We always end up talking about what is fun.
The thing is a game should be fun and what is fun and we all have different definitions of it, but it does tend to come down to engagement.
What's making people really emotionally into it because our games that really hit dark topics, and those are fun, but they're very moving, they're very meaningful and games have the power to move you in ways that an explanation never will, because you have agency.
It's almost like you're experiencing the thing that you're learning about.
We have play tests every single week, period.
I got that from Zingo, where we would always have user research every single week.
I don't know if all game studios do it at that pace, but that pace was mind -blowing.
You just always had people coming in, and so I built up the habit where I almost get them addicted to playtesting.
That rhythm, it's really right.
That really connects you to the customer.
What I see now is, honestly, the rise of Vibe Coding.
It's a stupid name, and a lot of people are not understanding it, but if you think about it as a prototyping tool, it is actually game -changing.
Because now you can make something that's fully clickable In the past, with Sigma, it was just such a pain in the butt to hook it all together And click little hot spots and everything Some of the product managers I know are doing just that They're making quick prototypes, they're going out and testing it They're bringing that information back And then eventually, they can give something to the engineers That is actually easier to understand than it's an optimization Because now we have a prototype that's clickable And they can see, okay, what happens when this happens But I would not recommend
using those prototypes for production code Because no, just think about it as a prototyping tool.
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, I'm excited to welcome back Christina Woodkey for the second time on the show, a renowned author and thought leader in the realm of OKRs.
This time though, we're gonna change it up a little bit and talk to you, Christina, about game design.
Christina teaches Game Design at Stanford University and brings a wealth of knowledge on how these concepts can transform the way that product managers and leaders make strategic decisions.
I'm thrilled to have her back on the show to explore how we can use this as product leaders.
And we're also going to dive into how she sees AI transforming product management education.
But before we talk to Christina, it's time for Dear Melissa.
This is a segment of the show where you can ask me any of your burning product management questions and I answer them here every single week.
Go to dearmelissa .com and let me know what's on your mind.
Hey, product people, I have some very exciting news.
Our new Mastering Product Strategy course is now live on Product Institute.
I've been working on this course for years to help product leaders tackle one of the biggest challenges I see every day, creating product strategies that drive real business results.
If you're ready to level up your strategy skills, head over to productinstitute .com and use code LAUNCH for $200 off at check out.
Here's this week's question.
Dear Melissa, I'm a product manager of five years and formerly a consultant working with agile software teams. I'm struggling to land a job in -house after consulting and being labeled generalist. Something I thought was a good thing.
I feel like it is much easier to learn about an industry than it is to learn how to have a solid product mindset.
I know about dashboards more than the average Joe.
How do I help articulate this or break through?
Why are companies and recruiters more concerned around being a subject matter expert versus an open -minded product person?
The age -old debate about whether a subject matter expert is needed that can learn product or whether you need a commensurate product manager.
Now, in many organizations, this has been a debate for a very long time.
And in highly regulated organizations or ones that are going through transformations, a lot of times they will lean more towards the subject matter expert part because of the complex nature of the business.
I don't necessarily love this depending on what the makeup is of the team.
If the team has a lot of subject matter experts on it, but not great product managers, that's where I think they need to hire in commensurate product managers who can learn about the business rapidly, like you talked about.
And consultants usually have to do that pretty quickly.
I know, as part of my job, I have to get up to speed on everything.
I've worked with insurance companies, banks, all these highly regulated things, healthcare, all of that, and if you can learn that and dive in and start to understand customer problems, that's a fantastic skill set.
So I would really suggest for you to highlight that in your resume as well, that you are good at getting up to speed on complex industries or the industries that you're actually trying to target.
This could also be a signal though that the company doesn't know what good product management is and thinks that subject matter expertise is the most critical thing that somebody could have. So that might just be a lack of understanding by the company or by recruiting.
In other cases though, you might have some fantastic product managers on the team who are not subject matter experts and this might be a struggle.
So in those cases, sometimes you would look for somebody who is a great product manager but still have subject matter expertise.
So it really depends on the organization, and that's the hard part about product management.
It's like what is the right mix to get somebody in here who can be effective within this team, not necessarily just the role as a standalone?
Now consulting on the other hand too might be holding you back in some ways.
Sometimes people think that you lack the full ownership of the product all the way through.
So what can you do to actually set yourself apart from other people?
how can you show that this is really valuable or that you've either owned it end to end or you're really good at starting new products for example or that you're really good at transforming businesses or working with complex stakeholders, what about you is special?
This is what you really need to highlight in your resume because when we do go out and start looking for product managers, we do look for certain things that will make them successful in that environment.
So this could be a great opportunity for you to highlight those parts.
