精准选题、提升病毒式传播力与独特的产品框架 | Oji Udezue (Typeform)
Picking sharp problems, increasing virality, and unique product frameworks | Oji Udezue (Typeform)
Foundations of Virality
Oji Udezue: Products who try to be viral just for what I call synthetic virality that fail. Because in the end, if you’re synthetically viral and people get to the product and it sucks, that’s it. Slack wasn’t even viral, there was no synthetic virality. Slack couldn’t even connect to organizations for the longest time. You could be working on the third floor, and someone using Slack on the fourth floor and you would have no clue, there’s no way to share it with them. But what happens when you went to lunch? People are like, “We got Slack and this is amazing.” And people on the third floor are like, “Holy shit, when can we get it?” Boom, boom, boom. This is the bedrock of virality. Build a great product that solves a sharp problem.
Introducing the Guest
Lenny: Welcome to Lenny’s Podcast, where I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experiences building and growing today’s most successful products. Today my guest is Oji Udezue. Oji has helped build and grow products at Microsoft. He worked on Windows, outlook, Hotmail and inner Explorer, at Atlassian where he was head of product for all their communication tools, at Calendly, where he was chief product officer, at Twitter where he was head of product for creation and conversation. He’s currently chief product officer at Typeform, which I am a happy customer of. Oji has one of the broadest and most interesting careers in product, and he’s also one of the most thoughtful humans I’ve met. In our conversation, Oji shares some of his favorite product frameworks and also why you should be really careful applying frameworks at your company. We dig into what he’s learned from Calendly and Atlassian and a Typeform on how to do product led growth successfully, and also how to get really sharp with your ICP or ideal customer profile.
Also, how to increase your products virality and a concept called forest time, which I love. And even his favorite Nigerian food, which I am currently on the hunt for. With that, I bring you Oji Udezue after a short word from our sponsors.
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Oji, Thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.
Where to Find Unicorns
Oji Udezue: Thank you, Lenny. It’s a pleasure to be here.
Lenny: It’s my pleasure. You’ve been a PM and a product leader in so many amazing and also just very different companies, all with very different approaches to product and growth. And I think you have this very rare broad perspective on what works in product and growth across a lot of different ways of doing it. And so I have a bunch of questions for you. I hope you came ready for that.
Opportunities Across the Four Quadrants
Oji Udezue: I am ready.
Lenny: Okay.
Four Quadrant Company Examples
Oji Udezue: Yes, sir.
Moving from Low to High Frequency
Lenny: I love it. Okay, so I want to start with frameworks. You’ve written and shared a bunch of really interesting frameworks for how to think about product and growth, and so I just want to dig into a couple of them. And one of them is around how to find big B2B SaaS ideas and it’s around finding the right workflow. Could you just share this framework and also just how founders and also investors can use this idea to find big ideas?
Oji Udezue: Thank you. So I think you’re referring to where do you fish to find a unicorn.
How Much Better Must Your Product Be
Lenny: That’s it.
Oji Udezue: And the thing behind that is people can find that on Substack and the Medium, my writings. But the premise is that there’s a lot of risk in building startups, and the last decade of product management and startups has really focused on the method of building software and companies. We talk about the lean approach, we talk about fail fast, [inaudible 00:04:28] and so on and so forth. And I think that that was a necessary phase for us because a lot of innovation was just the ideas of founders unvalidated by customers, and we needed this inflection point in our discipline. People need to understand though that customer science is not the solution to everything otherwise OpenAI will never have done anything. It’s also innovation. And so the problem space and the solutions to the problems space is still a big driver of success in building software companies.
What problem are you really solving? And if you believe that the problem space is key, so what problems will predict success? In B2B SaaS especially, which is much easier to circumscribe is where I start to think about, look, how do you tell from the beginning? Because an investor as well as an operator. Now to segment this space, I think of two dimensions. One is how many departments in the company does the workflow you’re trying to solve apply to? Is it just a few or is it all of them? And the second is how intense or how frequent is the workflow executed? Is it daily? Is it weekly? Is it three times a week? And so on and so forth. Now if you draw a nice quadrant of these two things, then you can start to have some predictive power. Things that are useful in every department I call every one workflows, like things like collaboration, like Slack, email, calendaring, workflows, social knowledge and Notion and so on and so forth.
And then things that apply to single departments, I call niche and that’s what I call niche. And then the intensity is about frequency. A month is not infrequent, daily is super frequent. If you divide the market or the enterprise into frequency and into how broad the workflow is, you can actually have predictive power. And what I found by looking at the biggest company is public and private in each quadrant was that every one frequent workflows intuitively are the most profitable to work on, but also the hardest to get into because they’re dominated by Microsoft and Google and very, very large companies. For example, one of my friends is the CEO of Coda. And so this is interesting, because he’s in that space, for him to think about.
And then the place where B2B SaaS really thrives is niche workflows that are highly frequent. High ni is what I call it, high frequency niche. And then there are the other two quadrants that are a bit more challenging. And then you have to figure out how to navigate your way into one of the other two. If you are in one of the top two quadrants, high ni and high everyone and you solve a really important problem, workflow problem, you can probably turn into a billion-dollar company. If you do the other two, there’s some challenges that you have to go through. And the framework talks about how you should navigate those places into success. And I think it’s very important because if this is true, and by the way, like I said, I did some validation on it, founders can start to, before they invest years, start to think about what probability of success is. And if you’re an investor like me or VC, you can start to think about how you deploy your money.
Ideal Customer Profiles for Companies
Lenny: What are examples of companies in each of those quadrants? If you can frame this and I don’t know if you have this in your head already.
Frameworks and Mental Models
Oji Udezue: High frequency everyone workflows tend to be things that are done by the doorman to the CEO. So it’s email, it’s collaboration, it is writing, it is math, all the basic things. At Atlassian, we spend a lot of time thinking about this. So Word, we’ve had word processing forever in the workspace. Things like Notion and Confluence are huge as sort of evolution of that, Slack, email. Companies in that space, Google, Microsoft, Atlassian, et cetera. And the high ni, which is high frequency niche, you have things like Jira, you have things like tools for recruiters, you have martech, you have sales tech.
And we know the companies behind them, Atlassian, Salesforce, so on and so forth. And then in the low frequency everyone, you have things like maybe form tools. And actually, they’re not that many of them, low frequency everyone or even expense. Actually, the best expensing. Not everyone does it all the time, but everyone essentially has to do some of it, mostly, at least a lot of people. And then there’s a low frequency niche, which is particular department. So planning, which is done by FPNA, but done infrequently, things like that.
Starting with Sharp Problems
Lenny: How frequent is frequent in your experience? Does it have to be once a week at least? What do you think is that minimum bar?
Customer Discovery vs. Customer Listening
Oji Udezue: Frequent is every day really or multiple times a week. Infrequent starts to be like two times a week, once a month. And of course there’s a big interregnum in the middle of that.
New User Onboarding and PLG
Lenny: It’s interesting that there are examples of companies that succeeded in those lower quadrants of infrequent, say the expensing use case. Do you have a sense of what it takes to win there? Because I imagine most startups are in that area, and I imagine founders are like, what can we do to win still?
The Essence of User Onboarding
Oji Udezue: Well, this isn’t a static framework in the sense that companies are not destined to be one of these things. The essence of strategy is to navigate from the curve of travel is essentially go from the lower to the higher. Atlassian is trying to go from high niche to high everyone with Confluence and with all the tools that they have. People below are trying to get into the high frequency niche by focusing on their core customer. So what it looks like in say low frequency everyone workflows, something like that is, well, if some people are using it infrequently, but they must use it, well that’s a good thing. But then maybe you provide a module that is used by the finance department every day, and so suddenly you’re moving into the high frequency everyone workflow. So it’s about finding a part of the organization that considers this mission-critical and then solving their problems beyond the problems for everyone for example, in that quadrant.
User Activation Milestones
Lenny: Is there an example that comes to mind of either at Calendly or Typeform or Atlassian where you pushed it further up the frequency direction or the everyone direction?
Oji Udezue: For example, at Typeform, now this is real for me, Typeform technically is low frequency niche or low frequency everyone, depending on how easy it is to use and how it surrounds the customer. And one of the things that I’m trying to do as part of product strategy is to move it into high frequency niche, high ni, which is a very productive place to be. So for marketers, for salespeople, I want to make sure that they think of us first. And because we are particularly good at customer facing interactions, if they think that we are the way to win new business and to make money, then a portion of our audience, not every single one of them will consider us high ni. And I think expanding that foothold is the way to navigate a business like that. You can see that with Qualtrics, you can see that with SurveyMonkey. Lots of companies are thinking about how to further unbundle that market for a very, very specific kind of customer. And that is what they’re trying to do. They’re trying to hit the high ni, even for that more generic workflow.
Understanding Network Effects
Lenny: That’s an awesome example. You also have this framework that I think you call the zone of benefit, which is around how much better does your solution have to be than the status quo? A lot of people are like, “Hey, look at this product, it’s better than what you have now.” And usually people are like, “Ah, whatever. It’s good enough.” And you’ve had some insights on just how much better it needs to be for people to care. Can you share that?
The Enduring Power of Network Effects
Oji Udezue: Honestly, the reason I like being a product manager is on any given day, I’m drawing from anthropology, sociology, behavioral economics, leadership, communication skills. I’m trained, I have a master’s in engineering, so I’m an engineer as well. I’ve done marketing and sales, so really pulling from so many things. And the reason I talk about the zone of benefit is ultimately what we’re trying to do is impedance match technology to humans. That’s it. If you really think about it, that’s one essence of what we’re trying to do. So the zone of benefit works as a framework because people will not pay for things that don’t either really shrink the workflow that they’re doing or doesn’t give them superpower. So the same amount of time, but twice as much output. But the most important thing is that it has to be noticeable.
If you do something 20% better, often people just around you, just as a human, people don’t notice. And so for a product to make a difference, it has to be at least two, three more X for people to say, “You know what? This is offering enough value for me to maybe make a switch in cost,” and so on and so forth. And it really comes down to look, economic theory tells us that people work for leisure, they work enough to afford their leisure. It’s sort of broad, and I know some people don’t necessarily do that. Especially in the tech industry, people just love to work. But that is really it, when you think about eight billion people on the planet. And there’s a lot of benefit really hones in on the fact that if you’re going to help me work less, make about the same amount of money, then for me to notice you, you have to accelerate me by three times for me to care.
The Essence of Virality
Lenny: Okay, awesome. So three times. So the idea there is you should feel like this is three times more productive in the thing that I’m trying to do or saves me three times, I don’t know, I do it three times faster.
Oji Udezue: Yeah, that’s when people actually feel it and they feel it enough where they part with money.
Customer-Led Marketing
Lenny: Awesome. And I think what’s cool about this is it helps you identify the ICP for your product if you’re working a startup or even a new product within an existing product to figure out who exactly is going to most benefit from this. Is that part of this?
Understanding Forest Time
Oji Udezue: Yes, yes. Your best customers aren’t price sensitive for what you’re shooting for because they get it. They fundamentally understand it. So yes, when you’re shooting for ICPs, now every startup has marketing problems getting an audience problem. But once you start getting a decent audience, over 100 people or more, you should start to notice the people who are like, “You know what? This, I really care about this.” And that starts to tell you a little bit about who’s your target audience.
Lenny: Would you be up for sharing the ICP of some of the companies you worked at? Just to give people a sense of what would be a good ICP.
Experience at Bridgewater
Oji Udezue: I think for Atlassian, it’s really kind of obvious. It’s developers mostly. But it’s tech teams writ large because the fundamental of an R and D team is building stuff. And Jira helps the engineers who actually build stuff to track what they do and to give visibility to it so that they can be valuable to the organization. So that is incontroversial. So the ICP is really clear and have been clear for Atlassian for a very long time. Calendly is this weird company where people don’t see all the value. People think it’s just casual scheduling. But really the people who care about scheduling the most, and I don’t mean calendaring. Calendaring is very different from scheduling.
The people who care about scheduling the most are salespeople because it’s the lifeblood of them earning money and marketers, because it’s the lifeblood of them maybe learning about their customer. Recruiters, because it’s the lifeblood of them attracting and scheduling the people that they need to do their job. So Calendly’s ICPs were people who were scheduling with people who were not in the organization for some business reason. Typeform is marketers mostly because Typeform exists to make the web talkative, to make it more human. And with Typeform, you can brand that conversation and actually make it conversational because one question at a time, the beautiful design. And so marketers feel like we help their websites talk to each other. Product people think we help their web apps talk to people they care about, UX people feel the same way. So those are some, I think the interesting thing is Twitter.
Lenny: I was going to ask what the ICP for Twitter might be, still.
Reflections on Bridgewater
Oji Udezue: So Twitter is actually more fun in terms of ICP because first of all, I’ll talk about the things that’s not obvious about Twitter. 30% of Twitter’s customer base were unseen, they were media organizations, people like the NFL, the NBA, HBO, who wanted their content to reach more people, to be in conversational spaces. And they were essentially business customers and not seen in the conversation pool, it’s not obvious. But we interacted with them all the time and we rev shared ads for their videos, because we’re making content all the time. And so Twitter was a way to extend the monetization of that content, that inventory that already had. But when you go to the consumer side of Twitter, who was the ICP?
Well, actually Twitter understood, and this is sort of reflected in what Elon Musk is doing these days, that he doesn’t seem to understand. And if you ask anyone who was at Twitter, you’ll see the understanding in their eyes and the fact that he doesn’t understand, because Twitter’s ICP is bifurcated. On one side, it is the most accomplished people in the world, the people who have something to say. This is why there’s neuro Twitter, there’s weather Twitter, there is cancer Twitter, and so on and so forth. In fact, if something breaks, some new innovation happens in the world, it probably breaks on Twitter before it breaks anywhere else, because these are people in informal communities following each other and sharing their results.
So basically there’s this big circle of experts. We break down into celebrities, we break down into luminaries, leaders and so on and so forth. That’s the ICP. Now how does Twitter work? These people attract the other 90% who listen to these people, but also they need to create their own informal communities around the things they’re passionate about and have this mimetic relationship with the luminaries and the experts. And that is sort of the planet Twitter, experts on one side, humans who need to connect with the things they’re passionate about, the people who are like them, that is the ICP of Twitter, the people who have something to say in those two categories.
Building Abstract Frameworks for Product Development
Lenny: Are you happy you’re not working on Twitter anymore?
Oji Udezue: I am ecstatic, I’m ecstatic. It seems like such a shitshow, no shade on anything or anyone purposely. But look, what’s happening is evident. So I don’t think I have much to say about that.
Lightning Q&A
Lenny: Yeah, what a wild ride over there. Zooming out on the frameworks question, when I asked you ahead of our chat about what frameworks you love and anything you think would be interesting to share, you had a really interesting response and so I’d love for you to just share your perspective on frameworks broadly.
