The State of B2B Product Management (with me, Saeed Khan and guest host Janna Bastow)

There's a part in the report that I think showed this really big gap between product leaders and the rest of their teams. And I want to just have a look at what's going on with product leaders. Like, are they delusional? We expected a gap. I mean, there's no way there wouldn't be a gap. But the size of this gap is enormous. On average, it's a 50 point gap between what the leaders believe, which they believe they're doing a super job and what the ICs believe. Yeah. Why is there a gap in the first place? It's either because the product leaders think they're doing a great job, but they're not, or they're doing a good job, but they've done a terrible job of communicating it, or the ICs have an incredibly over the top expectation of what a good job even looks like. Hello and welcome to One Night in Product, the show where I chat to some of the brightest minds in product from across the globe to help you see product management in a whole new light. If that sounds up your street, don't forget to dive into the back catalogue on your favourite podcast app or on YouTube. And of course, follow, share, subscribe or drop me a comment or review. It all helps keep the lights on. Tonight, we're going to try something a little different, and I'm welcoming back some old friends to help me out. Speaking of old friends, I don't come much older than Saeed Khan, who's been described as a Feynman level teacher with the deepest level of understanding. So why he spends any time hanging out with me, I have no idea. We're also joined by Jana Bastow, the co-founder of Mind the Product and a co-founder of ProdPad, a tool that helps you get a handle on the product chaos. Although based on some of the companies I've seen, you're going to need a whole bucket of handles where we're going. Jana's here as a guest host to grill me and Saeed about our new report, the state of B2B product management and what a state it is. So Jana, welcome. Jana, it's over to you. Amazing. Hey, thank you so much for bringing me on here. And I'm super excited to talk about this report because it's got to be one of the most honest pieces of research that the PM community has had in years. So thank you for putting it together. I want to talk about what it actually means for real product teams. So there's a bunch of really interesting findings in the report. I want to talk about how strategy is frequently sidelined by operational reactivity, right? So, you know, we're seeing that 49% of respondents, about half respondents are rating an overemphasis on delivery over strategy as serious or this five alarm fire. It shows that three quarters say that their product plans get changed due to sales-driven commitments. So if three quarters of product people, leaders included, admit that their roadmaps get changed by sales commitments, you know, that's not a bug in the system, that is a system. So who actually owns the roadmap in B2B? Well, who owns the roadmap in B2B? I mean, obviously, you've kind of already mentioned it. It's the sales team in many situations, right? Like, I think this then comes a lot to a couple of things. From my perspective, at least, and companies that I've seen out there and many of the companies that I spoke to, you've kind of got this idea of like, the company is, you know, kind of starts off, you know, they build for a few people to start with. They maybe get some kind of, you know, like a beachhead customer or something like that, or maybe someone that is in the Rolodex or the founder or something like that, that they manage to, you know, maybe someone that the founder used to work for and they can just get them on as an early customer. And then they just start building for them. And then you kind of go deal by deal and deal by deal. And the next deal always has some new thing in it because they didn't build all the stuff yet. So they just keep building and they keep building. And then three, six years down the line or something like that, they've built enough things that they can attract enough people, but no one's quite happy enough anymore because actually all of the different types of people that they could be selling to, or they have been selling to, they all want something kind of a little bit different, different focus areas and such. So they kind of have a fairly average product for a lot of people. And that's kind of okay, I guess, if you want to buy an average product, but obviously most people want quite a good product. And I think that what you find yourself in is kind of sales loop of like, well, we've got to get the next customer. We've got to get the next customer. We've already demonstrated some traction. So we've obviously got a product. So let's just keep building and keep building. I think also there's some level of just almost like this is the way it is in kind of large sale or large enterprise sales, right? Like that's the mindset from maybe the leadership of these organizations. Like we've just got to do whatever the next big customer wants because they're huge. That's 500 grand that's going to land on our desk tomorrow. So let's go and build that because it would be stupid not to. And it's almost just this mindset of just build for the next thing, build for the next thing. And very sales driven, because that's the mindset of the people from the organization that maybe, yeah, let's be honest, maybe don't have always kind of strong product muscles or like a sort of a strong product strategic mindset. They're very much seeing it as a collection of deals and a collection of quarters to be won. Yeah, absolutely. And I think it was something like 13% of companies prioritize on a deal by deal basis. Like that's basically one in eight. I mean, well, what point does it stop being- I would say it could be more than that to be honest, but you know. Yeah, yeah. What point does it stop being product management and start being professional order taking? You know, I'll say this. I think there's two or three specific problems that people need to understand to kind of try and solve this. So Jason alluded to the first one, right? Which is when you start the company, you're absolutely focused on customers, individual accounts and so on, because that's just the reality of it. And so you're building for these specific companies, not custom software, but aligning with their use cases and their problems. But at some point you have to switch from customers to markets. And that's kind of an intentional shift that has to happen, but it doesn't happen in a lot of companies. The market is sort of everybody who will buy our product or the market is large enterprises or whatever. When I've worked with some companies and said, who's your market? How do you define your markets? How do you segment your markets or anything like that? It's usually a very vague description. So I think that's the first shift that has to happen is you have to understand that, yes, customers are important, but you're building for markets and you're selling to customers. And that distinction is also fundamental to the gap between sales and product management, right? Sales sells to prospects, to individual customers, and that's what they care about. This customer's needs at this point in time, whereas we in product are thinking about markets and looking ahead. So sales is in the now, right? This quarter, next quarter type of thing, whatever their pipeline is, we are looking at next year, right? We're looking at the work we do is going to drive business in the future for the company. And so companies have to understand that dichotomy and they have to understand how to align that. It's not a question of one takes precedence over the other. You have to balance it out, right? So when sales comes in with a hot deal and a feature request, and we only need this, and can you get it done? Somebody has to understand that, sure, if this aligns with where we're going, it's a good capability that will help us with more customers in the future. It's not a one-off, et cetera, right? Now there's exceptions to that, but the worst story I ever heard of this was a company where sales came in with a 500K deal with 300,000 of custom work, which by the way, the customer would actually pay for, which I thought was an odd thing, but fine. It ended up costing the company $2 million to actually develop that thing. But there was this belief that, well, we will sell this, it'll open new markets. None of that came true. So if you actually added the cost, and that 2 million was the engineering cost. If you added up the full cost, you know, the go-to-market and all that, it was probably at least double that. So that's the problem, right? Customers versus markets and timeframe. And I think product leaders need to educate the rest of the company on that and figure out how to balance the two. So you talk about that story as if it's an exceptional story, right? As if it's something that's different than what we're seeing in other companies. But actually I've heard that story time and time again. You know, even at that level of magnitude, you know, we know how much it costs to build something, to get something out there and then continue