Real Progress VS Busy Work with Tim Herbig: how to connect strategy, the right metrics and discovery to build what you want - Impactful Products, Beach Body or Meaningful Life.

Busy isn’t the same as better. We sat down with product strategist, coach and consultant, and now a pubslihed author Tim Herbig to unpack a simple truth: real progress with impact that matters happens when strategy, metrics, and discovery align. If you lead change across a product, a platform team, culture or your own habits - you’ll leave with a clearer way to choose what to focus on, what to measure, and what to learn. Say no with confidence. Retire progress theater. And build momentum you...

• 0:09Speaker 00

  Hello and welcome back to another episode of Change Wired Podcast. My name is Angela Sharina, I'm your host, I'm your partner in change, personal and collective evolution, and your executive coach 360. And today I have a treat for you. Yes, we have another guest on Change Wired Podcast. Tim Herbeck, who writes about product strategy, building software, setting OKRs. One might say pretty niche and boring stuff, but as you listen to this podcast, you hopefully start thinking as I did. Wait, this isn't just about products, this is about everything.

• 0:54Speaker 00

  This is about life, how we set goals, how we know if we're actually moving forward or going in circles, how we avoid fooling ourselves into thinking we're making progress when we're really just busy. I wanted to have Tim on Change Wired Podcast because he's figured out a really cool framework for making real progress, not just in building products, but in anything you are trying to transform. It all comes down to three things working together: strategy, metrics, and discovery. And we're gonna dive into what those words mean and how you can apply it, not just again

• 1:37Speaker 00

  to building products or services, but strategy for anything you want to change in life. Tim shows how these concepts are supposed to talk to each other. If you're leading any kind of change in your team, in your organization, your own life, you'll hear something that shifts how you think about getting from here to there.

• 2:01Speaker 00

  Tim spent over a decade working in product management before becoming a coach and a consultant. And now a published author of the book Real Progress that we are talking about on this podcast. He also writes a weekly newsletter that you actually want to read because it brings value with every word. This conversation goes deep into details, but it always stays practical. We talk about AI, we talk about beach parties, we talk about why best practices might be the very thing that's holding you back. So grab your drink of choice, find your favorite listening spot and let's dive in.

• 2:46Speaker 00

  This is Change Wired and today we are talking about making real progress, progress that makes some impact. Tim, welcome to Change Wired Podcast. So glad to have you here.

• 3:01Speaker 01

  Thank you for having me.

• 3:02Speaker 00

  Yes, you know, I was very excited to invite you to the podcast after reading a couple of your articles, reading your book, exploring your work. One of the biggest reasons is because on this podcast, Change Wired, we are passionate about change, evolution, collective unlocking of more of our potential. And any sort of directed evolution and development or change, not possible without a good strategy, B, some sort of metrics, and C, discovery process in such a complex thing as our life or our businesses.

• 3:46Speaker 00

  And when I was reading your book and your articles, I'm like, yeah, this is about product and building things, services or products. But then it also feels like it's so relatable to life in general. And I'm curious, did you have this, I don't know, were you thinking also about maybe bigger theme of your book, not just the scope of it?

• 4:09Speaker 01

  That's a really good question. I don't think I consciously, I would say I probably didn't do it consciously. Now that you're laying it out, I think it makes a lot of sense. The, the thing that I use as a, as a pattern in the book, and I think this is true for, for a lot of other things, is when I, when I work with clients and they tell me about a different way of working, the different thing they want to establish. What I encourage them to do is to think of the way of working like a product. So basically, what's the vision for this way of working? Like, how do you want people to behave differently? What are the levers you would pull your strategy to implement this kind of change? How would you track whether you've achieved this change or not? And then, of course, very much connected is

• 4:53Speaker 01

  to identify the levers you would use to get closer to the vision, like what kind of problems are you trying to solve?

• 4:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 4:59Speaker 01

  And so I think in that regard, i- if I can apply this kind of trinity, so to speak, to, if I can apply this to, to, to ways of working, I figure it's very much applicable to other things in life as well.

• 5:11Speaker 00

  Yes, because at the end of the day, no matter what we are trying to achieve, it's a, it's a project. One might say it's some kind of product. Yeah, exactly, a journey. And unless you want your journey to be like very chaotic and never sure where it is you're going to end up, then you've got to have some strategy to, to get you to a specific destination. Let's leave that, you know, for a moment. We're gonna get again to your book very soon. And I'd like to know, as our listeners probably too, where did it all start? Like, I know you, you spent quite a lot of, quite a huge chunk of your life in product, in different roles.

• 5:51Speaker 00

  But then maybe even earlier, like, how did this whole passion for product development and your work now started?

• 5:58Speaker 01

  That's a really good question. I think the, like, like many people, I, I stumbled into product management. In two thousand and ten, I worked at a company, at a marketing agency, and they built an internal tool. And someone was, we've got to use Scrum now to build this, like an agile methodology, and you're going to be the product owner. I had no idea what that meant. I think frankly neither did the company in full. And so we tried to figure that out, but it didn't really work out that well. The thing that I always had, already back then, is I I I would say I always had a strong affinity for for digital products, like I liked using nice things. And so I always am very, very curious. And so when I started to work in this in this company back then,

• 6:40Speaker 01

  I worked a lot on mobile advertising technologies, for example. And I I quickly found myself having more thoughts about this topic than I could share at work. So I was looking for other outlets to share that because I'm a I'm a very, I I process with writing, just it's just how I think. And so I I was looking for outlets to to write about these thoughts that I had about how things were related and certain methodologies and everything. And I quickly started to write on another blog and then from that writing became a very natural habit of me, of my work. And so over time, I think back in twenty twelve, twenty thirteen, and then turned my attention even more to writing about product management.

• 7:19Speaker 01

  Not with a specific goal even in mind, but just for me to to process the things I I experienced throughout the week or the months at work. And I like to joke that I think in twenty sixteen, I started writing a weekly newsletter, which I still keep going to this day. And people always ask me, how do I come up with ideas? And the the most honest answer is it's the experiences throughout the week. Like, most of the time, this thing I'm I'm writing about is related to something I experienced the the the previous week. And um I have that at the same time, like I I think as in other areas of life, whenever I get to experience something, like my favorite way of processing it is writing it down, either in a notebook or writing it in a WhatsApp message to a friend, for example.

• 7:59Speaker 00

  Yes, it's I I love reading your newsletters, by the way. That's one of those newsletters where you actually get value and it makes you think differently and and makes you learn. And it very much feels like a lived experience.