So I would really look at what is my experience with consulting, what is my experience in other organizations and what might give me an edge over other product managers.
And I would rewrite your entire resume though, to focus on that because those keywords and those little parts might set you apart from the rest of the competition.
So I wish you luck in your journey and I hope that helps.
Again, if you have questions for me, go to dearmelissa .com and let me know what they are.
Now let's talk to Christina.
Hello, Christina, welcome back to the podcast. Thank you, hi Melissa.
it's great to have you here again.
And I'm excited because we're gonna dive into something that's not OKRS.
Last time we talked about OKRS and that's what you're really known for but you also teach product management and game design at Stanford. So I wanna talk a little bit about what is game design?
How do we think about it with product management and building better products?
And then also a little bit about how you see product management evolving in the world of AI and how we think about teaching it and what's on your mind there.
So can you tell us a little bit about your work your courses around those topics back at Stanford?
Sure. I know you invited me to talk about game design first, so we'll start there.
I have two classes, Serious Games and Design for Play, which is an introductory course to understand the core concepts in game design.
And I really love the Serious Games because it's about making games that do something.
And it's really interesting to deeply think about how do we persuade.
The first part is two weeks doing an then two weeks doing a create empathy project, and two weeks doing an explain complexity project.
And then the last two weeks are take one of your games and make it awesome.
And so the students really have to think through like, how am I persuasive?
How do I educate? And I think it's a really useful class for ordinary product designers as well because grappling with these ideas are very important and education is often gamified.
So I'll often have some students from the School of Education joining me as well.
So, the introduction to game design is a massive class I'm teaching right now.
There's a hundred students.
It's just madness. It's so much fun.
We play games. We make games.
We test games. The energy is terrific.
But at the same time, I'm teaching them really important core theories and ways to think about interaction.
I've joked it's My Chocolate Covered Broccoli class where I get them to deal with a really hard theory by making them really passionate about making awesome games.
I love that. When you were teaching about game design, like what are the core principles that are around it?
We always end up talking about what is fun.
The thing is a game should be fun, and what is fun?
And we all have different definitions of it.
But it does tend to come down to engagement, what's making people really emotionally into it.
Because there are games that really hit dark topics.
There are games about cancer, about starvation, and those aren't fun, but they're very moving, they're very meaningful.
And games have the power to move you in ways that an explanation never will because you have agency.
It's almost like you're experiencing the thing that you're learning about.
It's a very powerful tool.
I think that putting fun at the forefront really changes how you approach projects.
Again, engagement by putting that forward. For example, game studios are notorious for always shipping late, but if you think about it, you're not going to ship a game that isn't fun ever.
Not because the deadline's there.
You have to get to this emotional experience before you release it.
Am I often thinking about other companies that ship on time, but they're not really fulfilling the goal of the project?
Maybe they don't even know what the goal is.
I've come to introduce people back to OKRs I'm afraid.
I've come to talk to people who are about to do OKRs and say, as practice, take every project and make sure it has an OKR first because that teaches you to think about the goal.
But in game design, the goal is understood.
It's very clear and you know when something's good enough to ship.
I think that's a big idea.
Oh, that's really interesting.
So when you're talking about the goal is very clear, what does that mean around game?
Is the game fulfilling the emotional experience that the designers want to make?
So if you're making a game that is like dying in Darfur and you want to create empathy for starving people in Africa, then you can't do it until that emotional thing has been fulfilled.
But if you want to make something that's fun and escapist, like Animal Farm, then you're going to be testing to find out do people feel safe, do they feel comforted?
Do they feel like it's an escape from everyday world?
So you're always really thinking about that emotional resonance.
And I think we don't think about that enough with non -game products.
That's true. And I do see, I know the whole user experience community is probably yelling, yes, we do, we do over here.
But I don't think as a rule in product development, we spend enough time thinking about that.
When you think of like an example of a really well designed game, what's one of the ones that you use?
And it really depends.
There's lots of really well -designed games.
I'm in love with Stardew Valley, to be honest, because it is cozy, but it does a lot of wonderful things.
Excuse me. I have a cat that demands to be part of the podcast, I'm afraid.
We love that. Yes. Excellent.
That's the blessing.
Three on brand. We get pets.
And this one is always thinks when I'm talking to podcast, he's talking to me.
Stardew Valley is a weird one because it was built by one man and now he's one very rich man.
It was very popular it was during the quarantine during COVID.
Then it got popular because it gave people a place to go that was understandable.
I think that's one of the things I've seen even back when I worked at Zynga, that people go to games because they make sense.
There are rules. Unlike regular life where stuff happens, you're like, what the hell just happened?
And there's a certain comfort in knowing that if you play by the rules, you will get the results that you're expecting.
So with Stardew Valley, there's some farming sim, but there's also a dating sim, but there's also a dungeon crawl.