to support it. And so, you know, I truly agree with the sentiment that product teams need to be thinking about the market and thinking about the wider problem to solve. But it just seemed to check with the reality that we're seeing in so many companies. I mean, have B2B product teams generally found a way to handle this or is the industry just sort of accepting that this is the way to work? I personally, to jump in, I think one of the biggest issues that we have here, I'm not even sure this is a B2B problem specifically, although obviously it manifests itself in B2B all the time. And the reason that I'm not sure if it's a B2B problem specifically is it's more of a concentration of revenue problem. Like if we were working B2C and we had a dating app and there were like five people that would be spending 150 times as much as everyone else to use the dating app, then I'm sure that, you know, the people making that dating app would be in exactly the same boat as the person that's building the kind of supply chain app for the enterprise, right? It's just, there's a whole different dynamic when you're starting to sell into big, you know, huge customers that have massive deal sizes and you just sit there and it's a brave product person or product leader that sort of sits there and somehow almost just tries to sit there and say, oh, well, our vision says this when actually there's a customer out there that's willing to drop or allegedly drop at least several hundred thousand on the desk right now. So it's that kind of gorilla versus, you know, whatever the opposite of that in an analogy would be, you know, the small person versus the big person. There's no way to win that debate just by being theoretical. Like to Saeed's point, what these people need to be able to do is to do a better job of explaining how not that, you know, we can't get that 500K because of our strategy or our vision, but actually if we don't do this other stuff, then we are gonna lose a lot more money in the longterm. But then it comes down to the point, well, how do product teams find a way out of it? Some don't, like, you know, there are some organizations out there that are quite happy to be reactive sales-driven feature factories and that's just kind of the way that they're gonna operate, probably the way they're always gonna operate. But I think that the best way to try and attack this as a problem, if we call it that, is to try to, at the very least, kind of sort of minimize or mitigate the damage to some extent. So, you know, Saeed and I have done some training for working with sales teams in the past. You know, one of our kind of potential approaches is, and I know that people like Rich Miminov sometimes advocate for this as well, is like, you know, carve out some time for this and some time for that, like staff it out properly. Okay, we've got big customers that are gonna be coming in, they're gonna need a bunch of staff. Okay, so we have a team that does that or we have a percentage of our allocation that does that. We'll take a hit on our velocity of hitting the strategic goals because we know that's always gonna happen, but we can still carve out 60, 70% to do the strategic stuff that's gonna pay off in the long term. But I still think it's on the product leaders to actually prove that it could pay off in the long term in the first place, right? Because if they're just gonna sit there and say, oh, but our roadmap says this, doesn't help. They need to be able to frame it in a way that actually resonates with the people that are sitting there looking at a big deal, a big bag of gold on one side and a very nicely formatted PowerPoint on the other. And there's only gonna be one winner in that situation. Yeah, and you sort of touch on a few points there that insinuate there's a deeper problem, right? So you talk about contrasting the velocity of getting something out versus the long-term goals. You talk about this big bag of money that's hard to refuse. And I wonder if there's underlying incentives and measurements that are set at the leadership level that make it difficult for product managers to work a good product management system outside of that. You know, it's hard to turn down immediate cash. It's hard to turn that down in favor of a potential long-term win. Even when we see time and time again, it playing out that actually the long-term win isn't that win, they don't get all the magic customers turning up. And actually the short-term costs are way higher than anyone ever estimates. Yeah, I had a VP of marketing telling me that she was frustrated with this sales-oriented culture that was in the company she worked in. And she said, one of the things that wasn't being done by anybody was looking at the opportunity cost. So if sales comes in with a deal, sure, we'll, you know, there's revenue, we'll do this extra work, but what are we not doing by doing that extra work? And then for her as a marketing leader, she had to deal with it as well. It wasn't like it just came for free. Like now all of a sudden there's this capability in the product that is being, needs to be marketed that doesn't align with whatever they were doing before. They have to adjust their plans or campaigns, et cetera. And she saw this as slowing the company down. So I think I was really happy to hear that, to be honest, when I heard it. But I think what happens is the context of the company has to be defined in a way that supports long-term and short-term gain. So what I mean by that is if you have no context about where you're going, then any deal coming in seems fine, right? We haven't defined a vision. We haven't defined our market. We haven't defined our longer-term objectives, right? If you don't have any of that, or it's sort of loosey goosey in everyone's head, then when these deals come in, everything seems to be good, right? Unless it's something so out there, so sort of bizarre that everyone looks and goes, yeah, that doesn't seem right. But those are few and far between. And whose job is it to define that context, right? I think first and foremost, it's the product leader's job in the product organization, right? I'm sure that VP of marketing would have loved to have a clear product vision and direction and strategy articulated and said, yeah, I can align with that, or hey, here's my feedback, but yeah, let's move forward together. When you don't have that, when you have product leaders who are buying into faster delivery is value delivered or something, which you see all the time, and I groan every time I see that, you're fighting a losing battle. You're just setting yourself up for being a victim. And quite frankly, I think sales leaders see that as well, and they'll take advantage of it. They'll take advantage. They're not gonna say, hey, product leader, I think you really should define a product vision for the next several years. That'll help me sell next quarter, right? Isn't gonna happen. So product leaders need to do their job and you don't see it as often as you should. And somebody I know who I won't name, but sort of knows the industry well, he said, yeah, the reason a lot of them don't do it is because it's easier. It's easier to not do that than to say, hey, let's fix the problems. And I think that impacts the product organization. That's why you see a lot of product managers being frustrated and burning out. But I think it also affects the company because then you're just left to a really good sales team. A really good sales team will hide a lot of problems, but once sales get tough, guess what? You have nothing to fall back on. And they always get tough as well, just to interject there. There's always a point where they get tough, right? It's not like you're sitting there and the good times happen forever. Sometimes liking it like, yeah, you can shoot as many barn doors with a machine gun as you want, but eventually you're gonna run out. So ultimately, once all of the easy sales are gone, all of a sudden you're just sort of stuck there with, I guess, an empty machine gun. Bad analogy to that. I've been like someone who's really been there. Absolutely. And you made a really good point about how it comes down to the product leaders. I actually wanna hone in on these product leaders because I think that there's a part in the report that I think showed this really big gap between product leaders and the rest of their teams. And I wanna just have a look at what's going on with product leaders. Like, are they delusional? So 88% of leaders say that they align their teams around shared goals. I mean, that's great. Good job leaders. But only 34% of their ICs agree. That's a huge 50 something point gap. So this is probably on the surface the biggest surprise for us. So when we were creating the survey, we had some sense that this was a problem and that's why we created this specific set of questions where we asked product leaders to assess themselves. And then we asked the individual contributor product managers to assess the leaders on the exact same things. Because we wanted to measure- Like a 360 for the industry. Yeah. We wanted to measure, you know, how big that gap was. And we expected a gap. I mean, there's no way there wouldn't be a gap, but the