Creating great products isn't just about product managers and their day -to -day interactions with developers.
It's about how an organization supports products as a whole.
The systems, the processes, and cultures in place that help companies deliver value to their customers.
With the help of some boundary -pushing guests and inspiration from your most pressing product questions, we'll dive into this system from every angle and help you think like a great product leader.
This is the Product Thinking Podcast.
Here's your host, Melissa Perry.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Product Thinking Podcast.
Today we're going to talk about everybody's favorite topic, AI.
But we're going to talk about how product companies are doing it right.
Joining me today is Sarah Rocio, the Chief Product Officer at G2.
Sarah is a long -time product expert with the years of experience identifying new market opportunities and developing products from concept right through to delivery.
She also has a unique perspective of working at G2, which collects reviews of software products all over the world.
Sarah talks with us today about trends she is seeing in the industry with AI, who's doing it right, and how they're also incorporating it strategically at G2.
But before we talk to Sarah, it's time for our segment on Dear Melissa.
So this is the part of the show where you can write me any of your burning product management questions, and I answer them every single week.
Go to DearMelissa .com and let me know what you're thinking about today.
Let's see who wrote in this week.
Dear Melissa, we don't have an existing product manager in a relatively small data team, but there is a clear gap in our delivery process where I believe a formal product management role would deliver value.
If you had the chance to establish a new product team, where would you start with their position, focus, and brand, assuming we can't do everything on day one.
All right, so let's first identify what the issue is with your delivery process.
We have to make sure it's actually product management related and not something else.
So if it is about, let's say, decision making, and we just can't get things out the door because people won't make decisions, that could be product management related.
If it's on a scoping side where we're building too much and it takes forever, again, that could be product management related.
If it's about, hey, we don't know if we're building the right thing, that might help too.
So if it's not those things, I don't know if product management is going to help.
So let's first start from the problem and assume it's one of those.
If you're going to bring in one person to start the product team, you need to focus on them as the person who can help you make sure that you're building the right thing and then helping to make sure it gets done.
If the biggest issue is getting things out the door, I really advise that you start with that.
This person that you bring in should be helping you think through what goals you want to hit and then helping you poke at your current product to see if it would hit them.
If it feels like a yes, that's where they help you ship it, make sure you're breaking it down, road mapping it out, getting out the door.
But sometimes the biggest hurdle in product management is actually just delivering.
It's about scoping it so you don't build too much and making sure that we can make a decision to get out the door.
So if you're just really struggling with shipping and it comes into those issues, the biggest thing that you can do to justify the existence of a product management team is by making sure you actually deliver things.
It's good to go back and test it and make sure it's the right thing, but you want to evaluate if it's a risk associated with shipping it is more or less of what the risk would be to not ship it, to wait and actually dive in, see if it's going to work, all of those different things.
So you do want to actually have somebody who comes in, make sure that they understand the goals, make sure they understand why you're building what you're building, breaking it down into smaller chunks to actually test value and get it out the door faster.
But at the end of the day, if you can't ship, you can't actually produce results.
So you want to figure out what's preventing you from doing that.
Again, it could be scoping, it could be decision making, it could be we don't know we're building the right thing, so we beat around the bush.
That's where I would position product management to help.
So really focus on trying to get things out the door if that is your issue with delivery.
Of course, you want to make sure it's the right thing to build, and you do want to instrument it so you can measure success, but you want to make sure you can actually deliver.
So hopefully setting up a product manager to get in there, demonstrate value quickly, is going to lead the way to create an actual formal product management team and be able to do that at scale.
You want to make sure that what you're delivering is the right thing to build, but you also have to make sure that you can get it out there and then reflect and make sure it's hitting the goals.
So I hope that helps.
All right, let's go talk to Sarah.
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Welcome to the podcast, Sarah.
It's great to have you here.
Thank you. I'm excited to be here.
Can you tell us a little bit about your career journey and product and how you got to where you are today?
So I started my career journey in marketing, but I found I was always really curious about solving problems and really making the biggest impact.
And so early in my career, about 23 years ago, I accidentally found myself in a product role moving from being a designer and a creative, and I loved it.
