Ezinne Udezue: belief

Transcript context

…It's absolutely my pleasure. You guys are a rare guest duo. You two are married, you're both longtime product leaders. You've been in product combined for over 50 years. The cool thing about the fact that you guys have been in product for so long is that you've seen a lot of change in the role of a PM and the role of building products. You've also seen what doesn't change. So let me actually start here and I'll throw this to Ezinne. What are you seeing changing most in the role and day-to-day job of a product manager? And what are you seeing staying the same? At a high level, the core value that a PM has to deliver hasn't changed. It really is de-risking the product delivery process while also really trying to maximize the value the business gets from these investments. But tactically, I think that the good thing is that we're finding out that PMs are freed up more. And as a result, they can actually invest more in developing true insights about their customer. So you're finding out your engineering leaders, engineering team, they're asking you to really confirm your insight and your instinct about the customer. The second thing I would say is that there's a need to orchestrate a little differently. So in the past, it was around people, orchestrating people, getting them into the room, et cetera. But now there are many moving pieces. There's the software, there are also the feedback loops, the LLMs that are the multiple touch points that you have in technology, and showing that those are also being built in a way that allows for true learning within your software. So that idea of working static software isn't true anymore. It's almost like living, breathing software. And ensuring that the things that allow it to breathe actually occur. Two other pieces, data literacy and understanding of what it is that your product is learning from. Where's the data going? And how is it being used, how is it being organized so that it could be leveraged for future insight about your product use and customer use? And then the last I would say is just creating the right guardrails within your product to ensure that it actually continues to do what it needs to do. We spoke earlier and I have a whole thing about ethics of AI, et cetera. And I think that we have a responsibility as product people, and I'm seeing PMs ask the questions that we didn't get to see them ask when we were building social media. So those are the current things I would say. I definitely want to come back to that topic. There's something you just talked about that connects so deeply with something a recent guest talked about. Asha Sharma, she's a chief vice president of Microsoft working in AI, and she had this concept that products are evolving from product as artifact where it's this done thing you ship, to a product as organism that continues to evolve based on data that it's feeding and this metabolism of data.…

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