Trisha Price: [00:00:00] Hi everyone. I have an exclusive discount for hard calls listeners to Pendomonium Pendo’s Product Festival. I would like to invite you to join me in Raleigh, North Carolina from March 24th to 26th with an exclusive 30% discount. When you use the code hardcalls30, that's hardcalls all lowercase, and the numbers three zero.

Trisha Price: Get your discounted ticket at pendo.io/Pendomoni See you there. 

Jeff Lash: I look at AI as another tool, another arrow in our quiver. I like to say that no one wants your product. They want some sort of outcome and your product helps them achieve that outcome. I would say the same thing for most of AI, right?

Jeff Lash: No one wants AI. They want something that AI can maybe help them achieve that thing, that outcome, quicker, faster, easier than before. 

Trisha Price: Hi everyone, and welcome back to Hard Calls, the podcast where we [00:01:00] highlight the best product leaders from across the globe. If you're new to the show, I'd like to invite you to hit follow or subscribe.

Trisha Price: We wanna make sure you stay up to date with all the latest episodes. Today I'm joined by Jeff Lash, who is currently VP of Product Management at Insperity, where he is helping shape product strategy that delivers HR services to small and medium sized businesses. Jeff has been in product for over 20 years, including advising product leaders at Forrester and Serious Decisions.

Trisha Price: Jeff has spent a lot of his career building great product teams where product didn't really exist yet, which makes him a great guest to chat today. Welcome to the show, Jeff. 

Jeff Lash: Thank you for having me. It's great to be here. 

Trisha Price: Yeah, it's gonna be a great discussion today. As you know, the name of the show is Hard Calls, and it's called Hard Calls because I mean, that really is what our job's about every day.

Trisha Price: And so before we jump into all, all things product, I'd love for you to share with us today, what's one of the hardest calls [00:02:00] you've had to make? 

Jeff Lash: So I was thinking back the first product management job I had was, managing a product that was built for physicians. So I worked for a medical publishing company, so a company that provides medical books, journals, physician information.

Jeff Lash: So if you go to the doctor and the doctor's looking up a drug interaction or a treatment option on the computer, it might be a product like that. This was years ago, I managed a small team and the product we had was for physicians. There was a. Sister product we had that was made for nurses and they were built on the same technology platform.

Jeff Lash: So there were some features we were designing specifically for one audience or another. and there was another product team that handled the nursing product. But there were some features that were shared. And so I took over the product. I took over the team, and then a probably couple months into the role.

Jeff Lash: Learned about a new feature that was being developed for nurses, which was basically a dictionary feature. So nurses are reading something, they see a big medical award, they don't understand, they can look it [00:03:00] up. That was something that, that was highly requested among the nursing audience. The product manager of my team was planning on rolling that out to our physician audience.

Jeff Lash: That wasn't something I had really heard about. We had done some customer research. We had a whole list of. Features that had been requested as, as most product managers do. And that wasn't really something high up on list. And so I remember asking around and asking the product manager and saying, why are we launching this?

Jeff Lash: And the answer is, well, you know, they're, they're building it for the nursing product so we can get it kind of for free. I said, yeah, but are people gonna use it? Well, maybe some medical students might use it or, or maybe this. And, and I, as I dug into it, it was like, this was not something we were launching because people really were asking for it.

Jeff Lash: It was like, oh, well, what's the harm? And my answer was, well, there is some harm. It's one extra thing that takes up the interface. There is some development time, there's QA time, there's code complexity. Some people might say, why are you launching this dictionary feature when you're not launching these other features that we've been asking for?

Jeff Lash: So I made the hard call to say, no, we're actually not gonna [00:04:00] launch it. Product manager was a bit surprised and a bunch of the other people were a bit surprised. My boss at the time actually was completely supportive and backed me up and I, I think it very much set the tone for how I wanted to manage the product going forward differently than it had really not been managed in the past.

Jeff Lash: And so I think that to me was at the time, a very difficult call. Looking back, I'm like, oh, that was really easy. But it was, you know, I was new to the role, I was new to the product. I'd inherited a team, and so. I'm looking back. I'm really glad and proud I made the decision, but, you know, certainly at the time there was a little anxiety in terms of, you know, how are people going to take this internally and, and how will they feel about it, especially if a, if a bunch of work has already been put into doing it.