And what I found is what I loved was solving the hardest problems for customers, and I did that for the last 20 years, moving different products and business opportunities.
And at its core, I found my way always in data and really finding that insight.
So in the last about six or seven years, I've been focused on capturing the real voice of users through reviews, and I did that in consumer and now in the B2B space.
And there's something just really great about bringing kind of authentic truth to the world.
So where I got today, which is the chief product officer at G2.
And when you look at G2 and where you are right now, what are some of the product priorities that you have there?
First, we're a marketplace for software.
So we collect reviews from users, and we want to make sure that we build trust in everything we do.
And that's a really hard thing to make sure that your buyers trust you and you're collecting authentic information.
But for us, what we're really trying to do is maintain that trust and number two, really change how people share information and create simpler ways for people to really engage with information we're sharing.
And so those are our areas of focus right now.
So G2 is actually in a pretty highly competitive market.
There's a lot of different review sites out there.
You've got TrustBiley, you've got all these other ones.
How do you think about setting a good differentiated product strategy or a product strategy at all?
And what are you doing to really gain market insights and use that data that you were talking about to shape that?
We fight against the biggest traditional analyst firms.
So it's a really fun place to be because we actually can learn from the pain points of not only those traditional analyst firms, but the other review sites.
Number one, I always believe in product.
Stay really focused on your users and your customers and then really make sure that you're taking advantage of the shifts in the market, whether it's regulatory or channel shifts or social and user behavior and really drive that kind of creation of all those different things and smash them together
and say, what opportunity does that lend for the company and for specifically G2?
So at a time when user behavior is changing and people don't trust reviews all the time, how do we actually build trust into everything we do?
How do we use AI in a way that actually summarizes information to make it even easier to make confident decisions?
And so for me in particular, always go back to the pain point of the user and then use those shifts in the market to take advantage of opportunities.
The Trust thing is actually really interesting because I think as we got into more reviews, people started to poke on this and say, hey, are they actually given an accurate review?
Were they paid for this review?
When we see influencers online or we see people promoting things, there's always this undertone of, does somebody get paid to do that, to give a good review?
What have you been doing to make sure that it feels authentic and to make sure that people can actually build that trust that you were talking about?
What's the key there?
There's two pieces.
We care deeply about the user and validating the user.
The user actually has used that software and we do that in very different ways.
One is making sure that we actually embed with a lot of these software companies in their own admin, in their own user flows so that they validate that the user actually is the user of theirs.
Number two, we actually ask questions and coach in meaningful ways for authentic feedback, specifically around the features of the software.
So we really want to not have a general kind of comment for someone to say, this is great software, but we want to know if this software, for example, we're just talking about Riverside, does this software do what's intended to do?
How is the audio of it?
How is the visual? I'm really asking those deeper questions to really get that insight to come out so people really do know that they authentically have the right user and the right content to make decisions.
That's interesting because we were talking about Riverside before you jumped on here, like you just said, and I'm like, oh, this is good hand in hand with what you do with G2.
But I have reviewed things onto G2 before and I do like that.
You have asked me like specifically, what about this feature?
Does it do this? Does the user experience live up to those things?
And I thought that was really nice instead of like, here's the open text box just right.
And it felt like for me too, I went, oh, like this is the type of information they're looking for feedback on.
This is the type of evaluation they're doing against other ones.
So I do like that a lot for pulling that out.
I think it's a really nice feature.
Can you tell us a little bit maybe about how you think about innovation too at G2 and maybe where a specific example or something that you've released, where you've tapped into those market insights and helped bring that to fruition?
It's a little meta.
So we at G2 love software.
And we love using software.
We love learning about software.
And a lot of software companies are using AI right now.
But what's interesting is a lot of people don't understand how effective it is.
Is it actually delivering the feature set and the use case intended?
What is the outcome that it's trying to achieve?
And so recently, because we were so interested ourselves, we actually started asking questions of reviewers in certain categories on how they feel about the sentiment.
What is the impact of that AI?