It has all these combinations of things and a fishing sim.
So when you're playing it, there's such a wide variety of interesting things to do.
They all make sense and they're all inter -twingled.
You can't make progress without hitting all of them.
And I think it's incredibly well -balanced.
It's incredibly interesting.
It does a great work of tutorials and getting you on board without over -explaining to you.
good help systems, varies from platform to platform.
Some platforms, it doesn't work as well.
I tried playing it on my PS4, and it was like, I'm going back to mobile where things make sense.
But it's a really a great game.
And I think that's another way that we could think about regular product design, is how is this supporting all the elements of my user's life that are connected to the promise that I'm giving them?
You don't want... some people want, but you don't want a product that's about one thing to suddenly try to be everything in somebody's life, But you can think about, while you're trying to reach that goal, how do I support it completely and well?
There's an interesting thread in there too when we're talking about goals.
I've worked with a couple of managers who came from game backgrounds, some of the big game studios.
And where I feel like they've always struggled or asked me questions is about the product metrics or the goals.
Right to hit. Because they're like, oh, we're not, we're more of like a B2C company.
Like they can choose whether to play our game or not.
It's a fun thing. It's a nice to have, it's not like a mandatory B2B stuff.
So we're different.
And I've always tried to explain that's fine, it just is different goals, right?
Like we're just going to measure different things.
When you think about the goal that we're trying to get to around crafting good games on that.
How do you balance that as well to be, let's say, productive and not just we're going to take everybody's attention away, because I think that's the part with games that people can go down a rabbit hole where you get so addicted, like you never leave. Yeah.
It does depend on what kind of games, if they came from like an EA traditional console games.
Those are made just for pure fun, and so they would be the people you're talking about, but if you talk to the mobile people, man, they got numbers.
They watch everything, everything that's instrumented.
Very hardcore data geeks.
But I know exactly what you mean about getting addicted, and I think that's the problem with the mobile games is that they are very much designed to get as much of your attention and as much of your money as it possibly can.
I'm really excited by Netflix getting into games, so it's part of a subscription because they They can make mobile games that are designed just for fun, just for pleasure, as opposed to these separate you from your money microtransaction ads, all that stuff, which is exhausting.
Addiction's a tricky one.
A game should be compelling, but when you talk about addiction, I always feel like you should be talking about things that are actually making a chemical change in the brain.
And if dopamine, a lot of the mobile games are designed to release dopamine.
But the problem is if you play too much, you're going to basically cold turkey, right?
You're going to give up the game completely.
I always thought it was very interesting when I read about Blizzard with World of Warcraft, people were spending every waking hour on World of Warcraft, so they actually started enforcing sleep just so people would get off game cause they were worried that people were going to have to cold turkey it and give up the game completely and that would be bad for the revenue.
So I think that we should be balancing being super engaging with lifetime experience.
I think that's one of my problems with some of the social media like Facebook, X, et cetera, is they're so designed for dopamine.
LinkedIn even now is designed for dopamine and the problem with that is that people will get off the platform completely because it's too much. It's too exhausting.
It's taking too much of their life.
And I think that's something for businesses to think about is where do I fit somebody's life and am I taking it over?
I always remember Reed Hastings saying, our number one competitor is sleep.
And I was like, that is not a good philosophy.
Yeah. It's definitely not great for your customer.
And I think there's like a lesson in there too, because I see it on our products too, right?
Balancing how do we hit our internal product metrics from a business perspective, but also deliver customer value.
And that's where I think you get those dark patterns, right?
Like you can't unsubscribe from something or you opt into something you didn't know about and all of a sudden get charged like crazy.
There's no way out of it.
And it sounds like that brings us parallel back to how do we do this ethically?
Oh, absolutely. Substack is terrible.
I've been trying to unsubscribe from paying for Lenny's newsletter for a couple weeks and I can't find it and it's just completely ridiculous, but just my personal whining there.
Yeah hopefully if he listens to this he could help you unsubscribe.
With this too though, I do see this trap in product management where if we go after these business goals at all costs right we forget about that user value.
what do you think game design does as well to make sure that you remember the user value?
Like how do you teach your people when they're designing it to understand their users better, empathize with them make sure there's really like a goal for them on that side?
One of the unique things with my class is we have play tests every single week, period.
And we just, I got that from Zenga where we would always have user research every single week.
I don't know if all game studios do it at that pace but that pace was mind blowing.
You just always had people coming in.
I know Teresa Torres talks a lot about that as well, about that just every week, somebody's scheduled, you're gonna work with them, period.
And so I build up the habit where I almost get them addicted to play testing because if you play test really early, and they're like always embarrassed, we got these crappy paper prototypes but I try to show them crappy paper prototypes to know what they should expect to be play testing.
