Episode 176: Harnessing the Power of Product Principles: A Conversation with Debbie Widjaja of Zero Gravity
Debbie Widjaja is the Chief Product Officer of Zero Gravity, but in her 13 year career has worked in roles with Shopify, Bulb, and Facebook just to name a few. I was delighted to welcome her onto the Product Thinking podcast to delve into her journey from Indonesia to her current role.
She explained her view on product principles and how important it is to establish them in order to guide your team in a direction that aligns with your values and the company DNA.
We covered AI, how to deliver innovation in smaller companies and what the future of product management looks like.
Read on to see what Debbie had to say.
You’ll hear them talk about:
07:30 - Debbie’s upbringing in Indonesia has had a profound impact on how she has shaped and evolved her career over the 13 years she has been working in product management. Ultimately, as she explains these formative times of her life, growing up without the internet has meant that Debbie has a deep appreciation for the absolutely transformative effect of technology to people’s day-to-day lives. As Debbie describes, her perspective is particularly wide because, having experienced the reality of that positive transformation, she also went on to see the other extreme while at Facebook, dealing with hate speech and misinformation.
12:40 - Wanting to work for companies that perform a social good has been central to many of the choices that Debbie has made in her career so far. And as a result, grasping a company’s principles is a particularly important task for her. How that intersects with strategy is a point that Debbie has some interesting thoughts on. Her view on the difference is that strategy tends to be more practical, with principles perhaps being longer-term and set in stone. As Debbie illustrates, strategy could change year on year, while principles need to be more consistent to be effective and worthwhile.
23:12 - A company that could be categorized as performing social good, need not necessarily be a charity. In fact, Zero Gravity, Debbie’s company is a for-profit, and this makes the structure of the company's operations and finances quite interesting indeed. The clever aspect of Zero Gravity’s set-up is that the way they’ve monetized their work, is by partnering with other companies who are committed to hiring and nurturing socially mobile talents. This way, although the company can make money, every cent is to some extent working to achieve the larger mission.
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Intro - 00:00:01: Creating great products isn't just about product managers and their day-to-day interactions with developers. It's about how an organization supports products as a whole. The systems, the processes, and cultures in place that help companies deliver value to their customers. With the help of some boundary-pushing guests and inspiration from your most pressing product questions, we'll dive into this system from every angle and help you think like a great product leader. This is the Product Thinking Podcast. Here's your host, Melissa Perri.
Melissa - 00:00:37: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Product Thinking Podcast. Today, we're joined by Debbie Widjaja, Chief Product Officer at Zero Gravity, which is a platform that inspires, removes barriers, and nurtures a virtuous cycle for social mobility. Debbie previously worked in product management roles at Facebook and Shopify and has written articles on Medium about product principles. She'll be speaking about PM as GM, bringing product management back to its first principles at the CPO Summit in Amsterdam this spring. But before we talk to Debbie, it's time for Dear Melissa. So this is your segment where you can ask me any of your questions about product management. Let's see what today's question is.
Dear Melissa, historically here and at other companies where I've worked, the product owner reported to the product manager for a product area. This resulted in many one-to-one reporting structures that our HR department has recognized isn't a best practice and can also put a product manager that wants to manage a product, but not people in the position of managing an individual when that might not be a strength of theirs. To solve for that, we had the product owners and product managers report to the product directors for our various solution suites. This has worked well for the past year or so, but now we're in a situation where we will be consolidating more products under one product director and the number of direct reports they will have will be unmanageable. Additionally, I believe we have the opportunity to better support our product owners as a whole by potentially aligning the product owners under your product owner manager, who will make sure they are all using tools consistently and following best practices, and who will facilitate a product owner community for these important resources. Have you experienced a similar situation and how has this been managed from an organizational structure standpoint?