• 8:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:14Speaker 00

  Yes, I can so relate also to thinking through writing, that's why I also have daily blog. It's like every day I have something that I I'm thinking about. And so in in writing, like putting it the into something you can see and then deconstructing and thinking deeper about different concepts. Yes, so that that's, you know, how your interest in product developed in writing and moving forward. How did your interest maybe start in? Developing for this like a specific combination of, I guess, I'm not sure if it's product strategy, product building, like, how did you combine

• 8:55Speaker 00

  strategy and goals and discovery that into this, you know, beautiful process that has this three elements?

• 9:05Speaker 01

  Yes, interesting organic journey, I would say. I think when I worked as an in-house product manager and head of product, I always enjoyed the, I enjoyed many parts of my work, but I definitely had a big neck for, for the discovery aspect. Like, I enjoyed understanding things through qualitative research, quantitative research. Like, I'm fortunate that interview customers always came relatively easy to me. Doesn't mean I'm always, always good at it, but it came easy to me. So I enjoyed that part and untangling things. So discovery always felt like, like a very natural thing. And the big, like, metrics or OKRs came in a bit of a, like a sneaky way, because in, in twenty, I think twenty fifteen, twenty sixteen, I, the company I worked at, I, I got a new boss.

• 9:49Speaker 01

  And then on, on the reflection of this transition, I learned that our boss previously had used some version of OKRs with us, which sparked my curiosity about OKRs as a framework. And then I got into it and realized, oh, that's, that's actually interesting. And then I got very curious of how to put that into practice over the years and try to implement it in various different teams that I, that I had to use. I would say that one of the biggest tipping points that led me to this, like, this trinity kind of focus for me came from when in twenty sixteen I changed jobs, I almost accidentally joined a consultancy. It was supposed to be a different kind of company, but it became a consultancy. And what I found myself having, having to do after having worked for years only with other product people, is now having to

• 10:32Speaker 01

  adjust how I explain the things that were natural to me to others, to educate them, actually get them to do things differently. And so I, I had to give workshops and, and training and, and coaching, just intuitively. I, I never did a training on that. And for that, I realized, okay, this is like, again, this comes, I like to go after things that come easy to me as there's a natural pull, a natural, natural gravitation towards. And it was around that I found myself getting pulled most often to, to this topic of problem understanding, measuring success. And then eventually, a couple of years later, realized how much Like how big the leverage of strategy is on both of these things, right? Of course, you can, you don't always have to start there, but the leverage is quite strong.

• 11:17Speaker 01

  And so I honestly, I ended up doing like I, it's this, this age old overlap of like what comes nat- kind of natural to me. What do I believe is important and what do I see companies struggle with? And then from that, like, these are the three core topics that, that I sort of like landed on. And it's also because I'm convinced that they are so interconnected and that so many of the issues in one domain can be solved, or at least guided by these other domains.

• 11:45Speaker 00

  Yes, and I love, you know, in your book, you have this graphic of progress wheel.

• 11:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:50Speaker 00

  And certain questions that, or I guess challenges that people have and the questions that they can ask themselves. And it usually relates to the other area. How did that come to be? It's, when, when you look at it, it feels so intuitive and then, but coming up with that, obviously different.

• 12:07Speaker 01

  In hindsight, everything feels intuitive, right? I think the, I think when I first started, the funny thing is with the book, I think it took me two years to write the book. But it was very, the initial idea is very close to the result that I produced, which is cool. So I had a lot of clarity around what I wanted to put in the book. So it was more about how do I package it essentially?

• 12:24Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 12:24Speaker 01

  And I had this idea of a wheel kind of framework relatively early on. And it was inspired by a friend of mine, Petra Willer, who is a fantastic product leadership coach. And in her first book, she has this tool that she calls, and the PM wheel, the product mentor wheel.

• 12:42Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 12:42Speaker 01

  Just a different purpose. It's a diagnostic tool to help with personal development of product mentors. So I always felt like, oh, there's so many canvases already and like, because the, the problem for me is that the three domains are not linear. There's not a linear one to three steps. So I wanted something that was like positioned all of them on an equal level and showcased the non-linearity. And actually then it was, I think it was, it was my wife during a family vacation where she basically gave me the core idea of here's all these things, like the, the question, connection kind of thing. So that's how, how it came to be. But it took a long time before I actually got to defining it in detail because I first wanted to write the, the three core chapters of the book, so to speak.

• 13:25Speaker 01

  And then I wanted to return to the progress wheel and then I weaved it into the rest of the book.

• 13:30Speaker 00

  Yes, again, now it all makes sense. But.

• 13:36Speaker 00

  The other question I had for you is, can you define also for our listeners, what for you is strategy? So that's the first question. And then, why do you feel that it is important for people to always connect this strategy, the OKRs or metrics that people use to discovery and not treating them as separate entities?

• 14:03Speaker 01

  That's a really good question. I think the first one,

• 14:09Speaker 01

  the first question, what is strategy? I think a couple of years ago, I might have pointed to a specific shape of a strategy, a specific way of how it's articulated. And the more I work with the topic, the more I realize how almost irrelevant the actual shape is. I've seen tremendously clear strategies on one or two pages in a Google Doc, just very clearly written out. I've seen strategies who used a great framework or template, but didn't really convey much. And so what I try to always come back to, because I think it's also, the problem is that your customers don't really care about your strategy. So you're not writing for your customers.

• 14:49Speaker 01

  You're writing it for your team members, your direct reports, whoever you're working with, right? So just like a product, when we try to think of a product, it has to work for this audience eventually. So just like with the strategies, like, okay, it has to work for my colleagues. It has to work for Tim in this department or for Andrea in this department, whatever. And I think that's an important thing to then reverse engineer it. Okay, how in our company, how do we convey strategy? Like, what's the format that really sticks in our company? It could be a visual framework, it could be a one pager, it could be a presentation, whatever it is. It doesn't really matter. Because from then, you want to think about, okay, what does it have to achieve for people? And there are different interpretations. Like, I'm convinced that the more I work with it is that the core value it has to provide

• 15:33Speaker 01

  is to help people say no or yes to certain opportunities, right? So when something comes along your way, you want to be sure that, oh yeah, I'm going to pursue this, I'm not going to pursue this. And I think coming backwards from all of that then dictates the shape, what information you put in there, how you put it together and all that kind of stuff. That's what I see. That's what I think it has to be. So always try to work backwards from are there certain formats the company has in place?

• 15:58Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 15:58Speaker 01

  What's the point if I work with a company and they are very set on a certain framework, how they articulate strategy, but I come in with a different one? And then it might be well articulated, but it fails to convey the message because no one reads it because it's the wrong format. So I try to come backwards from that and I try to marry in a way the format that works in the company and the core questions I believe should be in there and then try to try to find another one.

