#225 Christian Marek: How AI is Shaping the Future of Product Management

This episode is sponsored by RapidSOS. Close the safety gap and transform your emergency response with RapidSOS. Visit https://rapidsos.com/eyeonai/ today to learn how AI-powered safety can protect your people and boost your bottom line. In this episode of the Eye on AI podcast, we delve into the role of AI in product management with Christian Marek, VP of Product at Productboard. Christian shares his journey in shaping the future of product management, exploring how AI is changing the way we ideate, build, and deliver customer-centric products. Throughout the episode, Christian unveils Productboard's innovative AI-driven solutions, including the groundbreaking Productboard Pulse, which accelerates ideation and discovery by aggregating and analyzing customer feedback. He explains how AI enables product managers to prioritize features, write detailed specifications, and align product roadmaps with organizational goals—all while driving ROI and delivering exceptional customer experiences. We also discuss the evolution of product management, from its origins to its rise as a mainstream discipline in organizations of all sizes. Christian offers insights into how AI tools are reshaping the product management landscape, making it more efficient, collaborative, and impactful than ever before. Don't forget to like, subscribe, and hit the notification bell to stay updated on the latest breakthroughs in AI, product innovation, and customer-centric technology! Checkout Productboard Pulse: https://www.productboard.com/product/voice-of-customer/ Stay Updated: Craig Smith Twitter: https://twitter.com/craigss Eye on A. I. Twitter: https://twitter.com/EyeOn_AI (00:00) Introduction (03:18) What is Productboard? (05:04) Christian Marek's Journey (07:20) Defining Product Management (08:45) How Productboard Was Born (10:05) Transforming Product Management (14:32) Exploring Use Cases: Existing and New Product Development (18:13) Scaling Productboard (20:33) Managing Complex Projects Without Productboard (24:59) Industries Using Productboard (26:29) Why Startups Benefit from Productboard (29:25) Closing the Feedback Loop on Product Management (33:16) Non-Digital Applications of Productboard (36:27) AI Model Selection (39:48) The Future of Product Management with AI (43:30) C-Suite Engagement and ROI with Productboard (45:15) How to Get Started with Productboard

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  The way we use AI here is really across the board. Most recently, we announced a new product called Product Board Pulse, which helps product managers to really accelerate ideation and delivery, discovery pieces of this product management process by aggregating all the different insights, customer feedback that an organization has in a single place, in a single repository, where the PM automatically gets trends surfaced about certain feedback themes, about the product, about the go-to-market process, about pricing, whatever it might be that customers have issues with. And can also use basically an AI chat interface to ask specific questions, like, hey, what is a specific customer saying about X? And that like really accelerates the ideation and discovery process

• 0:45Speaker 00

  from weeks to, we believe, days.

• 0:47Craig S. Smith?

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• 1:29Craig S. Smith?

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• 2:13Craig S. Smith?

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• 2:27Craig S. Smith?

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• 3:10Craig S. Smith?

  So go ahead, why don't you introduce yourself? Tell us how you got to Product Board and what it is.

• 3:18Speaker 00

  Sure, sure, yeah, happy to. So yeah, I'll start with, you know, Product Board and what we do. So Product Board, we're a end-to-end, customer-centric, product management platform. So four product leaders, we're basically their command and control center for their product organization and for individual contributor PMs that do the day-to-day work, we help them get the job done more efficiently, faster, and focus on the things that truly matter. And that is the product management craft. So as a comparable to think about, basically what Salesforce is to customer relationship management, we are to the product management discipline.

• 4:00Speaker 00

  And just to outline a little bit what the product management job is and how we think about it, product managers in organizations, it's still a fairly new, fairly evolving discipline, typically take, typically own vision, strategy, and execution, roadmapping for a specific product area. And basically, you know, ultimately to drive business outcomes and working very closely with customers to ultimately bring amazing products to market. Today, we count over 6,000 customers, including some brands like Salesforce, Toyota, and Zoom. And the reason why they choose Product Board is because they want to increase product ROI, get their product to markets to faster, et cetera.

• 4:42Speaker 00

  Now, I'm currently the VP of Product here at Product Board. And the reason why I joined the company is because I'm personally extremely passionate about the product management craft and building amazing products for our customers. And actually, I've set all my, let's say, product management career up to mastering my own product management craft. I started at Google, really absorbing the skill sets of many amazing product managers there. Then I will start, then I went to DocuSign when the company was pre-IPO, had amazing mentors, folks who spent like decades at Microsoft, I could learn so much from. And then I was also at Meta for a year and a half, where we actually had something called Product Manager Circles,

• 5:24Speaker 00

  where it'd be done on a weekly or bi-weekly basis, and we'd exchange like challenges and problems that we're facing, how to write a product vision document. And so I'm super excited to bring that all to Product Board now and help other product organization, product managers, excel at their product management craft, knowing that it needs to be, you know, opinionated in a way, but also flexible to meet the needs of the specific organization.