Okay, so from reading this, I think you probably have been doing SAFe. That's my guess. Because they typically had product owners reporting into product managers, and they were two different roles. And that's a historic holdover from SAFe in many organizations. And it did lead to a bunch of one-to-one things. This is the big thing. Product owners and product managers should be the same exact job. There should not be a two-layer thing between a product owner and a product manager. Product owners are product managers and product managers should be doing pieces of the product owner role. So this is a lot of what I talk about in Escaping the Build Trap. If you look at product ownership in Scrum, it's only just a piece of what you would do in product management. It's about really managing the backlogs, working with the developers, and basically a lot of times they become project managers to get things out the door. That devalues our role as product managers, which is a strategy role, which is a business role. It's about getting things done and executed and making the decisions about what we're going to be building. That's also with consulting people. You're not doing this in isolation. But it's not just about managing a backlog and shoving things into developers. And that's what I feel like product ownership has become. So no, I don't think you should be consolidating everybody under a product owner manager. I think you should be taking your product owners and your product managers, making them one role called a product manager. And then I think you should be reconciling that across the organization and having them all roll up through a product director. So product managers, no product owners should be reporting into a product director.
Product directors usually report into a VP of product and a VP is a product report into chief product officers. There's associate product managers as well. Those are super junior product people who don't have a lot of experience. Those people would also report into a product director. That's how that works at other companies. What I think here is you have an extra layer. And that's why this is becoming unmanageable. Also, this sounds to me like a symptom that I've seen before of what companies did with SAFe. What they did is they deployed a bunch of product owners around pretty much all the functionality that they had developed in companies. And that created a huge pool of thousands of product owners because everybody was over every little piece of functionality. So when I came into a bank, for example, I had a product owner I was training who was just on the login API. And I was like, can you log in? What are you doing with this login API? Oh yeah, it works now. It works everywhere. It's fantastic. It's fine. But I spend 40 hours a week going through user stories. I'm like, user stories about what though, if you can log in? If the goal is done, we should be moving on. So it sounds like you might have a legacy holdover of that as well. And instead, what we should be doing is having enough investment in the most important ones of our products to have good product management coverage, but we don't need somebody over every little thing. They should align back to generally a product area or a product director from what it sounds like to you, but you might not be actively working on a feature or a piece of a product that's not strategically prioritized. So that's how you actually cut down and consolidate companies to get to a manageable number of product managers.
You shouldn't be working on every little piece of the product ever in a scaled company. That's just useless, right? That's a waste of people and a waste of time. You want to make sure you're prioritizing here. So to me, that's what sounds like it's happening to you. And I, in your case, in your company, I'd really evaluate what are product owners doing? How is it different than product managers? Are product managers at a leadership level? Are we separating product strategy into product management and then just execution into product ownership? I firmly believe that product management needs to be a dual role at the individual contributor level where we have strategic capabilities built into our people who are also executing. Otherwise, as you scale, there becomes a huge divide between your individual contributors and your leadership, right? You want to make sure that you do have people thinking strategically everywhere, and that helps you consolidate your teams and make sure that you scale effectively. So I hope that helps. And if you're out there listening to this and you have a question for me, please go to dearmelissa.com. Let me know what your question is and I'd be happy to answer it in an upcoming episode. Now, let's go talk to Debbie. Are you eager to dive into the world of angel investing? I was too, but I wasn't sure how to get started. I knew I could evaluate the early stage companies from a product standpoint, but I didn't know much about the financial side. This is why I joined Hustle Fund's Angel Squad. They don't just bring you opportunities to invest in early stage companies, they provide an entire education on how professional investors think about which companies to fund. Product leaders make fantastic angel investors. And if you're interested in joining me at Angel Squad, you can learn more at hustlefund.vc/mp. Find the link in our show notes. Welcome, Debbie. It's great to have you on the podcast.
Debbie - 00:07:09: Hi, Melissa. Thank you for having me.
Melissa - 00:07:11: So you've had a very cool journey on your product management career so far. You've worked for a lot of really big-name companies. Now you're the chief product officer of Zero Gravity. Can you walk us through your career so far? And maybe how has your perspective on product management changed over time? And what led you to Zero Gravity?