Trisha Price: Yeah. I, I love that hard call. I think it's a really good one because. You know, the best product managers and product leaders, as you know, they drive outcomes and they drive value to our users and [00:05:00] value to the companies we work for. And there's still a cohort of product managers and product leaders that celebrate because they put something on a roadmap and they shipped it.

Trisha Price: And this is like a perfect example of like, I did it, I shipped it, I did it. There's something else coming out like, but if it isn't useful, it's just clutter and it's just frustrating to the end user. and so less is more. Sometimes it's delivering the right features, you know, designed in the right way, not just delivering more.

Trisha Price: So that's a, that's a great example. 

Jeff Lash: Yeah. I actually, it's funny you mentioned that. I've been in situations where ne never a team that I manage, but either when I was doing more like consulting advising or other teams in other parts of companies I worked in actually had annual objectives for number of features launched, not value, added, not impact on retention or new sales or things like that.

Jeff Lash: Literally it was, you know, I have to launch [00:06:00] four new features this year. And so I, I joke sometimes it's the. The, you know, oh, we, we check the box, we wipe our hands, we have the pizza party, and then we move on to the next thing, which is, yeah. Luckily, I, I've, I've very much seen a shift in my, you know, 20 years of product management away from that.

Jeff Lash: But it still does come up and it 

Trisha Price: Still does. 

Jeff Lash: You know, I think it's something a lot of product folks struggle with to this day. 

Trisha Price: Yeah. Well, I know one thing that you and I have talked about before and I think is super interesting, I think our listeners will enjoy, is, you know, when we're making these hard calls, the concept of like a reversible decision versus an irreversible decision, and just sort of impact of those and how you think about building software in sort of these two buckets.

Trisha Price: Tell us a little bit about that, Jeff. 

Jeff Lash: Yeah, I mean, I you know, product folks, product managers are making decisions every day. some of those decisions have ninja major implications. Some of them are minor implications. Some of those decisions are easy to reverse and some are not. [00:07:00] you, you actually, I think the phrase you used is one way doors versus two-way doors, which I've never heard before, but I really liked that.

Jeff Lash: So, you know, I worked in a lot of companies that were a lot of products that were information services companies where there's IP that we are providing to clients to a platform. Once you decide to give clients access to a certain corpus of content, a certain type of content, if you decide you don't want to give that to them in the future.

Jeff Lash: Undoing that is very difficult. It can be done, I've done it. But you know, you say, oh, you get access to, in the case of that publishing company, all of our books and all of our journals, including these special ones, and then we decide, oh, these special ones, we don't, we actually wanna charge extra for. Undoing That decision is very difficult.

Jeff Lash: So this idea of thinking, well, before I make a decision, I think about how hard would it be to undo this, either if I got the decision wrong or our strategy changes in the future. Generally as a general rule, it's much easier to give people [00:08:00] something later than it is to try to take something back. So that dictionary example, if we had decided, oh, the dictionary isn't a good feature, yeah, we could've removed it.

Jeff Lash: And you know, honestly in that case, not many people would've complained. 'cause I don't think the doctors would've used it a whole lot, but some people would've. They would've gotten used to it and it probably would've snowballed and escalated other things. So I like to think about, you know, how hard is this decision to undo?

Jeff Lash: if we decide that we don't wanna do it later, we wanna change it. And, and also, what are the other options? You know, I think one of the biggest changes in product over the past decade or so is, is experimentation, right? I think people always wanted to experiment, but we never really thought about it as much because technically it was just so difficult.

Jeff Lash: So now if I say, Hey, I might want to. Create, you know, allow people to access this content they didn't have access to before. I can do it in a very controlled way. I can do it to a small audience. I can, you know, have them opt in. I can, you know, give warnings and things like that. There's all these sort of tools and technologies obviously, as you know, that make this possible.

Jeff Lash: [00:09:00] So I think that gives us more flexible. So it's not a, you know. Stay up all night fretting over your decision. It's all right. Let's maybe run some experiments or tests to give us some more data and confidence before we make a decision. 

Trisha Price: Yeah, I love that. I think, you know, experimentation in this one-way, two-way door concept or reversible, irreversible decisions is such interesting thing because one to your point, if you know something is a very difficult, maybe it's not completely one way door, but it's really hard and painful to your point, to pull back.