Oji Udezue: Yeah. Look, I’m two things simultaneously. One is actually, I like frameworks. The way that I try to express them is mental models because the essence of a framework and a mental model is that it is a shortcut. It packages some dense thinking into a way for you to approach a problem or to approach an opinion and so on and so forth. So I do collect them. But I think that what’s important, I feel in product management, is to have the ability to understand the fundamentals or the empirical relationship that constructs a framework in the first place. In math, you would call it being able to derive the equation. And the reason that’s important is because there’s so much uncertainty in what we do. Product management isn’t a science. In fact, programming isn’t even a science really, because if it was, we’d treat it differently. So the art of building, say a software company that is profitable is not scientific.
There’s a lot of uncertainty, a lot of unknowns, there’s timing issues. So I guess while I love mental models, while I love frameworks, what I want people who listen to me and maybe listen to you to understand is you have to go deeper. Because as situations change, as an investor and advisor to startups, I advise differently if you are just starting, if you’re in the middle, and if you’re scaling. In the book that I’m writing on product, I actually make that distinction a lot in the book, which stage are you? Because then the thing that applies to you is different. If you understand the fundamentals, you’ll be able to use frameworks in a much more productive way because you’ll adapt it to your stage, you’ll adapt it to the problem. And I think that’s really important. I see lots of people using frameworks very blindly, and I think that’s harmful to them and harmful to their businesses.
Optimizing the Work Environment
Lenny: What a great segue to where I wanted to take us next, which is around the book that you’re writing, which is my understanding is it’s product management for product led growth. And I’m on your wait list to find out when it’s out, and I saw that the other day you asked people for their advice on what to call the book. Do you have any favorites at this point of what you might title it?
Oji Udezue: Well first of all, there are two things happening with the book. One is I believe PLG is, I have maybe a different definition of PLG, but I think the way that we are basically adapting products to the consumer or to the business professional and using the product itself to sell the value proposition is really key to transitioning from what we used to do 20 years ago to today. Basically, I think even enterprise companies will tend towards a consumer type product management over the next decade than the other way around, that’s my bet. And so let’s call that PLG, just writ large. And also I think product management is set for growth. So obviously that’s good for you, Lenny, because everyone needs to know how to do this.
It’s an integrative art within building software and software is seeding the world, the book, I want to get very practical. What matters about doing those two things well, and the best titles coming up are, my original title was Building Rocket Ships. So it’s like how do you think through all the different things you need to build a really successful software company? Think about the practice, think about the business, meld those two things together. So a lot of people love that title. Well, there’s a huge variation in submissions. So I think we’re going to do that one more time and offer more options before we nail down the title of the book, so still TBD.
Core Life Principles
Lenny: Cool, all right. I’m excited to see where you land. So let’s just spend some time on PLG. I feel like this is your bread and butter as a product leader. You’ve worked at some of the most successful PLG companies and I think you have some of the most unique perspectives on what works and doesn’t work. And I saw you shared a preview of what you’re going to be sharing the book, and so there’s a few things there that I thought were really interesting that I haven’t seen other places when it comes to PLG. So I was just going to dig into it-
Oji Udezue: Yay.
Nigerian Cuisine Recommendations
Lenny: Absolutely. The first is this framing that you had for where to start and how to focus with your PLG problem. And you described it as starting with a sharp problem. Can you talk about what that means?
Oji Udezue: Yeah, so I’m trying to connect dots. The sharp problem is a little bit of that whole quadrant framework, which is what problem are you going to work on? I think that problems have predictive power of success if you actually solve the problem. And this is different from, I have an idea, yeah. I think that a lot of innovation can come from inspiration, but the best inspiration comes from understanding customers and their problems. So my advice to founders is pick a problem that is materially felt by your customers, pain points that steal their time, their energy, their money, their focus, the inability to afford their leisure. If you can solve those kinds of problems, and look, I know that it’s broad, because it requires insight. The best founders often are people who felt a problem, understand it, understand that it’s really difficult, and understand that there may be like five, 10, 20 billion people who feel it and they don’t want to solve that problem versus I feel a problem, but only 100,000 people care. In which case, maybe it’s not that intense anyway, unless you can charge them thousands and thousands of dollars.
So pick those kinds of problems. If you have the narrative in your head that if you really solve this, people will pony up. That’s what I ask people to find. Too many of us just have a sharp idea. Look, I’ve built a startup on a non-sharp problem, and I knew how it felt. Well, I also know working in companies that are solving sharp problems how it feels, it’s a huge tailwind to do that. In fact, when you work on sharp problems, it’s hard to fail because you can make mistakes and the customer’s obsession will carry you, but if you work on something that doesn’t have a sharp problem, mistakes can kill you because essentially you’re having to pay a lot for marketing, you’re having to pay a lot for word of mouth. People, when they get poor, they don’t care about it, like recessions.
Closing the Episode
Lenny: Coming back to something you mentioned earlier about just how much pain it needs to be for people to care or how much pain it needs to solve versus the status quo, I think is a really important element of this. I think most founders like, no, I need to solve a problem. But usually it’s not painful enough or it’s not solving it enough, given either an example of something that you’ve tried or you’ve seen of just like that was a sharpish problem but not sharp enough and people didn’t care, either a company worked or a startup you advised of just like, okay, it wasn’t sharp enough.
Oji Udezue: I don’t want to create enemies because I know a lot of founders. But here’s one, here’s one. I don’t know if you remember during the pandemic, this venture studio by I think one of the ex founders of Evernote created mmhmm camera, remember that?
Lenny: Oh yeah, absolutely. Yeah, great video.
Oji Udezue: It was fun, but I don’t think it was a sharp problem. It was fun, but yeah, it didn’t change the world of your Zoom camera. It didn’t change the world of your collaboration. And so I think that’s one example of a non-sharp problem, for example, for most people.
Lenny: What are signs that it’s sharp enough, just like in your experience? I know you talked about it steals your time, energy, money focused. What are flags that this is sharp enough in your experience?
Oji Udezue: I think there are two ways to think about it. If you are in the trenches as a founder, the easiest way to map out a sharp problem is draw the current approximate average workflow for your target customer, at least what you think is a target, and then draw the workflow after they’ve used your software and see how much shorter it is, yes or no. And then try to measure those lines. If you draw them as horizontal lines, try to measure those lines and see if it’s much shorter. If it’s 2X shorter, 3X shorter, so let’s say pre-customer, that is the best way to hone in on it. Post customer, you should talk to the people who are most enthusiastic and derive their workflow and their workflow change and try to measure that. I think that’s how you figure out if it’s a sharp problem or not.
The other thing that we talk about in startup super early stage world is, I call it the whites of their eyes. When you take a problem and you share it with someone who it’s going to affect their workflow, and I use the word workflow a ton because I don’t use specs anymore or use cases, I think workflows are the unit of productivity. When you see people’s eyes get big and they expose more whites to you, you’re probably onto something. It’s not enough, that’s not a workflow thing, that’s an excitement thing. But people often react that way when you’re solving a really sharp problem for them. And then people spontaneously bring up money, it’s like when can I pay? When can I… Those kinds of things give you an indication.
Lenny: Two other versions of the showing more whites of your eyes, which I love. Two other versions of that I’ve heard is one is you see their pupils dilate and they’re just like, “Whoa, I need this now.” And then the other is someone described it as, you see this nod of as you’re talking, they’re just like, “Oh, I get it. I get this.” And then they’re like, “Okay, we need this in our company.”
Oji Udezue: I’m a little over those ones because sometimes it’s just excitement and just noise. And so the things I said previously about workflow compression or capability inflation, I think those are more reliable, which is all about customer research and customer conversations. That’s what I would focus on. Yeah, I’m saying all this from mistakes I’ve made, basically. So I feel like this is scar tissue, which is what I’m trying to pour into the book.
Lenny: Speaking of talking to customers, another one of your big bullet points in the book is around continuous customer discovery, and I’m curious what you found to be successful in actually doing that. A lot of people talk about it when you keep talking to customers, get feedback constantly. What actually works in your experience?
Oji Udezue: Yeah, I feel like all of park management is about discovery these days. Everyone talks about it, and I want to make a distinction. I think discovery is when you use customer conversations to understand a very specific thing that you want to optimize further workflow that you want to optimize further. And then you call the people who are most likely to be affected and you do use various research strategies to talk to them. There’s a version of that also that is what I call continuous conversations, which is a Calendly and a Typeform, which we’ll do more and more of. You should organize it so that your PMs, your designers, your engineering managers and your PMMs are constantly talking to customers by default. Meaning that customer conversations show up on their calendar every week automagically, without them getting involved. And then they’re trained on how to have the conversation, because the death of customer discovery is friction. If you ask individuals to do customer discovery, they will not do customer discovery.
This is the thing that dies in an innovative company because it’s very difficult to actually talk to the right customer, not talk to any customer, talk list of the right customer continuously. But there’s a third thing that I like to talk about, which is customer listening. In fact, I’m going to talk about this at industry in October, the PM Conference. Customer listening is different. It’s not really discovery. It is the scarfing up of customer signals that are happening constantly anyway. So people are talking on social, people are talking on app stores and G2 crowd. If you have a instrumented churn survey, people are talking. If you have NPS, people are not only giving you the scores where they’re putting in the verbatims. If you have a bug report, which we had at Atlassian, people are filing bugs, developers love to file bugs, so of course we have that for that audience. And then if you go to Zendesk and customer support, people are either talking about one thing all the time or a range of things, and you can see the frequency distribution.
And of course in Salesforce, you have closed one. These are all things happening no matter what you do. Whether you’re listening or not, you’re getting these signals. One of the big, hairy, audacious goals of product management is being able to process these signals efficiently. We did it in a certain way at Calendly, which I drew a rig together through workflows and Slack, and then having individuals triage those things. And if you can do that hard and at industry, I’ll talk a little bit about how to do it. It’s not exactly discovery. It is what matters. Our job is to meld customer delight with business ambition. And it feels essential beyond discovery that you are listening and you’re understanding what matters from a customer delight perspective. And I don’t think many of us do this really well. I’ve tried to do it everywhere I’ve gone, Twitter, Atlassian, Calendly, now at Typeform. But it still feels like something that the industry can get better at.
Lenny: This touches on advice that Teresa Torres teaches around continuous customer discovery. And she actually had a really good tactic, that I’ll share here that stuck with me, about how to actually do this. So the way she recommends companies do this is have a little popup on your site asking visitors like we’d love to talk to you and get your feedback on our product. And it just links them to a Calendly to book a meeting, and that’s how it shows up on the calendar.
Oji Udezue: Yeah, that’s what we did at Calendly. But I will say, so a couple of caveats, we did that in the community. We had community at calendly.com and we understood that that was a self-selected group. But it was still important to talk to them because they were still representative. And of course you should do it in a product. The challenge of that approach is always is it the right customer? And the pro/con of that is talking to one customer is useless, talking to 100 is super useful. And so the challenge is are you targeting the right person?
So some intelligence upfront and who to show it to and why you’re showing it to them, so that they can come is interesting. Very particularly effective by the way for growth, because if people don’t activate or churn, they don’t want to talk to you. But if you can present that thing in their activation or conversion journey, they might actually talk to you. And so that’s really key. So I 100% agree with Teresa, that’s exactly what you should do for not even, I wouldn’t even call it discoveries for listening, and some of it can be discovery. Yeah, I think that’s exactly what you should do.
Lenny: As you’re talking I’m realizing I’m using most of the products you help build. I’m on Twitter a lot. I use Calendly a lot. I use Typeform as my default survey tool.
Oji Udezue: I saw that, my team is really excited that you’re using Typeform.
Lenny: You’ve impacted my life in so many ways, Oji.
Oji Udezue: I think you owe me money, Lenny-
Lenny: What do you need? How much? Give me your Venmo QR code, it’s on [inaudible 00:37:09].
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Getting back on track. Another important part of the book that you’re writing is around onboarding. And something that I talk a lot about on this podcast is just the power of onboarding and how impactful it’s to retention and so much of the eventual success of your product and how customers use it. And so I’d love to hear just your advice on what you think is really important, I guess why onboarding is so important in success and PLG. And also just what tactics have you found to be really effective?
Oji Udezue: Let me talk about a few fundamentals. Onboarding is a substitute for sales and all these account management teams for millions of customers. The task is how do you make it approximate a human and how friendly a human is and how approachable a human is? Because if you can do that, then you can process thousands and thousands of customers very quickly. Onboarding is an exercise in understanding the mindset of a buyer, of an evaluator. It’s nothing more than that. Meaning that the province of understanding is social psychology, it’s not really product, it’s biopsychology. And guess who knows a lot about this stuff, it’s people in the offline industry. The people who stock shelves, the people who provide inventory online and so on and so forth. They are extraordinarily good at this. So the reason I say this is to divert people who are [inaudible 00:40:00] to really find where to source their inspiration from for onboarding, first of all.
If you think about this as intentful in that way, which is people come not knowing anything about you and in a progressively developed confidence that you are the tool of choice, you then have to break it down into how does that journey go through a mind, the average mind anyway, and how do you assist each part? One is value proposition, understanding, one is trying to see if it’s simple enough and provides enough value. One is kicking tires and one is making the choice that this is something I’m going to go forward with. How does your onboarding support hit all of these things? Now I think there are two parts of onboarding. One is mandatory, the setup, it has to be spare. I try not to make it more than three screens, but it’s about how do you say what this does and provide the essential setup that your customer needs to be successful?
At Calendly, for example, we asked them about connecting their calendar and setting some defaults. Is it 9:00 to 5:00 or whatever that is? Those two things set up all the future success. And if we made it optional, more people would fail. So it’s information and the essential setup, and it should be as short as possible. Then there’s a whole other set of things that should be optional because they’re not necessary for everyone to be successful, but they’re beneficial if people are curious. And also, it can be what we call a random access, so people can get back to it any time they want, if they’re feeling help. And so if you divide onboarding into those two things and then figure out what to put in one and what to put in the other, I think you can be quite successful. And this is just the tip of the iceberg that I get into in the book.
Lenny: Are there any examples of really big onboarding wins, things that really helped with conversion or activation that come to mind?
Oji Udezue: Well, I think keep it short is one big win. The fewer things, the better, that are essential, that everyone has to go through. It’s unclear if all those clickthroughs go here, go here, and all those things work-
Lenny: The wizards, yeah.
Oji Udezue: Yeah. The wizards have had, in my experience, limited benefit. So much as just directing people to the one thing that they need to do post mandatory onboarding. Having examples, not 10, one or two of what good looks like is particularly powerful because it’s mimetic. People see, oh, okay, this is exactly what I’m shooting for, is very powerful. In terms of trial and conversion, letting people understand and being very clear about where they are in the trial cycle, whether you want them to pay for it now or they need to pay for it later, after seven days. Having them understand that really clearly so they know where they are versus they feel like they’re completely at sea, I think is very important for conversion.