Debbie - 00:07:30: So I started my career about 13 years ago now, back in Indonesia. And at that time, my first job was to deploy a digital recruitment solution. Maybe most listeners are too young to know this, but we used to use paper CVs to apply for jobs in companies. Because I didn't grow up with the Internet, I didn't grow up with smartphones where you can be perpetually connected to the world, basically. I had the privilege to witness how much technology can transform your day-to-day life. Banking, ordering food, ordering rides, etc. But unfortunately, I also was in a position to witness how technology can bring a really negative impact to your lives as well. Case in point, when I was at Facebook, for example, I handled many cases where Facebook was used to spread hate speech and misinformation. So I truly enjoyed being in the center of what's happening in the world by having a big role in building and developing products that we use in our day-to-day lives. But the main evolution, I suppose, that happened in my life is that at some point, I think about five, six years ago, I decided that I only want to work on products that I truly believe are bringing positive impact to the world, like either social impact or environmental impact. Because as a product manager, our definition of doing a good job is when we move product metrics. But personally, I think a lot about the second order or third order thinking about what does it actually mean when those metrics move? And I want to make sure that it translates into a positive impact that I want to see in the world.
Melissa - 00:09:01: I think it's really nice that you're dedicating yourself now to social good products and products that are going to make a change. Can you talk us through maybe what you learned at places like Facebook and Shopify that you are now taking with you and applying at Zero Gravity and in this next phase of product management?
Debbie - 00:09:20: I think what those big companies do really well is, well, you know, the classic, they're answering really big user problems and they execute the solution really well. But because I joined those companies when they were already post-product market fit, I didn't see the actual zero of finding product market fit. So I couldn't speak more about that. But in terms of operationalizing the product once they're post-product market fit, I think what Facebook and Shopify did really well was actually creating very clear product principles and operationalizing it in day-to-day product development. So, for example, Shopify had a few product principles, such as building what most merchants need most of the time or being very clear on your green path. And that became like the language of product management. So when we create a proposal, for example, the leadership team or the engineering leadership will ask questions like, oh, how is this leading us to the green path? And people just have that common language and everyone understands what we actually mean and strive towards.
Melissa - 00:10:22: It sounds like a lot of this is the way that we do product management here. Like they really take those embodies it. They talk about it a lot. How do the leaders show up in these bigger companies to actually do that? In what ways do you get to see as a product manager or as a leader there, these values come to life?
Debbie - 00:10:40: Usually it translates into the kind of questions that they would ask when we're doing product reviews, for example. So Shopify had, it's relatively simple, their product framework. It was named Get Shit Done, GSD. And it has, I think, three stages, like proposal, prototype, and launch. And then every time we want to move a project from one stage to the other, we would have a product review session with at least two directors, because usually our project will impact more than one team. And then in those product review sessions, the directors will ask challenging questions that are usually derived from those product principles.
Melissa - 00:11:20: And how have you been thinking about how those things translate from larger companies to what you're doing now at Zero Gravity as you're taking the helm and you're the chief product officer there now?
Debbie - 00:11:30: So, of course, there's a danger of creating too much process, for example, for a small company, and it creates just more waste than benefit. But one of the first things that I did when I joined Zero Gravity was creating a set of product principles. Because the good thing about having a clear product principle is that whenever we are thinking about, should we do this, for example, or should we prioritize A versus B? Or even like once we prioritize A, how should we build it? Like, in what way? Having a clear set of product principles, even before we know how we are going to use it, like in what cases we are going to use it, is really important because then we get alignment from everyone in the leadership team. When I joined, I didn't just create product principles out of what I thought was good. I had to extract almost like the DNA of the company, the vision, and how Zero Gravity has evolved for the past four years until today. And that's how I then created a set of product principles that we agreed on. So then the next time we are thinking about launching a feature, for example, or designing something, we know what principles we need to strive towards.