Trisha Price: Then you can do even more experimentation, right? To be more confident in your decision before you go with it. But on the other hand, sometimes it's a scarier place to do experimentation because even if you've only introduced it in a small group, you've introduced it, right? And so it's just, it's just a fun and interesting sort of debate to have with your team and yourself when you're approaching these [00:10:00] more difficult, irreversible decisions.

Jeff Lash: Yeah, and I'll just add onto that. I think, you know, obviously there's a lot of product folks that are doing a lot of experimentation. One thing that I don't hear discussed as much in those scenarios is the other stakeholder and audience implications. So a lot of it is, oh, you know, can development add that switch?

Jeff Lash: Can we add that light switch to turn it on or off? and how quickly can we get that development done? But I've worked pretty much exclusively in B2B enterprise sales type environments. Usually with a direct sales team. So when we decide to run an experiment, it's not just me and the development team and the designer deciding we're gonna run experiments.

Jeff Lash: It's alright, I need to figure out which clients are going to see this and I need to talk the to the account teams that are at those clients. I need to understand what the situation is that those clients and is there something that, is there a big renewal coming up that this might positively or negatively influence?

Jeff Lash: I need to talk to our marketing team. 'cause if they're marketing and saying. You know, X, Y, Z is not included and now [00:11:00] we're temporarily making X, Y, Z included. That impacts our marketing. So this is really where,

Trisha Price: And support, right? 

Jeff Lash: Exactly. 

Trisha Price: How confusing. How confusing for your support team when they get a support ticket.

Trisha Price: And they didn't even know that these people have a different experience than everyone else. 

Jeff Lash: Support legal, finance. I mean, I've been in situations where especially like with, with on more of the information services side, when you decide to make information available, that changes like your financial accounting in some cases of how we look at usage and if there are royalties we need to pay.

Jeff Lash: So there's all these sort of implications. So it's not just. Yes, there is definitely the technical, how do we make it happen and from an experiment standpoint, how do we structure it? But it's all those other stakeholders. So I think that that sometimes people get frustrated and it's like, oh, that means I need to slow down.

Jeff Lash: To me, it's just, we need to be more careful. It doesn't mean you can't do it, it doesn't mean there's, I'm gonna generalize and say there's probably a lot more steps you have to go through in B2B than B2C where you can just like try out a new feature today and turn it off tomorrow. But [00:12:00] I think it also is a lot more powerful if you can get it right and you can get sales on board, support on board, et cetera.

Jeff Lash: you can get their buyin and hopefully some help. And I've done some things like that where we did some experiments that in, that gave us a lot of data and a lot of confidence, both with what we saw our users doing, but also with the other internal audiences, our internal ecosystem that we were partnering with, that gave them an understanding of how we were approaching something.

Jeff Lash: So when they say, Hey, why don't you just do X, Y, and Z? We can say, well, we're trying it this way and we're trying to get this data and here's how we need your help. And that way when we did make some decisions, they were on board with it as well, and they, they knew something was coming. 

Trisha Price: I love that. So in this era of AI driven development and all the tools that are coming and.

Trisha Price: We're using. It's, I mean, it's wild. It's such a wild and fun time in product and it's just changing the game. How have you seen that influence how you think about experimentation? [00:13:00] 

Jeff Lash: I like to describe this era of AI as kind of like the web in the late nineties. If, if anyone remembers or was alive or, or was involved then like, you know, in 96, 97, 98, like the web was, you know, burgeoning. Like certainly it was being used, but I don't, we had, we had no idea of the full potential and the opportunity, and I feel like that's kind of where we are with ai. Like certainly it has been around for a while. It didn't just pop up a couple years ago when with Open AI, but I think we can't even, I can, I can't, I'm not supposed be, I cannot personally fathom all the opportunities and all the things that will change.

Jeff Lash: So I look at AI as, as another tool, another arrow in our quiver. I like to say that no one wants your product. They're, they want some sort of outcome and your product helps them achieve that outcome. I would say the same thing for most of AI, right? No one wants AI. They want [00:14:00] something that AI can and, and AI can maybe help them achieve that thing, that outcome.