size of this gap is enormous. On average, it's a 50 point gap between what the leaders believe, which they believe they're doing a super job, and what the ICs believe. Now, someone asked me a question after we published the report saying, you know, can you identify which companies have the smallest gaps? Are they better off in other factors than the ones with the big gaps? And unfortunately in this data, we don't have that because we can't connect the ICs to the leaders. We didn't ask people to identify their companies. But as a whole, I mean, I think this is fairly representative of, you know, the problem, right? And there's a number of issues to think about, right? So one is there would be a gap just because there's some self-assessment bias and other things, you know, the ICs don't see everything that the product leaders are doing. They don't get the impact of all that. So that's fine. But a 50 point gap says there are communication issues at the very, very minimum. There are organizational issues and there are some process issues, right? So I think that leaders need to take this specific sort of data to heart and say, okay, what can I do to understand why there's a gap there and then work to close that gap? Because I think the more context the product managers have, the closer they are to the decision-making process, right? The more they understand the why, not just the what, I think it'll help them overall. Yeah, absolutely. And for those listening in, if you take a look at the report, you'll see there's a number of measures that the questions were pointed at, including things like, are people aligned around shared goals? Do they enable effective prioritization? Do they invest in mentorship and career development? And for all of these types of things, the leaders rated themselves up in the 70s and the ICs were in the 20s to 30s. So like a 50 point gap with this disconnect. And I actually wonder as to whether, this is something that we see when people are interviewing and join new companies. We see this happen all the time where somebody interviews for a role, it looks really exciting, they leave their other role for this new shiny company and they get in and it's a nightmare. Is it that these leaders are unclear about what's wrong with their business? Are they lying in order to make themselves feel better, to bring in good talent? What's happening here? I think there's some of a bit of both of those things and probably a bunch of other different things as well, including people not really knowing that they're not saying or doing the things that they say that they're doing as well. Because if we look at, to kind of almost double down on some of what Saeed said, we sit there and say, well, why is there a gap in the first place? It's either because the product leaders think they're doing a great job, but they're not, therefore they're deluded. Or they're doing a good job, but they've done a terrible job of communicating it. Or the ICs have an incredibly over-the-top expectation of what a good job even looks like. And it's actually not possible to do a job like that within the organizational structure. And actually the context of the organization means that actually the leaders are doing the best job that they can. But then if we go back to this point about hiring, it's a big bugbear of mine of this idea that you've got obviously all of these people doing the beauty contest to try and get into and in front of the people to get hired in the first place, the candidates. There's so many candidates out there now trying to get jobs in the first place. And then obviously you've got the people hiring as well that themselves are not necessarily so much a beauty contest because it's a kind of a buyer's market at the moment when it comes to hiring PMs. But at the same time, they want to make the company look a little bit good. They know the kinds of questions they're going to get. They know the kinds of things that PMs are going to ask about and that PMs don't like. And PMs obviously these days have been coached enough that they can ask the right sorts of questions. So I don't know if it's all lying as well as, or as much as just also a bit of kind of over-optimism as well, like I've definitely gone through interview processes in the past, like, you know, across the last few years where you sit there and like, you know, maybe you get the job and you kind of get in the job and you're like, actually nothing they said in the interview process was true at all. But you look back at it and you kind of speak to them within the organization and they actually kind of believe it still. They don't necessarily even know. to believe it still. They don't necessarily even know that they were wrong. They just have a different lens on the same issues that maybe now are kind of bothering you. So I don't think it's all lying. I think there's a lot of over-optimism. There's a lot of just knowing what the kind of sensitive areas are, and therefore people try and steer away from them. And I guess there's a lot of contextual relevance as well. Maybe within the context of that organization, they're actually doing pretty well, but at the same time, someone coming in, they maybe have an even higher expectation, especially if they've come from maybe a better performing organization or different vertical or something that maybe has slightly better product culture or whatever. So yeah, I think this is a bit of a mess on both sides because you've got these leaders that are maybe kind of over-optimistic about some of the things that they're doing or saying. And you've also got the kind of the supply side, the people going for the jobs that are sort of partly just looking for any job at the moment because there's so many people looking for jobs at the moment, but also partly they don't really even know what to look for. So they kind of go in and they maybe ask a few basic questions and then they find out all the rest when they start the job. I just want to add one thing, which is that one question, it's slide 21 in the report, but that one question was sort of the explicit question we asked in parallel. But when we saw that data initially, when we started looking at the results, that's when we said, you know what, this is something we have to dig into in the report. And that's what helped frame a lot of the rest of the report where we compare leaders versus ICs on other topics in the report. So for example, objectives. One of the things I've seen overall is that a lot of people work towards either poorly defined objectives or almost no objectives at all, like in the sense of, you know, what are you actually working towards? Why are you doing the work that you're doing? And so that one, for example, there's a set of questions on objectives and one of them is, you know, and this one we didn't ask people to compare. We just said leaders answer the same question as product managers. And so one of the questions is my team is aligned on objectives we're working towards, right? Seems like a simple thing. 77% of leaders said yes, they agreed with that statement. 47%, 30% differential said that, you know, yes, their team is aligned. So what's going on there, right? Like you look at everything from vision to objectives, to strategy, to roadmaps, you see this problem. And I think the problem is coming from two areas. This is my hypothesis. So one is, A, there is no system of work that's been defined to get this alignment, right? The kind of system you'd get in a sales methodology and sales or, you know, development methodology and engineering. I think that's the first thing. I think the other thing, and this is, again, a hypothesis, is that in product, there are a lot of product leaders who haven't been product managers very long or at all are leading product organizations. I've seen companies where the head of product was an operations person. The head of product was a lawyer formally. The head of product was, you know, a product manager and got put under marketing because, you know, that seemed the right thing in the company's context. And if you don't have that, right, it's not going to end up well. So can you imagine a sales organization run by someone who'd never done sales? Now, the only difference between that and a product organization is they'd miss revenue two to three quarters in a row and they'd be fired. Like you'd see it, you can measure it, you can objectively see how bad it is because of the work that product does and the fact that it's leading work. You don't see the impact of that until much later. And so a lot of these people can stick around for years and their impact isn't as clear. So I think, I think, but the people like the product managers doing the work, they see the impact right away. So I think that's something to think about is are your product leaders experienced enough to truly lead and develop and optimize a product organization, right? To understand the roles and responsibilities and processes and things. And, and I'm not trying to pick on certain products people, but organizations and CEOs should understand that. Like you wouldn't, you wouldn't hire an experienced sales leader or an engineering leader. Why would you do that in