And they play test with each other and then they debrief and talk about what worked, what didn't work, what else could they do.
And then it gets even more intense towards the end of the quarter when they're pay testing every single class, every single section, that rhythm it's really right if you remember right methodology, rapid iteration, testing and evaluation, something like that.
It's that idea that you test with three people maybe, make some changes, test with two or three more et cetera, et cetera.
But that really connects you to the customer.
It's really awful easy to drift off into the sort of auteur mindset where you're so busy making the thing perfect and you don't feel like it's ready to be shown to anybody, especially with games.
The thing about games is like music or movies, they are both the commercial product and art.
And so the students will get very emotionally attached to the thing that they're working on and you really have to push them to show that work to other people.
That's really cool.
And I get a lot of parallels and they're about rapid testing for products too.
And I see a lot of companies like disappear or not wanna show anybody what they're working on because they're afraid they can't make this splashy launch. And if we show it to people they're gonna expect it right away and all of that stuff.
And that's where they get stuck building so many things that really don't matter at the end of the day and end up in the build trap.
The projects I worked on when I was in industry and we do a tiny bit of need finding and then maybe a usability test at the end, I can never go back from this rhythm of testing.
Once you've experienced it and it's just so powerful and so useful you can't do anything else.
How do you set up the premise too with the testing?
cause obviously you said like it's paper prototype sometimes and those expectations.
How are you like explaining what to test for to your students?
You know, what information to take back, how to navigate it, if it's not like all the way done.
I do that throughout the quarter.
Like when they walk into the class for the very first day, all they see on the screen is instructions say, make Tic Tac Toe fun for Stanford students.
And they have a bunch of materials on the table.
And I'm like, okay, you got 10 minutes, make Tic Tac Toe fun, and they build all these really quick games, right?
And then they immediately have to play test it with somebody next to them.
And that gets them over the that moment where you're like, oh my God, am I gonna show something I work?
And then I say just simply, was that what you expected?
Just to teach them the difference between what you think is gonna happen and what's actually gonna happen.
And then later in the quarter I start teaching them to write scripts, set goals, how to evaluate more robustly.
And they also move away from testing just with each other to testing with outside people and their actual target audience.
So it's really about scaffolding.
I don't know if that applies very well to regular product management, but I think the important thing is to start realizing that you cannot predict how people are going to behave. That's why I try to open the class with that moment.
I think there's something there too, where for a lot of places, they're not even testing internally with people in their company that might not be working on anything until how they're building it.
That's an opportunity for usability testing or helping there.
Not that you should stop there.
But I see those like baby steps not even being taken sometimes and I also think we paint this vision of this rapid iteration, rapid testing that we expect everybody to get to at the end of the day.
And I like what you're introducing because it's not like you have to be there today, right?
It's like I introduce you to all that scaffolding before you actually get there and I think that can apply for teams that are getting used to getting feedback, showing things that are half -bake, like how do we show it internally Maybe, how do we show it to one customer or friendlies?
And then how do we take it somewhere else?
And how do we keep building on this practice?
And there's a lot of dog fooding.
You're constantly playing your own game.
The idea of doing kind of solo testing as a starting point.
Ask yourself, how does this feel?
Is this working? Does this match my vision?
But then immediately turning around and going to colleagues.
And we talk about the path, which is first you test with yourself, which means building something so you can actually evaluate it.
Then you test with other designers as a way of having someone who's very thoughtful and hopefully has some knowledge to give you advice.
And then you start moving out to friends and family, that could be admins in a company or other coworkers who work in something that's not in your area.
And then that's a little easier.
And then eventually you move to stranger testing where you're actually just giving them the game and letting them play by themselves without you there to tell any rules or anything.
And it's just a nice staggering up that gets you a really good final product.
Cause if you think about it that way you're not exposing strangers or play testers to a really shitty thing.
You start intimate, you start safe with people who understand that crappy is okay.
And then you move your way out.
That's cool. Yeah. I really liked that.
I like the way that you introduced that and build it up.
When we're testing on yourself in that moment as well how do you help your students also understand like their own biases and also to accept feedback?
because I also found teaching people who were building startups as well in university.
A lot of people, when they hear that feedback, they just want to dismiss it.
Or they're just like, oh, they're wrong or they're not listening.
They just don't get it.
How do you help instill a sense of openness to people who want to pursue this?
Yeah. It's funny because we don't run into that as much, I think.
And I think that is because we start testing so early.
This problem is the raw, like the beginning of an idea.
When they first come up with their concept, we even do concept testing.
We have them turn around and pitch it to each other to get them to start taking in feedback, and that regularness of taking in feedback keeps you from, again, holding the thing as precious.