• 16:25Speaker 01

  To back to your second question, like how these things are are connected, right? I think it's and that's I tried to answer that in the progress wheel is that because I think this the some of the more common questions or struggles you might find in companies of why quote unquote strategy doesn't work, right? And I mean, there's a thing that's a content aspect that you might have made the wrong choices about your audience, your differentiation, whatever. The problem is these things no one knows anyways from the get go, right? It's like no one knows it. So the only thing you can focus on is how can you increase your chances of it succeeding? And I think there are two levers that you have, right? One is of course that ideally there's less fewer parts of a strategy are completely

• 17:09Speaker 01

  unproven and fully assumed rather than at least informed by some kind of information.

• 17:13Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 17:14Speaker 01

  Doesn't mean you always have to do like a months long market analysis, but at least like some kind of informed conviction of like, yeah, here's why we go for this thing. And this this informed conviction could be it's because that's what we're uniquely good at as a company. It is what we know our customers want. It's what showcases all capabilities. That's perfectly fine. And the other aspect is that the execution of that strategy is not aligned with the choice that you made, right? Like you said, the strategy, but you do different things still. And I think that's where where metrics can be very helpful to say, okay, like here are the indicators, the measurable indicators that would help us to see if the strategy has worked or not. And we're going to use these measurable indicators to check if the stuff we're doing

• 17:58Speaker 01

  goes in the right direction, right? Our strategy is to branch into this new market. Then you build something. It's like, does it help us branch into this new market? And you don't really know. But if you translate branching into this new market in number of customers from this new industry or retention rate or revenue, then you can check, oh, we launched these five features. And you can link it to these metrics.

• 18:19Speaker 00

  That's it. It also reminds me so much if there's just like coaching in general, let's say someone trying to achieve great health. Well, that is their outcome. So the strategy, well, you got to have some informed framework for to design the things that you're going to do that can be immensely helpful instead of just trying a bunch of things that you're not sure of. And then, so that's, you know, the, I guess where discovery can also help. And then metrics, you got to measure something to figure out if you're actually moving towards that or not moving anywhere.

• 18:57Speaker 01

  Agree. I think it's funny that you bring this up because I think it's one of the easiest examples I often use in workshops to articulate the non-product angle, just to understand the concept, right? If you say you have something like, I want to have a perfect beach buddy by next year's summer, right? Like, cool, that's maybe where you want to go. And then you can discuss the strategies to get there, right? And that depends on the type of person you are. Are you, do you enjoy cardio? Probably maybe, maybe you don't. Do you enjoy going to the gym? Okay. So what exercise strategy works for you? What kind of dietary preferences do you naturally have to get into a caloric deficit? For example, like that could be the some strategies you choose. And from then you could then set them because the metric should not be lose, like have this kind of body fat or this kind of weight in nine months because that's lagging.

• 19:40Speaker 01

  What you need along the way is how often do I work out? Do I improve the reps or the weight and able to lift in the gym? How often do I hit my caloric deficit? How many steps do I take? This is the stuff you would track, you could actually use to track your progress along the way to see if this strategy has worked. If, for example, you say my dietary preference is trying to do a keto diet, but with a keto diet, I routinely fail to come into a caloric deficit. Maybe you need a new diet, right? The caloric deficit.

• 20:09Speaker 00

  So and that also speaks back to the point like you might have some good strategies that work for somebody, but you might try them and measures things and you might find out that it actually doesn't work for you.

• 20:22Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 20:23Speaker 00

  So, you know, it's not an indication that the thing is not possible or the strategy doesn't work. It's just this strategy did not work for your specific context.

• 20:32Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 20:32Speaker 00

  Which you also, yeah, write a lot about, about, you know, contexts and best practices.

• 20:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:39Speaker 00

  You know, can you maybe expand on that, on context best practices? And also, I, I actually remember I found your work when I read an article about leading and legging indicators. I think that was like the best article I saved it, I'm probably gonna be rereading it. It's the first time I think I really understood the concept and how complex it is. So could you also explain that what are some good ways to set the leading and legging indicators? Because it seems like intuitive some word that leading is something you can, you know, measure and track every day, legging is something that's more like delayed. But then also you explain, for example, that if you work in an organization or a team,

• 21:23Speaker 00

  you might have different leading and legging indicators depending on from what side you look at them, like at what level.

• 21:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 21:32Speaker 00

  Love to, to hear.

• 21:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, happy to touch first on the context and practices topic, right? I think what I, what I often find in my career is like commonly there's this saying about like best practices, right? And I think the, the issue oftentimes is that the best practices are not contextual, right?

• 21:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 21:49Speaker 01

  I think there's this great quote from James, James Key, who wrote Atomic Habits, and he said, um, advice, uh, I probably missed it up. He said, advice is context dependent, but questions are context independent essentially. And I think that's the problem, right? I can't give people advice across industries, across company size. I, I just can't, I can't say this is a universal rule. And so I I started to use the term better practices to acknowledge the context. Like it's not about a universal best. It's about relatively better, like what does better in your context mean, right? If a team says, look, if you would say universal advisors talk to ten customers every week, but you're a team who does enterprise level B two B work, and you talk to no customer right now,

• 22:34Speaker 01

  you maybe you're really good if you talk to three people every week. That would be better already, right? Compared to trying to chase ten and you get lost.

• 22:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 22:42Speaker 01

  The journey. I think that's very crucial, particularly since I, my work, I early on I decided I wanted to stay relatively broad with the type of companies that I worked with. Not focus on, on, let's say, I don't know, e-commerce or SaaS. Because I think that a lot of principles are very universally applicable. And I personally enjoy this challenge of rethinking, how do I translate this this principle into the tactics required for this team? So it was my personal preference to do that. And then what I did in the book, I worked with these like quality checks and questions. I tried to implement questions are like, okay, in your context, ask yourself these questions and potentially dig deeper into how could you, how to, how could you move forward?

• 23:22Speaker 00

  Which is such a powerful coaching technique.

• 23:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, thank you. And it was interesting because I had it first in the book and it was in the draft. I think it was routinely the best, the most exciting piece in the book. Beta readers talk about like, like this is good, this is good, but these things, they are great.

• 23:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 23:39Speaker 01

  I I enjoyed that as well.

• 23:42Speaker 01

  On top of leading lagging indicators, like this topic first called my attention, I think in, I don't know, I think twenty twenty or twenty nineteen, something like that. Because of the product work that I was doing, like I talked a lot about OKRs and I, then you oftentimes have this problem of this misalignment between setting a goal and measuring the goal, but it not being aligned with the cadence of the work of a team.