product? Just to follow up on that. I think there's one really important point there, which is that because of the industry focused nature of many B2B organizations, that sometimes they almost have an inherent distrust of a product person versus say an industry person, someone that's been in banking or been in supply chain or been in health for 20 years or whatever. And they kind of want to bring that product leader in as like a chief product officer or chief strategy officer or whatever they want to call them. And they, again, to Saeed's point, they have very limited understanding of the product fundamentals, but they understand industry inside out. I think that's an over optimization personally, apart from in really, really specific industries, like maybe, you know, maybe law, maybe you need some kind of subject matter expertise, but then at the same time, do you need it in the product leader? Or can they be someone that kind of has a partner within, you know, some kind of chief law officer or something like that, that's going to be the person that, that kind of almost reminds me of the magistrate system, which I don't know if this translates to Canada for Saeed, but this idea that like in the UK, you have this magistrate system of like lay judges effectively that can kind of prosecute, lower down cases within the kind of criminal hierarchy. So you basically get, I think, three magistrates that are kind of basically trained in being magistrates, but they're not lawyers. They've never been lawyers. They're not like legal experts or such, but they have people to the side of them that can advise them on matters of law. So their job is to basically apply judgment, common sense, you know, hear all the facts and make a call. But if they're not sure about the law, they can go and speak to one of the lawyers that kind of sits with them in the room. And it kind of, it's only just come to me because I was talking about sort of law and legal tech, but just this idea that just because you're in a specific industry, doesn't necessarily mean that all of the knowledge about that industry has to live in the head of one person. I still think there's a lot to be said for bringing in proper, high skilled, high quality experience, product leadership, whether or not they've got specific industry expertise, especially if it's an industry that maybe doesn't have a particularly strong sort of product mindset in general, you know, like if it's a kind of a more traditional industry or something like that, where whoever you bring in is probably not going to be someone that's seen all of the things and done all of the product things that maybe you could have done in a different industry. So yeah, definitely, you're going to need to have some way to bring that sort of industry expertise in. But I don't think that always has to be, oh, the only person that can run our product team is an industry person. I think it's a bit more complicated than that. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, something that I've seen out there is the fact that the soft skills that product managers bring to the table are often much more valuable in the moment than the hard skills. You know, it used to be that product managers were expected to know how to code. And of course, that's gone by the wayside by a long way now. But, you know, it's the product people who bring the ability to collaborate with their team, to get people aligned, to get people on the same page with each other. And those are not things that require you to know about the industry. You just need to know the people who know about the industry and work with them to pull out the right insights. So I want to maybe help out some of the product leaders who might be listening in, because I'm sure there's some people listening in who are feeling a bit seen, right? They know that they put something like, oh, yeah, we totally have everyone aligned. We're investing in this, that and the other, right? We're doing all the right things. And now they realize that chances are their ICs do not agree with them. I mean, what should these product leaders be doing? So I think if you want to, so, okay, let me rephrase that. Put your product management hat on, right? There's a problem potentially. There's a market problem. That market happens in your company, but let's call it a market problem. And you want to understand it better so you can potentially find a solution for it. Like, what would you do, right? Go do some discovery, go talk to your teams, go understand the context around them, talk to other people in the company, like, you know, talk to VPs of marketing or sales leaders or engineering leaders. In the work that I've done in companies, when, and Jason does this too, we'll do an assessment and it's a 360 degree view and you get the view from everybody. And what's hilarious is to hear the disconnects of people who work together each and every day. But it's also, you know, it's also revealing to companies when you bring it out and you tell them like, this is what I've heard. It's anonymized, but this is the view of this. I mean, one question I remember asking a company was about their vision. And I asked people, does the company have a vision for the products or something like that? And one guy said, yes, absolutely. I said, oh, that's great. What is it? He goes, well, it depends who you ask. And he said, well, what does that mean? He goes, well, every leader in the company has a different vision of what we're trying to do. And when I, when I went to talk to some of the leaders and they didn't say, you know, I've heard you have different visions. I just said, what's your vision? And you could see the, the, the distinction across the team. And that's at the very highest level. It's not like specific plans or something. It's at the very highest level. So when you start uncovering that, you start seeing, okay, where the problems lie. So assess the organization, sit down with the team, sit down with others. And, and I think a big job of product management and product leaders, cause we work cross-functionally is to drive alignment and, and help people get aligned. Marketing will do what marketing needs to do. Sales will do what they need to do. Our job is to help them do things that are aligned, right? Are we marketing to the people that we built the product for? Are we messaging in the right way? Is sales enabled to go and take that and do the same things, right? These are things that I think you should do. So that's one. I'll, I'll leave, I'll leave, I'll leave the rest for Jason, but I think that's literally the first step and decide where to go from there. And interestingly, just a quick note that you've, you've come back to the same point that we made in the previous bit was around the fact that having an underlying STRAM vision in place, having that clarity of what that vision is, is the thing that prevents these disconnects, prevents your, your, your strategy being sidelined by reactivity. I think it's the first step. Like if you don't have the, like everything cascades. So if you look at the topics we covered, so vision, objectives, strategy, roadmap, et cetera, to me, they cascade down, right? If you don't have a clear vision, you probably don't have objectives beyond revenue, right? Cause you're not working towards anything longer term. If you, if your objectives are only revenue, then your strategy is get deals, right? Focus on whatever. And then your roadmap will be whatever those deals drive, right? Like you you've, you've lost the chain of connectivity. So yeah, like people think vision is this loosey goosey thing. We don't need it, but it helps align everything underneath. So, I mean, I even think about it the other way. So it's not so much that this stuff topples down from the top, but it's that, it's that foundation that everything else gets built on top. An upside down temple chart. This is a, this is big. I can, I can just see our name up in lights. Exactly. I'm excited. Let's get AI to build the rest of it. But I do think that there's this important, this important point that, which I think so kind of touched on this idea. And I know we talk about discovery or lack of within the report as well. And this kind of idea that, you know, product managers are all about discovery. They're all about, you know, wanting to get in and understand their users needs. And they absolutely should be like, that's a really important part of the job, but they seem to be very unwilling sometimes to turn that lens into their own organization and start to discover what it is that the stakeholders and kind of partners within the organization actually need to be successful. Like, you know, we all know here that, you know, product management is more than just about shipping features. You know, it's about making sure you're shipping the right things, but also that they're going out and actually able to be sold or make money in the market to sustain the business. I think too many B2B product teams, they kind of find themselves just stuck in that middle part. You know, the decisions are coming from somewhere else. And the once they kind of get it to the point where it's ready to release that they kind of just