I think there are a few things like that, but I also want to mention that it’s different for every product. Depending on where you are in the quadrant and the amount of augmentation and problem solving and how sharp the problem is, you might want to adjust your approach. And this is the kind of thing that there’s some fundamentals, but it’s not necessarily this one size fits all. In fact, at Typeform, we’re trying to maybe invent a new twist on freemium just because of some of the things we’re seeing for our particular customers. And so yeah, these are for me, some new learning as well as I go through each different product.
Lenny: Along these lines of onboarding activation and getting a user activated is really important. And I’m curious, do you have an example of what an activation milestone was at Calendly or Twitter or a Typeform? Just to give people a sense of like here’s a good example of an activated user milestone.
Oji Udezue: I think this goes back to people, the Pendos and the Amplitudes of this world. You have to think through your aha journey. Like at Calendly and also at Typeform we have three thresholds of increasing activation. And we just try to make sure that people go through each one as many people as possible. And frankly, we try to figure the drop-off between the increasing definitions of activation. So at Calendly we want to make sure you’ve created your first meeting. But then if you’ve created five within a week, that’s really much more powerful. At Typeform, it’s really about have you published the form and have you gotten responses? And have you gone to look at what the responses mean in the insights page, for example.
At Twitter it is are you following anyone or are you being followed? Because that verb, follow, is the way you start to construct your informal community. Remember what I said is Twitter is for people who want informal community around a topic that is not… Facebook is about who do you know, Twitter is about who do you want to know? Who’s passionate about what you’re passionate about? And so if you haven’t set up your follow graph at all, you’re not going to really activate. It’s not going to be compelling for you.
Lenny: Awesome, those are great examples. It’s funny hearing that Twitter activation milestone out of context sounds, so creepy. Have you followed anyone or is anyone following you?
Oji Udezue: Yeah, because a lot of people go in and then they tweet into the void or they don’t feel like they have a voice. But that’s not the most important thing. Most important thing is are you getting content that you are interested in that makes you want to come back and see more of it and follow is a huge part of doing that.
Lenny: Yeah. Just on the point of Twitter, I don’t know if this goes anywhere, but it’s crazy how it keeps going no matter how much destruction is happening all around, employees-
Oji Udezue: Oh, you want me to talk about that? Because I want to talk about this.
Lenny: Please, let’s do it.
Oji Udezue: So one of the things they, I don’t want to say they, one of the things I learned early on is network effects.
Lenny: Yeah.
Oji Udezue: Network effects, let me define it. Network effects is when you create value for passive members by other people joining the network. So I am by myself, I have done nothing. I’m at home, chilling, but one person joins the network and immediately I gain benefit, okay. So think about Facebook. If there are eight billion people on Facebook, it means that all of a sudden I can reach everyone on the planet. And so the more people on Facebook, the more it’s valuable to me regardless of my effort. That’s network effect. If I’m into Word, word processor, Microsoft Word, and the more people who use that file format, it means that the more Word documents I can read.
And so I did nothing, so by increasing the people adoption of Word, I gain benefit. Network effect, that’s what it is. So Twitter and then this is the mental model of critical mass, network effect is about critical mass. You hit a critical mass and sometimes that’s not mathematically defined, and then you’ve hit network effect because people want to come because people are already there. So Twitter has hit critical mass and lots of your favorite social networks. Network effects is a feature by itself, and it’s the most powerful feature. A good way to illustrate the power of network effects is Twitter did not die because Threads came about, that’s the power of network effect. In fact, the last telegram was sent in 2016, over 100 years after it was invented because of network effects. It had to be manually closed down.
I believe Friendster is still alive, so we have to be really clear that it’s really hard to kill a network effects business. Now how do you actually accomplish it if you were to accomplish it? Well, the revenue side of any social network is vulnerable to attack. So for example, if advertisers stop being on Twitter, for example, they’re not gone because again, network effects affects them. They want to go where the eyeballs are. But if for some reason they disappeared, while the people will continue to come, the ability to have money to improve the network will disappear. And that is a negative spiral. What is very, very hard to kill business, it’s hard to kill software that’s reached network effect, although you can kill businesses that have reached network effect.
Lenny: That’s a really important and interesting insight. I think what’s even especially interesting about Twitter is Elon and the team have removed every other benefit of Twitter, like the brand, gone, employees, 80% gone. Every part of it is being cut off, except for the network effects, and so it’s a really cool case study. Dan Hockenmaier tweeted this, was a previous guest, of just like it’s a good case study of what is just the power of just network effects.
Oji Udezue: That’s right. I did a really interesting course at Berkeley Business School, asked about technology companies and so on, and this is a perfect case study on network effect. The best I’ve ever seen. It is incredible.
Lenny: Yeah, it’s wild Threads isn’t able to get there quickly, unlike what it felt like initially.
Oji Udezue: Threads will prosper, I believe. And again, it’ll just be another click for advertisers who understand the Facebook marketplace versus Twitter ad marketplace is much harder to access. And so I think the way Threads wins is the revenue spiral versus the pure activity spiral.
Lenny: Interesting. Where essentially they find ways to, even with lower base, generate revenue, which drives advertisers, drives more investment.
Oji Udezue: Correct, correct, correct.
Lenny: Awesome. All right. That’ll be fun story to watch. Kind of along those same lines, I want to chat about virality a little bit. You worked on some of those viral products out there in B2C, I guess Twitter is an example, but also in B2B, which is really rare and interesting. And I know there’s no silver bullet for increasing virality, but everyone’s always wondering, how do I increase the virality of my product? So I’m curious, anything you could share, any tactics that you’ve seen work to increase the virality, especially of a B2B product?
Oji Udezue: Well, as is my style, I want people to understand what virality is in the first place because I think people have misconceptions about it. People think virality is some Hotmails tag at the bottom that says, we’ll get a free account. Virality is really when the word of mouth of a product is high quality. That’s really the essence of it. Let me rephrase that. It’s when customers market your product. And that is incredibly powerful, but also that’s incredibly actionable, if that makes sense. There are products who try to be viral just for what I call synthetic virality that fail. Because in the end, if you’re synthetically viral and people get to the product and it sucks, that’s it. That’s the end. Even Hotmail, for example, people talk about the viral tag. I don’t know, you know what I’m talking about? Because I-
Lenny: Absolutely, at the bottom, yes [inaudible 00:51:34].
Oji Udezue: Well remember, it wasn’t just that. It was one of the first webmail things. And webmail was revolutionary because you didn’t have to have a POP3 client and lose your email across multiple devices. It solved a lot of really good problems for customers at the time for email. And so when they arrived from the free account, it was like, holy crap, this is amazing. And so let’s do that. Uber doesn’t have any weird viral traps, but it compresses the workflow of getting a cab so much that it’s viral, if that makes sense. In fact, it was this time where Austin kicked them out for and other apps came in and filled the void, and then it came back after the year and just crushed everybody. There was no campaign, it was just viral by itself. So that’s what virality is. So then the question is how do you increase it?
Well look, fundamentally build a great product that solves a sharp problem and build it really well. If you do this, this is the bedrock of virality. If you don’t do this, there’s no viral tactic that will work in a sustained way. It will fizzle. But if you do this, you can lay on synthetic virality strategies for referral, strategies for coming back into the app and creating an account. Remember before Calendly, there was Acuity scheduling, there was other things. The difference was Calendly was so well-made, so simple for schedulers, so respectful of schedulers’ time, not just the creator’s time that the virality worked. It did not work for others who sucked. Xted AI and other places, they weren’t that good. You have to be good to be viral.
Lenny: That is such an important insight, that everyone looks at Calendly like of course you’re sharing calendars with everyone, it’s going to go viral. That’s like what a cool trick. But your point is so interesting that there’s previous versions of that, but the product itself wasn’t great. The experience wasn’t great. It was too complicated, it didn’t work, and that’s what made it so viral.
Oji Udezue: Yeah, there may be several things I think affect virality. But I think that this is the nugget that people need to take away, that is the foundation of bedrock of all of them. Customer support actually affects virality. If you have fanatical customer support, people will love it. Viral tactics like the page that says, oh, get an account, and so on. All these signing documents, Calendly and so on and so forth. Network effects as in Calendly, you have these green dots. If you and a person have, Calendly tells you when you’re free, all network effects, really high quality execution, synthetic virality all contribute to net virality. But the fundamental is exactly what we just discussed.
Lenny: Just got to get it all right. No big deal.
Oji Udezue: Build the best product possible, honestly, if you want to be viral. Slack wasn’t even viral, there was no synthetic virality. Slack couldn’t even connect to organizations for the longest time. Why? You could be working on the third floor and so on, using Slack on the fourth floor, and you would have no clue. There’s no way to share it with them. But what happens when you went to lunch? People are like, “We got Slack and this is amazing.” And people on the third floor are like, “Holy shit, when can we get it?” Boom, boom, boom. Great product first is virality.
Lenny: Seth Godin has this phrase they always come back to, if you want to make your product remarkable, something people want to remark about, and that’s basically the core of word of mouth.
Oji Udezue: Yes, yes, yes.
Lenny: I was watching a talk you did on this kind of topic and you had this great phrase that you sort of touched on, but I think it’s so good, and I just want to make sure we highlight it, which is that virality is customer augmented marketing.
Oji Udezue: Yeah, I think it is the thing that I started with first. It’s when your marketing is essentially done by your customers because what it does, it affords you the ability to spend less on marketing. And you can either uplevel your marketing execution or save money that you can put in the product. Atlassian spends maybe like 10, 20 percentage points less on marketing than the equivalent competitors because it’s viral and also because it’s network effects at this point as well, say Jira. And so it’s customer augmented marketing. Your customers are either forcing other people to adopt it or shaming them into adopting it or FOMOing them into adopting it. So yes, virality is essentially customer oriented marketing, which gives you options.
Lenny: I love that phrase, I’m going to use it now. I have just a few more questions before we get to a very exciting lightning round, and these are kind of random two topics that I wanted to chat on. One is this concept that you call forest time. It’s a post you wrote about the importance of forest time. Can you just describe what that is and why it’s so important, and then also just how to do this?
Oji Udezue: I operate, I’m an operator right now, meaning that I’m building things, I work for a company. But I also advise and invest, which is different. When I’m advising, I’m looking from above, from outside, I have a bird’s eye view and I’m able to say, “You know what? This will work. This won’t work. What have you done? Can I look at the results?” And then cycle the advice based on what you’re seeing and what I’m seeing. When I’m operating, I’m building a team, I’m hiring, I’m managing all the things, Alina, shout out that hates sometimes. And that’s what I’m doing. When you are operating, you have the tug of war. It is so intense that you don’t have the attention to have a bird’s eye view constantly.
And so forest time is the idea that you make time within your week, within your month to see the forest for the trees. Most of the time when you’re operating, you’re seeing the tree, which is the problem in front of you. But sometimes you need to see the forest, so you can figure out it as an alternate path, different from the one that you are currently on your campaign. And so it’s time to elevate, to get some bird’s eye view, to see the entire landscape and see the alternative paths through the current problems that you’re escaping. And I think that it has to be very intentional. And intentionality there is, I have published a workflow, a document that helps you make that step to make that elevation.
Like what are the issues? What are alternative ways to solve this potentially that I’m not seeing? Et cetera. And what I try to do is I try to create that forest time for my executive team as well because it’s not just me that suffers from this, it’s most everybody. In fact, it’s most PMs because PMs are so influential that the spoke of the wheel of product creation and product development that we often, it’s a sine wave. You are discovering and shaping problems and then you are commanding and captaining execution. And it’s endless and they’re endless meetings. And so you need to create time for forest time, for elevation. If you don’t, you’ll become less effective over time. It’s just attrition.
Lenny: And then just to make it even more concrete for people, what are examples of forest time? Is it taking time off? Is it advising on the side? Is it-
Oji Udezue: It is taking a day off at the end of a month, a full day or two days. And instead of just playing golf, although that’s fine, it is doing a workflow, worksheet to survey the forest specifically. And sometimes managers are like, “Wait, you’re giving people a day off when they should be working harder and harder?” And I think it’s completely worth it. It’s not about working harder, it’s working smarter. It’s about seeing more options than you see. And so I’m very happy to give that time to product managers, to product executives or design executives or engineering executives.
Because I think that if they do it properly, then we’ll have better execution in the long run. Let’s put it this way, in product development, we aim for maybe like 10% of the time and then we execute and build for the other side. It’s not just, there’s more stuff we do. If your aim is off, then you are spending one, $2 million incorrectly of people’s time. And so forest time should improve your aim. That’s the entire point, because your aim is a precursor to a huge amount of investment. And so I think it’s well worth it.
Lenny: I love this. So specifically what you do with your team is once a month, you give them a day to do this kind of worksheet that you put together?
Oji Udezue: Yes.
Lenny: And then that worksheet is in this post that you wrote, that you point to. Is that right?
Oji Udezue: Correct, correct.
Lenny: Amazing. Okay, great. This is very practical advice. I love it. Okay, one last question before a very exciting lightning round. You worked at Bridgewater Associates, which I didn’t know until I started digging into your past. That sounds creepy. And Bridgewater Associates famous for what? Ray Dalio’s hedge fund, author of Principals and all these other incredible books, and it’s a very unique working environment. So I just wanted to ask about your experience there, specifically one of the craziest things there is just this thing called dots I think it’s called, where people just call out mistakes that people make at the company and it’s public. Is that how it actually was? Any memories of that?
Oji Udezue: Yeah, yeah. I was a senior management, what’s called an SMA, which is the management layer right under Ray’s team. And we were the priests of the Church of Bridgewater. Bridgewater did things like record, this is public knowledge, I’m not saying anything-
Lenny: Yeah, he writes about-
Oji Udezue: … before every meeting. Eventually we created a dot collector, which allows you to rate people in real time. So I’m just having a conversation with you and before the meeting closes, in front of each other, I pull up my laptop and I rate you and rate the interaction. And in theory, the idea is that if you constantly rate people across hundreds of interactions, then you build a picture of them that is fairly accurate, statistically accurate, that will transcend maybe emotional relationship as wisdom of the crowd idea. So that’s a theory. In practice, it is emotionally exhausting. And like you said, the little creepy, even the recording.
So I think there were things about Bridgewater that I understood intellectually in terms of the purpose that Ray had designed, but didn’t quite work. It’s like the way I think about this is the theory of the principles are really good. The practice and the execution can be quite off and not very human or not very empathetic. But I will say this, Bridgewater taught me things that I don’t think any other organization in the world thought taught me. One example is Bridgewater thinks of people in three dimensions, their skills, their attributes, and their values. Most organizations think about people in terms of just their skills. But it makes sense that people have attributes and values, that people are timid, people are bold, people like to jump in, people like to stand back.