And through learning of what they're saying, we're actually able to bring it back and say, look, these are the use cases that work really well.
Let's actually go and apply those into how buyers are actually working with G2.
And what they're trying to discover on G2.
And there's two use cases that work really well.
One is discovery and two is summarization.
And so those are the areas that we're really kind of applying AI in so many different ways across our user experiences.
I think it's really interesting because you get that perspective of how do people buy and how do they actually choose products at G2 across all of these software companies.
And I know when I work with a lot of software companies, all I hear from them is we need to have an AI strategy.
That's what our customers are asking for.
When you actually dig into those reviews, you just mentioned the benefits, but is that true?
Are people actually coming out and buying these products just because of AI?
Do people mention that in their buying process when you're looking through this?
Or is there something deeper there that companies should be worried about?
I think investors and board of directors think companies need an AI strategy.
I think very few software companies are doing it well.
And I think it's because they don't know how they're not going to the pain point of the user and understanding how that technology, like by the way, other technology has always helped bring advanced kind of those pain points in the user experience.
There's this movement of saying, I just need to use a hammer and I'm going to use it across as many places as I can in my product experience.
But a lot of them just don't work.
When you're observing the ones that don't work, is there any specific trends there that people are doing with AI where customers are like, this doesn't matter, or I didn't even look?
I think it has to be trained and tuned a lot.
And how users interact, they come and they don't know whether to trust it or not.
So I think a lot of those applications that don't give additional answers on the why or they're transparent about the data they're using and actually link out to a broader experience to learn more, I think there's a lot of distrust.
And you only have to have so much time with your users to really build that trust.
So if they have two bad experiences, they're not going to come back and use it again.
And I think that's what you're starting to see is this frustration that they're not transparent enough and the answers aren't accurate.
Interesting. So when companies are trying to build trust, you mentioned show them where the data is coming from or show them why they make the decisions.
We talked a little bit about AIs being really good at discovery and summarization.
Are there any other places where you've seen customers just be like, oh, this is a home run when it comes to AI things?
Do you have something that you feel is a home run?
I feel like when customers look at AI from what I've seen, from what's been good, it's like they don't even know that AI is doing it, right?
Like it's just giving them what they want.
When I work with these companies sometimes, it's like they're trying to bash things over the head saying like, we have AI here.
They think like the marketing strategy is to scream that they have AI in there.
And most of the customers or users that you ask about, they're like, oh, there was AI in there?
I just thought it was great because it did the thing like I asked it to do and it saved me a bunch of time.
And that's one thing, like the ones that are good, I feel like are sneaky.
They're just like, you had a question and I gave you answers.
Here you go. It's not sneaky.
It's just built in.
It's not something that we have to go like shout from the rooftops.
It's just like, oh, here we go.
We solved the problem.
I 100 % agree. And for my guidance is for those people who don't have it perfect yet, make sure you market beta and make sure people know how to give you that.
Like don't let the chat bot or anything stop asking the question of how to be better.
Because that's how new product development is.
Hey, breakthrough is you just keep getting the feedback and you keep iterating.
And I think in a lot of these use cases, it'll get better and then people won't shout from the rooftops because it's just expected.
That's a topic that's going on right now too is about how a user's experience changes with AI and like what will it look like in the future when AI is just built into everything.
How do you think about how product strategies or experiences are going to shift and what will be different, you know, a couple of years from now versus today when AI becomes just a like, duh, we should be using that where we can.
I think the user will become much more at the forefront than ever before and personalization at its core.
We will anticipate and we will recommend things that users don't know that they need yet.
And I think that world is really exciting because I think people are open to wanting to learn more and open to going to that kind of next stage for us on the next stage beyond just like discovery, like bring me down the path of what I don't know and how you can help me make a software purchase based
on what I'm really looking for.
And I think overall consumer just behaviors is going to change around specifically around shopping and engagement and that kind of funnel.
That's an interesting topic there too.
And I want to poke on it because I'm sure you've heard this as well.
Like we all have out there when you talk to some people about discovering customer problems, right, and trying to solve them for them.