• 24:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 24:03Speaker 01

  So you set a very high level goal. It's like with the beach body we just had, it's the same problem, right? Like, how do I know tomorrow that I'm on track to the beach body next summer? The the way, the scale doesn't tell me.

• 24:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 24:15Speaker 01

  And so that's what sparked my interest. And then I did a bit of research just on the topic because it was not a new term, but I found often that the term was explained very. Academic in a way. And I think to me, it missed this New York's reality of the teams that I got to meet. Like this massive reality, just like you said, like you have a team that has an internal customer, ex home or B two B or B two C. And they always read these examples. This is what a leading indicator is, but they could not get these metrics. So they were like, we're failing. I was like, that's not true, because if you have a metric that is relatively more leading than what your company has, then it is useful for you. So I wanted to, like part of that, and it's part of that I try to bring more into my content over and over is.

• 24:58Speaker 01

  I I try to produce content in a way that teams who might feel, let's say, underrepresented, feel heard or seen. Right. Because I think back to the topic of best practices, a lot of things talks about the the great examples out there.

• 25:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 25:12Speaker 01

  A common example for me is teams who work on internal products, for example, and they oftentimes don't. I'm not represented in most content out there. It's like a couple of years ago with B two B. No one talked about B two B. Now people talk more about it. And I think. That's what motivated me to showcase, instead of writing twenty articles for every context, to say, let me try to produce, put it into one approach. That people can take into their context and just show in a few few examples. And yeah, this is content of like a leading indicators. Is I love it so much because it's so universal. It's independent of product as we just established.

• 25:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 25:45Speaker 01

  And yet, and it's so powerful, and yet it's often, it's so misunderstood.

• 25:50Speaker 00

  Yes, and I was actually looking for, you know, the information in that when I was working on culture design.

• 25:58Speaker 01

  Right.

• 25:58Speaker 00

  Because the problem is there, you have a lot of. Values or legging indicators that are very legging, right? And you need to measure something to make sure that you are moving somewhere. Otherwise, like a lot of companies end up working for decades on the same thing and not sure if they moved somewhere. Yeah, and I found that is very useful. Useful concepts strategy, a way to explain it, something that I could also use. And also love, you know, the concept that you just explained about like better. I have this phrase, better is always available. Like you cannot guarantee a lot of things, but if you put intentional action and you measure it to track, you could end up somewhere better.

• 26:40Speaker 01

  Exactly, yeah, agreed.

• 26:42Speaker 00

  Or at least, you know, you learn something for the next time. So yes, that's again, I don't know if you had something here to to add to that. My, or I'm going to continue with my questions. Another, you know, thing that came to mind while I was preparing for the interview is this idea of, I love how you framed a strategy is ability to say no to a lot of things that, you know, coming from our world, like ideas, we features we can develop.

• 27:15Speaker 00

  But then where do you draw the line between still being adaptable? And listening to the signals that it might be the time to either expand your strategy or pivot or change it completely. Like, how do you navigate that?

• 27:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it's a really good question. I don't, I don't have a universal answer to that, quite frankly. I think it's what I tried to convey in the book, and this is based on, on, on my, my dear colleague, Ravi Mehta, who, who gave me a lot of feedback on the book, where he said, particularly these days in a, like where, for example, at least in the software industry, like the market pays, the change of pace at the markets is so dramatic. The point, the POV I landed on for now is, okay, I think it's still important to have this time horizon of a strategy that looks at least a few more months into the future. Because again, you don't want to, if you look at quarter, like that's a quarter. It's like you need something a little bit more long term. And yet you have to be receptive to like, Ravi calls this, like, I think market interrupt moments or something like that. Like, and the most prominent example would be the launch of ChatGPT, right?

• 28:17Speaker 01

  Then it would be like probably like an interrupt moment. And then what is a market interrupt moment, of course, again, it's very contextual, I think, it how it affects you. And I think. The way I like to think about it then is like your strategy consists of these different, almost like gears that are intertwined. When you dial one gear, the other gears turn as well. And then you have to think about that. And I think the question is, when the market interrupt moment happens, which part of a strategy is that predominantly affected, right?

• 28:45Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 28:45Speaker 01

  Chances are your vision might not be affected. Your vision is still very, very long term. Chances are the segment you're going after is also not necessarily affected. Chances are you have a new competitor.

• 28:56Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 28:56Speaker 01

  Chances are you're still solving the same problem, but your very proposition might be in question because maybe there's a new expectation. Your differentiation might be very much in question. Maybe your distribution as well, when the platform like OpenAI launches integrations or an app store, suddenly your value has to be distributed differently. So I think the art, but it's difficult to science it because it's more of an art. I think it's to say,

• 29:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 29:17Speaker 01

  this has come out, which part of the strategy is like, does change now if I turn this dial? And how do the other dials have to turn consequently? So that's the way I see it. So it's this, I think there's no standardizable, templateable answer to that. But it comes back to this point of translating a strategy into some kind of metrics and then having the routine or the discipline to check in on the goals as well to say, oh, like this metric is suddenly off track. Is that because we're executing poorly or is that because of shift in the market? And I think you can see this in many businesses right now, when you say something like your organic SEO traffic might be changing due to AI search, for example, then you have to think about, okay, it's not the core content that is in threat. It's also not the segment.

• 30:01Speaker 01

  It's the same information I'm trying to provide, but how do I distribute it differently now to still reach people because their behavior has changed? So I think it's about mapping these changes to the aspect of a strategy and thinking which needs adjustment.

• 30:14Speaker 00

  Yes. And what I'm hearing again, what can be useful here is not only having those metrics that are meaningful, but also having a practice to reflect on them. So you could adjust.

• 30:25Speaker 01

  Right.

• 30:25Speaker 00

  When the market disrupt itself or pivot.

• 30:33Speaker 00

  One other, you know, interesting topic that you started the book with was alibi progress.

• 30:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:40Speaker 00

  Which is an interesting topic for me because it applies, I think, to every domain of life.

• 30:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:46Speaker 00

  I think that, you know, something like, just because you can measure it doesn't mean you should or it's meaningful. So, yes, how did, how did that come to be from your work, from your life?