Melissa - 00:12:39: And how do those principles kind of relate back to strategy? Where's the line between principles and strategy?
Debbie - 00:12:45: So strategy is almost like practical things that we want to do. Like how do we win? If this year we want to, let's say, get 50% market share and 3x our revenue, what kind of things do we need to focus on? Principles are used, I would say, to assess whether those strategies or the execution of those strategies is the right one that aligns with the DNA of our company. So it's more fundamental, strategy could change year on year, but product principles, I would say, stays relatively the same unless the company has grown so much to a different stage and then you have to maybe adjust a subset of your principles.
Melissa - 00:13:24: I like that. That's so eloquently put. I've never heard anybody kind of explain it that way. And to me, it's sounding like your product principles are the ones that keep you from doing things that might be against your values or not good long term for the company, right? Like kind of balancing almost like, that short-term win versus that long-term strategy that we like to talk about in product management. So for you, as you went on this evolution and you've been focusing on more tech for good, where did it really start where you started to look at? There's technology out there. As you mentioned, you were working on the hate speech of Facebook and different places like that. When did you start looking in your career and say, I want to shift more towards the social good aspects, right? Rather than working for some of these bigger companies because they're fantastic companies, especially for your resume. And a lot of people want to work for. What was kind of the driving factor for you?
Debbie - 00:14:16: Going a little bit personal. So I'm originally from Indonesia and I grew up in a very religious society and religious family as well. And then I moved to the UK when I was 26. I stopped going to church. I stopped believing in religion, basically. But then the problem with that was when I dismantled religion in my head, I needed to replace it with something. I needed to find meaning in my life. So then I thought then the way I could bring meaning into my life is by making sure that the 8 to 12 hours of my day that I spend on my job is actually bringing a positive impact to the world. And also when I first moved to the UK, I started with almost like zero in my bank account. So working at Facebook, that allowed me to save a little bit more money, build my own safety net through my savings. I'm immensely grateful for that. And I wouldn't. I wouldn't change what I did. However, after a few years of building up that CV and savings, I realized now that, okay, this is the time where I can actually afford to not prioritize, let's say, how much money I'm making and actually choose to do something that I truly believed in.
Melissa - 00:15:29: It's a really inspiring story, too. How do you feel about your huge move? I don't even know what else to say. Your relocation from Indonesia to the UK changed your perspective on product management or maybe shaped your way of thinking or how you approach problem solving now.
Debbie - 00:15:46: It gave me humility. I didn't realize how privileged I was in Indonesia until all of those were taken away from me. Although I chose to. But yeah, I came to the UK knowing nobody, literally not a single person. And I had to send maybe hundreds of CVs and didn't hear back. And I felt really lucky that I scored. At that time, honestly, I thought I'm ready to become a pizza delivery or something. And then somehow I got the job at Facebook. I think at that time, honestly, I have been rejected by so many companies to the point that I was already quite good at interviewing. So by the time I was interviewing at Facebook, I got the job. Anyway, yeah. So because of the struggle that I had to face, it was humbling. And I think humility is a good trait for a product manager. Because then you listen more to your users. You don't just assume. You listen to your stakeholders. You don't just say that, well, I'm the CEO of the product. You should just follow what I say. So, I think that was a really good mindset that I had adopted since I moved here. And also because especially, in the beginning, I was so determined to rebuild my life, my career and my reputation. So I was really driven. I put in all the hours I almost like to live in the office. That allowed me to gain back my career pace, I would say. And then once I got to the leadership position, my background also, I think, made me when I look at my team, like when I interviewed the people in my team. For example, I tend to value people with potential rather than credentials. So I judge people based on how far they've come rather than only where they are at the moment. I think having to move to a completely new continent and rebuild my life just changed my whole perspective in the way I run my career.