• 5:48Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah, you know, I was talking to somebody, probably on the podcast a few weeks ago, and they had worked at Microsoft early on, and they told me that Bill Gates actually created the position of product manager. Do you know if that's true?

• 6:08Speaker 00

  I think there's, there's different viewpoints on this subject. I think product, I think Microsoft specifically had a role called Product Manager, sorry, Program Manager earlier on, which definitely had some aspects of the product management role, the way it is known today. And actually, one of my former mentors, she still mentor, is or was a program manager at Microsoft and was then a product manager at DocuSign or Product Leader. Many people also attribute Google to having like really founded the role and brought it to life and scaled it. So hard to tell who actually did it. Sometimes the good thing is the role is scaling in many organizations.

• 6:50Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah, well, maybe, maybe start by describing exactly what a product manager is. I mean, a lot of people. Get confused between product manager and project manager. Uh, so yeah, can you just in a nutshell, say what a product manager is? And then talk about uh how product board developed.

• 7:20Speaker 00

  Sure. So a product manager in a nutshell is a function in organization that owns the vision, the strategy and the execution of a specific product or part of the product in larger organizations. To that end, they work together with the engineers, the designer, other folks in the organization to build ultimately the right product for um the customers. And so the way that we think about product management is that it really always starts with customer centricity. So this is baked into, we call it the product excellence framework, which is basically a a process that you can follow. It all starts with the customer inputs, um making sure that you're actually solving a customer need.

• 8:02Speaker 00

  Then you turn that into a roadmap that you share with your team members so that you can collaborate on that. And then ultimately delivering these features to market and getting feedback on that. All the while, uh making sure that that you're aligned to the strategic objectives to the company um to ultimately drive that business out back. So impact. So the product management role is in that ways many very versatile because it requires a certain like uh product sense where you have to figure out like what is the right product to build. You need to be able to talk to customers, you need to be able to work with engineers, with designers. Um, and you always need to think back about business strategy as well. So it's actually a really fun role.

• 8:38Craig S. Smith?

  Hmm. Uh, and so how did uh how did product board develop?

• 8:45Speaker 00

  Yeah. So our founder um came up with the idea for product ward on a plane flight. When he was, you know, trying with the uh wifi uh on the plane to basically manage, you know, his product roadmaps, et cetera, basically working on spreadsheets and presentations, et cetera, which is a very inefficient process because it typically involves a lot of redundancies in organizations. So for example, uh just to give you a sense, like when I actually started at DocuSign, I was asked to put together a presentation going around the entire product team that. Would summarize our product roadmap.

• 9:28Speaker 00

  Now, that was a great onboarding exercise for me, but the roadmap was outdated after just two weeks. And when we then presented to a chief product officer, you know, we had to be like, oh yeah, this is here, but in reality, it's taken a week longer and whatever it is. So I think our founder faced that very similar pain point. And that's when he decided to basically build a solution for that. And you know, that is basically what Product Board is today, really covering that whole product management process end to end.

• 9:55Craig S. Smith?

  And tell me about how AI integrates into the Product Board platform.

• 10:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, so

• 10:08Speaker 00

  we take a very customer centric approach to using AI into Product Board platform. And so it manifests in a few ways. The way, basically what we think about is like, how can we help PMs do their job faster, do the job most efficiently, drive greater ROI for the organization? And the way we think about the process is it starts with ideation, where you think about like, hey, what are the right products to build in the first place? Then you do discovery, where you basically try to figure out like, hey, does this idea that I have actually have legs? And let me go validate with customers to make sure it's the right thing. And then there's the delivery cycle of actually like building the product itself. So the way we use AI here is really across the board.

• 10:52Speaker 00

  Maybe just to give a few examples, most recently, we announced a new product called Product Board Pulse, which helps product managers to really accelerate the ideation and delivery discovery pieces of this product management process by aggregating all the different insights, customer feedback that an organization has in a single place, in a single repository, where the PM automatically gets trends surfaced about certain feedback themes, about the product, about the go to market process, about pricing, whatever it might be that customers have issues with, and can also use basically an AI chat interface to ask specific questions like, hey, what is a specific customer saying about X?

