Oji Udezue: prediction

Transcript context

…Let me throw over to Oji this first point you made, I love. This idea that PMs... There's more time spent almost at the top of the funnel, the top of the product development lifecycle, confirming insights from customer data, deciding what to build. There's talk recently of just PMs are almost becoming the bottleneck for teams because engineers are moving so much faster and PMs are the same, just like sitting or maybe docs are easier to write. What do you see there? What do you think about just this ratio shift potentially where PMs almost become a bottleneck with AI accelerating other functions? For the last 20 years, we've had very fixed ratios in terms of how work gets done. PM takes this amount of time, developers takes this amount of time, go-to-market takes this amount of time. And I think that contract is basically exploding because the build process, the closed solutionary process, the build process is accelerating so fast. A company we worked with told us that they're sort of like a build-contract-build company. They said they'll get off the phone from a pitch and in four hours they would have a prototype. And so the question is like, "What is a PM doing?" The person listening to that is half PM, half developer in order to be able to produce that. And so what we're seeing is that the way... PMs do three things, we think about what the customers want that is profitable, so working on sharp problems and dividing sharp problems and what's their customer's mind that makes it sharp. We support the solutioning and the build of it and then we don't do this enough, but we need to support the go-to market of it. And so what's happening is that this middle thing is becoming more capable and much faster. And so the way we support it has to change. PRD writing is insufficient at the moment. Sort of like the static way we ask questions about what's in the customer's minds, that stuff needs to be faster. The cycle time is so fast now. And so PMs need to adapt and that means new tool sets, new skill sets and so on and so forth. I think that's where the most pressure is. But at the same time, like Ezinne said, PMs can take some of the... If they adapt to this really well, they can spend a lot more time on here, right? And that's where there's a lot of opportunity. And the thing that we want PMs to do is not be the crouch, not worry about people saying, "Oh, you're the bottleneck." No, don't be the bottleneck first of all, but also since you see everything, add value in other places where traditionally I would spend time. I want to pull on this sharp problem thread. This is my favorite Oji meme. We talked about this a bit when you visited the podcast last. I think it's such a useful concept, so I just want to make sure people learn this while we're talking about it. Talk about what a sharp problem is and why that's important.…

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