#0 - Introduction: PLG, Product Management, and the tech wars

[00:00:00] That's what excites me about joining companies that truly, for example, levels the uneven playing field and also taps into a problem that people can't solve themselves or need someone else to solve.

My name's Isabel, and this is your product Thinking Toolbox.

So why am I even having this podcast or why even have a podcast in the first place? So I've had this habit of reaching out to different people in different spaces, be it product, MarTech, e-commerce, product led growth, and it's been a big driver to my personal growth as well as career growth because it was, these conversations really highlight a lot of the blind spots that I didn't realize I've had, and it has essentially expanded my way of thinking. And I already have had a newsletter of writing down the different thought processes and mental models that it takes to expand my

[00:01:00] product thinking toolbox and. One for selfish reasons, I kind of want these conversations to be kept somewhere, recorded, somewhere for my own personal use and gain, so that can reference it in the future or just use it as a refresher.
But I also wanted to just share it with the world. Like I I, I love doing things, telling people, because I don't only believe that it's gonna be benefit myself, but also benefit you, whoever is listening out there and watching this as well. Because I think essentially all of us as people who are not only in product, but people who want to learn about how to build better products should be leveling up through talking to different conversations and making that those conversations accessible as well.
So what is this podcast? This podcast is going to be focused on highlighting various product led growth practices, which is something I'm very passionate about currently, and also just leaders in the space, leaders in

[00:02:00] different industries. I have had the privilege of working and talking to different, intelligent, incredible people that are way smarter than me, and I just wanted to share that with the world and share their talents as well, and give them a platform to be able to put their thoughts in their brain out there in the world.
You all must be wondering, who am I? Why do I care? And what am I doing here? I am currently a growth product manager at Unbounce. Unbounce is a CI platform, a conversion intelligence platform that enables marketers, be it from small marketers to agencies to create high performing landing pages quickly and effectively.
I've had about four to five years of experience in product, and I have been a product manager for a couple of large organizations like Shopify or Indigo. But I've also been in a scale up, for example, like Unbounce. Right now we are pivoting into a

[00:03:00] new market and that's also a very exciting space for me to be in.
And then I've also had startup experience, previously, especially talking to people. I've let Canada's largest student entrepreneurship conference for three years bringing in super dope people from all across the world. Into Ottawa to empower, inspire, and enable students to grow.
So I wanted to take this podcast to combine all my learnings to help companies establish best product practices, as well as learn from inspiring leaders in the industry.
Maybe let's kick off this introduction episode to talk through what is exciting about product right now. Why is it crucial to join product right now? And what excites me about product right now? We're in a space where product used to be so new that we used to be almost entangled into project management.
We used to

[00:04:00] also be the drivers of initiatives like. Big feature releases. Why are we building a feature? And then leaning into scaling that feature and making it profitable, obviously for the business and a money driver for the business. And now we're seeing this new emergence of companies really focusing on product led growth.
And what exactly is product led growth? It's when a product is a natural driver of sales, of marketing, of leads. The company's not as focused on, in general recruiting and selling to customers, but letting the product speak for itself. For example, a lot of, a lot of people use Calendly Slack as an example of product led companies
Because they are such great, useful products that solving a fundamental pain point for customers, it ends up being a natural

[00:05:00] driver of these basically, profitable businesses. And this causes it habit loop. It causes stickiness in customers wanting to come back, and it also causes customers to want to have more people join the product and expand their use of the product because the product will only succeed if they have more and more people that they're collaborating with, which is such a cool space.

it's letting the software and the tech speak for itself in. So that's one of the things that really excites me about product. Like why now? Product managers are now able to really take a look at what is the viability of the business as a whole, what are the gaps in specific metrics to drive in a business?

And then being able to really look at the market, look at existing needs of the customers, and being able to work with different people all across the business to drive that metric, to drive that specific revenue driver. I said drive a lot in that sentence . Um, and that's what

[00:06:00] excites me about product and why I even joined product management in the first place.

Let's spend the introduction episode talking about what I think is the product manager's greatest enemy, and that is the fancy tech wars.

When we think about AI, blockchain web three, sometimes it makes me cringe. Unbounce, for example. We are utilizing AI and machine learning to take all of our conversion data and really help marketers level up. But whenever I say we're a conversion intelligence platform or an AI platform, it makes me cringe a little because I think there's such a connotation of that buzziness that comes with this new tech..

And it can kind of be the downfall of any product manager. For example, recently in Singapore I saw an an advertisement for an AI powered search company. I was so confused, like, so what if it uses ai? How does it differentiate itself from

[00:07:00] Google, which uses complex AI to determine how content gets rank.

Ai ml, blockchain, crypto, headless commerce. These are commonly used buzzwords to attract the common man, causing them to both be confused and curious, and in this day and age of a fast growing market tech. Has been both niche and bake at the same time. On one hand, you have a multitude of companies within specific industries that target other multitudes of companies within specific industries.

And on the other hand, you have an oversaturation of markets competing in the same space with the same products. And then here is what comes down to the biggest PM or product manager's tempt. Choosing a cool new tech solution over truly understanding the value of what the product is offering. Observing, you know, the the GPT-3 chat, GPT [00:08:00] buzz on multiple social media platforms recently, and as someone who's working in the mar tech space specifically, also with a company that's aiming to be the conversion intelligence platform in the market.