• 11:35Speaker 00

  And that like really accelerates that ideation and discovery process from weeks to, we believe, days. Beyond that, we use AI like in the delivery pieces and discovery pieces when you actually write these product specs. So what product managers do to convey their product vision, their ideas, actually the product that needs to be built, to engineers, to designers, they typically write some sort of product specification to inform that. Now, we use AI here as well to accelerate that writing of that spec, whether it's like automatically spitting out the pain points that customers have, then like ideas for requirements, solution suggestions, or whatever it is.

• 12:16Speaker 00

  And the reason why we can do that so well is because underneath our platform is a really structured, basically database about the entire product organization at the products that they have. And that helps us inform the large language models that we are using to create really good output for product managers and help them get the job done faster.

• 12:36Craig S. Smith?

  Right. You say that underlying knowledge base is not of a specific product, but

• 12:46Craig S. Smith?

  but the, I'm sorry, not a specific product, but but sort of knowledge of the product manager role or or product management in general, is that right?

• 12:59Speaker 00

  It's both. It's both. We do, you know, when customers work with us, they typically build out their product hierarchy into, we call the product hierarchy into product board, where say like you have a mobile application, you have a web application, whatever it is, and you have a bunch of features and and components underneath that. And that then, you know, basically mirrors the real products. And so then, you know, when the PMs go in and they ask the AI a specific question like, hey, how might I improve this specific product based on all that customer feedback that we're seeing? The problem can be highly contextual. And so, so, yeah, so it's both like we have the product management best practices that we believe in and that is, you know, reflected in the way we work with AI.

• 13:42Speaker 00

  And we have, because our customers entered that into our system, and sometimes, you know, we help them in this process, the actual hierarchy of their product landscape in our product as well.

• 13:53Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah. And most of the product managers I know joined organizations and took over an existing product or product line. But this platform can can help from

• 14:09Craig S. Smith?

  You know, ground zero, right, that you you you imagine a product and work out what the product is going to be. So can you can you take us through sort of how the platform works? Like if you you come to the platform, you want to create a product, what do you do?

• 14:33Speaker 00

  Sure, sure, sure, sure. So it actually does both. Craig, for context, and we can go through both a little bit where say like, hey, you're kind of like building on the existing. So your new product manager joining a product board today and you're trying to figure out in the specific product space that you own. What you need to do. So you can use actually like our own tools in product board to take a look at, hey, how does the product work today? What features are on the backlog? What are customers asking for? You can literally go in and ask the AI like, hey, what are the top feature requests from customers? And basically explore from there. And that can quickly form your opinion as you ramp up as a new PM on an existing product.

• 15:15Speaker 00

  Where you might want to take it in the future and go through this journey of ideation, discovery and delivery. And ultimately deliver ROI to the organization that much faster. Now, there's a second journey that you mentioned where it's like, hey, you're a product manager. And you're actually trying to figure out like, hey, is there a new product that you need to build? Oftentimes, that's the case when you're trying to enter a new market. Or, you know, when there's a technology shift that might open up a product opportunity. Similarly, the way the product what helps here in these scenarios is product manager can go into the platform. Ask, you know, AI and work with the customer feedback to figure out like, hey, what are existing customers saying about this already?

• 15:59Speaker 00

  What are sort of like my blind spots that I should go look into? And then start ideating on that, building these product specs into the product documentation that are required directly in the platform. And then, you know, engage with different folks in the organization to really get this discovery process started. And ultimately, then later on, translate that into actually building out the product and getting that delivered with the engineers and the designers.

• 16:23Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah, and on the building out a process. Again, is is that is are there L L M's that are informing that process? Or?

• 16:37Craig S. Smith?

  Or are you connected to or do your engineers

• 16:44Craig S. Smith?

  join the platform and you can suggest different engineering solutions to different ideas in the in the product specs?

• 16:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's a good question. So engineers can definitely collaborate on the product specs and you know, add to that with the engineering content. Like, we we don't currently use AI to basically suggest like engineering approaches or technical specs. Yeah.

• 17:15Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah. So so as you move through this this process and and this is how many people can be working on the platform collaboratively?

• 17:28Speaker 00

  Uh, at this point, our largest customers have probably like thousands of concurrent active users. So just like within one customer, beyond that, we're talking about, you know, tens of thousands of active users.

• 17:41Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah, but I mean, if I'm a product manager,

• 17:45Craig S. Smith?

  you know, and I I I sign on to the platform, do I have my designer also on the platform, my software engineer or machine learning?