This is famous in game design, is there's tons of people who will design something and show it at the end, and they won't listen to feedback at all because they've got so much of their own self invested in it, at that point.
But if you have that regular rhythm feedback, you tend to hold it back.
I've had students come up to me and say, wow, this is game -changing.
In the past, I was always so terrified of feedback, but I'm much more comfortable with it now.
So I think it's just a human thing.
I don't think it's game design versus business design, I think it's just how are you getting regular feedbacks that small enough and quick enough that you can make changes and grow as opposed to having your baby, my baby.
it's not so much invested in it.
When you look at the...
the world of product management, game design...
obviously, a lot of it is also being influenced by AI these days.
How have you started incorporating that into your curriculum or talking to your either designers about it or product managers?
Where do you see that fit in?
Traditionally with new technologies, I wait to see if it's actually going to arrive.
So I've been working at Stanford, I've been seeing that IAA has been coming for a very long time, but I hung back until it was hitting the mainstream, and it's definitely happening now.
I'd been through the web revolution, but then crypto was going to be blockchain.
But AI is definitely coming, there's no question about it.
And one of the biggest things that I think I'm going to change my product management class...
Actually, I've been using AI in my product management class for a while because I have them work with artificial companies and it's been very easy to generate a lot of data around each artificial company.
I can make financials, I can make fake user research so that when they start in the company...
Okay. So one of the problems with a lot of classes is they're all the same.
You come in, you come up with an idea, you test the idea.
And I wanted them to come in and have to deal with the fact they're working at a shoe company.
I wanted them to have that feeling of you don't get to do whatever you want, because that's what products management's all about.
Right? So I was using AI to generate that.
Cause it's just possibly large.
Otherwise I usually have it based on a real company so that the data would be pretty accurate.
What I see now is honestly the rise of vibe coding.
it's a stupid name and a lot of people are not understanding it, but if you think about it as a prototyping tool, it is actually game changing because now you can make something that's fully clickable.
In the past, with Sigma, it was just such a pain in the butt to hook it all together and click the little hotspots and everything.
So, if you can manage to learn how to do vibe coning, you could actually make something in which all the clicks and links work.
And that then allows you to fully usability test it and show something that's real enough that can evaluate it and that's very exciting to me and there's so much potential right now with because they're moving more and more to no coding platforms and some of the product managers I know are doing just that.
They're making quick prototypes.
They're going out and they're testing it.
They're bringing that information back and then eventually they can give something to the engineers that is actually easier to understand than a documentation because now we have a prototype that's clickable and they can see okay what happens when this happens and sometimes something's been missed, but I would not recommend using those prototypes for production code because no, just no. Think about it as a prototyping tool.
Yeah. I think that's really important.
I know all the developers listening to that will probably be very happy someone said it but it writes like way too much code and not great ways.
It's not good code, and to build real things is oh God, it's regulations and code combines and bottom there.
Just think of it as a prototyping tool.
Which I think is fantastic.
And I'm excited that we can do that.
I know when I was teaching at Harvard or 102 class they used to get a small budget to hire engineers to actually build their prototypes.
They can go do it themselves now, which is pretty cool.
And I always thought that was such a hard part about teaching product management.
Two things that were talking about.
One, if you can't work with a company how do you simulate all the stuff around it?
And I've been doing the same thing with creating like fictitious companies and stuff and giving it as examples.
And then two, how do you do it alone as a product manager to get the experience of what it's like to interact with code or understand how things get developed and what that all comes back to?
You worry about the whole, like, how do you bridge that gap of how they work with engineers at the end of the day?
Right, cause building it for real is gonna be and then just like building it yourself but I like that it actually introduces you to what's needed to code.
And if you look at lovable and stuff, it processes because it walks you through its process without setting it up.
So now you're starting to understand how something is built or how an app is built too.
Yeah, I hopefully that'll help them understand engineers better.
I think there's gonna be a very real tension between product management and design, which always has been underway because now the product manager maybe feels they don't need design and the designers now go, why do I need product management?
Because more and more designers are learning to five code as well and they can quickly put together something.
But that means we have to really think about what value is the product manager really bringing.
And I think we need more emphasis on the business piece.
People forget that the third leg of product management is really of good products as business.
And the product manager has to represent the business values.
Today, Marty Kagan was, put a post on LinkedIn, and I was like, yes, product manager's in charge of the value and viability.
Will it make enough money for it to actually work?
And then the designers, they have the time to go really deep and understand what a great experience is.
What should happen when you click?
How does the screen move around?
And not just is it pretty, but is this gonna be a sensible flow?
I think there's gonna be a tension because now everybody's vibe coding different things that a designer's vibe coding to try to figure out how does this product work?
The product manager's vibe coding prototypes to probably test with people.