All these other things, we think about personality and proclivity. Bridgewater tries to establish and measure them and also tries to write job descriptions that say, this is the kind of attributes we’re looking for, not just the skills we’re looking for. And then of course values. Are you a thief or are you a principled? And so on and so forth. Now that idea of looking at talent or people in general, both in your professional life and in your personal life, is a huge addition to me as a professional from Bridgewater. So I’m saying that there were things I didn’t enjoy about Bridgewater, but things that I learned that I’ve learned nowhere else as well.
Lenny: Did you take that to what you do today? Thinking of people in those three different ways and-
Oji Udezue: 100%. in my professional life, in my personal life, when I interview people, I am cognizant of those three things and I try to extract those three things, because I think it improves your success. Famously, all the weird skill-based interviewing at Google was only 50/50 predictive. And the reason is Google did not consider the other two things, I believe. Bridgewater was willing to endure 80% attrition to arrive at the best people. Now I don’t think it works for them because some of their system was not empathetic of humans, like expecting humans to be computers. But I thought that was a very important insight.
Lenny: Awesome. Oji, is there anything else that you want to share before we get to our very exciting lightning round?
Oji Udezue: In the history of product development, we have basically started to create abstraction to guide our work versus the Wild, Wild West. So the engineers came up with agile and peer programming and all these things. The designers have come up with design thinking, design sprints, and combined with research to talk about how to do discovery of various complexity. And the question is the product abstractions, because there’s code, there’s product in this business. So the product and business layer, what is our abstraction? What is our crucible for organizing our work?
We don’t even have one. We don’t have a name for it. And so the idea of a part system is that there’s an abstraction above agile and design thinking that we have to pay attention to build solid organizations and to execute well at the product and the business layer. This is a co-creative framework with me and Ezinne. And the idea here is how do you construct a good product system? And literally, you could boil it down into a checklist of the systems you need to build a really good cohesive R and D organization. So I think that’s the tee up. I’m going to have to leave you thirsty because someone else is probably going to go deep into it.
Lenny: Amazing. And that’s your wife that you mentioned who you are co-creating this framework with and who we’re going to have on the podcast in the future.
Oji Udezue: That’s right.
Lenny: What is it like being married to another product leader? Would you recommend?
Oji Udezue: 100%, you can have really productive conversations and you can redesign other company’s applications in one conversation in the evening.
Lenny: Amazing. Well, that was almost the lightning round question, but I moved it up earlier. And so with that we’ve reached our very exciting lightning round. Are you ready?
Oji Udezue: Yeah, I’m ready. Let’s do it.
Lenny: Okay, great. Let’s do it. What are two or three books that you’ve recommended most to other people?
Oji Udezue: There’s one business book that I recommend, I think it’s called The Halo Effect. It’s basically a book that lets you call on all these business books that tell you all kinds of stupid shit. It is how to deconstruct what is important in a business and self-help book and what is not important and what is just circumstantial storytelling with random facts and form-fitting evidence. It’s called The Halo Effect. Read it. Why do you need to read it? Because garbage in, garbage Out.
People were amazed at the Outlier Effect, Malcolm Gladwell, and then people have been tearing it down for 15 years now. But everyone ingested it and thought it was the most important thing. But how do you know what’s important to take away from them and what’s not? The Halo Effect will help you. And then the other thing is, I read for pleasure because I read a lot for work. And so science fiction is the thing. There’s lots to recommend, but I would say that people should either read Dune, Frank Herbert or Foundation by Asimov. If you haven’t read those two things and you’re a science fiction person, you really should. The world building is incredible. I understand Tolkien and fantasy, but the science fiction side of it is those two books.
Lenny: There’s also a TV series of Foundation now, which I can say recommend absolutely. But it’s a beautiful show.
Oji Udezue: Yeah, no. I haven’t watched Foundation yet. I just felt super weird watching it after reading it. And I could only make it through three quarters of Dune. Well one, but I will make it through them. I don’t expect them… The books are glorious. If you love prose, the books are, man, crazy. But I will get through them eventually.
Lenny: I’ve not actually read Dune, but the movie was incredible. I played the video game Dune where you’re just mining spice all day and it’s just stuck in my brain forever. Okay, next question. What is a favorite interview question that you like to ask candidates that you’re interviewing?
Oji Udezue: I try to ask two. I feel like it’s going to give people a cheat sheet when I interview them. But I try to ask two questions. So I’m not a person who does favorites, so it’s hard for me to pick favorites. But I ask people to introduce themselves and I think it tells me a lot about them, how they tell about themselves, what they say about themselves and the content of it. I ask people about the things they think they’re truly great at and then I ask people the things they think they need to learn. The latter too is about their professional skill, their craft. I think it tells me a lot about how they communicate, it tells me a lot about how thoughtful they are. It tells me a lot about what they’re proud of and what they lead into. And those kinds of things are very important to me.
Lenny: What is a favorite product you recently discovered that you love?
Oji Udezue: I have been optimizing my workspace a lot. So I’m on a kick right now where I use Windows. I was in the Windows PM and I still have my Windows box. But a lot of people, we use Mac at work and I’ve used Mac for the last few years. So even though I switched between them, I’ve spent a lot more time on Mac and my Windows experience is completely optimized. It is perfect. But Mac, I’m like the Windowing sucks, there’s all these gaps I see. So I’ve been trying to figure out how to dial in my Mac experience.
I hate the activity monitor, sucks. What’s a replacement? The sound. It doesn’t support sound through HDMI or sound through… I don’t know, just some weird setup. So I’ve been optimizing that. One particular product that I like in the context of that is Unlocks. It’s one man product that allows me to just look at my phone and log into my Mac when I walk up and then locks it when I walk away. And it’ll actually detect my proximity. So it’ll start the login process while I get close. I think that’s incredible and I feel like it improves my productivity.
Lenny: Very cool. Sounds like a lot of haterade for Macs over here.
Oji Udezue: Well, for someone who uses it a lot, no, I think pros and cons. I’m no longer paid by Microsoft, so there are things I don’t like. But there are also things that the Mac isn’t perfect either.
Lenny: Yeah, indeed. What is a favorite life motto that you repeat to yourself or share with other people, either in work or in life that you find valuable?
Oji Udezue: I’ve taken to saying that there’s more knowledge outside my head than inside it. And this is a plea for curiosity. I have three main things that are my North Star personally. Obviously when I say personally, I mean everything professionally. Which is originality, curiosity, and wisdom. And so this thing about there’s more knowledge outside my head than inside my head is a plea for curiosity, it’s a plea for skepticism. It’s a plea to be humble about what you know, no matter how old you are, about the world around you, and always be listening for more. Even when you know something, let other people speak because they might add 10% more to the 90% you know. And so being an active listener is very important.
Lenny: Beautiful. Last question, you are from Nigeria. What is a Nigerian food that you think people need to find and get ASAP?
Oji Udezue: I’ll recommend two, depending on how familiar you are. So if you’ve never had fried plantain with beef stew-
Lenny: Oh man, that sounds great.
Oji Udezue: … then you should stop what you’re doing, stop work, whatever you’re doing, find your next Nigerian friend and go get some, okay? This is the food that most Nigerians will basically trade years of life to have access to, okay. So that’s what I would say. And then the second thing is if you want to be in the in club in Nija, as we call it, you got to try pepper soup.
Lenny: Pepper soup.
Oji Udezue: Now, if you all are not into spicy stuff, I’m sorry, the door is close to you. But pepper soup is really… And it is amazing. It’ll make you sweat, but it’s delicious and you should give it a shot.
Lenny: Oji, I think we’ve solved many people’s sharp problems. I really appreciate you making time being here. Two final questions. Where can folks find you online if they want to reach out? And how can listeners be useful to you?
Oji Udezue: I publish on Substack when I have time, you should check it out. It’s usually all about things that are beneath the surface. What’s behind the thing. I believe that’s how you’ll find it. I’m on Twitter as well, so you can follow me because I will talk about products. How you can be useful to me is go follow me on Twitter, sign up for updates on the book. If you do, I will draw from that audience to help name the book, to help design the cover for the book. The book is intended to have a freemium because I want this book to be available to people in Africa and India, across the world. So there’ll be a free version of it and there’ll be premium versions with more tools, more help, and maybe even interviews with luminaries that you care and love as well. And so hopefully that will fund the free side of it as well. So come in, become part of the party, maybe join a pre-read, an early draft read. That is the best way you can help. So this is a call to all PMs and people of goodwill.
Lenny: Amazing. What a great answer to that question. I’m going to go get some pepper soup and some plantain beef meals. Thank you so much for being here, and I’m going to go get some food.
Oji Udezue: All right. Thank you, Lenny. It was super enjoyable and love hanging out and God speed.
Lenny: Bye, everyone.
Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcast, 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
| English | 中文 |
|---|---|
| activation | 激活 |
| activation milestone | 激活里程碑 |
| aha journey | aha 旅程 |
| Asimov | 阿西莫夫 |
| Bridgewater Associates | Bridgewater Associates |
| calendaring | 日历管理 |
| conversion | 转化 |
| critical mass | 临界质量 |
| customer augmented marketing | 客户增强营销 |
| customer science | 客户科学 |
| dot collector | dot collector |
| drop-off | 流失 |
| Dune | 《沙丘》 |
| everyone workflows | 全员工作流 |
| Ezinne | Ezinne |
| fail fast | 快速失败 |
| follow graph | 关注关系图 |
| FOMO | FOMO |
| forest time | 森林时间 |
| Foundation | 《基地》 |
| FPNA | 财务规划与分析 |
| Frank Herbert | 弗兰克·赫伯特 |
| freemium | 免费增值 |
| high ni (high frequency niche) | 高利(高频利基) |
| ICP (ideal customer profile) | 理想客户画像(已在术语表中) |
| impedance match | 阻抗匹配 |
| lean approach | 精益方法 |
| Malcolm Gladwell | 马尔科姆·格拉德威尔 |
| martech | 营销技术 |
| mental models | 心智模型 |
| mimetic | 模仿性的 |
| negative spiral | 负面螺旋 |
| network effects | 网络效应 |
| niche workflows | 利基工作流 |
| Nija | Nija |
| onboarding | 引导新客户 |
| Outliers | 《异类》 |
| part system | part system |
| pepper soup | pepper soup(辣汤) |
| plantain | 大蕉 |
| POP3 client | POP3 客户端 |
| product frameworks | 产品框架 |
| product led growth | 产品驱动增长 |
| Ray Dalio | 瑞·达利欧 |
| revenue spiral | 收入螺旋 |
| sales tech | 销售技术 |
| scheduling | 排程 |
| Seth Godin | Seth Godin |
| sharp problem | 尖锐问题 |
| silver bullet | 银弹 |
| SMA (Senior Management Associate) | SMA |
| synthetic virality | 人工病毒式传播 |
| The Halo Effect | 《光环效应》 |
| Tolkien | 托尔金 |
| Unlocks | Unlocks |
| virality | 病毒式传播力 |
| webmail | webmail |
| whites of their eyes | 眼白效应 |
| wizards | 向导式流程 |
| word processor | 字处理软件 |
| workflow | 工作流 |
| writ large | 广义上的 |
| zone of benefit | 收益区间 |
Reformatted by reformat_english.py
精准选题、提升病毒式传播力与独特的产品框架 | Oji Udezue (Typeform)
精准选题、提升病毒式传播力与独特的产品框架 | Oji Udezue (Typeform)
病毒式传播力的基石
Oji Udezue: 那些试图仅仅为了病毒式传播而追求传播力的产品,会出现我所说的”人造病毒式传播力”,最终都会失败。因为如果你的病毒式传播是人造的,人们接触到产品后发现它很糟糕,那就完了。Slack 甚至都不具备病毒式传播力,根本没有人造的病毒式传播。Slack 在很长一段时间里甚至不能跨组织连接。你可能工作在三楼,四楼有人用 Slack,而你完全不知道,没有办法分享给他们。但你去吃午饭时会发生什么?人们会说:“我们用上了 Slack,太棒了。“三楼的人就会说:“天哪,我们什么时候也能用上?“然后一个接一个。这就是病毒式传播力的基石——打造一个解决明确问题的好产品。
嘉宾介绍
Lenny: 欢迎来到 Lenny 播客,我在这里采访世界级的产品领导者和增长专家,从他们来之不易的经验中学习如何打造和增长当今最成功的产品。今天的嘉宾是 Oji Udezue。Oji 曾在微软帮助打造和增长产品,参与过 Windows、Outlook、Hotmail 和 Internet Explorer;在 Atlassian,他担任所有通信工具的产品负责人;在 Calendly,他担任首席产品官;在 Twitter,他担任创作与对话部门的产品负责人。他目前在 Typeform 担任首席产品官,我也是 Typeform 的满意用户。Oji 拥有产品领域最广泛、最有趣的职业经历之一,他也是我见过的最有思想深度的人之一。在我们的对话中,Oji 分享了他最喜欢的一些产品框架,以及为什么在公司里套用框架需要非常谨慎。我们深入探讨了他从 Calendly、Atlassian 和 Typeform 学到的关于如何做好产品驱动增长的经验,以及如何精准定位你的 ICP(ideal customer profile,理想客户画像)。还有如何提升产品的病毒式传播力,以及一个我非常喜欢的概念——森林时间(forest time)。甚至还有他最喜欢的尼日利亚美食,我目前正在四处寻觅。话不多说,在短暂赞助商广告之后,为您带来 Oji Udezue。
(赞助商广告已跳过)
Oji,非常感谢你能来,欢迎来到播客。
Oji Udezue: 谢谢你,Lenny。很高兴来到这里。
Lenny: 这是我的荣幸。你作为 PM 和产品领导者,在非常多非常了不起、也截然不同的公司工作过,这些公司对产品和增长的做法都很不一样。所以我认为你拥有一种非常罕见的广阔视角,能看到在不同方式下产品和增长领域什么有效。所以我有一大堆问题要问你,希望你准备好了。
Oji Udezue: 我准备好了。
Lenny: 太好了。我想从框架开始聊起。你写了很多、也分享了很多关于如何思考产品和增长的非常有趣的框架,所以我想深入探讨其中几个。其中一个是关于如何找到大型 B2B SaaS 创意,核心在于找到正确的工作流。你能分享一下这个框架吗?创始人和投资人又该如何运用这个思路来发现大机会?