• 18:00Craig S. Smith?

  My data scientist also on the platform so we can sort of work collaboratively on the platform and how large a team is optimal in that?

• 18:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, great question. So

• 18:17Speaker 00

  we support collaboration for organizations of all sizes, ranging from SMB to enterprise. So no matter if you're engineering product design partnership organization that you work with, it's like a total of a hundred people or your organization is like, you know, Salesforce, probably thousands of of of product managers and peers. Like, we support all of these use cases. So it really depends on on your organization and the size that you have in order to, you know, get the best out of of product management. We're here to support you. And the way we think about collaboration is like, definitely like, you know, it's it's a tool for product managers first and foremost, but engineers and designers and other key stakeholders, data scientists, ML engineers.

• 19:05Speaker 00

  Et cetera are definitely like, you know, key contributors and also actively involved in the platform and do certain things in there. So for example, we talked about this a little bit earlier. When you as a product manager, you would write a product spec, an engineer would come in and sort of like review it, make comments there, et cetera. Similar as you as a product manager build out your roadmap and you say like on the high level, here's where I think I want to go in Q4 this year or Q1 next year, you can invite your partners to provide key input like effort estimations, feedback on the direction, technical feasibility. You can also use these roadmaps to manage up in the organization and like share that with your leadership and get that feedback. Hey, here's what I'm thinking about. Is that aligned with the strategic objectives

• 19:49Speaker 00

  in my organization? And you know, if not, then thanks for the feedback and I'll go fix it. So, and then we also obviously have collaborators in product board from the go to market organizations. So oftentimes feedback comes, you know, either directly from the customer success team within the organization, from sellers, professional services team, marketers, wherever it might be, and whoever has like some sort of customer touchpoint. And we often see those folks use product board as well to get that feedback, track how their feedback made it onto the product roadmap, and also stay up to date on the most recent things that actually get delivered and shipped to customers. So our collaboration platform in that sense is really comprehensive and can reach a large part of the organization.

• 20:33Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah. You were saying at the beginning that the founder came up with this idea because he was on a plane kind of switching between Excel sheets and I imagine Word documents and maybe something else. How do people, how do product managers manage complex projects

• 21:00Craig S. Smith?

  without something like product board? Is it all done on Slack and scrolling up and down in a Slack conversation to, you know, see what was said three days ago? I mean, I go through that all the time.

• 21:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's a good question. So I think there's there's different ways to project manage, sorry, project manage. There's definitely the traditional ones like that you mentioned, like spreadsheets and Slack that still many of our customers use. Some customers also use purpose project management tools specifically for the project management function, which is really all about, you know, driving timelines, making sure milestones are hit, then, you know, making sure scopes are clear. But what we have found is that the product managers that use Product Board prefer our tool simply because it is purpose-built for them. We give them sort of the right structure to drive the project, product management

• 22:00Speaker 00

  process forward, again, starting with the ideation and discovery pieces all the way to delivery. So we have specific metadata, for example, like on our roadmaps, like costing, like release timelines, specific tasks that need to be executed for certain feature launches. Where then, when a product manager actually thinks about the entire process, that's why they'd rather spend time in a product management solution specifically dedicated to them rather than a generic project management solution, which is really more tailored to timeline tracking, which is what the traditional project management role is more emphasizing.

• 22:35Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah. And, and did you say that you're a product manager at Product Board?

• 22:44Speaker 00

  I am a product person and product manager at Product Board. That's correct. Yes.

• 22:48Craig S. Smith?

  And do you use Product Board for managing the product, Product Board?

• 22:57Speaker 00

  Absolutely. It's very meta in that sense. But yeah, product managers at Product Board, including myself, as a product leader and VP of product, we use Product Board for all of our processes. So for example, when it comes to discovery and figuring out an ideation discovery and figuring out what we actually need to build, we use our new product called Product Board Pulse that uses generative AI to basically, you know, take all that customer feedback and create the source of truth. And we go in and we leverage those insights. Decide and we just went through this exercise was goes on the Q four roadmap and what goes on the annual roadmap for next year. This is actually the season, I think, where everybody's going through this process in product management because you think about what your annual plan is.