And there's gonna have to be a newf.
And then the engineers, I don't want your fucking prototypes.
I'm gonna code it from scratch, give me something I could work with.
I think it's going to be really interesting to see how people navigate that tension.
Yeah. I'm also interested in it too.
So like when I started out, I was a product designer, I guess we would call it, like a hybrid product manager and UX designer.
And I didn't really learn that there were two different roles until my third or fourth job, and then they went, oh, like we're going to hire a UX designer to do that part, Melissa because like I wasn't particularly super great at it, I was good enough, but like I didn't have the visual design experience make things beautiful.
I did the UX pieces very well.
And then I got really interested in the visual design part, because I was like, okay, how do I actually make this interactive and beautiful?
And what are the ways that we do this?
And I could learn that craft. So I flipped to just being a UX designer and they cut me out of all the product at my next company.
And then they would let me, they were building a bunch of stuff that had no backing on why we should be building it.
So it kept weaseling my way back into product and being like, hey, but like, why would we do that as a company?
I don't see as many of those hybrid roles anymore.
But I feel in the early like late 2000s, early 2010s, I met a bunch of people who were like hybrid product managers and designers.
And I don't think everybody cut out to do that.
And I also think it works for a certain scope of products.
Like I don't think you could do that.
And depending on how big it is - It's mostly a startup, it's at tidy companies.
It's a startup, yeah.
And I worked for smaller companies at this time.
And so like that part is really interesting but I think that mentality of like, how do you bring it back together?
Or how do you make sure that we're in luck there has always been important.
And I think I'm gonna be interested to see how these types of tools like Lovable and stuff maybe re -emerge a product designer role a little bit more or not?
One of the things that's really different about my product management class is that I set aside time to do interpersonal dynamics and really teach people how to give effective feedback, how to navigate conflict, how to negotiate and very few classes unless you're in the business school will give you those skills but the skills that let you as a product manager get things done.
I think it's the second, maybe the first most important thing to learn as a product manager, as well as understanding how businesses work.
And again, you have to think about how do we make sure that the product manager's really going to bring unique value and be able to get stuff done with the team?
Yeah. And I think that's one of the things that are emerging as I talk to more people about how is AI going to change product management?
It's like we're going to focus more on the human skills.
Right? That becomes more important than ever.
Like whether it's understanding your customers and their behavior, whether it's negotiating and understanding things that way.
Like, I think a lot of that is going to be front and center.
And if you don't have those, that's going to make it just, it's going to be harder to get what you need to do done when the rest of it can be automated.
How do you actually usher something through?
And I also think it's one of the most important things about being a product management today is just that sometimes we can hide behind all the other project management type stuff, task -oriented things, and we're not focusing so much on that user interpersonal dynamic, because we're like, oh, we're so busy with all that.
Yeah, and that's not how you get things done.
And that's not how you succeed in the company.
And that's one of the reasons I came to Stanford was I thought I get to educate the future VPs and founders and all those people and make them understand there's a human being at the other end of the technology.
And that's been one of the missions for me.
And so a lot of my classes are about seeing that human being.
I think it's so important.
One thing you mentioned was talking to users, which I think is incredibly valuable.
And I'm a little worried that people are just outsourcing all their analysis.
There just came a really good study.
I'd heard this from a bunch of user researchers, that using AI would not give them as many insights and some of the insights would be wrong.
One of the biggest dangers of AI is that it makes shit up, but it makes shit up so well that you can't tell it's making shit up.
It's really good at it.
And actually just this morning I'm writing a novel for fun and I uploaded the novel.
I said, okay, give me feedback about these things.
And I kept clicking through.
This was chat GDP and it had made up the problem.
So you have to change this moment between James and Love Day and chapter four, there's an overworked used word that's used three times in chapter 14.
I'd go there and do a search and if they weren't there.
And so if you think about it, is your tool trustworthy?
Cause it looked, looked right.
It looked perfect. it's like they're using the names of my characters, overused phrase is an overused phrase, but it just wasn't accurate.
And there's a wonderful study that came out on LinkedIn today that suggested the best use of AI was to have it do research, have you do research so you know the data really well, and then see if there are new insights from the AI.
So you use it as a coworker, but it's a coworker whose work you always have to be checking and I think that's gonna be true for awhile because I was using O3, which is basically what deep research is.
It's the best model that they have. I found Claude's actually a lot better at it, doing editing as well as writing because everything Claude told me about was actually accurate.
And I think unfortunately we're gonna have to keep using multiple models for a while.
It's really clear that some are better at different tasks and by multiple models, even within OpenAI, of course, 4 .0 is not the same as 0 .3.
It's not the ones that are better or worse or just have different tasks and getting your head around that is hard and the only way to do it is to use it.