I always like to say, you know, there's like latent needs that people know they have a problem, but they don't know necessarily how to solve it or they may not even be aware that that problem is a particular super pain point until you go out and solve it in a novel way.
And then there are things where people are like, I'm pulling my hair out, please fix this for me.
When you're out there like observing all of these software companies like you get to do with G2 and the purchase behavior of customers, how do you balance that or how do you think about balancing that or how should CPO think about balancing that, right?
When you have this opportunity to solve a problem that people might not be super aware of yet, that they can't really like describe, let's say, how they would think about solving it in detail.
How do you balance that and how do you think about going through a process to make sure that that's the right problem to solve?
We do a lot of testing.
So we have a lot of buyers on our site, so we have the luxury of saying, of agreeing that we're going to do some amount of innovation testing just to see what we learned.
And we actually do it on our site.
Oftentimes people will come in and they'll say, what were you doing over here?
And I was, oh, it was just a test.
But a lot of times, as to your point, we have a hypothesis.
So we start saying, we've been noticing these trends on our site or a drop -off or people are moving over here.
And so we start actually creating just very small kind of incremental tests to see if there's something to learn.
And then we, honestly, we ask a lot of questions.
So we jump on phone calls with buyers, and we just say, what were you trying to do here?
And can you help us?
And oftentimes people will talk to us about what the next best step was that they were trying to figure out and they won't describe it to your point as a pain point.
It's something that's frustrating because it doesn't exist in the world.
But usually if you stay curious and you just keep asking the why or how do you feel or what were you like, what's great look like or what would be a delight moment, they'll tell you.
And that's one of the tenets I always have is if you ask, people will tell you.
And that's awesome.
When you're doing that discovery process with the customers where you can follow up and say what were you trying to do, what does that actually look like?
Because I think a lot of companies out there are product managers.
They struggle with that nitty gritty as well of how does your organization specifically find out who did something unexpected and does the product manager pick up the phone and call them?
How do you actually operate that so you're able to get that feedback?
So we do a couple of things.
One is we've instrumented our site, which most people in product, if you're in kind of the, we straddle B2C.
So we actually have analytics on our site so we can see where people are, like, where they stopped.
We actually have CSAT where we actually ask people, like, how do you feel about this experience?
We have screen recordings, so we can also see kind of where they're moving.
And then oftentimes we ask people to opt in to talk to us.
Both buyers are willing to give us feedback and we'll share and sometimes we'll do kind of prototypes with them live once we started seeing an experience and say, what would this help you?
I was just on a phone call this morning that we have a labs team, which a lot of companies don't have a separate kind of innovation team that's totally focused on intending to disrupt things.
And they were basically, they're testing some ad units and they basically, it's all self -service and the moment someone opts out is a moment they get a pop -up and say, why'd you leave?
And just asking that simple question of, what didn't you get here?
And then being able to say, well, are you willing to talk to us?
People more often than that will tell you why they don't want to actually engage with you.
And so we just constantly have this feedback loop mentality of we just always want to ask.
Product managers do it in our product.
We do it separately.
We have executive advisory boards.
We have customer advisory boards.
We have kind of ongoing pilots as well where there's a commitment to give us feedback.
With the labs teams, I found that certain organizations do have labs teams, a lot of them don't.
When you're trying to look at that labs team and manage the innovation there, how do you think about balancing what that team is doing and their testing versus what your core team is doing on the product?
How do you make sure that the core team isn't like, oh, they got to do all the fun stuff over here and we just have to do all the legacy things or enhance what we already have?
How do you keep that bridge going?
So first of all, it's hard.
And it's more so not like the innovation piece because we drive, it's really important, we have a tenant of value that we live by, which is we actually want to fail fast, we want the entrepreneurial spirit, we want to test things and learn.
So every team can do that.
And we actually applaud every team for both like and celebrate their failure and just the process of learning and their success.
What's interesting is there's more friction on, they don't have to scale it.
So they're constantly testing and iterating and then at some point it'll leave labs to scale.
And I think that's the moment that everyone's like, oh, wouldn't that be fun that we didn't have to scale it?
And that's where some of that handoff happens.