• 23:39Speaker 00

  So we definitely do that. I personally also use product for Pulse, for example, when I go into a customer meeting. So later on today, I have a call with one of our enterprise customers. I will go into product for Pulse and learn about all the feature requests that they have made quickly. So that I can get up to speed quickly and show that I can emphasize with their needs and give them context where it sits in the

• 24:01Speaker 00

  where it sits in our roadmap. Similarly, as we just went to through Q four planning now, the roadmaps that we've built, all the individuals, teams that have contributed, created their planning documents in product board, built their roadmaps in product board, created their feature descriptions in product board, and shared them that way with leadership. And we actually also just went through a OKR refresh as part of our objective and key results refresh, which is a goal setting methodology that we use as part of our next fiscal year planning at product board. And so these are now also in product board, and that's what helps leaders like myself, like our CEO, the founder, make sure that everybody's heading in the right direction because we can make the tie in from objective and key result to the actual feature work

• 24:46Speaker 00

  and really monitor the end to end there.

• 24:48Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah.

• 24:48Speaker 00

  Yes, we use it very heavily and extensively.

• 24:50Craig S. Smith?

  What's kind of the range of products that have been designed or are being supported by product board?

• 24:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, I would say our customers reach across industries. So definitely we're strong, we're strong representation in technology. So whether it's B two B SaaS or consumer companies, definitely well represented there all the way from SMB to some of the largest tech companies on the planet. We also see product being used in advertising companies and manufacturing companies to really all across the board where there is, there might be a digital product in most cases, but we have even seen it's used in certain cases for other non-digital products.

• 25:38Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah, I do is, is it too robust a solution for a startup?

• 25:46Speaker 00

  I think it's a great solution for a startup, to be honest with you. Particularly, I think if you're early and you wanna get that product management muscle going in your organization. Starting with that foundational structure basically pays off later on because once you're sort of planting the seed and you're establishing your product hierarchy and you're making sure that, you know, as your product like grows, that it's reflected within that. It's extremely valuable. The other thing that's extremely valuable is that in a startup, you actually need to be super laser focused, right? There can't be any slack, like mistakes are very painful and costly and if they happen, you need to react quickly. And so Product Board can help you make sure that everyone in the startup is aligned.

• 26:29Speaker 00

  So it's extremely valuable for startups for sure. I mean, it's obviously also extremely valuable for like the large companies, particularly the ones that are, we call them digitally transforming, where the product management muscle isn't as established yet. Because again, we help them out by giving them the structured process in terms of ideation, discovery, delivery, helping them make sure the investments are allocated to drive ROI. And we also help with things like the Product Excellence Framework, which is a set of best practices to really help product managers in an organization organize leverage processes on top of Product Board to really make the most, you know, out of their product management organization, but also about, you know, the product management deployment itself.

• 27:12Speaker 00

  But ultimately, it's all about the goal that product management is aligned to, and that's building for customers while driving ROI.

• 27:19Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah, and product management doesn't end with the launch of a product. It's sort of a continuous process of evaluating performance or ROI or customer satisfaction. How is that presented in Product Board? I mean, can you?

• 27:45Craig S. Smith?

  Do you have a dashboard that's tracking uh these different things? How do you track customer satisfaction? Is there a some sort of a feedback tool within product board to, I don't know, send surveys or or something like that? Uh, or for ROI? I mean, is all of that being fed into product board? So a product manager uh has a snapshot at any point in time?

• 28:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, the short, the short answer is, is, is yes um to many of those things you said. So yeah, you're absolutely right. Like the product management job definitely continues post-delivery. Specifically like for the scenario that you mentioned earlier, where the product manager actually ships something big, something new, like that first delivery is actually just, you know, the first milestone. And oftentimes, you know, you joke when you, you know, you work towards this like first big launch, then it's like, hey, this is when the job really starts, because now you, you, you really need to, to, to hit the ground and get the feedback and iterate the product, product, just, just like you mentioned. And so ways that um, you know, customers can do this today is leverage product or pulse, our uh new I tool to collect that customer feedback

• 29:02Speaker 00

  and quickly get that feedback in um to see what customers are saying, just to make it a little bit meta. Again, Craig, actually, customers are giving us feedback about product or polls, and we're seeing that in product board polls. Obviously, you know, we're also seeing other feedback across the product or platform and product or pulse. So that helps us, you know, quickly react based on the feedback and shift the product roadmap and shift the direction accordingly. We also have integrations with um, you know, various data analytics tools that we can pipe directly into product board and dashboards to show things like engagement, usage, and all this kind of stuff that product managers typically care about directly where they do the job.