Like I'm telling everybody, you've gotta be using AI for at least an hour a day just to get your head around it.
One of the most successful things I've seen is people who do a project, whether it be build a flight simulator or in my case, use it for editing a novel.
If you're using it all the time, that's where you start to learn what it can and can't do and how it works.
When you're thinking about updating your product management class, like to incorporate AI, what types of things are you planning to change or restructure?
At the end of the quarter, I want to see working prototypes.
And in the past, it's been hooking Figma together, and then they test it, but they can't test all the flows, and it's very exciting to see doing that.
I'm going to have them do research and do that exact exercise where they do the synthesis themselves, and then they have the AI do the synthesis and actually for themselves compare the two because I think you don't believe things unless you experience them.
And a lot of my design of my classes is designing for experiences, not lecturing at them with information.
And that's going to be important.
I think AI can be really good at market research. I think it's great for brainstorming.
There's nothing better than saying, give me 20 ideas about this, and it will come up with a ton of them.
And then you can look at them and say this, or maybe that.
So hopefully that instead of saying, don't use AI, but instead saying, here's how you use AI, I'm hoping to really prepare them for the work they're going to get into.
Because they're going to use AI at work.
And with product management, I've always tried to be hyper pragmatic with my teaching and make sure they really understand the things they're gonna need.
Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense.
The market research aspect of it too, I really like with AI, I've had a lot of people teaching more product strategy stuff and I'm talking about the market research and I've run into a lot of people at companies saying, well I don't have any access to any tools to do market research. And I was like, cloud and chat GPT and Perplexed will let you at least start there and get more than nothing.
And I don't think people are leveraging those types of things as much. And instead we're just trapped sometimes corporations in our ways of, I don't have access to that or I can't use this or I can't do that and so powerful to actually be have something that can go out there and at least giving you like a starting point is better than nothing.
A lot of learned helplessness in companies because companies have been keeping people from acting for so long.
I don't know if you follow Ethan Mollick but he wrote something really wonderful recently he was talking about the problem of shadow use of AI.
A lot of people are using AI at work but not admitting it they're using it because they're they're afraid the company is going to be mad.
They're going to think the work is inauthentic.
So all they're doing is using it and then making sure it's good, which is the best way to use AI.
And they say that companies leadership have to really, he says it has to change.
We have to get these people out from behind the shadows because those are the people that can learn from.
And that's such a difference, I think, between what I'm hearing with like scale -up companies.
And like, I work with a lot of PE backed and VC backed companies.
And then I work with a lot of really large corporations And the large corporations are talking about AI and the capacity to move fast and incorporate it.
But then they block all the AI that you could possibly use.
Right? They don't let you use it internally.
And we incorporated some of the activities and stuff into Product Institute and our product strategy course and we have to go through so many hoops to do it even though we don't ask for any proprietary data or anything like that, just to get it approved.
Some companies are easier than others.
But when I work with the PE firms or the VCs, the boards there are like, is everybody in company like at least trying AI?
If not, you need them to just go play with it.
Give them time, they're just telling the CEOs, they're telling the heads of product, technology, they're like, give people space to go play with this because it's going to make you go so much faster.
I think that's probably the resource thing.
Large corporations have so much money, they can stand to burn it for a while and smaller companies don't.
But it's that mentality I almost feel like I was talking about back in 2010, in lean startup era where corporations were like, do we think like startups?" And I'm like, you've got to measure success based on success and not just based on getting checking the box and having things done.
You don't have the urgency that smaller companies have to actually deliver on value because they'll run out of money.
So. how do you create, not necessarily a fake urgency, but how do you create a value system that is based on real value and not just on shadow work or checking the box?
Absolutely. I think it's going to be a huge challenge going forward. I'm worried about people are like, we're going to be AI first, intimate AI right away.
Because in my experience, it takes a remarkably long time to understand how to use AI, and to use it effectively.
I started using it hardcore only like in December.
And my first experience was this is crap.
And then it was like, oh, this is really good.
Oh no, it's actually not very good.
And then just working through how do I get the results I want?
Which models are going to do it?
How do I write a good prompt?
How do I have the conversations?
And I'm still finding all these new ways to use it, which is fabulous.
Just recently, I started using it to write my prompts for me, which is really effective.
I think that people have to start playing now because it's going to be quite a while before they know how to use it effectively.
I agreed with you on the, we really need to learn how to use AI before we could just say, AI is going to replace all of this stuff.
And I haven't been wildly impressed with a ton of it.
Like I found it way harder to learn certain you're like this is mind blowing, but then you try it.
It's this experience where you're like, that's really cool that it can do this.
Okay, I wanna do this and just can't make the leap yet.
Like it's not gonna cut out all 10 of your steps, right?