We've been observing the AI and ML space for quite some time. and over the years our team has been doing deep research on how we can utilize our 13 years of conversion data to leverage the power of machine learning models who serve as the highest recommending, highest converting recommendations and content generation for our users.

However, when the trend of GPT-3 started emerging in the mainstream media, we started seeing more talk about how the technology is gonna take over jobs instead of how it was going to solve existing pain points and optimize existing workflows. This fear-based buzz is a tricky thing for companies. On one hand, shouldn't we be reacting quickly to the market?
And then on the

[00:09:00] other hand, trends can be extremely costly, uh, extremely costly things for cu thing for companies. If a company invests in a new technology too quickly without defining the problem clearly it could result in being stuck in the Built Trap, which is a great book by Melissa Perri, if you haven't read it yet, resulting, resulting in designing and building something for the sake of building it.

So instead of questioning the value and learning, um, we end up building something for the sake of building something.

So a great example that I think about is, and we're having this chat in the recent, uh, onsite that Unbounce was having about. Virtual reality. I'm very curious to see where virtual reality is gonna go.

We were talking about how when Oculus came out and all these super cool VR tools came out and Google Glasses came out and, and that was a big hype around the market as well. It fizzled out pretty

[00:10:00] quickly. So the question is, why, why did it fizzle out quickly? Why didn't the market kind of jump on it and started to use it?

The biggest thing there is, was it essentially solving a pain point, and was it really honing into that pain point and tidying those people with that specific pain point to actually action on it? Or was it just some sort of hype, some cool thing that people were finding fun to use, but was it essentially useful to their day to day?

And I think that's what excites me about joining companies that truly, for example, levels the uneven playing field and also taps into a problem that people can't solve themselves or need someone else to solve themselves. And in the past, when we think about these problems, it's outsourcing, it's hiring freelancers in the market.

[00:11:00] and now we're taking that behavior and essentially scaling it super, super fast through the use of tech, which is why software and even software as a service industry excites me so much because we're really helping the smaller guys be able to pay a smaller fee compared to what they would have to do in the past and be able to say, okay, well this is a pain point that I'm having, solve it for me while I focus on really optimizing my current skillset to so that I can do something better.

I'm excited to dig into these types of problems, especially on this podcast. I have already conversations about talking to someone in the product marketing space to learn more about how you can combine forces to really build great product.

I'm also talking to a few experts in the industry so that we can dive deeper into how to revolutionize that industry, especially how to scale that from a product led perspective to let the product

[00:12:00] speak for itself. And I'm excited for you to come along.

I, I am truly, truly eager to see what happens with this podcast. I don't even know if anyone's gonna listen to this right now. I don't even know if anyone's gonna listen to the future episodes, but I, I'm excited to really at least put all of this content and work that I'm doing out there into the world so that whoever chances upon this even. One person that's trying to break into product or a product manager that's trying to scale up and lean into more of a growth product approach, or just anyone out there, um, who's just intrigued about how software is built.
I, I hope that you and I can take this. These lessons, these learnings, and be able to grow together. I'm excited to identify our blind spots together to tap into maybe conversations that we never thought of tapping into before. And

[00:13:00] I just, I just wanna take everyone with me.

So last but not least, I wanted to highlight a few resources that I've been loving, and maybe I'll try to do it on a monthly basis.

So currently a newsletter that I'm obsessed with is Lenny's Newsletter. My current manager at Unbounce, Sean, shout out to Sean if you're listening to this. He recommended this newsletter to me and I've been hooked ever since. Lenny has been really great in his interviews. He has his own podcast as well.

He writes up really interesting perspectives and use cases as well in his newsletter, in his ck And also you have access, if you signed up for his substack, a community on Slack where you can tap into many, many, many different product managers across different organizations, different geographical locations as well.

So definitely check that out.

And also another book that I've been reading that I mentioned

[00:14:00] earlier, it's called The Build Trap. I've read it before. I would recommend reading it again. It's by Melissa Perri. She also has a few other resources that you can find. She teaches and I think she also writes further as well.

So definitely check her out. She's a really great product leader.

And thanks for tuning in for this first episode. I, I was very nervous talking to the Abyss . Like I didn't know who was gonna be listening and it feels weird to just hear myself ramble and drone on. Um, but I hope that you're gonna enjoy listening to this podcast.

As much as I love kind of working on this, it's a little fun project that I'm doing on the side. And. It's good. It's a really great opportunity for me to take again, all my learnings and put it in the form of self-expression that I find easiest and most intuitive, and hopefully that you can walk away learning something new.
I am so excited for you to listen to the next episode. In the next episode, I'm going to talk to a dear friend of mine [00:15:00] and also a really, really talented product marketer. We're gonna talk about how do you get into product marketing and what is product marketing, and also the areas of opportunity to work better together in product marketing and product management as well.
So I hope you join me again. Thank you for listening. I, this is probably gonna be available on wherever you take your podcast on. And I also am available on LinkedIn, Isabel Gan.
Thanks for listening again, and I will see you in the next episode.