And there's lots of stories of how that's worked well or not worked well, but that's where the friction point is.
What are some things that worked well for you with that handoff?
Because I'm sure some of the people who get the product could be like, well, they didn't really think about how this would scale or they architected it this way or this, I could think of a laundry list of reasons why people might get frustrated.
What types of operating procedures or like processes do you put in place to make sure that the handoff goes smoothly and you can actually scale it?
This is what we've done.
So I think new product development is about people and staying connected to kind of having people trust each other and understand the background.
So you connect first as humans.
So we actually bring in some of the new team very close to the team who's been iterating to hear, to learn, to actually see what they were seeing and be empathetic to the situation and be ready.
So being able to say, I'm ready to take this on, I have the scope and the understanding to make sure it's successful against the guardrail's intended use case or the impact that we're looking for.
And so the teams basically have the ability to connect, learn, and then say, I'm ready for it are the three things.
We learn a lot and we might only have a dozen examples of what's moved from labs into teams, but it all seems to start at that great connection between the engineers.
When you're looking at maybe handoffs that didn't go so well, where do you think they've broken down in the past?
They weren't bought into the vision.
They didn't believe it was the value of the use case and the future of that vision that they wanted it to be proven in a different way.
Would you like try to put in place to help with that?
Bringing them in earlier to see the vision, to understand how it connects and the importance of it so that they are bought in.
People want to work on things that they understand.
They want a sense of purpose.
They want to know what they're doing is worthwhile.
And so when they're not bought into the vision, it feels like it quickly kind of goes on the side of their desk and they're not interested because we all have so much to do.
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Another thing I've seen with innovation teams is how much direction you give them, right?
Or like what's the mandate for the problems that they want to go after?
For example, I worked with one really large company that wanted innovation teams and they wanted to go out and like experiment around things.
But they gave them such a wide net.
It was literally like, anything.
You can experiment around anything.
And you're like, well, we do financial services.
Should we experiment around like meal delivery?
Like what, you know, what's the boundaries there?
And for them, they didn't give them any guidelines whatsoever, not even that, not even within our business.
It was whatever you do.
I've seen other ones where it will be within a problem space and they're like, go out there and try to solve it.
Or other ones, a little more relaxed, but like obviously within our business area, let's say.
How do you balance that net of giving them enough direction that it makes sense, but also not like stifling the creativity in case they find something that might be adjacent to what you're doing now, but not necessarily exactly what the business looks like?
At the highest level, we have a three -year plan and a vision for the company.
And so for us, we want to be where you go for software.
And so if someone wants to try to build a car, we're going to say boundaries are already kind of set.
And so we'd say probably not anytime soon.
So as long as it's within kind of the scope of the vision and we document around what great looks like, when you start investing in these things, we want to put enough guardrails to say this is the impact.
Like you tell us the impact you can see or where you see the vision, and then that will help us make sure that it feels like a worthy project.
And it's usually we let people test their way into areas and it's over time we have such smaller teams that there's not that much risk in terms of kind of inefficiency of what they're doing.
Are you also looking at these innovation teams as the ones who are going out and like playing with new technology?
Like when LLMs started to go out there, are they the ones who are kind of searching around saying what can we apply this to, or are you keeping them like more problem focused and that happens somewhere else?
It was interesting.
So all of our teams, we want them to play with new technology.
But what ended up happening is at G2, when the LLMs came out, they were the first ones to say, I'm going to start testing our way in and having an opinion on what works really well for what.
And then because they had kind of the flexibility and weren't tied to this core kind of roadmap the same way, they were kind of the first movers and then started doing KTs or knowledge transfers to other teams, putting kind of structure in place, making it easy for anyone to really use and apply the benefits
of a lot of these technologies.
We also have a platform team who does similar things in other ways where they end up kind of experimenting and sharing those lessons.
But all teams get the benefit of using the technology because we find that the more they have the ability to try new things, the more motivated they are.
Because at the end of the day, they get geeked out and excited about the technology.
How are you also preventing people from being like, oh, this is a really cool technology.