• 29:41Speaker 00

  Um, similarly, um, you can also tie to actually, you can actually also tie the feedback that you're getting to actual revenue input impact, which is extremely meaningful, right? When you're like looking through like, hey, this is the product I launched, what are the biggest opportunities? I pursue next? Like, what is actually the potential revenue tied to that? Based on my customer relationship management system, based on, you know, other systems I have internally that track that. And that helps, you know, really accelerate the prioritization decision. To point about in-product surveys and doing that kind of stuff and launching surveys, that is also a way that we enable customers to see how their product is performing. So there are various ways of doing that, whether you collect a net promoter score directly in the product

• 30:25Speaker 00

  or a customer satisfaction score, you can tie that all back into Product Board and then see how the different features, how the different capabilities, how the different products that you launched are performing. And then ultimately, and this is really where we close the loop and where it becomes really powerful, tie that back in the objectives and key results that you have set as an organization to make sure that you're hitting the goals that you were about, that you set out to actually hit.

• 30:49Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah, and you were talking about presenting to senior management or if it's a small organization to the founders. Presumably then, Product Board, or do the senior management or founders, do they log into Product Board to review? Or does Product Board have a function to generate a report that you can pass along?

• 31:16Speaker 00

  Yeah. So the short answer is yes, they absolutely do. So, you know, the CEO directly as the founder, like he spends a lot of time in Product Board and gives us feedback. Similarly, the entire executive team is actively using Product Board to, for example, check in on objective and key results progress and see if anything goes off track. And then like digging in specifically into what that might be, like is, you know, somebody, is there a team that's running into challenges and then how can we help them? And that is actually something that is used in offline reviews where, you know, you don't need to necessarily be in a meeting to do that. You can do that at any time because we have the right operations processes through the product excellence framework that we have

• 32:00Speaker 00

  to make these things actually like populate and make sure the teams do the work. But like sometimes we'll also online, do online reviews in Product Board directly so that leadership, folks in leadership, like myself, like my peers, have the full visibility onto what is happening there. Now, what we also hear from organizations, from our customers, is that actually fairly senior leaders in the organizations like SVP, senior vice presidents of products, even CPOs, review roadmap outputs directly in product board. Sometimes, to your point, they will consume it through reports that are generated by product board that ultimately reflects all the work that the PMs have put in to like, you know, update the data, create their roadmaps. But like, we see stakeholders up to the chief product officer level, use product board to

• 32:45Speaker 00

  check in how things are progressing and if there's anything going sideways.

• 32:48Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah, you were saying that the largest block of users are in digital products, right, or technology products. What are some of the non-digital, non-tech products or product types that product board that you see people using product board for?

• 33:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think the two main types that we have seen use product board for outside of digital tech is advertising, where an ad campaign is almost like thought of as a product. Because at the end of the day, you're trying to reach a specific customer. You're trying to deliver a certain customer impact. And you're trying to deeply understand, you know, what the needs are. And then you match the campaign to those needs. And you have several deliverables and collaborators in this process as well. Like, you know, your social media expert, your campaign strategist, whatever it might be. And then we see those folks collaborate as on documents, on roadmaps,

• 33:59Speaker 00

  on the actual description of what the ad should be. And then, you know, there's the person that actually like creates and produces the ad, who could contributes as well, and then the person who actually runs the ad. And then there's obviously the customer also that might then like check in on the roadmap, like, hey, particularly if it's an ad agency, like, hey, what is the agency actually doing? When are things getting delivered? And so they basically create a roadmap for their customers to then, to then use. That so that is one example. Similarly, we've also had manufacturing examples where manufacturing would use us for digital products, but sometimes also for physical products. Particularly fast moving. This is particularly a case with a few fast moving manufacturing organization, which seems to be an ongoing trend now.

• 34:41Speaker 00

  We need to keep a really close ear to customer feedback, like some Chinese companies have actually pioneered some really amazing business models here where they post ads on TikTok and other sources. And then, you know, you quickly translates the engagement metrics on those ads to actually products that you're building and shipping. So we have seen similar companies and startups emerge that use our product in similar ways where they quickly respond to market demands through our product management solution, which is something that we didn't originally anticipate, but it totally, it totally makes sense.

• 35:16Craig S. Smith?

  Hmm. That's interesting. So when you see something like that, does that then generate ideas for further features or even new products within product port?

• 35:29Speaker 00

  It does. It does. It does. Of course it does. Yes, yes, yes. And we always like ask ourselves like, hey, where do we put our chips? How do we prioritize? What is the biggest bang for the buck? And verticalization, which I think this, you know, is what this specifically gets at, like, how do we serve a specific vertical beggar? Is is definitely something that is top of mind for us. And if the customer pull warrants it, then it's definitely an area that that will double down on. Right now, we're getting a lot of customer polls specifically from the enterprise where they are really asking for that command center for their product organization to drive ROI, to make sure the PMs work in a customer centric way, to make the organization a more customer oriented through voice of customer reports.