throw it out and the sales team sell it. And they kind of, it's not just that they don't get involved in some of those things because, you know, in some cases that's actually through organizational design, you know, they have a different team to do that bit, but that they're not even kind of having discussions with those people don't really understand what those people are doing with it. Don't understand, for example, how the sales team, you know, maybe they've never even seen the sales deck that the sales team are using, for example, not really aware of what the sales team are talking to prospects about or even which prospects are being spoken to. Doesn't mean that, you know, product managers or product leaders need to be salespeople. Although some would disagree in some companies, but it's more like they should have a good understanding of the kind of the heart, you know, the commercial heartbeat of the organization versus just kind of measuring everything on, oh, we built some stuff, we ship some stuff. Yeah, the sales team aren't complaining about that stuff anymore. So I guess we get to work on the next thing now. And yeah, we talk about, well, where does this strategy, where do the objectives come from? Obviously, in some organizations, very loosely defined to Saeed's point, in some organizations, maybe there's actually an active pushback against doing that sort of thing, because they want to be reactive to customers. And that's the only thing that they think that they can do to succeed. Okay, well, you're probably not going to get to do too much strategic work in the short term in that organization. But maybe you can find a point down the line where something happens that maybe kind of opens up a little chink that you can kind of leverage to say, well, maybe now's the time to do it. But I think in many organizations, yeah, and this is an interesting thing that I've seen through some of my work with clients is, you've got a CEO pretty much begging the product team for some kind of strategy, but they do, you know, basically, you know, assuming that there is a vision, you know, begging for more strategic kind of ownership of product, and for people to start driving the path forward. But at the same time, almost actively not allowing that because they don't have one yet. And it just everything looks like two sides point again, everything looks like a good deal. But when you don't have that, and they kind of get kind of caught in his doom loop of like, never quite building the strategy never quite doing the work to understand where they could be going. But at the same time, because of that, that kind of reinforces it because then they just they get forced to just keep chasing deals. So I do think to your side mentioned earlier, product leaders do need to do a better job of carving out the time as best they can, at least to actually at least do some of the back of an envelope work to say, okay, look, this is, this is some of the stuff that we know now, if we focus here, we believe this will happen, you know, a bit of scenario planning, go to the leadership with an opinion, and then try and actually kind of harden that up and firm that up by having good discussions with the leadership team, we believe if this then this, okay, fine, you don't believe that, let's talk about that instead versus just accepting their fate and just building stuff. Yeah, and absolutely. I mean, you talked about this vicious cycle that this this doom loop, this vicious cycle that gets created. And see, you made a really good suggestion around making sure that product leaders are carving out the time to do this sort of discovery work, internal discovery work. But how do they do that? Because the report shows pretty clearly that product teams don't even have time for customer focused discovery. You know, it's the it said, 25% of ICs say that they have that only 25% say that they have sufficient time to do user research and discovery. Product leaders aligned with that they said 30% of them said the same there. You know, there was a quote from somebody who said that they simply weren't able to get access to their customers. Right? I mean, is this something that we're really seeing is this common, like 75% of product teams just don't have time to do the discovery? Well, okay, I'm going to trust the data here. I would say that yes, from my sort of observational experience that people get very tied into what's happening in the office, you know, engineering has needs and other people have needs and, you know, product manager meetings, meetings, meetings, meetings. So I would say, yeah, but I think this idea of time is an interesting one, right? Because what's important, what we deem as important is where we'll spend our time, right? If we say that something is not important, then we won't spend time on it. So first of all, the companies have to understand that this is important work, right? So there's a quote that I love by David Marquette. He wrote a book called Turn the Ship Around and another book after that. It's a really good book, actually, a leadership book, but he has a quote, and I'll read it to you because I'm going to, I'm going to frame the next part on this. It says, as individuals, we should embrace our responsibility for being the best we can be within the design of the organization. But as leaders, our responsibility is to design the organization so that the individuals can be the best versions of themselves, right? So when we say that, oh, the product managers don't have time, well, they're, and you know, I'll assume they're working hard, but they're, they're trying to do their best in a system that wasn't designed for their ultimate success. And I think that's a fact. And this is why I always come back to the product leaders who have to say, how do we design this to be successful? I think the first thing product leaders need to do is understand their role and design the system where they as product leaders can be successful, right? So one of the things that is in the report, we asked product leaders, where are you spending a lot of your time, right? And they said, well, things like executive management, internal politics, firefighting, supporting escalations, sales and revenue support. There's lots and lots of things that they're doing that isn't really, I mean, let's just say it's necessary, but it isn't really the most high value work that they're doing. They should take a step back and say, why am I spending so much time doing this other work? And I don't have time to do things I really want. They should fix the system for themselves first. They should understand what they can do to change the system that they're working in. As a leader, they have authority to make some decisions and to enact some changes. And they should do that constructively with other leaders. I think that's the first literal step. You can't fix problems for someone else if you don't solve the problems you have, right? The adage I'll give is when you're on a plane, put your mask on first, then put the next person's mask on, right? Fix it for you. So I'll take it from, I'll leave it at that. And I wonder if there's some confounding problems here, because you talk about leaders needed to take that first step, right? But we've already looked at the fact that the leaders, I mean, might be delusional. They don't know that they're the problem, right? They're only just starting to realize this. So they're not the ones taking these steps. And it's oftentimes the ICs who are screaming about the fact that the system isn't working. Sure. So one of the reasons, so if I can think back to last year, and Jason and I had been talking about this for a while. So we both do this sort of consulting work with companies. We try and help them and we help them the best we can. But both of us said, you know, we have no real data except for our own anecdotal data on what these problems are. And to be fair, you know, a lot of it could have been selection bias, right? Like really high functioning, well-run companies don't call people to fix problems, right? It's usually the ones who have really, you know, severe problems. And so that was one of the drivers for doing this research was to say, okay, let's get some, you know, a real data set, a body of knowledge that we can then leverage and share because, you know, we're not going to solve this problem by ourselves. And so I think, I think for leaders who didn't have that awareness or didn't have that understanding, they should, and I'm not plugging the report because we created, I think, look at the data in this report, identify what applies to your environment, and then see what you can do to improve it, improve it in the next month, improve in the next quarter, et cetera, so that you can be more effective as a leader. So that you can be more effective as a leader, and then you can help your team be more effective as an organization. Yeah. I think there's a certain amount of just being honest as well, open and honest. And hopefully, you know, this is a report that will go to product leaders, but hopefully even to, you know, the product leaders boss as well. Like if the circulation is good enough, then hopefully, you know, CEOs and, and