice is elementary, but then you have to try [inaudible 01:31:34] like a pounded yam with a soup. There are many different variations of that. And you get a pounded yam, like pounded cassava, and you eat that with a soup, and you will love it.

Lenny: Some controversy over here, competition-

Christian Idiodi: That’s right.

Lenny: … 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?

Christian Idiodi: You can find me on LinkedIn as well. You can reach out to us on our websites svpg.com. I tell people the best fit 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 a product community.

Lenny: And what is the website for that again? Specifically the nonprofit you started?

Christian Idiodi: Innovateafricafoundation.org.

Lenny: Amazing. Christian, thank you so much for being here.

Christian Idiodi: Thank you for having me, Lenny. Such a pleasure.

Lenny: Bye, everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com. See you in the next episode.

Glossary

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