• 36:11Speaker 00

  So that is generally where our roadmap pull is. But you know, if you see interesting opportunities in vertical spaces, like we won't leave those unturned either.

• 36:19Craig S. Smith?

  Hmm. The uh, the on the tech, uh, the underlying L L Ms that you're using, I imagine you're those are API calls to to uh, commercial L L Ms.

• 36:35Craig S. Smith?

  Is uh, are, how are you keeping up? I mean, it's a little off topic, but something I'm interested in. How are you keeping up with?

• 36:45Craig S. Smith?

  With all of these models coming out, I mean, have you committed to working with one model provider? Or are you always testing and switching between models depending on who's hitting the the, you know, the, the top of the hugging face leaderboard or whatever it is?

• 37:10Speaker 00

  That's such a, that's such an amazing question, Craig. So

• 37:15Speaker 00

  generally, we're taking an approach where we're trying to use what's best for the specific use case because we're an extremely customer centric company. The technology is a means to an end and that is, you know, how, how it works for us. But, you know, just in terms of how we're keeping up, we have the benefit of being directly located in Silicon Valley, which is, or in San Francisco, which is amazing. It's the tech hub, like people talk about L L M's and large language models all the time. So like when, you know, we reach out to other companies or we go to networking events with other prior people, or even with like, you know, AI experts like, like yourself, then we obviously learn a lot about what's working for people and what isn't. And that is, you know, a great source of truth in addition to the actual scores produced

• 38:00Speaker 00

  by several scoring mechanisms. At the end of the day though, the real judge, if the model is working and producing the results that it needs to, is the customer with the solutions we're delivering. So the way we're thinking about our technology strategy specifically is that for the different use cases in prior board, we may very well use different commercial models at a time and even cross compare the output of these models to choose the optimal response for the customer. And obviously this is such muscle that we're still building and that we're still getting better at. But at the end of the day, our strategy right now is to basically choose what is best for the customer, what meets their security needs, because many organizations also have

• 38:45Speaker 00

  pretty stringent requirements on what L L M's they might work with or what L L M's they might not work with. So ultimately, again, super customer centric and trying to make the technology decisions aligned to that.

• 38:56Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah. How do you see product management developing? Because as we were saying, it, it didn't exist.

• 39:08Craig S. Smith?

  I don't know how far back that is, but it's not something that has always existed.

• 39:15Craig S. Smith?

  And, and you're on top of sort of how people are, are how project managers are working. Do you see the role evolving at all? Or do you see a product board of sort of expanding into other areas of maybe not just product management, but, but a project management or, or even enterprise management?

• 39:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's a great question. The product management role is definitely evolving. And I think it's actually evolving in a very exciting way or in a couple of very exciting ways. I think, look, just looking back the last like 10 years, and this is a trend that we'll continue to see over the next couple of years. At, at least is the product management is becoming much more mainstream. So just like, you know, there was a marketer, which was a very nascent role, like in the late 1900s. And then every organization has a market, has a product, has a marketer now. I think product management is going to be the same way where every organization might have, that has something to do with digital. We'll have a product manager, because if you go back to what the role is really about is it's about being customer centric and driving that ROI.

• 40:32Speaker 00

  Like it's simply a no brainer to have a function like that in your organization. And just to give a couple of proof points here that this is actually happening, like, you know, if you look 10 years back, like product managers, yeah, or 20 years back, product, product managers, super nascent, some of the larger tech companies, Microsoft, Google, we've talked about it. 10 years back, across the Bay Area, Silicon Valley and tech companies across the globe. Now, if you look where you, where you find product managers, look at the leading banks in the US, in Europe, look at the leading consumer companies, you'll find product managers in every organization. So that is absolutely, you know, huge and I think super exciting. Because ultimately product managers drive impact for the business and, and for customers, and that is great.

• 41:15Speaker 00

  I think generally also, the skill expectations for product managers have increased and will continue to increase. Like twenty years back, say like it was primarily web applications, back box, software, couple pieces of hardware that like as a PM you could specialize in and I think you'd be fine. I think today, like what you need to do as a product manager to be successful in your job, and this is, this, this, this, this can be hard, is you need to think about web applications, mobile applications. And you know what? You also need to know about AI because that is simply how every product manager today works and gets the job done faster.