Melissa - 00:17:42: I think humility is key for product managers as well. And I do see a lot of people, I think, getting into it for the wrong reasons, because they do want to be the mini CEO of the product and they want to make all the decisions. Or they see this as like in a lot of MBA programs, people see this as the new investment banking. So they want to come in for the prestige and the tag. But I think people like you who want to serve other people are the best product managers, right? Because we're building stuff out there for others. When you look at this, one thing I've run into, I think, with some of those students, that I've taught as well, especially people coming from MBAs, is that a lot of them want to jump to where you are right now, right? They want to be a CPO of maybe not necessarily a social good company, but like the CPO of a startup. And they don't necessarily want to go through being an individual contributor, product manager, and going to a place like Facebook or Shopify or other companies, even growth stage companies to learn. They're like, I just want to be the CPO. I just want to jump into it. What do you think helped you become a better CPO by going to some of these bigger companies, first? And then what do you feel like you got from those bigger companies, right? And what did you have to kind of learn on your own as you became a product leader?
Debbie - 00:18:52: That's really funny what you shared. If I imagine myself as a PM, and I look at this, I always try to choose my manager, not just the company. And if I saw that a company has a CPO with no product experience, like they came out of an MBA, like an expensive one, probably, I would probably not apply to the job. Outside of the obvious of, you really learn how to do product by becoming IC, product manager first, right? And I can't imagine, unless you are the CEO and you are the one with the vision and also maybe like the money, or at least if it's not your own money, at least you are the one who convinced the investors to give you the money. Unless you are that, I don't think you can do product very well if you haven't been an ICPM. But outside of that obvious, I would say that by being an ICPM, you also learn what it means to be in a good product organization, under a good product leader, there are stuff like the practice of doing product critique, which is something that I think is super valuable, where like once a week, all the PMs in a company, they come together, they critique each other's work, like each other's PRD, for example, or a design of a new feature, learning from your peers on what good looks like. I think that's so important. And having seen that culture and try to create a similar culture in your own company when you are the product leader, I think it's probably not being spoken of a lot in books, but something that you need to see on your own before you can implement it well in your own company, if you're the product leader. So I just honestly can't imagine how it can go well, basically, if somebody is not the founder and wants to go straight to the CPO role.
Melissa - 00:20:42: Yeah, it bothers me too. I think a lot of people think they can just skip the whole working with developers piece and just go straight to product strategy, but they don't understand all that goes into actually getting that product strategy deployed well and done.
Debbie - 00:20:56: Honestly, this is probably a spicy point of view, but honestly, the kind of PMs that I usually least inclined to hire into my team is an ex-management consultant. Because they were the kind of people, stereotypically, of course, there are outliers everywhere. But stereotypically, they are really good at describing a shiny strategy in a sophisticated looking PowerPoint. But then they are quite useless in terms of executing the strategy, and they don't know how much things can go wrong. Working on developers, I could write a chapter on that, because developers are one of the trickiest bunch of people to work with. And if you don't know that, and you are a product leader, for example, then you will just think that your PMs are bad because they can't manage the developers. But I think they need to have first-hand experience before they can make an evaluation on that.
Melissa - 00:21:48: Did you know I have a course for product managers that you could take? It's called Product Institute. Over the past seven years, I've been working with individuals, teams, and companies to upscale their product chops through my fully online school. We have an ever-growing list of courses to help you work through your current product dilemma. Visit productinstitute.com and learn to think like a great product manager. Use code THINKING to save $200 at checkout on our premier course, Product Management Foundations. I think it also goes back to what you were saying, like, there's not a lot of people who will follow and respect you if you haven't put in the work, right? Or if you haven't actually seen what good looks like and know how to lead. And I've seen that go wrong in a lot of startups or growth stage companies, right? Where somebody has never really worked anywhere else. They've only seen that company. They grow up through the ranks. They're leading the team. And then the team starts to kind of revolt against them because they're like, what do we do at this phase of growth? And they don't really have much experience in it. So it's hard to know what you don't know. How could you possibly know what you don't know if you haven't seen it done before? So in these organizations we were talking about as well, like Facebook and Shopify, obviously they are very business metrics-driven companies, right? Like the goal there is profit. They're for profit. Everybody knows that from their stock prices. How does the way that you do product management change when you start looking more at social good organizations? And what's kind of the same and what might differ?
