Shaun Clowes: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah, you collect them all. Yeah, I was working with somebody at Salesforce and he'd been there a long time, very, very, very successful person. Honestly didn't need to work anymore. And he said something that I found really useful. He's like, "Well, now I'm at the point of my life where I want to work at the intersection of things that I am good at and things that will be valuable to the company to do." So basically it feels like the reward of completing your Bingo card is actually to just get to spend more time doing things that are leverage, that you enjoy and that are high leverage. And so that seems like a good outcome to me. I don't think most people are going to work and hopefully have some sort of great financial outcome and then go, "Well, that's it. I'm picking up stumps, I'm retiring." I think for most people, achieving some sort of financial outcome or some sort of independence or whatever is really just another stage. At that point it will be, "Okay, well now what do I do? What do I do with my life?" And so that was why I said earlier that at the end of the day, product management is at times the worst job in the world and at times easily the best. And it's both and it can be both. And so it's hard for me to think about if I think about the things that are the intersection of what I'm good at and are valuable to the world, product management is a pretty fun one to do and it's different every day. So I think we're pretty privileged. For those of you who listen, I mean, obviously your podcast reaches a lot of product people. I think we're pretty privileged to be able to operate at that intersection, but it's not easy because you got to show value. It's a very complicated job to show value in and to demonstrate value to the world, and it's constantly being attacked, like you mentioned, but it's still amazing when it all goes right. When a product is very successful in the market, it's hard to describe the joy you get from that. Kind of along those lines to close out our conversation before a very exciting lightning round, I want to take us to failure corner. People listen to these podcast episodes and everyone's always just sharing all these wins, everything's always going great. The CPO of this, CPO of that, just moving on up and people will want to hear times when things didn't go right. Because those are stories people don't share as often. Can you share a story when something didn't go right, when you maybe had a failure in the course of your career? And if you learned something from that experience, what you learned.…

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