But it'll cut out like two and then you have to figure out like what are those two steps that I should be using it for versus not how do I play with this and how do I not just give up?
And that seems to be one of the things I see where a lot of it is like, we're evaluating AI based off its potential today, but not it's reality.
Yeah, it's also really interesting that's reinforcing the importance of taste and experience and expertise because otherwise you can't tell that things are crappy and you see this amazing video made by an actual filmmaker made on video and you're like, wow, we can do all these things.
And then you go on and you can't make crap because you just don't understand.
You don't think that way.
It's just, it really matters.
And I find that for me because I've been a writer for so long, I can work with it.
but I can't, I went to try to vibe code something and I was like ah, so it's gonna take me a while to work through it.
That's the other thing is you have to commit to the effort if you want the result.
You can't magically expect it to be perfect.
Exactly, your expertise thing is making me think of a conversation we were having last week about new product managers or getting into product management, because with AI, there's all this talk about it can do PRDs for you.
It can write stories.
It can do all that stuff, which I always thought was great because that's just some of it's busy work, right?
but how then a lot of companies treat, I don't necessarily agree with this, but entry -level product management is doing some of that work.
So now people are asking, like, what kind of paths do we make and how do we ensure that there's still a way to get into product management that you can actually still develop that expertise?
Have you seen any shifts there?
It's amazing how many people want to be product managers, yet.
For a long time, it was a weird role that you grew into.
And then all of a sudden it got sexy and hot and there were conferences and everything.
And now I have this huge class of people wanting to be product managers and I have to explain to them that there's a ratio, there's one product manager for let's say eight engineers and four UXers, which means there's a lot more jobs for those, and I think that it's going to be really smart to go ahead and be a UX designer or be a software engineer, really get to understand the product and how it works.
And then move into it.
From the engineer side, you can be a technical product manager, from the UX side, and you can do a consumer product manager.
But it's really important to learn those fundamentals out in the world, and I think stepping directly into product management, very few people are gonna be able to do that.
I think it's gonna be very hard. So I think you have to get your experience somewhere else.
But the thing people don't know is, once you're inside a company, it becomes much easier to switch jobs.
So if you've been really an amazing UX designer for a year or two years, and you're trustworthy, and you're smart, and you say good things, and you say, I wanna move into product, people will be like, okay, let's help you find a place because we wanna keep you.
Or in my case, every six months when I was during the web.
That's the thing is when we're in times of extreme technological change, you can get promoted remarkably quickly.
It's my experience from the web.
So I think that going into a cutting -edge startup and being just helpful lets you move into product pretty well.
That's what you did, isn't it?
Yeah. I had a really random path.
I ended up in product as an intern at first, but then nobody knew what product management was.
There was like no jobs open for it.
And my roommate was a developer and I had taken, I was like a software engineering school.
So I was able to get a job as a developer cause it was making like way more money than product.
And then I hated it.
It's like this is not what I like doing.
And I was not very good as a software engineer.
It was just good enough to get that entry -level job, but I always thought it was nice because like I said, I got hired as like a hybrid product designer or product manager.
So I had both sides of that and then I did the engineering.
And then when I went back into product management at my next job, which was the people from the internship left went to a startup and he hired me in there.
I was able to pull it all together, which I thought was really good.
Like I had the experience of playing each of the roles and I understood the engineering side really well that not really well, but enough to talk to the developers and understand where it was going.
I was just a really shitty developer.
So my developers at the time, I kept designing stuff so that I could build it.
And they were like, stop doing that.
We know how to build anything.
Like you just don't.
So design it the way you want it to be built and we'll tell you what's possible and what's not.
And then I had to get over that hurdle which I thought was really interesting.
I love the prototyping tools cause now you can like actually play with it and see, Hey I want it to be this way.
Let's design for the best user experience and then work our way backwards into how do we actually think about architecting that?
Which I think is really neat, but I'd say like I know the job market's super tough for entry -level PMs these days.
And I think it always has been.
I think that's the biggest question I probably get.
So I'm worried about that just being harder and harder.
But I think that's really good advice to look at adjacent roles.
I advise people to do that too.
Have a plan B, always have a plan - Christina, it's been so good talking to you on the podcast today.
If you wanna learn more about you and your work, where can they go?
I've had this blog called Elegant Hack since 2000.
So that's usually a great place or cwoodkey .me.
I'm cwoodkey everywhere as well on all the socials.
So those are all places to find me.
Great. And I will put all those links on our show notes at the productthinkingpodcast .com.
Thank you so much for listening to our podcast. We'll be back next Wednesday with another amazing guest. In the meantime, go to DearMelissa .com and let me know all of your burning questions about product management.
I answer them every single episode.
We'll see you next time.