Debbie - 00:23:12: I think there are also different types of social good companies. The reason why I really enjoy my work at Zero Gravity is because we are a social enterprise, but we are still for profit. Let me give you a bit of context about Zero Gravity. So we are a platform for low-income students to help them get into good careers and good universities. We do that through mentoring, masterclasses, and we provide scholarships. And recently, we also started monetizing, like partnering with employer partners who want to hire and nurture socially mobile talents into their organizations. So the good thing about Zero Gravity is that every dollar that we earn actually translates into more opportunities for socially mobile talents. So obviously, diversity and inclusion in terms of ethnicity and gender has always been talked about quite extensively. And most companies already have a target for those things, but social mobility or the hiring of people from low-income backgrounds is relatively new. So when companies, normally big companies, have a target to hire more socially mobile individuals, they would partner with Zero Gravity and they will pay us for the partnership. We earn some revenue, but that revenue will always translate into more opportunities for socially mobile students, which is honestly like a really nice place to be in because there is no conflict.
But I had also been in an organization where we do one thing. So like we have a social good mission, but then the way we earn revenue is somewhere else. And then internally in the organization, we would say, that's how we exist to fund why we exist, which is like a really tricky situation, I would say, because at some point, the business might just abandon the mission altogether and focus on revenue or vice versa. They abandon revenue and focus on the mission. That's a long-winded background. But I think in general, when the business is like a social good business or like something that's environmental focused, for example, the main principles of product management, i.e. We need to acquire users, we need to retain them, we need them to do valuable things on the platform that would then translate into either social impact or environmental impact is still very much the same. And the focus on growth, for example, like we want to 3x, 5x our growth year-on-year is also very much the same. So I actually don't see that much difference in terms of applying good product management practices in these companies. The main difference is how you sleep at night. You know that you're actually bringing something good to the world.
Melissa - 00:25:53: I like that. I get asked this question all the time. I think from people who work in nonprofits or stuff like that, they go, oh, well, if we don't have revenue or cost that we're managing towards how do we do product management? But I think at the end of the day, we are all there to drive outcomes. And if your outcome is just more about helping people, it seems like there should be a factor around there. And there's guidelines, of course, like you said, on how to make money to help fund that. But to me, it's never been a wildly different way, I think, to run product management in a company. But there are a lot of people confused out there. I guess the big thing, though, that I hear from you as well is how do you make sure that you don't abandon that mission to just go after the revenue? What do you do as a leader and as a C-suite member to make sure that you are doing things that are in the best interest of your mission and not getting distracted? Because money is very enticing, right? So how do you keep people from going off on tangents to just chase dollars?
Debbie - 00:26:51: I think it goes actually above the product function here. Like the CEO and the investors, like one of the things that I asked Zero Gravity during my interview was, what are the expectations of the investors? Are they looking to grow their investment 10x, 100x? And the answer was, no, they're looking to see the social impact. So the way we measure our social impact is like, how do we boost a young talent's lifetime earnings by getting them into good universities? Because there's already public research on that. For example, somebody who goes to Oxford or Cambridge will in their lifetime, I think, earn, sorry, I don't have the numbers on top of my head. Let's say 50k more per year compared to their peers. So we boost their lifetime earnings by a certain amount. That's what we are trying to get. We are aiming to be a social impact unicorn, i.e. We create $1 billion of lifetime earning boosts in our members' lives instead of just our valuation. So the example of the company that I mentioned earlier, in which basically, the route that they took was abandoning their mission to focus on revenue, was because of the kind of investors that the company was dealing with. The main investor was one of the biggest VCs in Europe that has invested in companies like Figma, and they're expecting basically to see their investment multiply by a significant amount. So, it's almost like once you deal with that kind of investors, it's almost impossible to not focus on revenue at all costs, even if it means that you abandon your mission.