到哪里去钓到独角兽
Oji Udezue: 谢谢。我想你指的是”到哪里去钓到独角兽”。
Lenny: 就是这个。
Oji Udezue: 人们可以在 Substack 和 Medium 上我的文章中找到相关内容。它的基本前提是,创建公司有很多风险,过去十年间产品管理和创业领域主要聚焦于构建软件和公司的方法论。我们谈论精益方法(lean approach),谈论快速失败(fail fast)等等。我认为那个阶段对我们来说是必要的,因为大量创新仅仅是创始人未经客户验证的想法,我们的学科需要这个转折点。但人们需要理解,客户科学(customer science)并不是万能的,否则 OpenAI 永远不会做出任何东西。创新本身也同样重要。所以问题空间及其解决方案,仍然是构建软件公司成功的核心驱动力。
你到底在解决什么问题?如果你认同问题空间是关键,那么哪些问题能预测成功?尤其是在 B2B SaaS 领域,这个领域更容易界定边界。我开始思考,怎么从一开始就做出判断?因为我既是投资人,也是从业者。要划分这个空间,我考虑两个维度。一是你要解决的工作流适用于公司中多少个部门?是仅几个,还是所有部门?二是这个工作流的执行强度或频率如何?是每天?每周?还是每周三次?诸如此类。如果你把这两个维度画成一个四象限图,你就可以开始获得一些预测能力。在每个部门都有用的工作流,我称之为全员工作流(everyone workflows),比如协作类的 Slack、电子邮件、日历,以及社交知识管理类的 Notion 等等。而只适用于单一部门的工作流,我称之为利基工作流(niche workflows)。强度则关乎频率——每月一次不算频繁,每天一次则极其频繁。如果你按频率和工作流的广度来划分市场或企业,你实际上就能获得预测能力。通过观察每个象限中最大的上市公司和私营公司,我发现,全员高频工作流直觉上是最有利可图的领域,但也最难进入,因为它们被微软、谷歌等超大型公司所主导。比如,我有一位朋友是 Coda 的 CEO。这就很有意思,因为他就在那个领域,对他来说需要思考的是……
四象限中的机会分布
Oji Udezue: 而 B2B SaaS 真正蓬勃发展的领域,是高频利基工作流。我称之为”高利”——高频利基。另外两个象限则更具挑战性,你必须想办法找到路径进入前两个象限之一。如果你身处上面两个象限——高利和高全员——并且解决了一个非常重要的工作流问题,你大概率能成长为一家十亿美元级别的公司。如果做的是另外两个象限,就会面临一些额外的挑战。这个框架探讨了如何在这些位置找到通往成功的路径。我认为这非常重要,因为如果这个判断成立——顺便说一句,如我之前所说,我已经做过一些验证——创始人就可以在投入数年之前,开始思考成功的概率有多大。如果你像我一样是投资人或风险投资人,你也可以开始思考如何部署资金。
Lenny: 每个象限里有哪些公司的例子?你能举几个吗?我不确定你是不是已经把这些记在脑子里了。
四象限的公司实例
Oji Udezue: 高频全员工作流通常是从门卫到 CEO 都会用到的东西——电子邮件、协作工具、写作、数学,所有基础性的工作。在 Atlassian,我们花了很多时间思考这些问题。比如文字处理,在工作场景中已经存在很久了。像 Notion 和 Confluence 这样的产品作为其演进形态,规模都很大;还有 Slack、电子邮件。这个领域的公司有谷歌、微软、Atlassian 等等。而在高利,也就是高频利基领域,你有 Jira 这样的工具,有面向招聘人员的工具,有营销技术,有销售技术。
这些背后的公司我们都很熟悉,Atlassian、Salesforce 等等。再看低频全员象限,可能有表单工具这类东西。实际上这类公司并不多,低频全员甚至还包括费用报销。说真的,最好的费用报销工具。不是每个人时时刻刻都在做,但基本上每个人都得做一点,至少很多人是这样。最后是低频利基,即特定部门使用的东西。比如由财务规划与分析部门负责、但执行频率不高的规划工作,诸如此类。
Lenny: 根据你的经验,多频繁才算”频繁”?至少得每周一次吗?你认为最低门槛是什么?
Oji Udezue: 频繁基本上是指每天,或者每周多次。不频繁则开始于每周两次、每月一次这样的频率。当然,中间存在一个相当宽的过渡地带。
从低频向高频的战略迁移
Lenny: 有意思的是,确实有一些公司在那些低频象限中取得了成功,比如费用报销的场景。你有没有感觉在那个领域取胜需要什么条件?因为我想大多数创业公司可能都处于那个区域,我想创始人会想,我们还能做什么来赢?
Oji Udezue: 这个框架并不是静态的,不是说公司注定只能属于某一类。战略的本质就是在迁移路径上从低处往高处走。Atlassian 正试图通过 Confluence 和他们所有的工具,从高利向高全员迁移。处于下方的公司则试图通过聚焦核心客户来进入高频利基象限。所以在低频全员工作流这种象限里,策略是这样的:如果有些人虽然使用频率不高,但必须得用,那本身是件好事。接下来你也许可以提供一个模块,让财务部门每天都能用,于是你突然就向高频全员工作流移动了。所以关键是找到组织中某个认为这项工作至关重要的群体,然后为他们解决的问题超出你为”所有人”解决的范围。
Lenny: 你脑海中有没有什么具体的例子?无论是在 Calendly、Typeform 还是 Atlassian,你有没有推动产品向更高频率或更广人群方向发展的经历?
Oji Udezue: 比如在 Typeform——这对我是切身相关的——严格来说 Typeform 属于低频利基或低频全员,取决于它有多易用以及如何围绕客户展开。作为产品战略的一部分,我正尝试把它推向高频利基,即”高利”,那是一个非常有利可图的位置。对于营销人员和销售人员,我想确保他们第一时间想到我们。因为我们在面向客户的交互方面特别擅长,如果他们认为我们是赢得新业务和赚钱的方式,那么我们受众中的一部分人——不是所有人——就会把我们视为高利产品。我认为扩大这个立足点就是驾驭这类业务的方式。你可以看到 Qualtrics 在这样做,SurveyMonkey 也是。很多公司在思考如何针对一种非常非常具体的客户进一步拆分那个市场。他们做的就是这件事——试图触达高利,即使是在那种更通用的工作流中。
收益区间:产品需要好多少
Lenny: 这个例子太棒了。你还有一个框架,我想你称之为”收益区间”,是关于你的解决方案要比现状好多少的问题。很多人会说:“嘿,看看这个产品,比你现在用的好。“而通常人们的反应是:“嗯,无所谓,现在用的够用了。“你对于产品到底需要好多少才能让人们在意,有一些深刻的洞察。能分享一下吗?
Oji Udezue: 说实话,我喜欢做产品经理的原因就是,任何一天我都可能从人类学、社会学、行为经济学、领导力、沟通技巧中汲取知识。我受过专业训练,拥有工程学硕士学位,所以我也算是工程师。我也做过营销和销售,所以真的是在从众多领域中汲取养分。我之所以谈论收益区间,是因为归根结底我们试图做的事情就是让技术与人类实现阻抗匹配。就是这件事。如果你真正去想,这就是我们所做之事的一个本质。收益区间之所以能作为框架运作,是因为人们不会为那些既不能大幅缩减他们正在做的工作流、又不能赋予他们超能力的东西付费。所谓超能力,就是同样的时间,两倍的产出。但最关键的一点是,这种提升必须是可感知的。
如果你把某件事提升了 20%,通常你身边的人,作为人类,大家根本注意不到。所以一个产品想要产生实质性的影响,至少要做到两到三倍以上的提升,人们才会说:“你知道吗?这个提供的价值足够大,也许值得我付出切换成本。“这归根结底在于——经济学理论告诉我们,人们工作是为了休闲,他们工作到足以负担自己的休闲为止。这是一个宏观的说法,我知道有些人并不完全如此,尤其是在科技行业,人们就是热爱工作。但当你想到地球上八十亿人时,大致就是这样。而收益区间真正聚焦的事实是:如果你要帮助我少工作一些,同时收入大致不变,那么要让我注意到你,你必须把我加速三倍,我才会关心。
Lenny: 好的,明白了,所以是三倍。也就是说,你应该感觉到这个东西让我在做的事情上效率提升了三倍,或者帮我省了三倍的时间——我不知道——我做这件事快三倍了。
Oji Udezue: 对,只有到那种程度,人们才会真正感受到,并且感受到足够强烈,以至于愿意掏钱。
Lenny: 好的,明白了。我觉得这个框架很酷的一点是,如果你在做一个创业项目,或者甚至在现有产品中做一个新产品,它能帮你识别出你的产品的理想客户画像(ICP),弄清楚究竟谁会从中获益最大。这也是这个框架的一部分吗?
Oji Udezue: 是的,没错。你最好的客户对你瞄准的目标并不价格敏感,因为他们懂这个产品。他们从根本上理解它。所以没错,当你瞄准理想客户画像时——虽然每个创业公司都有营销问题、获取受众的问题——但一旦你开始有了不错的受众基础,超过一百人甚至更多,你就应该开始注意到那些会说”你知道吗?这个东西,我真的在乎”的人。这就开始告诉你一些关于谁是你的目标受众的信息。
具体公司的理想客户画像
Lenny: 你愿意分享一下你之前工作过的一些公司的理想客户画像吗?让大家感受一下什么样的算是一个好的理想客户画像。
Oji Udezue: 我觉得对于 Atlassian 来说,这个比较显而易见——主要是开发者。但更广泛地说,是整个技术团队,因为研发团队的根本任务就是构建产品。而 Jira 帮助那些真正构建产品的工程师追踪他们的工作进展,并让这些进展对组织可见,从而使他们能体现自身价值。这一点毫无争议。所以 Atlassian 的理想客户画像一直非常清晰,而且长期以来一直如此。
Calendly 是一家很奇妙的公司,人们并没有看到它的全部价值。人们以为它只是随便排个日程。但真正最在乎排程的人——我不是说日历管理,日历管理和排程是非常不同的。最在乎排程的人是销售人员,因为那是他们赚钱的生命线;还有营销人员,因为那可能是他们了解客户的生命线;以及招聘人员,因为那是他们吸引和安排所需人才来开展工作的生命线。所以 Calendly 的理想客户画像,是那些因为某种商业目的需要与组织外部的人进行排程的人。
Typeform 主要是营销人员,因为 Typeform 的存在是让网页变得健谈,让它更有人情味。借助 Typeform,你可以为对话打上品牌烙印,真正做到对话式——一次只问一个问题,设计精美。所以营销人员觉得我们帮助他们实现了网站与访客之间的对话。产品人员觉得我们帮助他们实现了网页应用与他们在乎的用户之间的对话,用户体验人员也是同样的感受。所以这些就是一些例子。我觉得更有趣的是 Twitter。
Lenny: 我正想问你 Twitter 的理想客户画像可能是什么呢。
Oji Udezue: Twitter 的理想客户画像其实更有意思。首先,我先讲讲 Twitter 不太为人所知的那一面。Twitter 30% 的客户群是看不见的——是媒体机构,像 NFL、NBA、HBO 这样的组织,他们希望自己的内容触达更多人,进入对话空间。他们本质上是商业客户,但在对话池中并不显眼,这一点不明显。但我们一直在和他们互动,我们对他们的视频做广告收入分成,因为他们在不断生产内容。Twitter 是一种方式,用来扩展那些内容、那些已有广告资源的变现能力。但当你看 Twitter 的消费者端时,谁是理想客户画像呢?
实际上 Twitter 内部是理解的——这一点也反映在 Elon Musk 目前正在做的事情中,但他似乎并不理解。如果你问任何一个曾在 Twitter 工作过的人,你会从他们眼中看到那种理解,也会看到他并不理解,因为 Twitter 的理想客户画像是对分的。一边是世界上最有成就的人,那些有话要说的人。这就是为什么有神经科学 Twitter、气象 Twitter、癌症 Twitter 等等。事实上,如果有重大新闻发生,世界上出现了某项新突破,它很可能先在 Twitter 上爆出来,然后才会出现在其他任何地方,因为这些人在非正式社区中互相关注、分享成果。
所以基本上有这样一个庞大的专家圈层。我们可以进一步细分为名人、意见领袖、领导者等等。这就是理想客户画像。那么 Twitter 是怎么运作的呢?这些人吸引了另外 90% 的人,后者倾听这些人的声音,但他们同时也需要围绕自己热爱的事物建立自己的非正式社区,与那些意见领袖和专家之间形成一种模仿关系。这就是 Twitter 生态的全貌——一边是专家,一边是需要与自己热爱的事物、与自己相似的人建立联系的大众。这就是 Twitter 的理想客户画像:这两个类别中那些有话要说的人。
Lenny: 你很高兴自己不再在 Twitter 工作了吧?
Oji Udezue: 我太高兴了,太高兴了。那里看起来简直一团糟——我不想故意对任何人或任何事指指点点。但事实就摆在眼前,所以我觉得我也没什么好多说的。
Lenny: 是啊,那边真是够折腾的。我们把视角拉回到框架的话题上——在这次聊天之前,我问你有什么喜欢的框架、有什么觉得值得分享的,你的回答非常有意思,所以我很想让你分享一下你对框架的总体看法。
框架与心智模型
Oji Udezue: 好的。你看,我同时具备两种特质。一方面,我确实喜欢框架。我表达它们的方式通常用心智模型这个说法,因为框架和心智模型的本质是一种捷径。它把一些密集的思考打包成一种让你可以用来处理问题、形成观点的方式。所以我确实在收集它们。但我认为更重要的是——至少在产品管理中——要有能力理解构建某个框架的那些基本原理或经验关系。用数学的话来说,就是你要能推导那个公式。这之所以重要,是因为我们工作中存在大量的不确定性。产品管理不是一门科学。实际上编程甚至都不算严格意义上的科学,因为如果是的话,我们对待它的方式会完全不同。所以构建一家盈利的软件公司,这件事的艺术性并不科学。
这里有大量的不确定性、大量未知因素,还有时机问题。所以,虽然我喜欢心智模型,喜欢框架,但我希望听我讲话的人、也许还有听你节目的人能理解——你必须往更深一层走。因为情况会变化,作为创业公司的投资人和顾问,我会根据你处于刚起步、中期还是规模扩张阶段给出不同的建议。在我正在写的关于产品的那本书里,我其实大量做了这种区分——你处于什么阶段?因为不同阶段适用的东西是不同的。如果你理解了基本原理,你就能以更高效的方式使用框架,因为你会根据自己的阶段做调整,根据具体问题做调整。我觉得这非常重要。我看到很多人非常盲目地使用框架,我认为这对他们自己、对他们的业务都是有害的。
Lenny: 太好了,这正好引出了我接下来想聊的话题——就是你正在写的那本书。我的理解是,这是一本关于产品驱动增长的产品管理方面的书。我已经在你的等候名单上了,等着它出版。前几天我看到你在向大家征询书名的建议。目前有没有什么你比较中意的候选书名?