I just want to do it for the sake of using this technology.
I've worked with a ton of developers, for example, too, where a new language comes out and they're going, oh, I've got to use it.
I want to use it here.
And then you just end up with a bunch of stuff that doesn't really go together.
How do you keep people excited but like temper going off on a tangent?
Generally, we have tenants, like ways of working in principles.
So we code in this language.
This is how we think about changing or transforming our architecture.
These are the rules that we have around different areas.
And then we agree to those and we don't change them.
And so people know, don't kind of mess around in this area.
This is not kind of the innovation areas to our point earlier.
It's part of the guardrails and it's known.
We do hackathons as well where they can kind of experiment and play around with different languages or different technologies.
But in our core, we have very clear tenants.
You mentioned platform teams, too.
I'm wondering if we can go down that for a while.
I've gotten a lot of questions on this podcast lately about platform teams because people are writing in, how do I be a product manager of a platform team, right?
Or how do I work with the platform teams when my work is dependent on other people's work, right?
I've got a lot of dependencies.
I feel like I don't have ownership.
I've worked with a bunch of engineers, but I don't really have users, people say, even though we know that your users are internal.
When you're overseeing both platform teams versus user -facing teams, what have you found works the same, I guess, with platform teams?
And where do you have to be different, right?
Where do you have to kind of change your approach to product management a little bit to make that work?
It's interesting. I think product managers who are either on platform teams or like internal tool teams are very different for me.
I think they're motivated for things like the efficiency or the satisfaction of their engineers or their internal users.
And they're usually the people behind the scenes that no one really, they're not looking for it to be on stages.
A lot of product managers, I think, thrive in the spotlight and thrive in wanting to be in front of customers and be celebrated for that.
And I don't think that platform team, platform product managers or internal tools product managers are built that way.
Sounds like they're a little bit more introverted.
They are. And I think they're motivated not only by the process but also the outcomes are motivated by the work as well because sometimes the outcomes aren't as clear and they don't always control all the outcomes.
Almost like in product apps, I would like in a product apps function, I think there's just a different motivation level.
Yeah, with the platform product managers, one of the questions we get a lot too is, how do I get buy -in for doing some of this platform work when I can't directly relate it back to revenue, I can't directly relate it back to some of these growth goals that we're all talking about.
It's more about tying it back in, like making something better on the back end for somebody or streamlining it.
And I know that it's work that needs to get done, but I worry that people don't find it important or they are not looking at me like I'm important to the business.
What would you tell product managers who might feel that way about how they can maybe sell their importance or talk about their importance to the rest of the company?
First of all, I think the work is important.
It's so foundational and so being able to really understand why that investment exists.
We have a data team whose job is to get everything into a data warehouse and then distribute it.
And so every time that individual is putting a new data type in or refreshing on a different cycle, what I tell them is go upstream, go look at our downstream and go look and see what decision will be made off this data that will help us be a better company.
Like envision that and help bring that to life because that's not only motivating for your engineers, but it's motivating for the rest of the company to say, yes, I'm so excited.
And I think those people who can envision that impact and the art of the possible are really the best at their job.
And when they want that additional validation, I also say like as to product people and any employee, help people understand what makes you tick, how you're motivated and make sure that others around you kind of give you that moment of validation and encouragement too because burnouts are real, especially
in product. Yeah, I think there's a lot of people out there dealing with burnout as well right now.
And I've heard that sentiment from so many people where it just feels like we're doing everything when it comes to product and product management.
And a lot of I think grunt work ends up on people's desks and they don't feel appreciated or they feel like they're always fighting for their importance.
What do you do to keep people motivated as a leader and what do you do as a leader as well to help evangelize I guess product at the C level and show people it is important?
I've been in their shoes.
I've been a product manager.
So I'm not only compassionate, I'm empathetic because I remember what it feels like.
So one is it's a lonely job.
And so creating that connection with other product people centers of like excellence and discussion around kind of what you're learning and sharing those learnings I think is really important.
That sense of camaraderie in product teams I think matters.
And so creating that internally.
For me, we're not impacting people's lives dramatically.