Melissa - 00:28:28: So it sounds like there was a mismatch between the type of investors they accepted money for and what the goals were for the company here. So they went to these growth stage investors that are expecting you to triple, double, quadruple your revenue in a short amount of time, and they get their big exit. And this company was more like, oh, we're mission driven. And I think that's a really good lesson for people out there who are trying to get into social good or even raising money for a social good company. How are you aligned with your investors? I've seen that happen too. If you're not aligned with your investors, they'll take over your company, kick you out. So when you're looking at product management and product leadership too, over the next five years, what are you excited about?
Debbie - 00:29:08: I'm excited to see product management going back to their first principles. I think there's too many resources out there that talk about frameworks for product managers, for example, like this is how you should do product management. And I've talked to too many PMs that focus a lot on how to do product processes and frameworks in the right way and not enough focus on actually delivering impact. I think the layoffs that happened like in the past couple of years since banks increased their interest rate, that forces companies to focus more on things that actually matter, right? Like profit margin of the company, increasing revenue, reducing costs, and as a product manager and as a product leader, you need to be profit making, not just a cost center essentially. So I'm actually quite excited to see people talk less about product management and just do build good products that actually do well in the market and translate into good financial outcomes for the company. And also, inevitably, everyone is asking about things like, oh, what's the impact of AI? Like, will it make our job redundant? I think if you're not bringing business value, AI or no AI, your job will be redundant anyway. Maybe AI will accelerate that because usually what I saw happen, let's say when a company lay off, say, 25% of their engineers, they would probably lay off more PMs than 25%, maybe like 50% of the PMs. Because you could still ask one PM to cover two engineering teams and one PM plus the help of AI to help them augment their thinking, expedite their writing process, could probably do that job without any problem. So going back just to the first principle, your job as a PM is to deliver business outcomes. And if you cannot showcase that, then probably we have to accept that our job is not going to be secure in the next five years.
Melissa - 00:31:12: I completely agree with that. I think there's a lot of people out there worrying too much about work, about work, instead of trying to drive outcomes. And we get those conversations in the way. And AI, I think, is an interesting topic too that we can dive into a little bit. I've seen a lot of companies out there just turning to AI for innovation, calling it innovation, right? And trying to figure out what to do with it, right? Like slap a strategy on it or let's just take this and we should do something with it because everybody's talking about it. How are you really thinking about AI? And how do you, in general, I guess, balance innovation in a smaller company like Zero Gravity versus what you've been seeing a Facebook or a Shopify do? How do those things actually differ too?
Debbie - 00:31:55: So on the AI side, there are two different ways we could look into this, right? One is how do we use AI in our day-to-day job as a product person? And one is how do we incorporate AI in our product strategy, in the actual product that we are delivering? I think on the day-to-day job, I already can't imagine how we used to function without it. I still remember not that long ago, maybe like two years, three years ago, I used to look at NPS comments and label them manually to see the themes and the comments. And now I could just copy paste everything into ChatGPT and ask them to summarize it. So yeah, if you're not using AI on your day-to-day job, definitely you're missing a trick there. In terms of incorporating AI into your product offerings that you build to the users, this is where it gets, I think, a little bit more nuanced. I'm a believer that AI is one possible solution and that you still need to do the usual homework, right? Is the problem worth solving? Is this the right problem? And is AI the right solution for this problem? But let's say if you've done that homework right, and AI is indeed one of the possible solutions for the problem, I started thinking of AI almost like Again, maybe most listeners are not old enough to remember this, but websites used to be desktop optimized. And then we moved to having smartphones. And then there were still a few websites that are not desktop optimized. And then you have on your small smartphone screen, you have to zoom in multiple times and then scroll left and then scroll right to see like a non-mobile optimized website on mobile.