Oji Udezue: 首先关于这本书,有两件事。一是我对 PLG 的定义可能与别人不同,但我认为我们基本上正在把产品适配到消费者或商业专业人士身上,并利用产品本身来传递价值主张,这种方式对于从二十年前的做法过渡到今天的做法至关重要。基本上,我认为即便是企业级公司,在未来十年也会趋向于消费级的产品管理,而不是反过来——这是我的判断。所以我们姑且把这称为广义上的 PLG。另外我认为产品管理本身还在持续增长。这对你来说显然是好事,Lenny,因为每个人都需要学会怎么做这件事。
这是一门整合性的艺术,存在于构建软件的过程中,而软件正在渗透整个世界。在这本书里,我想写得非常实操。把这两件事做好的关键是什么?目前最好的书名候选——我最初的书名是 Building Rocket Ships。就是关于如何系统地思考构建一家真正成功的软件公司所需要的一切?思考实践层面,思考商业层面,把这两者融合在一起。很多人喜欢这个书名。但收到的建议差异非常大,所以我想再征集一轮,提供更多选项,然后才能最终敲定书名,所以目前还是待定。
Lenny: 好的,我很期待你最终的决定。那我们花点时间聊聊 PLG 吧。我觉得这是你作为产品领导者最核心的领域。你曾在一些最成功的 PLG 公司工作过,而且我认为你对什么有效、什么无效有着一些最独到的见解。我看到你分享了书中内容的预览,其中有几处关于 PLG 的内容我觉得非常有意思,是我在其他地方没见过的。所以我想深入聊聊——
Oji Udezue: 好的。
从”尖锐问题”出发
Lenny: 第一点是你关于 PLG 问题应该从哪里开始、如何聚焦的框架。你把它描述为从一个”尖锐问题”(sharp problem)开始。能谈谈这是什么意思吗?
Oji Udezue: 好的,我在试着把一些线索串联起来。尖锐问题和那个象限框架有点关系,就是你要选择解决什么问题。我认为,如果你真正解决了这个问题,问题本身对成功有预测力。这和”我有一个点子”是不同的。我认为很多创新可以来自灵感,但最好的灵感来自对客户和他们问题的理解。所以我对创始人的建议是:选择一个你的客户切实感受到的问题——那些偷走他们时间、精力、金钱、专注力的痛点,那些让他们无力享受闲暇的痛点。如果你能解决这类问题——当然我知道这范围很广,因为它需要洞察力。最优秀的创始人往往是那些亲身感受过某个问题、理解它、知道它有多难、并且意识到可能有五十亿、一百亿、两百亿人也感受到这个问题,而他们想要解决的正是这个问题——而不是”我感受到一个问题,但只有十万人关心”。后一种情况下,除非你能向每个人收取成千上万美元,否则可能就没那么强烈。
所以要选这类问题。如果你脑子里有这样的叙事:如果你真的解决了这个问题,人们会愿意掏钱——这就是我希望人们去寻找的。我们太多人只是有一个尖锐的点子。说实话,我曾经在一个非尖锐问题上创过业,我知道那种感觉。同时我也在解决尖锐问题的公司工作过,知道那是什么感觉——那是一个巨大的顺风。事实上,当你处理尖锐问题时,你很难失败,因为即使你犯了错,客户的痴迷会支撑你。但如果你处理的东西不是尖锐问题,错误可能会致命,因为本质上你不得不在营销上花很多钱,不得不在口碑传播上花很多钱。而当人们手头紧的时候,他们就不在乎了——比如经济衰退的时候。
Lenny: 回到你刚才提到的,关于痛点需要达到多大程度人们才会真正在意,或者说相对于现状需要解决多大的痛点——我觉得这是这个概念中非常重要的一环。我想大多数创始人会说,“对,我需要解决一个问题。“但通常这个痛感不够强,或者解决方案带来的改善不够大。你能不能举一个例子,某个你亲身经历或见过的案例——一个”有点尖锐但不够尖锐”的问题,结果人们并不在意。可以是一家公司或你指导过的创业项目。
Oji Udezue: 我不想树敌,因为我认识很多创始人。不过这里有一个——不知道你还记不记得疫情期间,有一个创业工作室,好像是 Evernote 的前联合创始人之一做了一个产品叫 mmhmm camera,还记得吗?
Lenny: 哦对,当然记得。那个视频很棒。
Oji Udezue: 挺好玩的,但我不认为这是一个尖锐问题。它好玩,但它没有改变你的 Zoom 摄像头的世界,也没有改变你协作的方式。所以我认为对大多数人来说,那就是一个非尖锐问题的例子。
Lenny: 凭你的经验,有哪些迹象表明问题足够尖锐?你刚才提到了它会偷走时间、精力、金钱、专注力。还有哪些信号能让你判断这个问题足够尖锐?
Oji Udezue: 我觉得有两种思路。如果你是身处一线的创始人,找到尖锐问题最简单的方法是:画出你的目标客户当前大致的平均工作流——至少是你认为的目标客户——然后画出他们使用了你的软件之后的工作流,看看缩短了多少,是还是不是。然后试着去度量那些线条。如果你把它们画成水平线,试着量一量,看看是否明显缩短了。如果是缩短了两倍、三倍——假设是在获得客户之前的阶段——这是最好的精确定位方法。获得客户之后,你应该和那些最热情的用户交谈,梳理他们的工作流和工作流的变化,然后试着量化。我认为这就是你判断一个问题是否尖锐的方法。
在创业超早期阶段我们还会谈到另一个东西,我称之为”眼白效应”。当你把一个问题分享给一个工作流会因此受影响的人——我大量使用”工作流”这个词,因为我现在不再用规格说明或用例了,我认为工作流才是生产力的基本单位。当你看到人们的眼睛睁大,露出更多眼白的时候,你可能就找到了什么。这还不够充分,这不是工作流层面的东西,而是一种兴奋感。但当你在为别人解决一个非常尖锐的问题时,人们往往会有这种反应。然后人们会自发地提起钱——“什么时候可以付款?""什么时候能用上?“——这类反应会给你信号。
Lenny: 关于”露出更多眼白”这个说法,我太喜欢了。我听到过另外两种类似的描述:一种是你看到他们的瞳孔放大,然后就说”哇,我现在就需要这个。“另一种是有人描述说,你会看到他们在你说话时不停地点头,“哦,我懂了,我懂了。“然后说”好吧,我们公司需要这个。“
客户发现与客户倾听的区别
Oji Udezue: 我对那些信号已经有点不太感冒了,因为有时候那只是一种兴奋,只是噪音。所以我前面说的那些关于工作流压缩或能力膨胀的东西,我觉得更可靠——这些全都是围绕客户研究和客户对话展开的。这才是我认为应该聚焦的地方。说到底,我说的这些都是从自己犯过的错误中总结出来的。所以我觉得这些都是伤疤,而我把这些伤疤倾注到了这本书里。
Lenny: 说到和客户交谈,你在书中的另一个重要议题是关于持续客户发现(continuous customer discovery)。我很好奇,在你看来,真正落地做这件事的有效方式是什么。很多人都在说要持续和客户对话、不断获取反馈,但根据你的经验,什么才真正有效?
Oji Udezue: 我觉得如今整个产品管理领域都在谈发现。每个人都在谈,而我想做一个区分。我认为”发现”是指你利用客户对话来理解一个非常具体的东西——一个你想要进一步优化的工作流。然后你找到最可能受到影响的人,用各种研究策略去和他们交谈。还有一个变体,我称之为”持续对话”,也就是 Calendly 加 Typeform 的模式,而且我们会越来越多地这样做。你应该把它组织成这样:让你的产品经理、设计师、工程经理和产品营销经理默认状态下就在持续和客户对话。也就是说,客户对话每周自动出现在他们的日历上,不需要他们主动参与。然后你还要对他们进行如何开展对话的培训,因为客户发现之死,就是摩擦。如果你让个人自己去推动客户发现,他们是不会做的。
这是创新型企业中最先消亡的东西,因为要持续地找到对的客户——不是随便哪个客户,而是持续地从正确的客户列表中找到对的人——这非常困难。但还有第三件事我想谈谈,那就是”客户倾听”。事实上,我十月份会在 Industry 产品经理大会上谈这个话题。客户倾听是不同的东西,它不完全是发现。它是对持续不断产生的客户信号的收集。人们在社交媒体上发言,人们在应用商店和 G2 Crowd 上评论。如果你有设置了埋点的流失调查,人们在说话。如果你做了 NPS,人们不仅给你打分,还会留下逐字反馈。如果你有缺陷报告——我们在 Atlassian 就有——人们会提交缺陷,开发者最爱提交缺陷了,所以当然我们对这个受众群体有这个渠道。然后你去看 Zendesk 和客户支持,人们要么一直在说同一件事,要么在说一堆不同的事,你可以看到频率分布。当然在 Salesforce 里,你有赢单记录。这些都是不管你做什么都在发生的事情。不管你有没有在听,这些信号都在产生。产品管理的一个宏大而艰巨的目标,就是能够高效地处理这些信号。我们在 Calendly 是用一种特定方式做到的——我通过工作流和 Slack 搭建了一套系统,然后让团队成员去分拣处理这些东西。如果你能做到这一点——在 Industry 大会上我也会讲一些具体方法——这其实不完全是发现,但它至关重要。我们的工作是让客户愉悦与商业雄心融为一体。在发现之外,你还在倾听,并且理解从客户愉悦的角度来看什么才是重要的——这感觉是必不可少的。我认为我们当中没多少人在这方面做得很好。我每到一个地方都试图做这件事——Twitter、Atlassian、Calendly,现在在 Typeform。但这仍然是整个行业可以做得更好的地方。
Lenny: 这让我想起 Teresa Torres 关于持续客户发现的那套建议。她有一个非常实用的战术,我分享在这里,一直让我印象深刻,关于怎么真正落地这件事。她建议公司的做法是:在网站上放一个弹窗,问访客”我们很想和你聊聊,听听你对我们产品的反馈”,然后直接链接到 Calendly 预约会议,这样对话就会自动出现在日历上。
Oji Udezue: 对,我们在 Calendly 就是这么做的。但我要补充几点注意事项。我们在社区里做了这件事——我们有 community.calendly.com——我们清楚这是一个自选择的群体。但和他们交谈仍然很重要,因为他们仍然具有代表性。当然你也应该在产品内部做这件事。这个方法的挑战始终是:你找到的是对的客户吗?它的利弊在于——和一个客户谈话是没有意义的,和一百个谈话则非常有用。所以挑战在于你是否瞄准了正确的人。
所以在前端做一些智能化处理——对谁展示、为什么展示——让对的人来参与,这很有价值。顺便说一下,这个方法对增长特别有效,因为如果人们没有激活或者已经流失,他们是不想和你说话的。但如果你能在他们的激活或转化旅程中呈现这个东西,他们可能真的会和你聊。这是非常关键的。所以我百分之百同意 Teresa 的做法——这正是你应该做的,我甚至不把它叫做发现,更准确说是倾听,当然其中也包含一些发现的成分。我认为这正是你应该做的。
引导新客户与 PLG 的关系
Lenny: 说着说着我意识到,你参与构建的产品我大部分都在用。我经常上 Twitter,经常用 Calendly,Typeform 是我默认的调查工具。
Oji Udezue: 我注意到了,我的团队看到你在用 Typeform 非常兴奋。
Lenny: Oji,你在这么多方面影响了我的生活。
Oji Udezue: 我觉得你欠我钱,Lenny——
Lenny: 你需要什么?多少?把你的 Venmo 二维码发给我。
(广告段落已跳过)
Lenny: 回到正题。你在写的这本书里另一个重要部分是关于引导新客户(onboarding)。我在这个播客里经常谈到引导新客户的力量——它对留存的影响有多大,以及它在产品最终成功和客户使用体验中扮演着多么关键的角色。所以我很想听听你的建议——你认为什么是最重要的,为什么引导新客户在 PLG 中如此关键,以及你发现哪些战术真正有效?
引导新客户的本质
Oji Udezue: 我先说几个基本原则。引导新客户本质上是对销售团队和客户管理团队的替代——面向的是数以百万计的客户。核心任务在于:如何让它尽可能接近人类的体验——像人类一样友好、平易近人?因为如果能做到这一点,你就能非常快速地处理成千上万的客户。引导新客户本质上是一项理解买家心态、评估者心态的练习,仅此而已。这意味着,理解这件事所属的学科领域是社会心理学,而不是产品本身,而是生物心理学。你猜谁在这方面最擅长?是线下零售行业的人。那些负责货架陈列的人,那些负责线上库存管理的人,等等。他们在这方面极其出色。我之所以这么说,是为了引导那些正在摸索的人——首先,要真正找到引导新客户设计灵感的正确来源。
如果你这样去理解引导过程——人们完全不了解你,然后在逐步深入的体验中建立起信心,认为你就是最佳工具——那么你就必须把这个旅程拆解开来:一个普通人的心理过程是怎样的?你如何在每个环节提供帮助?第一步是理解价值主张;第二步是判断它是否足够简单、能否提供足够的价值;第三步是试用摸索;第四步是做出决定——这就是我要继续使用的东西。你的引导流程如何覆盖所有这些环节?我认为引导分为两个部分。一个是必须的——基础设置,它必须精简。我尽量控制在不超过三个页面,核心在于如何说明产品功能,并提供客户成功所必需的基础设置。
比如在 Calendly,我们让用户连接日历并设置一些默认值。工作时间是朝九晚五还是其他?这两件事就奠定了后续所有成功的基础。如果我们把其中任何一项设为可选项,就会有更多人失败。所以它是信息收集加上必要的基础设置,而且应该尽可能简短。然后还有另一整套内容,应该是可选的——因为它们不是每个人成功所必需的,但如果用户有好奇心,会从中受益。同时,这些内容可以做成随机访问的形式——用户随时可以在需要帮助时回来查看。所以如果你把引导分成这两部分,然后想清楚哪些放在必选部分、哪些放在可选部分,我认为你就能做得相当成功。而这只是我在书中探讨内容的冰山一角。
Lenny: 有没有哪些引导新客户方面特别成功的大案例——在转化率或激活方面效果显著、让你印象深刻的?