• 30:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, I think it's, it's, it's become more present. I think in the book I shared this anecdote of a boss of mine, a former boss of mine giving me feedback on that during the part of my career, I might have been a bit more focused, a bit too focused on the correct application of frameworks and methodology. And that this, I got a bit lost in the methodology and lost a bit of the actual results that are worth producing. And frankly, like over the years, then I mean, I've seen that, of course, sometimes in myself, but I also seen that in the clients I get to work with is that there's a they, they check the box of a methodology and they do it in the book, but it doesn't produce a change in behavior for the teams or the customers and therefore also not the bottom line. And then I think over the years, I used different, slightly different terminology for that. I think at one point I called it

• 31:43Speaker 01

  theater or something like that, but then I, I just landed on, on alibi progress. And funnily enough, I think the, the title of the book, Real Progress, I think it is actually the title I had in mind when I started writing it. So I, I thought about real progress and then it was more about finding the, the appropriate opposite of that. And then I just landed on, on, on alibi progress. As, as the, the term to use here.

• 32:06Speaker 00

  Yes, it's, it reminds me, well, it reminds me of my practice with trying to write good advertising. You know, there are so many metrics that you can measure and yes, it can reach that many people, but does it actually create the kind of progress that you want at the end of the day? Meaning, let's say you want to have more customers, right? Just because you reach more people doesn't mean that that's the only metric that matters or is needed. So in, yes, I found, and do you have any maybe?

• 32:39Speaker 00

  Well, in the book, you have a lot of questions, actually, but maybe one or two questions for either product managers or product teams or any leader to diagnose that alibi progress, right? How can you perhaps, because some things are simple like in life or advertising, but when you build product, when you have big organizations, it doesn't, it's not always as obvious. So maybe what are some signals? What are some questions to ask on a regular basis to make sure that the company, the team is actually making progress versus just sitting up the metrics for the show or the theater, as you said in the book?

• 33:16Speaker 01

  One of my favorite ways is probably when I work with a team or a company and they talk about a specific practice or way of working or framework, whatever it is. Then one of the things that I'm interested in is why are you doing this? And this is so simple, but it's often like, why? Tell me basically which problem are you trying to solve with this? And you could apply this to anything with this meeting, with this methodology, with this way of truck. What is it? And I think that is for me the first good test. Like to say, can you tell me the reason why you're doing this? If you can't tell me the reason why, there's a fair chance that you're doing it just so, right? Just so that you take the box. So I think that would be the first, the first thing for me. If you're at least can name the reason, like when you say, oh, we're doing this. So

• 34:00Speaker 01

  the teams are more aligned or the teams, I don't know, are more focused, whatever. Then the follow up question would be, okay, so how long have you been doing this? And how much has, how could you, it doesn't always has to be a quantifiable number. It could be an anecdote in this case, but how has the team's alignment changed over the past six months or twelve months? Right? So, and again, we could bring this back to this beach body example we had earlier on, right? So you might say, oh, I got to the, I got to the gym three times a week for twelve weeks now. It's like, great. But has anything changed? Like, do you lift heavier weights or have your body composition improved or whatever? And if it hasn't, then yes, you did the reps, but you probably didn't push hard enough. You didn't do the right exercises or whatever. Like then you can diagnose what

• 34:45Speaker 01

  the actual reason is.

• 34:46Speaker 00

  Yes, it's, you know, the question why there. It's such a powerful question, you know, it's been used with like Toyota Industries to, I think, to improve the production process and then it's used by, I don't know, Simon Sinek to figure out your life purpose, right? It's such a powerful question to get to the core of like, why you're doing the things that you're doing and is it really working for you?

• 35:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:12Speaker 00

  The amazing question and such a simple way to figure out if there is meaning or the results outcomes that you want.

• 35:23Speaker 00

  In terms of maybe mistakes, like in, in, in your experience, where do you find product teams, leaders, get this progress wheel wrong, or not so much progress, but

• 35:39Speaker 00

  in, interaction between strategy and metrics and discovery? What are the some common pitfalls that a lot of teams experience or leaders?

• 35:50Speaker 01

  That's a good question. I think, I would say, I think it's, I mean, that's kind of the main point of the progress wheel is like that to treat these three things and you could expand it to other practices, but to treat these three things as, as isolated practices. I think that's the first thing to say, oh, we, we, we just do the strategy or we just set goals or we just talk to customers when a lack of clarity in any of these will result in a lack of clarity in, in the respective domain, right? Like the, the less clear strategy is, the more a team will struggle to articulate useful OKRs.

• 36:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 36:24Speaker 01

  Or the less clarity about your target audience from your strategy exists, the harder it will be for the team to choose whose problems to prioritize, right? So I think that, that exists. And a symptom of that is of trying to workshop these things, like to only solve things in a workshop, like to only say, oh, we're going to do a strategy workshop or an OKR workshop or a discovery workshop. And I think that's a, that's a bit of a red flag because I think you can workshop parts of it, right? You can workshop certain things of that, but the actual work to understand customers, to understand which metric to use, like that happens outside of workshops.

• 36:59Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 36:59Speaker 01

  So I think an over reliance on, on workshops and treating these things too independently, I think these would be the two main things I would, I would pay attention to.

• 37:10Speaker 01

  And maybe, let me add a third one, it's for example, at least in the context of, I think it's applicable to all three is that if they feel they are stuck in their strategy or their OKRs, that they try to do strategy harder, for example, to say, oh, we just need another strategy template, or we need more strategy offsites, or we just need a new AI generator for OKRs or whatever. And it's like when the root cause, it might give you incremental gains, but the root cause is one of those adjacent practices that might just be even more powerful.

• 37:41Speaker 00

  Yes, it also reminds me of this, what I encountered is when this strategy, for example, is too vague and it is treated differently by the leadership. It's sort of like, that's what the leadership does. And then it is not translated to every level and department or not translatable because it is so vague. And everyone ends up measuring their own metrics that do not necessarily support this strategy. And they then shape the discovery according to their metrics, not really related again to the strategy. And that's how you end up pulling into different direction and not really making progress on strategy.

• 38:25Speaker 00

  And the same thing, like back to Beachbody example, running harder isn't always the answer to getting to where you need to go.

• 38:34Speaker 01

  That's a good point.

• 38:36Speaker 00

  No, again, just reading your book and talking to you, I can see like so much depth and so many things come together. It's like why certain things just don't work in companies, especially if the company starts growing and becomes large and you can't really see everything as a leader. But you can see the symptoms, like things are misaligned or not working.

• 39:00Speaker 00

  I think a little bit, maybe backward, maybe, I don't know, the question, what was the, I think, main motivation for you to put that in the book at this point, right? Why not just keep writing the blog? Why did you want to create this book? For maybe for who and what problem to solve?