others should be in a position where they can sort of look at this and start to see some of the things that maybe, you know, like they look at these things and they go, Oh yeah, that's, that's kind of like what our organization's like. So, okay, great. Well, we're not saying it's like that and it's good. We're saying it's like that. And that's something to work on. And we're very specific in the report around, yeah, this isn't a good thing, this bit here. And maybe you should try and do this rather than just like, Oh yeah, no, this is just what it's like. Because yeah, these are, you know, the areas that we're calling out are areas that we believe should be developed. So if leaders, product leaders and above can look at this and say, Oh, okay. No, fine. Yeah. This is a bigger problem than we thought. And maybe we should do something. Maybe. Yeah. Maybe we do need to check out and evaluate, you know, our team or our ways of working, you know, the product leadership skillset, you know, maybe they have come from somewhere else, you know, some other part of the business that, you know, they don't have a strong product mindset or background or experience that kind of been there, done that kind of experience. Okay, great. Well, let's try and then work to sharpen the saw and make them a little bit better at their jobs and also help them to communicate the value of what they are doing to their teams, as well as to their leaders and their colleagues and their sort of co-leaders within the organization. So there's a lot of work, you know, it's easy for us to sit there and say, well, product leaders need to up their game. And, you know, of course they do. Like probably most people need to up their game one way or another. But as I said, there is a lot of work to be done, but at the same time, at least by calling out, you can sit there and say, okay, let's at least have an honest conversation with our, with our teams, with the rest of our organization about what's going on, you can have that conversation yourself, you don't need to hire Saeed or me, I would be happy to be hired, but you don't have to hire us. You can have that conversation yourself, but you should have that conversation. Well, one of the things I'll just add is, um, whenever I've done work with clients, uh, sometimes they're, they're a little embarrassed by some of their problems. Um, and, and one of the first things I'll always say to them is, yeah, you're not alone in this and you're not different than most companies. And it, it's sort of a relief for companies because they look at other companies, oh, there, there's other companies that are so successful and look at, look at how much we're broken. And it's like, no, every company has problems and every company can be better. As Jason said, right. You can always up your game. And I think the first step is acknowledging that and saying, yeah, we, we want to improve and we have a clear picture of where we need to improve. And I think, you know, for anyone trying to solve a problem, those are the first two steps. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, it, it, what you're basically saying is that product teams need to lead the change that they want to see in the business. And that can look at, that can look like a number of different things, but, uh, it's effectively understanding that they have the problem, admitting they have the problem, and then talking about the fact that they've got, uh, a system, a way of working that isn't conducive to them building the absolute best thing. And that conversation can then be communicated upwards and downwards to bring people on board with it. But it does start with those product leaders right in the core, cause they've got the visibility over everything. Yeah. I think, I think one of the things too is for product leaders, I think product managers as well, although it's a bit harder, but for product leaders, um, you cannot simply frame it as we need to improve. What you have to do is, is connected to business outcomes and business goals, right? Like by, by, by working the way we work, this is how we are not helping the business move forward as best we can. If we make these changes, this is how we see the impact in the future, right? Nobody knows what the future holds and you can't predict exactly, but you should be able to connect it to, uh, the future maybe by using examples from the past. Right. So as an example, that story about, you know, the $2 million, uh, development hit for a $300,000, you know, deal or whatever, like every company has those stories, every company knows where they made mistakes and so you're fixing a problem and you have evidence to base your, your fix on, right? Those are the kinds of things leaders need to do. I, I, I say that product leaders should view themselves as business leaders, right? They are really fundamentally, they're at the executive table. They should be looking at the business as a whole and they should be showing how their organization helps the business overall, just the same way, sales, marketing, engineering, et cetera. Do it's harder for product because we don't have the kind of metrics that we'd like, but that's the mindset they have to have and then change becomes easier because you're speaking the language of leadership, you're not speaking the language of product, right? I think it's also harder for product teams because the metrics that they're trying to move are much longer term pieces, right? It's very easy for sales and marketing to make a statement about how something's going to improve something in the next quarter because that's the cycle that they live in, whereas with products, sometimes the cycles that we live in are looking out to what the product could be in five, 10 years. Yeah, I think that's true, but I think that there's, there's an easier route to take in the, in the shorter term. So every company has business objectives, like whether it's simply revenue, it could be expansion. We want to expand into a certain geography or expand into new market or something like companies have business objectives and I think the thing that product has to do is a first understand that and then B define what are the product objectives that will support those business objectives. So if you're saying, Hey, we want, and I have an example in my writing on this, but let's say your company wants to expand into Mexico, right? You're focused on North America. You want to expand into Mexico. What does that mean from a company perspective? Well, you'll have to set up a sales office and support, and you probably need some Spanish speaking staff. You're going to have to do marketing in Mexico. You might need to find a partner in Mexico, lots of business things. What does that mean for the product? Oh, we have to localize the product. We have to add Mexican specific support to the product. Let's say it's, you know, some kind of HR software, then you have to understand what that is. You have to understand what other impacts there are that are tied to Mexico, et cetera. Right. So you'll have product objectives as well. And then the company wants to expand to Mexico to generate revenue. And let's say we expect a 20% bump in revenue by going into Mexico. Well, what are we going to do for the Mexican market besides just localize that will help that, right? So you, you, you need to define those. And then all of a sudden, when you, when you have your roadmap, right, your roadmap is not sidelined by a sales deal because you've tied your product objectives to your business objectives. Right. And this is why that data on objectives in the report is so disappointing because most people don't have clear objectives. Most people don't align on objectives, right? All those things that are, I think, fundamental to business success aren't happening in product. Right. So we've talked about these underlying foundations, these underlying objectives and vision that we need to set for the team, getting people aligned around that. We've also talked about how product discovery is being underprioritized. There's just not enough time for it. And so product leaders can start carving out time. I also want to discuss how AI is being used to help us gain back some of this time or help us move faster, do more with the time that we have, because obviously time is precious. You know, the report shows that about 50% of leaders and 40 something percent of ICs use AI every day. Was that number surprisingly high, low, right on the nose? What did you think of that? That's funny. I sent a copy of the report to Akash Gupta. We all know Akash from LinkedIn and all over the place, his newsletter and all of that. And one of the slides, well, the slide that he sent back to me was basically the slide about how many people were using AI, and he's just like, well, who are the 50% of people that aren't? Because of course, you know, there was this, you know, that's the kind of the flip side is that there are people that aren't using it as well. And I think that it really, and as I've applied to him as well, it really strikes me that yes, there are a lot of people using AI for one thing or another. It struck me that a lot of the, like the majority of the usage