Oji Udezue: 我觉得”保持简短”就是一个重大胜利。所有人必须经过的核心步骤越少越好。那些点击这里、点击那里、以及各种引导流程的效果其实并不明确——
Lenny: 就是那些向导式的流程。
Oji Udezue: 对。根据我的经验,向导式流程的收益是有限的。与其如此,不如在完成必要引导后,直接引导用户去做那一件他们最需要做的事。提供示例——不是十个,而是一两个”成功样子”的范例——特别有效,因为它是模仿性的。人们一看,哦,原来这就是我要达到的目标,这非常有力。关于试用和转化,要让用户清楚地知道自己在试用周期中的位置——你希望他们现在付费,还是七天后才需要付费。让他们非常清楚地了解自己的处境,而不是感觉完全茫然,我认为这对转化率非常重要。
我认为这类要点还有一些,但我也想说,每个产品的情况不同。根据你在矩阵中的位置、增强程度、解决问题的程度,以及问题的尖锐程度,你可能需要调整自己的方法。这类事情有一些基本原则,但不一定是放之四海而皆准的。事实上,在 Typeform,我们正在尝试为免费增值模式发明一种新的变体,就是因为我们观察到了一些特定客户群体的独特需求。所以这些都是我在经历不同产品时的新收获。
激活里程碑
Lenny: 顺着引导新客户、激活用户这个话题——激活用户确实非常重要。我很好奇,你在 Calendly、Twitter 或 Typeform 有没有一个具体的激活里程碑的例子?让大家感受一下,什么是一个好的”已激活用户”里程碑。
Oji Udezue: 我觉得这要回到那些工具——Pendo、Amplitude 之类的产品。你必须认真梳理用户的 aha 旅程。在 Calendly 和 Typeform,我们都设有三个逐级递进的激活阈值。我们要做的就是确保尽可能多的人通过每一级。坦率地说,我们还要弄清楚各级激活定义之间的流失情况。在 Calendly,我们希望你创建了第一个会议链接。但如果你在一周内创建了五个,那就强得多了。在 Typeform,核心是你是否发布了表单,是否收到了回复,以及你是否去洞察页面查看了这些回复的含义。
在 Twitter,就是你是否关注了任何人,或者是否有人关注你。因为”关注”这个动作是你构建非正式社区的方式。记住我之前说的——Twitter 是为那些想要围绕某个话题建立非正式社区的人服务的……Facebook 解决的是”你认识谁”,Twitter 解决的是”你想认识谁”——谁和你对同样的事物充满热情?如果你根本没有建立自己的关注关系图,你就不可能真正激活。这个产品对你来说不会有吸引力。
Lenny: 这些例子太好了。有趣的是,脱离上下文来听 Twitter 的激活里程碑,听起来特别令人毛骨悚然——“你有没有关注任何人?有没有人在关注你?”
Oji Udezue: 是的,因为很多人进去之后就对着虚空发推文,或者觉得自己没有声音。但这其实不是最重要的。最重要的是——你是否在获得你感兴趣的内容,让你想回来看到更多?而”关注”就是实现这一目标的关键组成部分。
网络效应
Lenny: 确实。说到 Twitter,我不知道这个话题能引到哪里,但它真的很疯狂——无论周围发生多少破坏、员工……
Oji Udezue: 哦,你想让我谈谈这个?因为我很想聊这个。
Lenny: 请吧,来聊聊。
Oji Udezue: 有一件事……我不想说”他们”,有一件我很早就学到的东西是网络效应。
Lenny: 嗯。
Oji Udezue: 网络效应,让我定义一下。网络效应是指:当其他人加入网络时,你为被动成员创造了价值。我一个人什么都没做,在家里闲着,但有一个人加入了网络,我立刻就能获益。想想 Facebook。如果 Facebook 上有八十亿人,意味着我突然可以触达这个星球上的所有人。所以 Facebook 上的人越多,无论我自己付出多少努力,它对我来说就越有价值。这就是网络效应。如果我使用 Word——微软的 word processor——使用那种文件格式的人越多,就意味着我能读取的 Word 文档越多。
网络效应的强大生命力
Oji Udezue: 我什么都没做,所以随着越来越多人使用 Word,我就获得了好处。网络效应,就是这样。Twitter 也是如此。然后这里有一个关于临界质量的心智模型——网络效应的核心就是临界质量。你达到一个临界质量,有时候这个临界值并没有严格的数学定义,然后你就实现了网络效应,因为人们想来的原因是已经有很多人在那里了。所以 Twitter 达到了临界质量,你最喜欢的许多社交网络也是如此。网络效应本身就是一种特性,而且是最强大的特性。说明网络效应力量的一个好例子是,Twitter 并没有因为 Threads 的出现而死掉——这就是网络效应的力量。事实上,最后一封电报是在 2016 年发出的,距离它被发明已经超过一百年,正是因为网络效应。它必须被人为地关闭。
我相信 Friendster 现在还活着,所以我们必须清楚地认识到,杀死一个网络效应业务真的非常困难。那么,如果你真的要杀死它,怎么做呢?任何社交网络的收入端都是脆弱的、可以被攻击的。比如,如果广告主离开了 Twitter,他们并不是真的消失了——因为网络效应同样作用于他们,他们想去有眼球的地方。但如果出于某种原因他们消失了,虽然人们还会继续来,但用来改善网络的资金就会消失。那就是一个负面螺旋。这是非常非常难被杀死的业务——要杀死一个已经达到网络效应的软件很难,尽管你确实可以杀死那些已经达到网络效应的公司。
Lenny: 这是一个非常重要且有趣的洞察。我觉得关于 Twitter 尤其有趣的是,Elon 和团队几乎去掉了 Twitter 其他的所有优势——品牌,没了;员工,砍掉了 80%。每一部分都在被削减,唯独保留了网络效应,所以它成为了一个非常好的案例研究。Dan Hockenmaier 发推说过这件事,他之前也上过我的节目,说的正是这就是一个很好的案例,展示了纯粹的网络效应的力量。
Oji Udezue: 没错。我在伯克利商学院上了一门非常有趣的课,讨论科技公司等等,这就是一个关于网络效应的完美案例研究。是我见过的最好的。非常惊人。
Lenny: 是的,太疯狂了——Threads 居然没能迅速达到那个水平,跟最初给人的感觉完全不同。
Oji Udezue: 我相信 Threads 会成功。再说一次,它只是对广告主来说多了一个选择——了解 Facebook 广告市场的人都知道,它比 Twitter 广告市场更容易触达。所以我认为 Threads 获胜的方式将是收入螺旋,而非纯粹的活动螺旋。
Lenny: 有意思。也就是说,他们本质上找到了一种方式,即使在基数更低的情况下也能产生收入,从而吸引广告主,进而推动更多投入。
Oji Udezue: 没错,没错,没错。
病毒式传播力的本质
Lenny: 好,这个故事继续看下去会很有趣。沿着类似的思路,我想聊一聊病毒式传播力。你做过一些在 B2C 领域具有病毒式传播力的产品,Twitter 就是一个例子,同时在 B2B 领域也有,这非常罕见也非常有趣。我知道提升病毒式传播力没有什么银弹,但每个人都在想,怎么才能提高我产品的病毒式传播力?所以我很好奇,你能否分享一些你见过确实有效的策略或方法,特别是针对 B2B 产品提升病毒式传播力的?
Oji Udezue: 嗯,按照我的风格,我想先让大家理解病毒式传播力到底是什么,因为我觉得人们对它存在误解。人们以为病毒式传播力就是 Hotmail 底部那种标签,写着”注册一个免费账号”。病毒式传播力真正的含义是产品的口碑质量非常高。这才是它的本质。让我换一种说法——就是当客户在为你营销产品的时候。这极其强大,但同时也极其具有可操作性,如果这个说法成立的话。有些产品试图仅仅追求我所说的”人工病毒式传播”,结果失败了。因为最终,如果你靠人工手段实现了病毒式传播,但人们到了产品面前发现它很糟糕,那就完了。这就是终点。即使拿 Hotmail 来说,人们谈论它的病毒式标签——你知道我在说什么吗?
Lenny: 当然,底部的那个标签,是的。
Oji Udezue: 但请记住,不仅仅是那个。它是最早的 webmail 之一。而 webmail 是革命性的,因为你不再需要 POP3 客户端,也不会在多个设备之间丢失邮件。它在当时解决了很多关于电子邮件的、真正困扰客户的痛点。所以当人们通过免费账号来到产品面前时,他们的反应是:天哪,这太棒了。然后就自然而然地传播开了。Uber 没有任何奇怪的病毒式传播陷阱,但它把叫出租车的整个工作流压缩到了极致,以至于它本身就具有病毒式传播力。事实上,曾经有一段时间 Austin 把 Uber 赶了出去,其他应用填补了空缺,然后一年后 Uber 回来了,直接碾压了所有人。没有什么营销活动,纯粹是自发传播。这就是病毒式传播力。所以接下来的问题是,怎么提升它?
从根本上说,打造一个伟大的产品,解决一个尖锐问题,并且把它做得非常好。如果你做到了这一点,这就是病毒式传播力的基石。如果你做不到这一点,没有任何病毒式传播策略能够持续奏效。它会衰退。但如果你做到了,你就可以叠加人工病毒式传播策略——推荐策略、召回策略、引导创建账号的策略。记住,在 Calendly 之前,有 Acuity Scheduling,还有其他产品。区别在于 Calendly 做得太好了——对排程方来说如此简单,如此尊重排程方的时间,而不仅仅是创建者的时间,所以病毒式传播力才能奏效。它对那些做得很差的产品是不起作用的。Xted AI 和其他那些地方,它们做得不够好。你必须足够好才能实现病毒式传播。
Lenny: 这是一个非常重要的洞察。每个人都看着 Calendly 说,你当然在跟所有人分享日历,它肯定会病毒式传播的。多么酷的技巧。但你的观点如此有趣——之前有过类似的版本,但产品本身不够好。体验不够好。太复杂了,不好用,而这正是让 Calendly 如此具有病毒式传播力的原因。
Oji Udezue: 是的,我认为有几个因素会影响病毒式传播力。但我觉得这是人们需要记住的核心要点,它是所有因素的基础。客户支持实际上会影响病毒式传播力。如果你有极其出色的客户支持,人们会爱上它。病毒式传播策略,比如那个写着”注册一个账号”的页面等等,所有那些签署文档的、Calendly 之类的东西。网络效应,就像 Calendly 有那些绿色的圆点——如果你和另一个人都有 Calendly,它会告诉你们什么时候有空——这些都是网络效应。真正高质量的执行、人工病毒式传播,所有这些都构成了净病毒式传播力。但根本的基础正是我们刚才讨论的。
Lenny: 就是得把每件事都做对。没什么大不了的。
Oji Udezue: 说真的,如果你想实现病毒式传播,就打造最好的产品。Slack 甚至都不具有病毒式传播力,它没有任何人工病毒式传播。Slack 在很长一段时间里甚至无法跨组织连接。为什么呢?你可能在一栋楼的四楼用着 Slack,而三楼的人完全不知道。没有任何方式分享给他们。但是当你去吃午饭时会发生什么呢?人们会说:“我们用了 Slack,这东西太棒了。“然后三楼的人会说:“天哪,我们什么时候能弄到?“砰砰砰,就传开了。伟大的产品本身就是病毒式传播力。
客户增强营销
Lenny: Seth Godin 有一句话我总是反复想起:如果你想让产品变得 remarkable,就得让它成为人们愿意议论的东西,而这本质上就是口碑的核心。
Oji Udezue: 对对对。
Lenny: 我看过你就这个话题做的一次演讲,你提到了一个很棒的说法,虽然之前已经稍微触及,但我觉得特别好,想确保我们把它重点突出一下——病毒式传播力就是客户增强营销(customer augmented marketing)。
Oji Udezue: 对,我觉得这恰恰是我最开始提出的概念。它的意思是,你的营销本质上是由客户来完成的,因为这样做能让你在营销上的投入更少。你可以把省下来的钱用来提升营销水平,或者投入到产品中去。Atlassian 在营销上的支出比同等规模的竞争对手大概少 10 到 20 个百分点,因为它具有病毒式传播力,而且到了现在还有网络效应的加持,比如 Jira。所以这就是客户增强营销。你的客户要么是在迫使其他人采用你的产品,要么是通过社交压力让对方不得不采用,要么是通过 FOMO 效应让对方赶紧采用。所以没错,病毒式传播力本质上就是以客户为导向的营销,它给了你更多选择。
Lenny: 我太喜欢这个说法了,以后我也要用。在进入非常令人期待的快问快答环节之前,我还有几个问题。这是两个比较随机的话题,我想和你聊聊。一个是你提出的”森林时间”这个概念。你写过一篇文章讨论森林时间的重要性。能不能描述一下它是什么,为什么这么重要,以及具体怎么做?
森林时间
Oji Udezue: 我目前是一名从业者,也就是说我在做产品、在公司上班。但我同时也做咨询和投资,这和做产品不同。做咨询的时候,我是从外部、从上方来看的,我有鸟瞰视角,可以说:“你知道,这个行得通,这个行不通。你做了什么?能让我看看结果吗?“然后根据你看到的和我看到的情况来调整建议。做产品的时候,我在搭建团队、招人、管理各种事务——Alina,向你致敬,虽然有时候挺烦人的。这就是我做的事情。当你在做产品时,你会陷入一种拉锯战,强度大到你没有余力持续保持鸟瞰视角。
森林时间的理念就是,你要在每周、每月中留出时间来,跳出树木看到整片森林。大部分时候做产品,你看到的只是眼前的那棵树——也就是你面前的问题。但有时候你需要看到整片森林,这样你才能发现一条与你当前推进的路线不同的替代路径。所以这是一种抽身而退的时间,获得鸟瞰视角,看清全局,看到解决当前困境的其他可能的路径。我认为这件事必须非常有意识地去做。所谓有意识,就是我已经发布了一套工作流,一份文档,帮助你完成这种视角的跃升。
比如,当前有哪些问题?有哪些我没想到的替代解决方案?诸如此类。我也会为我的管理团队创造森林时间,因为不只是我一个人面临这个问题,几乎所有管理者都是如此。事实上,大多数产品经理都是如此,因为产品经理影响力太大,他们处于产品创造和产品开发这个轮子的轴心位置,所以我们的工作节奏就像一条正弦波:一会儿在发现和定义问题,一会儿又在指挥和带领执行。周而复始,会议无穷无尽。所以你必须为自己创造森林时间,创造抽身的时间。如果不这样做,你的效率会随时间推移越来越低,这就是一种消耗。
Lenny: 为了让大家更具体地理解,森林时间的形式是什么样的?是休假吗?是在业余时间做咨询吗?还是——
Oji Udezue: 是在每个月末给自己放一天假,完整的一天或两天。而且不是只去打高尔夫——当然打高尔夫也行——而是用一套工作流、一张工作表来专门审视全局。有时候管理者会说:“等等,你让人们本该更努力工作的时候给他们放假?“我觉得这完全值得。这不是更努力工作的问题,而是更聪明地工作。是看到比你目前看到的更多的选择。所以我非常愿意给产品经理、产品高管、设计高管或工程高管这样的时间。
因为我认为,如果他们正确地利用这段时间,长远来看我们的执行力会更好。这么说吧,在产品开发中,我们大约花 10% 的时间在瞄准方向,其余时间在执行和构建。这只是我们所做工作的一部分。如果你的瞄准出了偏差,那你就在错误地花费一两百万美元的人力成本。所以森林时间应该提升你的瞄准精度。这正是它的全部意义所在,因为瞄准是一笔巨额投资的前提。所以我认为这非常值得。
Lenny: 我太喜欢这个概念了。所以你具体对团队的做法是,每个月给他们一天时间,用你整理的那张工作表来做这件事?