• 39:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a good question. I think the

• 39:24Speaker 01

  Probably a couple of different reasons. Like, one is that it feels to me like when I talk to friends of mine also in the coaching consulting business, that at some point, like writing a book is like, it's like, it's like a better business card. It can become your business card, right? There's a weird thing that happens with people when suddenly you can start yourself calling an author compared to not, right? It's one of those things that are not rational, but real anyways, right? So I think that was always in the back of my mind as like a strategic tool of my business of like to have a book, so to speak. Another thing that is what I realized is that very often, over time, as I started to see these connecting these dots across these domains and these intersected complexities,

• 40:08Speaker 01

  so to speak, is that when I would try to convey this complexity in an article, it would blow up in adequate. It's like, it just becomes too big. It becomes too much and it's no longer an article. That's the second thing. And the third thing was that I had this idea of a book and so I was like, yeah, it's probably something I should do. And I remember in 2022, I thought this would be the year where I would write the book, but I never actually went for it. I never actually did it, right? And I'm a strong believer, as I mentioned before, that to going after where the resonance or the gravity of something is. So clearly, 2022, it wasn't there. But in 2023, like this term that came to my head is like, do I have the book in me?

• 40:50Speaker 01

  Like, I think in order to push through the journey of a book, like, it has to be within you so that you, that it creates enough power in a way to actually bring it into the world. Because it's a journey, you have to go through it. Nobody sits down and writes it in two weeks, almost no one. So that was, that was the thing that in 2023, I felt like, yeah, I have the book within me, like I have the things and the topics. And the funny, like mini breakthrough moment was, I was a bit strategic about that. I started working with a new editor on the blog to test how the collaboration worked. And then in, I think in May or June of that year, I was in a taxi, on a cab ride with three very accomplished authors in my industry. Peter Willer and Jeff Gotthoff and I think Christina Wodka as well.

• 41:36Speaker 01

  And the three of them just started talking about their book business. Like, oh, what's good about authorship and this or that. I was sitting in there and I knew them, I liked them, I was like, shit, now I have to write a book. Like, I was like, okay.

• 41:48Speaker 00

  Missing out.

• 41:49Speaker 01

  Hearing them, I was like, yeah, okay, I see. And then I think two weeks later, I talked to my editors, like, I wanna, I wanna read for real. And I want to embark on the journey of writing the book. So I think that was the, the spark of realizing, when do I really have it within me? To, to actually have enough power to push through this process of creating it. And this like, okay, I think it's part of my career, the stage of my consulting career where it really fits in.

• 42:15Speaker 00

  Ah, and no.

• 42:20Speaker 00

  Like slip of mind, the question, but I, I just thought about when you started talking about how when you write blogs and they blow up and become longer, almost not manageable for today's attention span. When people usually buy a book, they expect it to, to be a book, right? To dedicate some more attention and time to that. And I think that's where you're right, that the format also is important, that not everything that you can put in the blog, you should put in the blog or a tweet. But yeah, the, the amazing book, you know, it's one of those books. I also believe that when you decide to write a book and dedicate the time

• 43:02Speaker 00

  that you probably wanna feel like it's something that is valuable of people's attention, that's worth people's attention, meaning that, you know, it's something good that you can be proud of.

• 43:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:13Speaker 00

  And so you can't really force that process. I'm curious, how long did it take you to write it, like in terms of hours, maybe?

• 43:22Speaker 01

  In terms of hours, I think I stopped tracking at one point because it was just, I don't know, I think it's, I don't know. So it was two years from actually starting working on it and actually publishing, a little over two years, maybe. And I did it in phases, I would say. I think there were phases where I'd spent much more time, where I probably spent a week, I probably spent, let's say, twelve, fourteen hours a week writing on it, like net, really like net, net writing time. There were weeks where I probably only worked like four to six hours on it. I think the interesting thing is like, if you hear, if you hear that, I can imagine it might not sound like a lot, right? Because you feel like, oh, it's like forty hours, sixty hour work weeks, but like, but the, the, the period of actually like, that's like net time,

• 44:05Speaker 01

  thinking and writing the book. And that's so different than sitting in a meeting or doing normal corporate work. So it's very, for me, it's at least very intense. And I realized I can't properly, I couldn't properly write more than, let's say, five hours a day. I, I just, like, the diminishing charges were just too much. It just didn't make sense for me to continue after that. And then, yeah, it was easy to, difficult to find my flow also. Like, what's, what's the type of way of working that works for me for the book? I had to try a lot in that and trying to find what's the setup where I can really write well for me.

• 44:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, I also like, you know, to unpack the, the process because I like listeners to understand that a fact that we humans are not machines, not A I. And our brain has its capacity to deliver good work and good thinking. And as you said, you can't just order yourself to sit and write for eight hours.

• 44:59Speaker 01

  Exactly. Yeah.

• 45:01Speaker 00

  The, the. Go ahead.

• 45:04Speaker 01

  It's also, it's also what I noticed is that I, I, I would write something and then it would have to sometimes just sit a bit. I would have to marinate it in a way. I'd have to put this down and I might come back to it a couple of weeks later. I might not work on the book at all. I might work on different parts of the book. But to me, it was natural process. I, I couldn't like write it down, finish. It was always like, I would write it, I would let it sit, I would come back, I would write it again. Then I would share it with people and then I would, so it was this the evolution for me, because I also didn't want it to, like in a project I took is I didn't like lagging leading again is I didn't just want to write the full book and then get feedback on it, but I wanted to, I wrote individual chapters and shared each chapter with beta readers. So I could get feedback

• 45:46Speaker 01

  immediately. So that's also what, what kept me going throughout the two years instead of having to, having this, this dry period of not getting feedback at all, like having feedback in between.

• 45:55Speaker 00

  Um. And you know, writing with people, I think it's by now a very common practice for a lot of creators to create, to co-create with the audience, just because you also probably are writing for the audience, not just for your own entertainment. So you want the book to resonate. The curious that did you use AI at any, in any form of shape, like maybe as an editor or idea generator?

• 46:19Speaker 01

  So I did more towards the end, I would say in the last quarter of writing probably. Because early on, I found that the tools that I used early on when I started writing in twenty twenty three, they never felt good enough, quite frankly.

• 46:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 46:32Speaker 01

  Uh, like the context windows were too small, it was difficult to convey the whole message. So that didn't really work well. And so I would say, I remember that this year around like April, May, I started to use AI for a couple of like thinking pieces, right? I would, I would never, I almost never use it for actual writing. It was more like, okay, look, I have, I want to find a repeatable structure for the chapter. Or here's how I did this, tell me where the, the structure breaks, where, where I have a gap in there. So that's how I, where I, I, so I really mostly use it as a sparing partner. And it was good because I still had my human editor, but working with AI in between was basically like she would sit. It felt like she would sit next to me for the little maybe back and forth.