• 41:53Speaker 00

  And you not only need to do, use AI to get your job done faster with things like product board or product with polls or whatever it might be to really help you accelerate your day to day. You also need to know how you build AI products because like, you know, there might be a use case somewhere that one of your customers have that is much better addressed. With AI as opposed to, to everything else. And I'm going to quote Mary Lynn Nika here. She's an AI influencer who's, who's at Google and was a meta before. And she calls it every PM is an AI PM and that hundred percent resonates and is absolutely true. I think the third thing that we're going to see evolve that, you know, is obviously very exciting for product board is that there is now tooling for product management.

• 42:32Speaker 00

  And that didn't exist uh ten years ago, right? Like I was giving you this example where I was pushing data into this presentation and it was immediately outdated. And so I think the exciting piece is that there is, you know, now tooling out there that makes the PM job that much more efficient, helps them drive ROI. That much more easily for the company, helps the leaders in the organization make sure that the most important things get built quickly. So I think it's an exciting, you know, role and exciting function and exciting part of the industry that is still heavily developing with a lot of exciting things, you know, to come.

• 43:09Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah. What about the idea of, of uh C-suite using something like product board to, you know, looking at an enterprise as a product? And tracking uh or, or is that get too diffuse?

• 43:30Speaker 00

  No, absolutely. No, no, no, no. Enterprises definitely use Product Board today to, you know, make sure that their investments are properly allocated and that people are working on the most important things. So we do see C-suite personas in our customer organizations leverage Product Board. I mean, obviously, the key persona that we are serving today, that we're, you know, obviously have to verticalize social for, is the Chief Product Officer that makes sure that their teams are actually working on the most important things. And to get that bird's eye view across the product organization, what are people working on, but also being able to drill in specifically like, hey, what things are working, what things aren't working, if they choose to do so. Similarly, the other Chief Product Officer use case I also heard recently about,

• 44:15Speaker 00

  we touched on this a little bit, is actually like when you go into a large customer meeting to be prepared for that conversation using Product Board Pulse. And then we also see engagement from some adjacent C-level functions, like for example, Chief Customer Officer, because they are obviously heavily interested in what the product roadmap looks like. And when they go into a customer conversation or into a customer advisory board, telling them what's going on, telling them about the roadmap, being informed on the latest big developments. So we see a usage across the C-suite for sure.

• 44:47Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah. And, and for a, a company that doesn't use Product Board, what's the best way of to engage? Is it, I mean, is it a, is it a self-serve platform? Or do you have, you know, people that, that help onboard new product managers or new enterprises? How, how do people engage with Product Board?

• 45:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, both. So whatever suits the needs of your organization, I would say. So if you want to learn about Product Board today, you can simply go to productboard.com, sign up for a trial, experience the product, go through the stages of ideation, discovery and delivery to really experience the product end-to-end. If your organization wants to get like more into details of, you know,

• 45:39Speaker 00

  Best practices, how the product should be used and the rollout might be larger and more complex. We do have support and services and a direct sales motion available that you can work with us directly. And we can partner up together and see what the best implementation strategy for your organization is. And sometimes that might look like, you know, a big bang rollout to everyone at the same time. Sometimes customers like to run P O Cs first to validate, particularly in the enterprise. The product board is the right thing for them in a small part of the organization. Get the best practices established and then roll out from there. But we do have different ways of like getting to know product board depending on the needs of our customers.

• 46:18Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah, well, this is really interesting for me because I, as I said at the beginning, I really didn't, didn't know much about product management. Is there anything I haven't covered that that you want listeners to hear?

• 46:36Speaker 00

  Uh, that's a good question. I think, I think maybe just, you know, for, for the spirit of, of this podcast. And since you're, you know, so, so focused on, specifically since this podcast is, is focused on AI. Like, I just want to emphasize one more time that I think the opportunity for AI in product management is huge. Whether it's in the discovery phase to figure out what customers actually build. Or we have product with Pulse and prioritization where it's about trying to figure out what is actually the right thing that we put on top of the list. AI can help with writing product specs. So it's, it's, I think it really rapidly evolving space, specifically for product managers. And with the right tooling, I think organizations can go that much further.

• 47:19Speaker 00

  I also think that leaders in organizations actually play a super critical role in bringing the right AI to their organizations. So I'd always recommend thinking about like, hey, what are the biggest challenges you have in a specific discipline in your organization? Whether that's product management or something else. And then looking at the solutions from like, hey, which are the solutions that can really help me solve the problem in a highly targeted way? With the right data model, with the right vertical depth. And so definitely something to look out for, for leaders out there in the market.

• 47:49Craig S. Smith?

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