Shaun Clowes: belief

Transcript context

…ftware at massive scale with no sales team, can it even be done? And so I learned a lot in my time at Atlassian. When I went to Metromile, I'm like, "Well, I've never built a consumer product before." I can say that I've actually built a product that's touched many millions of people because Jira has, so I felt pretty good about that, but I'd never built one that I could say, "Yep, a consumer, your average consumer can use this thing. It's so simple. Even my grandma can use it." I'd never built a product like that. So I got that experience at Metromile, which is really fun. I'd never worked inside an organization as big as Salesforce or an organization with as good a sales motion. You talked about distribution earlier. Salesforce is an absolutely insane distribution machine, just an incredible company with just an amazing distribution network and a fantastic marketing approach that it's like a PhD in marketing. When you spend your time at Salesforce, you're like, "This company is just one of a kind. It's a one of kind, and it's so outlandishly good at one specific thing." And so looking back, all of these jobs have been, when I say bingo card, I've just got an outlandish education in these areas that are not obvious at all. And once you've seen them, they're like superpowers. They're superpowers to be able to bring that same experience to bear on things. And so one thing that I really I'm trying to figure out is why often people don't do that. And oftentimes people stay in a very specific domain. They prefer to stay in a domain or they prefer to stay in a specific kind of type of company or a role that works in a certain way, like companies that have the same operating model or they plan the same way or they try to stay with things that are pretty similar. But it seems obvious that the most likely way to really grow is the opposite. It's to constantly be choosing things that are either outside that, not totally outside the lines. Don't jump out of a plane if you've never parachuted before. Obviously you want them to be in some way and adjacency, that you want them to have something in common with what you know, but you want them to stretch you and change you. I had a really transformative experience many, many years ago when I was at Atlassian and a guy called Tom Kennedy, he was our general counsel, so chief legal officer basically, and a lifelong lawyer, very smart guy. I liked him very, very much. But just a lawyer. Just a lawyer, corporate lawyer, corporate counsel, I'm sure you know what they're like. And really great guy. And I remember, so mostly in our meetings he didn't talk that much except about legal things. But I remember in one meeting we were having this vigorous debate about a product strategy question about what we should do. Should we go left or should we go right? And as usual, he's there and he's mostly just staying silent. ng we were having this vigorous debate about a product strategy question about what we should do. Should we go left or should we go right? And as usual, he's there and he's mostly just staying silent. And then eventually the conversation's been going on for 15 minutes and he is like, "Hey, everybody, a year ago we talked about X, Y and Z," and he proceeds to lay out our product strategy at that time, and he's like, "Just recently we said the following things, and that was a product strategy, whatever. Now you are saying this. Isn't it obvious that isn't this? What you guys are saying is not congruent with that, and if you really meant what you said back then we should be doing X." And again, the room went silent, everybody kind of turned to him, kind of nodded, and then everyone went, "Yeah, okay, I guess we probably should be doing it differently." And so the meeting stopped when the GCE randomly mentioned that he deeply understood our product strategy and he knew enough to be able to contribute in that way. And so the life-changing part for me about that was just this realization that if I'm going to be a really great professional, the type of professional I want to be is that type of person. The type of person who can contribute to the whole company in all sorts of ways, doesn't spend all of their time in everybody else's business, but understands the business and has the mental horsepower and the experience to be dangerous in all sorts of, and I mean, that in a compliment way. I don't mean that in a negative way, but to be dangerous in all sorts of situations. I think that when you have leaders like that behind you and with you, then you're just unstoppable. You're an unstoppable force in business when you have that motion happening. Wow, that was an awesome story and an awesome perspective. It's similar to the advice I always give PMs of people always wondering, "Should I go deep on a specific subject? Should I just try different things?" And I find just variety, especially earlier in your career is really powerful, not just to help you discover the thing you like, but also to your point, just using insights from all these different parts of the product and internal tools and trust and safety and platform and consumer product side and growth and just core stuff. The more of that you have, the stronger you get. And I feel like another benefit of your approach is if you work at just B2B SaaS companies, if you have too many of that on your resume, it's very hard to get hired a consumer company. And so just having it creates a huge optionality for you if you do, which you did.…

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