It's just bringing joy back to your work and having fun.
Oftentimes when there's a mistake, even on our site we'll have like a little cute little character come up and say, whoopsie doodle, we made a mistake.
Just realizing that we can still, learning is good and it's fun and we should be having fun every day that we can and not kind of carry the weight always there.
There's always going to be weight.
Finance will always want us to be more productive.
Everyone wants us to find efficiencies.
But I really believe if you can celebrate these moments of learning, I think it goes a long way.
I also have implemented a one hour meeting for the entire company where the entire company comes in and sees the demos and the impact that people have made and just having your peers celebrate you for a moment.
Even if it's a five minute presentation, but the whole company is like, that was awesome.
It gives the teams fuel again to keep going.
We celebrate the wins and the failures in the same meeting.
How often do you do the demos?
We do it monthly. I started because at G2 we have this crazy staircase and we've called it innovation pulse.
I wanted all these people to be a close knit group and come around the staircase and see the demos and celebrate the team because progress is great.
We've done it for four years now.
It's monthly and it's super energizing.
A lot of people will tell me it's the most energizing and insightful meeting we have at the entire company.
I love that. It probably sets such a nice cultural tone for importance of work and we're all learning there together.
When you're also thinking about going back to AI stuff for a moment, right before we did this, before we jumped on, we did talk about how your processes or the ways that you work with the rest of the organization change when you get into AI.
Can you tell us a little bit about what you've been observing internally for how you use AI, for how your working processes change, for what expectations are different and how you manage that within the company?
Originally, you heard me say we started with labs with AI and we were really focused on how do we focus on the problems that we could never solve before with AI in the product.
What's interesting is the more I talk to product people, they're like, why would you start there versus starting internally?
We basically said, look, we're going to market in alpha and just learn because that's how we do things.
What was interesting is when we started doing those KT or those knowledge transfer sessions, it wasn't just engineering.
All of a sudden, the operations team came in to learn or all of a sudden, our marketing team came in, our employee success team came in.
What we did is, one, we actually started training everyone on the use cases that were working well and not working well.
We created this internal fun rally cry called 10 % more.
We actually asked everyone to say, how can you get 10 % more time back in your day by using a technology?
Everyone got hands -on.
What was really interesting is I realized that us having fun with it, us sharing what worked well, we actually started finding 35 % efficiency in someone's job and all of a sudden, they're celebrating and they're not scared of it.
They're actually saying, look how great this is and I can be more productive in my current job.
I think for us, it's really helped us embrace the technology, understand the technology across the company, but also there's not the fear that I hear in a lot of other discussions I have with leaders across operations or technology.
There's a lot of people are saying, I'm getting resistance to actually implement it because everyone thinks their jobs are going.
I have a very different reaction to that.
I think people have really leaned in.
When you're setting that up to that tone to make sure that people aren't getting scared and being like, my jobs are being replaced, are you actually communicating with them?
Like, hey guys, there's plenty of work to go around here.
We're not replacing you.
How do you manage that conversation as a leader too so that they're not just looking at the productivity metric of it and saying like, oh well, when I get to be 50 % increased productivity, that means that maybe they only need one of me versus two of me.
Learning and development is really important in my team and across the company and so we are constantly developing what we call professional development plans and reskilling.
We've proven historically that if you become 50 % more efficient, let's actually lean into another role that might actually be better fit for what you want in your career and for the company.
And so we've time and time again really invested in our team to develop those skills and it takes time to build that trust and this constant focusing on celebrating people who move into different roles.
Oh, I love that. That's really nice.
So it sounds like you have this culture or this awareness within G2 of, hey, even if I start here, this might not be where I end up.
It's not just about this role, it's about me being able to have opportunities in here and if I prove myself or if I do something cool, there's more opportunities.
And I think that our leaders and managers create the spaces where you could have those conversations and there are people who get scared, but the fact that we allow people to talk about it and say, this makes me nervous and this is why and just have managers say, I hear you, let's actually work out
what's next for you.
And sometimes it's not within the company too and I think that's sometimes okay, but I think the companies that aren't embracing AI across their full company, it's that change management and that resistance is just inherent.