within the report, and I'm not sure if this is also, you know, or if this is just a B2B thing, or if this is just a generic thing, a lot of it seems to be kind of the basic stuff that we all use AI for, you know? Like, so yeah, summarizing meeting notes or doing a bit of research and stuff like that, like they weren't necessarily doing all of their kind of 25 flawed agents and, you know, like automating their lives through some kind of personal operating system or anything like that. No, they're summarizing and summarizing meeting notes, summarizing research, and, you know, using it to do a bit of research potentially on competitors or just, you know, to create a PRD or something like that. All of the things that we know that LLMs are particularly good at, because they're great at creating text. Now I do worry that the people that are using these are kind of overusing them and that they're maybe not going to be doing the critical thinking that maybe they need to do, but at the same time, let's assume for the sake of argument that they are, kind of makes sense that people would be using them for those things. I do think though, that, you know, if we just kind of focus on, you know, the social media and professional bubbles that we all live in, kind of looks like everyone's using these things and they're using them for everything. And again, you've got your Claude this and your Claude bot that's, or your open Claude this isn't, like everyone's just like posting on LinkedIn or, or wherever about all of the things that they're doing and all the productivity gains, et cetera, et cetera. I don't think that's the majority of product managers out there. I think many of them are curious, but also kind of afraid and they don't know, and some of them are frankly kind of blocked by organizational restrictions as well, or they have to use something awful like co-pilot. You know, I go out and speak to companies and I've done training for companies on LLMs and how to use AI in the context of product management. And it's very clear that the vast majority of PMs in any room don't really know much beyond, well, you know, can we summarize a document or ask it to answer a question for us, this kind of idea that everyone in the entire PM sphere is somehow kind of, you know, like, you know, tooled up to the nines doing everything, you know, absolutely everything automating themselves through, uh, you know, being a hundred X PMs doing everything through Claude code, I just don't think that's true at all. I think the report backs that up. If you look at some of the stuff that people are talking about, and there's obviously also a bit of skepticism around how far it can go in certain areas, certainly around strategy, for example, but at the same time, I think that it kind of, you know, I'm kind of glad in a way that people are using it for the stuff that it's really good at. I'm sure that they're still investigating some of the other things, and I'm sure that it's still going to get better in some of these areas, but I'm personally quite glad, first of all, as someone who offers training and such, that there are still people to train, that's always a good thing for me, but at the same time, I'm glad that people aren't all kind of in the roller coaster going down and like not thinking of the consequences. I think that using it thoughtfully and using it for the right things, the things that we know it's good at, there's a great first step and it's good to see that people are doing it. Yeah. Seeing a lot of different use cases there that are very much around the busy work, right? Summarizing things and doing some writing tasks and that sort of thing, right? Are PMs using AI as a crutch for this busy work, or are they actually, you know, pushing it into places that move the needles, you know, are we seeing any actual outcomes, some impact from all this AI usage? We didn't actually ask that question in the data, in the research, so we don't have explicit data on that. I'll say this to answer your first question before, Jenna, is that I wasn't all that surprised by the results in the sense that, yeah, like people are using it for things that it's useful for. And when we say AI, right, let's be clear, it's generative AI and it's specifically large language models, right? So it's a very specific usage of this vast field, right? Product managers aren't using AI like as in machine vision or anything like that. Right? Like it's just this very limited use case. And so it makes sense. And I think that fundamentally the work of product management is people work, right? Discovery is people work. Stakeholder management is people work. Prioritization, which some people might do in a spreadsheet is really people work because you're aligning an organization, right, your team or whoever on this, right? So the work that we do or with the work we should be doing in product has to do with people. Now, in order to be effective at that, you have to know what you're doing, right? Stakeholder management, which, you know, is a term that gets thrown around a lot, is really difficult, right? It's really difficult. It requires understanding context across people. It requires understanding of human psychology and behavior. You really have to be skilled at it to really work and align a lot of people. LLMs or whatever you want to say are not going to help you with that. There might be things they could help you with creating, you know, some documents or some information to share, but they're not going to create it for you out of the blue. You have to have some insight and knowledge and, you know, maybe it can help frame that. So I think, I think that the way I look at it and the way I've argued it is that any technology, and I don't think AI is different, can help you be more efficient at what you're doing. But if you're not already effective at it in some way, then the efficiency isn't going to be great. If you're, if you don't understand how to do discovery and you don't understand how to do analysis and you don't understand how to create good questions and ask good questions, then large language models for summarization and all that aren't going to help you because you won't know what the output, whether the output is actually good or not, right? So I think that's the thing that people need to understand. And if you look at the, the, like, for example, again, on discovery, the blockers, right? I've easy access to customers, 45% of PMs agree with that. That means over half don't have easy access to customers. The time point that you brought up only 25% say they have the time, right? 43% say they have the training, right? My company values customer market research. Only 31% say that. None of those are going to be solved by AI, right? You need to solve the systemic problems first. You have to create that system of work and then, and then yes, become more efficient with these tools. And I think that's, that's something that people really need to understand, you know, AI, there's a lot of hype, there's a lot of assumption, you know, even the word artificial intelligence, guess what? One of those words is correct. And it's not the important one. So like understand what it is, but solve the core problems first and then become more efficient. Yeah. And I mean, it's actually on the point that you've asked the questions about AI right now, and I think it's such an evolving space that you'll ask that same set of questions in six months time and we'll get different answers, right? People are still figuring out what to do with this tool right now. There's a combination of people trying to do everything and some people doing nothing at all. Um, most people somewhere in the middle there. And I think we're going to see that evolve as a, as product managers and as the tech underneath, uh, evolve as well. And so looking to the future, the report also touches on the, um, the sentiment that people have for the product management world. Um, you know, we've got a lot of, we've talked about doom loops. We talked about dysfunction. There's a 50 something point perception gap between ICs and product leaders. And yet most PMs are optimistic. 