And it felt like such a janky experience. And I'm starting to think that in the next few years, maybe products that don't incorporate AI, for example, conversational AI, instead of, let's use Shopify as an example. Right now, if you want to configure a Shopify shop, you have to maybe answer in different ways, 20 different questions about your shop, right? Like, do you want to enable this? Which configuration do you want to do for your product listing, for example? And then you have to pick. The current websites or the current apps interaction is quite flat. While people are getting more and more used to the conversational type of interaction, in which you just describe, hey, I want to build this shop. I'm going to describe my business. You configure the website for me. So we are getting more and more used to that kind of conversational type of interaction. And probably at some point we'll take it for granted and websites that don't do that, like products that don't do that, that still ask us to configure things on our own, we'll probably feel as janky as those desktop size websites on mobile. So I think as a PM, you need to, as like I roll as it seems like, oh, everything is AI, like it's just a fad though. I do believe that you should consider carefully the use of AI in your product offerings because I think that's just the way forward.
Melissa - 00:34:47: I totally agree with your assessment on AI there. And what I like about what you're saying too is that it's not just like using AI internally as a PM. It's like, obviously, to do that. I see people confuse that with the strategy of how AI incorporates into what they're going to do to drive business and customer metrics, right? There's a confusion between those two things. And I think the separation of them is really important. I love your analogy though about it being like responsive web, because that's so true. I think one day we're going to wake up, look at a platform, bunch of data, be like, I don't want to sift through this data myself. Like, just tell me what the insights are. Like, shouldn't you be able to figure that out on your own with your AI? And companies that are not keeping up with that, I think are definitely in danger. So it's a good push for my next question, which is innovation, right? So you've worked at some large companies now, Facebook, Shopify, and now you're at a small company. How are you thinking about managing innovation and like looking at these trends, right? Of, hey, maybe we should do something with AI or we should do something over here that might be slightly different than what our current path is, right? To try to experiment and go beyond the bounds of what we're doing. And how does that compare back to what large companies do?
Debbie - 00:35:55: Large companies definitely have more resources to do whatever they want to do, right? But they are also a lot, lot slower. So I actually thought that being in a small company, like if you are a PM in a small company, you have the advantage to completely change what you're trying to do and innovate. Yes, you have less resources, but you also have less barriers. Like you probably don't have to convince five players of the leadership team to try what you want to try. Like Zero Gravity, and I cannot take credit for this because this happened before I joined, but Zero Gravity launched like an AI coach within our platform. So we integrate it with a big LLM to create a 24-7 coach that can help low income students with their university and job application. They launched that within a couple of months after ChatGPT was released. And I was so impressed that they were so quick in actually creating value based on existing technology. But in terms of lack of resources that you have in a small company, that is something that cannot be glossed over. Of course, when you have fewer engineers, you can build fewer things. And I don't like the saying of doing more with less because it can translate to overworking people, which leads to burnout and it's never sustainable. So I believe in do less with less, but because you have to do less, because you can only do less, when you have to really think about what do you want to do? How do you want to utilize these scarce resources? So I think as a product leader, it actually forces you to be a lot more strategic in your thinking because you cannot build everything. You can only build one thing and it's your job to be really sharp in what is the one thing that we can build that we believe will move the needle the most.
Melissa - 00:37:44: I think that's true. It's definitely good, wise words for people who are leading startups there. Thank you so much, Debbie, for being on the podcast today with us. If people want to learn more about you, where can they go?
Debbie - 00:37:56: So yeah, I have a Medium blog. Connect with me on LinkedIn. I don't have a newsletter or anything at the moment.
Melissa - 00:38:01: Great. And we will put all those links to Debbie's profiles in our show notes. So if you go to productthinkingpodcast.com, you can find all those links to find Debbie. Thank you for listening to the Product Thinking Podcast. We'll be back next Wednesday with another fantastic guest. And if you have any questions for me in the meantime, you can submit them to dearmelissa.com and I'll answer them in an upcoming episode. Thanks so much. And we'll see you next time.