It sounds like too, and some of these other companies are making me think about it.
They're probably looking at AI not as a tool that can level us all up but more as a way to replace people.
And I think if you come in with that mindset, that's hard to shake.
Well, it's interesting.
I was at a conference a couple of weeks ago and everyone said, well, AI, the finance and our board are asking for cost savings.
And I said, oh, well, I actually am looking for productivity and that's different.
That's not a reduction in people's jobs.
That's actually focusing on making the greatest impact as possible within these roles using the technology.
And so I've intentionally used productivity because I don't want people to get scared.
That's a great way to put it.
And I think it's that bridge where even if investors, if people are listening to this and say their investors are doing that, it's drawing back like, hey, better productivity is a cost savings at the end of the day.
It's not necessarily about eliminating headcount, but there's another side of it.
Every single company I've ever worked with wants to do way more than they actually can, right?
You have 18 ,000 initiatives you'd love to do.
You've got all this stuff you want to get out the door.
If AI can help you do that with the amount of people you have and you don't have to hire more, that's great, right?
Or you can scale slower instead of that.
That's another way to look at it too.
Yeah, absolutely. And when you have people motivated, people where they're finding the productivity gains is really interesting because oftentimes if you give them the tools, they will find it in the spaces that work they don't like to do.
And so over time, they're happier.
And I think that's really exciting.
Like I said, it's not what my big takeaway is AI is not just for engineering teams and embedded in product.
It's so much more. There's so much more we could be doing.
When you're looking at what you would like to do next with AI within your company or what you think product managers should be focusing on with AI, even internally, like in their processes, what areas are you excited about?
I started with kind of how consumer behavior is going to change.
I think we have a long way to go on personalization and G2 is built on a lot of data that we haven't shared before.
And I think we will break through if we really get personalization done in a better way.
I think the second piece, and maybe it's under personalization, but it's the first time I can see a path to localization that is within my budget.
Where every time we'd look at it and say, is it time to go to this country and build non -English speaking experiences?
And it just was too cost prohibitive.
But now there's an unlock that AI gives us that it's really good.
And so that's exciting to me to be able to also expand our addressable market just because of how we use the tools.
That's really neat.
Yeah, there are things out there that we can do now that blow my mind every day.
Somebody's like, oh, yeah, you can do this now with AI or you have this tool that's available.
And I think keeping on top of that as a product leader and being able to see what's coming is really important.
What do you do to make sure that you're staying abreast of the new technology trends or what's even possible or what you should be thinking of, but not get overwhelmed by the amount of new things out there?
Maybe this is just G2, but basically, we have a market research team who's always looking at AI to get them as part of our taxonomy.
And we have tools that basically distill who's doing really well in AI as an independent tool or as a feature in the product.
And we just keep asking, keep watching it.
And we know our own pain points.
So we basically every month just look at the tools and say, hey, we should be looking here.
And for me in product, there's always this moment.
It's easy to get stuck in the momentum of the day -to -day, but I always encourage my teams to take one step back, take a breath, reflect.
And in that reflection, you also look at the new technology along with other shifts in the market.
And that's the moment that we reflect and we can bring in kind of the scorecard of what we're seeing and say, do we change anything because of this technology?
That's amazing. And you got a whole built -in way to study other companies, which is really cool.
And I'm jealous of because I love seeing what other people are doing out there.
Sarah, thank you so much for being on the podcast.
If people want to check out you or G2, where can they find you?
Sarah Rossio on LinkedIn or g2 .com.
You can also go there and you can find any G2ers excited to connect with you.
As I said, we're always interested in feedback.
So feel free to connect with us on feedback channels as well.
Awesome. Well, thanks again, Sarah, for being on the podcast.
And thank you to our listeners out there for listening to the product thinking podcast.
We'll be back next Wednesday with another amazing guest.
And also, I'll be answering all of your product management questions.
If you go to DearMelissa .com, let me know what they are.
I answer them every single episode.
So we'll see you next time.
Bye, Sarah. Bye. Thank you.