• 47:13Speaker 01

  And then I would have a larger chunk of work and then I could work with my editor on actually fine tuning it and embedding it into the broader picture. Because that's what I still found what never really worked well with AI back then was to really make sure that the piece that was written, how well it fitted to the, the broader book. Like that's something where it always fell through, which is fine. But yeah, that, that was my, that was my, I think the strongest usage that I experienced.

• 47:39Speaker 00

  Yes, yeah, but I, I feel like that is a really good usage of it because what I found is when some people use it for actual writing, it very often loses that grounding, so just because AI doesn't have a lived experience. And so very often like what it writes, it becomes like such some generic stuff that is not very relatable and you can. Always, like at least from the books that that I tried that I know were written by AI, like you you can say that's not a lot of human was in the book. So, yeah, but your book is again like very relatable and it's like I just wouldn't be able to create anything like that because of the experience, originality, just the frameworks.

• 48:25Speaker 00

  Speaking of AI, you know, AI is like the biggest word these days. In your work, did you find that any concepts, any tools you use or strategies change because of AI or would you recommend something different because of the AI in the loop? Like, what's your thinking on that?

• 48:47Speaker 01

  That's a really great question again. I think I think for me, I feel like I have not like fully made up my mind on that. I think it's, I mean, it's ever evolving, so it's hard to do it anyway. So I'd rather stick to, stick to a few people that seem to be much more immersed in it and I just like to follow their lead. So, for example, uh, the the guy I mentioned, Robbie Meda, who contributed a lot to the book, like he had this great quote on AI helps you get to the hard part faster. And I I really like that to say like there's still very hard thinking required in life and building products. And it's great to think of which parts can AI shortcut for you that you get faster towards so that you can have more time to spend with. And I think that's a, it's a very fascinating, almost like meta question.

• 49:31Speaker 01

  Like because within product management, you might think if the delivery of features gets faster, what does that then mean? Does it mean I should build more features or shouldn't I spend the time that has now become available on harder questions? And I think that's almost like it's a big meta question for humanities. Like if you had suddenly more time to spare due to AI automation, do you try to do more of the thing or do you like, where do you else do you take your mind? So this is very, very meta. I realize that, but that's how I try to phrase it towards teams is you have a shortcut to get to the hard parts faster. Do you have the skills to like, do you, are you aware of these hard parts you should be thinking about and structures to talk about it?

• 50:14Speaker 01

  And leverage AI intentionally for that, for these shortcuts where it's applicable.

• 50:19Speaker 00

  Yes, it reminds me of my recent experience where I'm trying to figure out value proposition for my services. And what AI helps me to do is to deliver different presentations or videos that communicate either a framework or a service. But then I spend more time analyzing the feedback that I get from my potential client. And then thinking through what is actually, what I actually need to improve because this didn't get the response that I hoped for. And then I get back to the thinking instead of spending hours on building this thing up that doesn't even work.

• 50:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, agreed.

• 50:57Speaker 00

  So yes, I can, I can so relate to this, like AI helps you to get to the hard parts faster as long as you're prepared to, to then do the hard part more often. I guess it's like, you know, now you have to work with your brain actually harder, more often.

• 51:14Speaker 01

  Exactly, hopefully.

• 51:16Speaker 00

  Yes, so AI can make you smarter if you use it the right way, like you said, as you use it as a partner, like in the creation. Yes, thank you so much for sharing like this process and your thinking on because AI again such a big topic right now. But maybe a little bit more on AI, like, do you think in terms of,

• 51:40Speaker 00

  I guess just the process of applying the framework, do you think anything will fundamentally change around this framework because of the AI like, I don't know, the trifecta of stretches, goals and discovery, do we need more AI, I don't know, in discovery? Or, I don't know, what's your thoughts on that? Do you think that's a long-standing framework?

• 52:05Speaker 01

  I think at least I would say that the fundamental question will remain, right? Like the question of, like, the fundamental question of strategy, like, who do you focus on? How do you differentiate? What do you deliver through the OKRs? How do you measure success? And I think again, the question, the necessity to answer the question will remain. That's what my, today, my current stance is. I think the interesting question is how can you get to answers faster, right?

• 52:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 52:29Speaker 01

  We've talked about, so you can do probably faster research on competitors and alternatives. You can probably use AI as a very creative sparing partner for finding potential metrics to manage the strategy. You can definitely use AI to prepare for user interviews and synthesize feedback even faster. So I think these like the actual, the actions, the processes to, to execute or find answers to these questions, they will get better, speed up.

• 52:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 52:54Speaker 01

  For sure. I think the necessity to answer the questions will remain for the foreseeable future, as far as I can tell it right now. And of course, then, I mean, the other meta question is, what does AI mean, for example, as part of a strategy? Like, is it like, where is it in your strategy? I think there was this great quote by David Blunt, who wrote Testing Business Ideas, and he, I think he once wrote that AI itself is not a value proposition, right? AI is an accelerator or an amplifier for existing value proposition, or a creator of a new value proposition. But it's, it's like, it's like this, this backbone force that reinforces the change in the front end. But it's not it itself, it's not, it's not the value proposition.

• 53:36Speaker 00

  Yes, it's.

• 53:37Speaker 01

  And I think that resonated with me as a, as a way of thinking.

• 53:41Speaker 00

  It also reminds me of this fact that, you know, I think Elon Musk talked about those, like his five step process for the developing businesses faster. And one of the things he said that before automating or speeding things up, you need to eliminate things. But basically what he was saying, you need to create strategy and make sure that your process is good before you try to automate it, speed up or AI. Otherwise, you're just gonna get a lot more of the wrong stuff.

• 54:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, I agree.

• 54:08Speaker 00

  Um, I think I have just a few questions left. If before I let you go, I know you probably have a lot of other things to do. One question is. A question that I didn't ask, but perhaps you wanted to answer. Something that you wanted to expand more on.

• 54:26Speaker 01

  Oh, that's good. Yeah, I think one thing that came to my mind after we touched on the topic is how do I, how can I go from lagging to leading indicators?

• 54:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 54:33Speaker 01

  Uh, and like the, the, the thing, uh, for, for product teams, what I tell product teams is, the way I think about it is, okay, so you have your lagging indicator, which represents a certain success moment for customers. Like they bought something or something, something success moment has changed. And so the quest, the way articulated is, okay, now tell me what do the people who were successful have in common?