Oji Udezue: 是的。
Lenny: 那个工作表就在你写的那篇文章里,对吧?
Oji Udezue: 对,没错。
Lenny: 太棒了。非常好的实操建议,我很喜欢。好,在非常令人期待的快问快答之前还有最后一个问题。你曾在 Bridgewater Associates 工作过,这是我深挖你的背景时才知道的——听着有点吓人。Bridgewater Associates 因为什么而闻名?Ray Dalio 的对冲基金,《原则》等伟大著作的作者,而且那里的工作环境非常独特。所以我想问问你在那里的经历,尤其是那里最疯狂的事情之一,好像叫 dots 之类的,就是人们会在公司里公开指出别人犯的错误。实际情况是这样的吗?有什么印象吗?
桥水基金的经历
Oji Udezue: 对对对。我当时是高级管理层,叫做 SMA,也就是 Ray 团队之下的那一层管理层。我们算是 Bridgewater 教会的祭司。Bridgewater 做的事情比如录音——这些都是公开信息,我没有泄露任何——
Lenny: 对,他在书里写过——
Oji Udezue: 每次会议都录音。后来我们开发了一个 dot collector,可以让你实时对他人进行评分。比如我正在和你对话,在会议结束之前,当着彼此的面,我打开笔记本电脑,对你和这次互动进行评分。理论上,这个理念是如果你在数百次互动中持续对人们进行评分,就能建立起一个相当准确的、统计学意义上的人物画像,这种准确性会超越个人情感关系的影响——这就是群体智慧的思想。这是理论。在实践中,它在情感上非常令人疲惫。而且正如你所说,确实有点吓人,就连录音也是。
关于 Bridgewater 的反思
Oji Udezue: 所以我认为 Bridgewater 有些东西,我在理智上理解瑞·达利欧设计它们的目的,但实际效果并不太好。我的看法是,这些原则的理论确实非常好,但实践和执行可能偏差很大,不够人性化,也不够有同理心。但我要说的是,Bridgewater 教会了我一些我认为世界上没有任何其他组织能教会我的东西。一个例子是,Bridgewater 从三个维度看待人:技能、属性和价值观。大多数组织只从技能的角度看待人。但人有属性和价值观——有人胆怯,有人大胆,有人喜欢冲锋在前,有人喜欢退居幕后,这些关于性格和倾向的东西是客观存在的。Bridgewater 试图建立和衡量这些维度,还试图在职位描述中写明:“这是我们在寻找的属性类型”,而不仅仅是”我们在寻找的技能”。当然还有价值观——你是不是一个有原则的人?诸如此类。这种从三个维度看待人才乃至人的方式,无论是在职业生活中还是个人生活中,都是 Bridgewater 给我作为专业人士的一笔巨大财富。所以我想说,Bridgewater 有些让我不喜欢的地方,但也有一些我在其他任何地方都学不到的东西。
Lenny: 你有没有把这种方式带到你现在的日常工作中?用这三个不同的维度去看待人——
Oji: 百分之百。在职业生活中,在个人生活中,当我面试别人时,我都会关注这三个方面,并试图从中提取信息,因为我认为这能提高成功率。众所周知,Google 那些古怪的技能型面试只有百分之五十的预测准确率。原因在于,我认为 Google 没有考虑另外两个维度。Bridgewater 愿意承受百分之八十的淘汰率来筛选出最优秀的人。我不认为这对他们来说是成功的,因为他们的一部分体系缺乏对人的同理心——比如期望人像计算机一样运作。但我认为那是一个非常重要的洞察。
产品开发需要自己的抽象框架
Lenny: 太棒了。Oji,在我们进入非常精彩的闪电问答之前,还有什么想分享的吗?
Oji: 在产品开发的历史上,我们基本上已经开始创造各种抽象来指导我们的工作,不再是蛮荒的西部时代了。工程师们发明了敏捷、结对编程这些东西;设计师们发明了设计思维、设计冲刺,并结合研究来讨论如何进行不同复杂度的探索。那问题来了——产品的抽象是什么?因为这里有代码、有产品、有商业。那么产品和商业层,我们的抽象是什么?我们用来组织工作的熔炉是什么?
我们甚至连一个都没有。我们连一个名字都没有。而 part system 的理念就是,在敏捷和设计思维之上还有一个抽象层,我们需要关注它,才能构建稳固的组织,才能在产品和商业层执行到位。这是我与 Ezinne 共同创建的框架。核心思想是:你如何构建一个好的产品系统?实际上,你可以把它简化为一份清单,列出构建一个真正优秀的、凝聚力强的研发组织所需要的系统。这就是铺垫。我要让大家保持一点渴求感,因为之后可能会有其他人深入展开这个话题。
Lenny: 太棒了。你提到的这位与你共同创建这个框架的人是你的妻子,而且我们将来会在播客上邀请她。
Oji: 没错。
Lenny: 和另一位产品负责人结婚是什么体验?你推荐吗?
Oji: 百分之百推荐,你可以进行非常高效的对话,甚至可以在一个晚上的闲聊中就把其他公司的应用重新设计一遍。
闪电问答
Lenny: 太厉害了。这差不多就是闪电问答的问题了,不过我提前把它放进来了。那么现在我们正式进入非常精彩的闪电问答环节。准备好了吗?
Oji: 准备好了,开始吧。
Lenny: 好,开始。你推荐最多给别人的两三本书是什么?
Oji: 有一本商业书我经常推荐,叫《光环效应》(The Halo Effect)。这本书基本上能帮你戳穿那些胡说八道的商业书籍。它教你如何解构一本商业或自助类书籍中什么是重要的,什么是不重要的,什么只是用随机事实和牵强证据编织的因果故事。这本书叫《光环效应》,去读吧。为什么要读?因为垃圾进,垃圾出。
大家当初对马尔科姆·格拉德威尔的《异类》(Outliers)惊叹不已,但十五年来人们一直在拆穿它。可所有人都照单全收,还以为那是最重要的东西。那么你怎么知道哪些该吸收,哪些不该?《光环效应》会帮你分辨。另外,我因为工作读得很多,所以休闲时会选科幻。有很多值得推荐的,但我认为大家应该读弗兰克·赫伯特的《沙丘》(Dune)或阿西莫夫的《基地》(Foundation)。如果你是科幻爱好者却还没读过这两部,真的应该去读。它们的世界构建令人叹为观止。我理解托尔金和奇幻类作品,但科幻领域就是这两本。
Lenny: 《基地》现在也有电视剧了,我绝对推荐。非常精美的一部剧。
Oji: 对,我还没看《基地》的剧。读完书之后再去看总觉得怪怪的。《沙丘》的电影我也只看了四分之三——第一部。不过我最终会看完的。我不指望影视剧能……原著实在太精彩了。如果你热爱文字,那些书简直令人叹为观止。但我最终会看完的。
Lenny: 我其实没读过《沙丘》原著,但电影太棒了。我玩过《沙丘》的电子游戏,整天就是在采矿采香料,那个画面永远刻在我脑子里了。好,下一个问题。你面试候选人时最喜欢问的问题是什么?
Oji: 我通常会问两个。感觉这样会给我面试的人一份”作弊小抄”。但我确实会问两个问题。我不是一个喜欢选”最爱”的人,所以我很难只挑一个。我会请候选人做自我介绍,我觉得这能告诉我很多——他们如何讲述自己,说了什么,内容是什么。然后我会问他们觉得自己真正擅长什么,以及觉得自己还需要学什么。后两个问题是关于他们的专业技能和手艺的。我觉得这能告诉我他们的沟通方式、思考的深度、他们引以为傲的东西,以及他们会主动展示什么。这些对我来说非常重要。
优化工作环境
Lenny: 你最近发现并喜欢的一款产品是什么?
Oji: 我最近一直在优化我的工作环境。我现在处于一种痴迷状态。我用 Windows,我以前在 Windows 产品管理团队工作过,现在还保留着我的 Windows 机器。但很多人在工作中用 Mac,我过去几年也一直在用 Mac。所以虽然我在两个系统之间切换,但花在 Mac 上的时间多得多,而我的 Windows 体验已经完全优化好了,堪称完美。但在 Mac 上,我觉得窗口管理很糟糕,有各种缺口和不顺手的地方。所以我一直在研究如何把我的 Mac 体验调校到位。
我讨厌活动监视器,太难用了。替代方案呢?声音方面也有问题——它不支持通过 HDMI 输出声音,或者其他什么奇怪的设置都不行。所以我一直在优化这些。在这个过程中,我特别喜欢的一款产品是 Unlocks。这是一个人的独立作品,它让我只要看向手机就能在走近时自动登录 Mac,走开时自动锁定。它还能检测我的距离,在我靠近时就开始登录流程。我觉得这太棒了,确实提升了我的生产力。
Lenny: 很酷。听起来你对 Mac 充满怨念啊。
Oji Udezue: 嗯,作为一个重度用户来说不是的,我觉得各有优劣。我已经不再从微软领工资了,所以 Windows 也有些我不喜欢的地方。但 Mac 同样也不是完美的。
Lenny: 确实如此。
人生信条
Lenny: 你在工作或生活中经常对自己重复、或者分享给他人的一句人生座右铭是什么?
Oji Udezue: 我近来常说的一句话是:我头脑之外的知识比头脑之内更多。这是对好奇心的一种呼唤。我个人有三个北极星——当然我说”个人”的时候也包括一切职业层面——那就是原创性、好奇心和智慧。所以这句”头脑之外的知识比头脑之内更多”,是对好奇心的呼唤,是对怀疑精神的呼唤,也是对自己所知保持谦逊的呼唤——无论你多大年纪,对周围的世界始终保持聆听的姿态。即使你已经了解某件事,也要让别人说完,因为他们可能会在你已知的 90% 之外再补充 10%。所以做一个积极倾听者非常重要。
Lenny: 说得太好了。
尼日利亚美食推荐
Lenny: 最后一个问题。你来自尼日利亚,你认为哪道尼日利亚美食是大家必须尽快找到并尝试的?
Oji Udezue: 我推荐两道,取决于你有多熟悉。如果你从来没吃过炸大蕉配牛肉炖菜——
Lenny: 天哪,听起来太棒了。
Oji Udezue: 那你应该放下手头的一切,放下工作,不管你在做什么,找到你身边的尼日利亚朋友去吃一顿。这是大多数尼日利亚人愿意用寿命来换取的美食。第二个推荐是,如果你想进入我们所说的 Nija 圈子,你得试试 pepper soup(辣汤)。
Lenny: 辣汤?
Oji Udezue: 如果你不吃辣,那很抱歉,这扇门对你关上了。但 pepper soup 真的……它太美妙了,会让你大汗淋漓,但非常美味,你应该试一试。
尾声
Lenny: Oji,我觉得我们解决了很多人的尖锐问题。非常感谢你抽出时间来这里。最后两个问题:大家想联系你的话在网上哪里能找到你?听众怎样才能帮到你?
Oji Udezue: 我有空的时候会在 Substack 上发文,欢迎大家去看看。内容通常是关于表象之下的事物,探究事物背后的本质。我也在 Twitter 上,可以关注我,我会聊产品相关的话题。帮助我的方式是:在 Twitter 上关注我,注册获取那本书的更新通知。如果你这样做了,我会从这个读者群体中征集书名、参与封面设计。这本书计划采用免费增值模式,因为我希望非洲、印度以及世界各地的人都能读到它。所以会有一个免费版本,也会有包含更多工具、更多辅助内容的付费版本,甚至可能包含你喜爱的杰出人物的访谈。希望通过付费版来资助免费版。所以来吧,加入这个行列,也许还可以参与预读、早期草稿的试读。这是你能帮助我的最好方式。所以这是对所有产品经理和所有心怀善意之人的号召。
Lenny: 太棒了。这个回答真好。我要去找点 pepper soup 和炸大蕉牛肉饭吃。非常感谢你的到来,我去找吃的了。
Oji Udezue: 好的。谢谢你,Lenny。非常愉快,很开心能聊天,祝你一切顺利。
Lenny: 大家再见。
感谢大家的收听。如果你觉得这期节目有价值,可以在 Apple Podcast、Spotify 或你喜欢的播客应用上订阅。也请考虑给我们评分或留言,这真的能帮助其他听众找到这个播客。你可以在 lennyspodcast.com 找到所有往期节目或了解更多关于节目的信息。下期再见。
术语表
| 原文 | 中文 |
|---|---|
| activation | 激活 |
| activation milestone | 激活里程碑 |
| aha journey | aha 旅程 |
| Asimov | 阿西莫夫 |
| Bridgewater Associates | Bridgewater Associates |
| calendaring | 日历管理 |
| conversion | 转化 |
| critical mass | 临界质量 |
| customer augmented marketing | 客户增强营销 |
| customer science | 客户科学 |
| dot collector | dot collector |
| drop-off | 流失 |
| Dune | 《沙丘》 |
| everyone workflows | 全员工作流 |
| Ezinne | Ezinne |
| fail fast | 快速失败 |
| follow graph | 关注关系图 |
| FOMO | FOMO |
| forest time | 森林时间 |
| Foundation | 《基地》 |
| FPNA | 财务规划与分析 |
| Frank Herbert | 弗兰克·赫伯特 |
| freemium | 免费增值 |
| high ni (high frequency niche) | 高利(高频利基) |
| ICP (ideal customer profile) | 理想客户画像(已在术语表中) |
| impedance match | 阻抗匹配 |
| lean approach | 精益方法 |
| Malcolm Gladwell | 马尔科姆·格拉德威尔 |
| martech | 营销技术 |
| mental models | 心智模型 |
| mimetic | 模仿性的 |
| negative spiral | 负面螺旋 |
| network effects | 网络效应 |
| niche workflows | 利基工作流 |
| Nija | Nija |
| onboarding | 引导新客户 |
| Outliers | 《异类》 |
| part system | part system |
| pepper soup | pepper soup(辣汤) |
| plantain | 大蕉 |
| POP3 client | POP3 客户端 |
| product frameworks | 产品框架 |
| product led growth | 产品驱动增长 |
| Ray Dalio | 瑞·达利欧 |
| revenue spiral | 收入螺旋 |
| sales tech | 销售技术 |
| scheduling | 排程 |
| Seth Godin | Seth Godin |
| sharp problem | 尖锐问题 |
| silver bullet | 银弹 |
| SMA (Senior Management Associate) | SMA |
| synthetic virality | 人工病毒式传播 |
| The Halo Effect | 《光环效应》 |
| Tolkien | 托尔金 |
| Unlocks | Unlocks |
| virality | 病毒式传播力 |
| webmail | webmail |
| whites of their eyes | 眼白效应 |
| wizards | 向导式流程 |
| word processor | 字处理软件 |
| workflow | 工作流 |
| writ large | 广义上的 |
| zone of benefit | 收益区间 |
此文档由 AI 分片翻译(translate_long_document)