54% of ICs are positive about the next 12 months. Is this resilience or is it denial? Everyone's just in the roller coaster and they're just going down and they remind you of that meme actually, where you've got the, the kids in the roller coaster going up and then there's the one with the skeletons coming the other way. Um, but just this idea that like, you know, product management, we all know it's a hard job. It's never going to be not hard. And all of the things that Saeed said about the human factors and the fact that, you know, there's complexity and these things aren't going to go away. I think that, yeah, there are, as we've sort of discussed, there are definitely systemic issues in a number of organizations. Again, I can't say that these are just B2B. There's obviously the people that we focus on, you know, we very much work in a B2B space, but at the same time, it does feel to your point around resilience. Like I think some people enjoy the fact that it's hard. Like they enjoy the fact that there's all these different ends to pull together. They enjoy the fact that every day is different and, or, you know, most days are different. They enjoy the fact that they have to sort of sink their teeth into really difficult and complicated problems and sort of do all of this stuff and juggle all these different contexts that they have to do all the time. I think also though, the reason, in fact, that I think we asked these questions in the first place was primarily because there's so much doom online these days around, you know, the death of product management and the fact that, you know, everyone's going to be just using, again, sort of AI agents or whatever to do all of the things, and we're not going to need product managers anymore. Now we all know that product managers have always been under attack from one side or another, because someone always thinks that they can do their job. But I think that, you know, in the face of that kind of relentless social media narrative about the death of PM, I think it's actually really heartening to see that people are still up for the challenge. Now, you know, they're not saying that it's not a challenge, but it's a challenge that, you know, well, not all of them, there were certainly some people in there. I think one of the people put in the comments that their next priority for the next 12 months was to get the fuck out of product management or something along those lines, that that was definitely a strong statement. I don't think that person's going to be a nine or a 10 on the NPS for product management. However, at the same time, the vast majority of people seem to be, yeah, they're kind of up for the fight. They're up for the battle. They, they know that it's tough. They know that there are things that they still need to do. They know that there are kind of all these different sort of tools coming over the horizon that could, you know, maybe impact their roles in different ways. I know that everything's becoming more complicated, but I do think that for the most part, people seem to be, and maybe it's just a product manager thing in general, people seem to be up for the challenge. I mean, yeah, it really cheered me up. Yeah, I'll just say this. I was actually surprised that it was that positive, quite honestly. Um, and again, it's selection bias on my part. Maybe it's the people I talked to. I expected something more balanced between the positive and the negative to, to be, to be honest. And, you know, we've seen data from, there was a survey, I think it's now almost two years old where it was in the U S 66% of senior product managers were looking to quit in the next 12 months, if you want to see unhappy product managers, just go on Reddit, our product management. You said it all wrong there. I mean, it does suggest that there's perhaps some selection bias, right? You're asking people who are product managers, you're not asking the ones who got broken by the last few years of product management and have already gotten out, you know, that person who says their goal is to get out. Are they going to answer the survey next year? I don't know. Yeah, we'll see. Um, we have some comments on like positive and negative. I just want to read one of each just to kind of, you know, close off my comment, right? So obviously AI was a huge factor in all of this. Um, one of the quotes that's positive says, um, and this is an IC product manager for many of us, AI, AI wave is great watching some of the incredible ways that people are organizing their work environments and bringing fun and learning to jobs is inspiring. Well, very positive sentiment, right? Um, and then if you look at the negative, um, someone says, I'm not seeing companies make adequate investment in it, in product management. And they're pushing for process change that creates short-term efficiency, but I think loses the long-term edge of innovation. Right. And I think that's a good kind of, uh, insight that, yeah. Hey, how can we add AI to this? You know, I've heard the phrase sprinkle some AI on it, which just makes me kind of cringe. But people aren't looking at like the systems of work, regardless of whether product or, or not, we're not designed for AI. So if you want to really leverage this new technology, then look at the systems of work and say, how can we design them so that we can get maximum benefit from them, right? What, how can we remove the impediments and then add in the benefits and then you'll come out way ahead. So I think, I think that's something that people need to understand. Yeah, absolutely. So, um, I mean, those were the major, um, takeaways from the, uh, the report. Um, we've talked about everything from getting a strategic alignment, um, making sure that there's a, uh, we're, we're addressing that gap between leaders and their ICs, uh, making time for discovery, um, um, ensuring that, um, uh, we're using AI for the right reasons. And, uh, you know, just really understanding as to what people's, um, sentiment is with the product management world out there, which, uh. is with the product management world out there, which right now we're holding into a positive light. So let's go with that. Come on, come on, product management. Well, this is the point where I take over the reins again and just, you know, thank obviously Janna for spending some of her valuable time to do some of this stuff. I know you've got your company to run in the daytime as well. So why don't you, you know, a bit of quid pro quo, why don't you tell us a bit about what ProdPad's up to these days and maybe if that can even help us to solve some of these problems. Yeah, absolutely. And actually, I think a lot of people listening in probably already know about ProdPad. If you know about the Now Next Later roadmap, which is 27% of respondents said that they use Now Next Later which made me extremely happy. Because we, you know, that's where it came from is an early iteration of ProdPad that just took off and now we've got Now Next Later for the whole world. And we're seeing that grow and grow and grow, which is brilliant, right? More and more companies are realizing that it's the way to connect the team around the strategy, make that strategy visible to the team, you know, not just the people in the leadership room, but everybody in the company. You know, it helps, you know, one of the reasons I started building ProdPad was because I was in that company that had sales overriding the roadmap. And so building it was a way to gain back some control and make sure that we're working on the stuff that actually impacted the business as a whole and tied things back to the market, the wider, longer term picture that we're looking at. And it creates space for discovery as well. I mean, people are talking about the fact that they just don't have time for discovery. ProdPad builds it in so that the whole team can be involved with that discovery process. It's more visible, it gets more attention, it gets more love, and it actually gets used. There's no point in doing discovery if it's not being picked up anywhere. And you know what, I hear people are using AI. We've built AI directly into ProdPad and we're not just sprinkling on some purple sparkly buttons. It's giving it the context as to what your product is, what your vision is, what your goals are, what your customers have asked for, so that it sits as your sidekick, right? Our Copilot is a tool that you can use to make sure that you are sense-checking your decisions and working along a helping hand that makes sure that you are building towards the right version of the future product. Nice, well, we can all go and buy that, but where can people go and find ProdPad if they wanna go and check it out, maybe get a demo or something? Yeah, thanks, Jason. I mean, you'll find us in all the obvious places, right? Prodpad.com, if you wanna hit us up for a demo, you can find that on the site. If you wanna drop me a note and connect with me on LinkedIn, I'm always happy to chat and nerd out about product. I'm Janna Bastow, I'm really easy to find there as well. So really easy to find, you'll find us and we'll chat then. Well, Janna, so it's always a pleasure to speak to you, get some Canadian flair, kind of makes you feel like I'm a bit of an outcast on my own podcast, to be honest, but obviously, yeah, anyone wants to go and check out ProdPad, go and check out ProdPad, always worth going in and sort of seeing these tools for yourself and see what they can do for you. If you wanna check out this report, then you can go to b2bproduct.io and just go and download it. You don't need to put your email address in, it's all for free. You can just go and grab it, share it, make sure that as many people, maybe even your boss or your boss's boss can have a look at it as well. We'll also put that into the show notes as well as all these links, including links to Janna's LinkedIn, Saeed's LinkedIn, and even to my LinkedIn, even though I hate LinkedIn and don't recommend anyone goes there anymore. But yeah, if you wanna reach out, do connect with all of us, and I'm sure that you'll be able to have an interesting nerdy product chat with at least one of us. But Saeed, Janna, thanks so much for taking the time and good night and good luck. Thanks. Thank you, take care.