• 54:56Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 54:57Speaker 01

  So like a very simplified example might be, so you, maybe you're a furniture e-commerce company and you see that people who have the highest conversion rate or the biggest basket, they have added, I don't know, twenty or more items to the bookmark list for, for the shopping wishlist, for example. So then you could say, okay, so there seems to be correlation between the number of items someone has bookmarked on our platform and the success moment of purchasing. So maybe the bookmarking a product for later could become a leading indicator, right? So we optimize for the leading indicator and then we observe in this cohort, whether there's an actual correlation between the, the higher purchase, a chance to purchase, for example. And I think this fundamental way of thinking could be good, again, using, going back to the beach body example.

• 55:41Speaker 01

  You could look at, okay, who are the people who I like, who I want to look like, for example? And then you could reverse engineer, what do they have in common? Like, oh, okay, some of them do weight training instead of cardio or some of them have, I don't know, a pescatarian diet over keto diet, whatever. And then even there, you could say, okay, these are potential leading indicators to choose from. And then it's the question we had earlier. Then you just choose which works for your capabilities, for your preferences and use that as the leading indicator. So basically finding the pattern among the successful.

• 56:13Speaker 01

  Once and then figuring out which pattern you you can actually replicate for your in your context.

• 56:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, so it's also, I think, a good way to educate or your strategy or of to design your strategy, right?

• 56:27Speaker 01

  Right.

• 56:28Speaker 00

  Seeing those better practices and then designing your work process to measure it on those like leading indicators. Yeah, it's such a good one because, yes, I think also what our modern time is, how it is different from before is we have so much choice of all the things that we can do. N I is obviously very conducive to that, meaning like you have so much so many options, but that doesn't mean that all of those those options are worth doing. And one just waste your resources. So that's a good way to filter through those faster. And like, what's my success? What's the common pattern and how can I make that? Or to put that into test in my leading indicators.

• 57:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's again such a such a such a concept again, what you're talking about. I feel like it's it is applicable to so many areas of business and life.

• 57:22Speaker 01

  Right.

• 57:23Speaker 00

  If you extrapolate the concepts. Another question that I had, an interesting one, at least from my perspective. One practice that you perhaps still see in teams and and leadership that you think should retire by now.

• 57:41Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 57:42Speaker 00

  Like this.

• 57:46Speaker 01

  That is a really good one, and it makes me think.

• 57:54Speaker 01

  Huh.

• 57:57Speaker 01

  I might say.

• 58:01Speaker 01

  I might say the, let's say, the conversation about, for example, that metrics or results of a team predominantly being used for reporting. So that's more like a one way street. So it's more like me as the team, I have an update on certain things and I just communicate it to you instead of it being the conversation starter. Uh, like that's why I see it most often in the context of O K R is that it's then, oh, we don't have time to do a check in. So just submit the O K R. So it's just looking at the numbers. And I think it's it just loses, it's not wrong per se, but it just loses a big portion of the value this can create from actually talking about these things.

• 58:38Speaker 00

  And if I may, I would also add, based on your work, that this practice of using strategy as sort of isolated tool somewhere out there again at the leadership level versus having it as a day-to-day decision-making assistant, like guidance, right? Yeah, this is a strategy and this is how I use it to say yes or no to certain things. Then that should be a lot, like used a lot wider.

• 59:08Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 59:09Speaker 00

  And the last question, the future for the book, for your work, what do you think? Like, what's your, what are your hopes? Where do you see yourself developing in the next, I don't know, couple of years to a decade?

• 59:23Speaker 01

  Interesting. I'm still in the process of figuring that out, I would say. I think after completing the book, it marked, it felt like completing the big era of my work. And so it feels a bit like in the process of shaping this next era. Definitely not, by no means tired of talking about the things from the book, so this will keep going. I think for me, the, the biggest wish for the book is predominantly that the, quote-unquote, the right people will pick it up. What I mean by that is that what I often got as a feedback is like, there's a, that this is not a book for everyone. And that's fine, it's not what I had in mind. So it's, it serves a certain people of a certain experience, a certain situation, better than others. And which is great. So my biggest hope is that it, that it gets picked up by the right people. That these people get value from that.

• 1:00:07Speaker 01

  I oftentimes have that with people, reach out to me and talk to me, share a message on LinkedIn, how well they like, how much they like the book. Then I look at their, their CV on LinkedIn and I see that they're actually quite mature, quite experienced in the, the craft. And that makes me very happy because that's the type of people I wanted to write for. The, like, the next thing I want to explore content-wise a bit more is this idea of, what I mentioned before, like, teams in companies who are building for internal, so internal teams. Internal teams or platform teams, as you like to call it. I really like that because it's certainly a pattern or a red thread throughout most of my clients, that these teams exist, that these teams, these teams do incredibly important work for the frontline success.

• 1:00:49Speaker 01

  But that they have issues adopting some of these product practices we like to talk about so much. So that's what I, what I would like to focus on a bit more and shining a bit more light on practices for, for these kind of teams. And I'm making them more visible, giving them more guidance, making them feel seen and heard. Think that's like a content topic I want to explore a bit more in the future. Yeah, other than that, I realized this year like how much I enjoy live interactions with with audiences, whether it's meetups, talks, or just webinars. And so I I look forward to putting more of that out there and just having more. Yeah, real time conversations and interactions with people.

• 1:01:24Speaker 00

  Um, but I'm looking forward to seeing more of that and perhaps, you know, attending some talks and workshops. But speaking also of the area that you want to develop more, I feel like that is so important also because it's shapes culture. Like the products and services that are done internally and you said like that help people to be seen and heard. And ultimately, this internal environment defines than the external output. And the, you know, efficiency of the whole enterprise, however small or big it is. So, yes, I can totally see why you why you see it as a very important area. Well, Tim, thank you so much for being a guest on this show and change wired podcast.

• 1:02:07Speaker 00

  The the last thing I want to ask is where would you like people to go to connect with your work? What to check out and I'm gonna link everything in the show notes, but what are the best places?

• 1:02:19Speaker 01

  I think the best place is probably LinkedIn to just from a search for my name, get in touch there. I have my open profile, always looking forward to hear from people. And if they if people would just like to be in touch and to get regular updates on what I'm up to. My newsletter is probably the best place to go. It's herbic.co/newsletter. They can't miss it from there. And yeah, looking forward to then always hearing from people on what lands with them and what's present for them.

• 1:02:43Speaker 00

  Yes, thank you for sharing this. And obviously, guys, don't forget to check out Tim's new book, Real Progress: How to Connect the Dots of Product Strategy or PRS and Discovery, which, as I mentioned, can be applied to so many areas of life, business, I don't know, culture, development and and beyond. I said, thank you so much, Tim, and I'm looking forward to the what you accomplish, what you develop next. And thank you so much again for being on the show.