Jeff Lash: Quicker, faster, easier than before. I'll use an example. One of my favorite AI tools I use, I'm a big pickleball player and coach 

Trisha Price: Me too. Well, I'm not a coach, but I just love it. I'm not a coach, but I love it.

Jeff Lash: But there's a great app that I use that you can record your matches and upload it and it uses AI and it basically tells you, you know, it gives you a lot of guidance, whatever.

Jeff Lash: So to me, AI is not the exciting part of it. The exciting part of it is. One of the things it does is it cuts out the dead time between points. If you've ever played pickleball or watch pickleball, like you play a point and then the the point is over and then it's like 10 or 15 seconds before the next point.

Jeff Lash: So if I need to watch a match, it might be 14 minutes end to end, but this tool automatically cuts out that dead spot. So. I can watch a match one of my matches in seven minutes or eight minutes instead. So to me, the value is not the AI, the value is it takes me less time to watch one of my matches, or [00:15:00] I want to just see all the shots that I missed.

Jeff Lash: It can show me that. So AI is just a tool that helps BH, G, that outcome. So I think right now there seems to be a lot of excitement about AI for AI's sake or, you know, the, the differences in the cool things, how, how AI works. But to me it's really more about the outcome. I want to create a better presentation.

Jeff Lash: I want to write a more coherent email. I want to, you know, save me lots of time doing research. I want to, you know have my code refactored much cheaper than it would cost me to hire a human to do it a much quicker, you know, things like that. So I think the more we can think about outcomes, you know, the more we can figure out how AI helps. 

Jeff Lash: I've seen also situations where people are using AI and it's like, you don't need to, or it's actually not the most efficient way of doing things. So I think there's lots of opportunities, lots of possibilities. We haven't begin to even explore all of them. But that's how I look at it, is like at the end of the day, I'm trying to achieve something.

Jeff Lash: My clients, my customers are trying to achieve something. And [00:16:00] are there ways that AI can. Help, just like there are other ways that other things can help as well. 

Trisha Price: Yeah, I, I mean, it's, it's really fascinating. You know, I've been seeing really cool things with AI lately, to your point where, you know, you've got product managers or designers able to generate code and we're able in a matter of minutes.

Trisha Price: Hours to create new experiences and have them testable and usable for customers. So when you talk about this experimentation concept that you're talking about and getting more confidence for these irreversible or complex hard calls, like the fact that we can now have an idea, use AI, have 2, 3, 4, 10 different experiences ready in a 10th of the time, it would've taken us to do just one and now be able to your point, to put that behind a feature flag and pick a segment of [00:17:00] our customer base and try it out to have a level of confidence to make the hard call is just, it's just fascinating. It's fascinating to watch what's happening out there.

Trisha Price: Product managers using, you know, tools like granola or just the transcripts from their calls and having agents searching for things like bugs or enhancement ideas, and automatically taking that bug and fixing the bug and having code fixes in production before you're off the call. And it is just wild what's happening to our lifecycle and our ability to go fast.

Trisha Price: But to your point. You can go really fast and just create really bad stuff. So if you don't know the job to be done and you don't really understand the customer value and the problem you're trying to solve, who cares that you went fast with ai? You know? 

Jeff Lash: Well, and I think there's absolutely, and the other thing I think is there's also plays where, places where AI can get you [00:18:00] certainly efficiency gains, but there's also places where like that's not the bottleneck.

Jeff Lash: So as you, I think another example I thought of. Yes. Like in the, in the old days and probably many people still, like if I want to test a concept with customers, yeah, I might need to mock up a wire frame or create a prototype. And in the old days, like I remember coding prototypes by hand at HTML or doing 'em in PowerPoint 'cause there wasn't any other tool.

Jeff Lash: Yeah. So now I can go to an AI tool, I can type a couple sentences or upload a, upload a transcript of a meeting and it'll create a prototype. Awesome. In the areas I've worked in, B2B. The biggest, bottleneck. The thing that takes the most amount of time in the prototyping and testing process is recruiting users.

Jeff Lash: So yes, I can create a prototype in one hour rather than three days, but if it still takes me a week to recruit people and a week to conduct the interviews, that's. That's saved a little bit of time, but it hasn't really nailed the biggest problem. So I think if you look at a lot of, and, [00:19:00] and, and honestly, like maybe there's a tool out there that helps with that.

Jeff Lash: I don't know, I haven't looked at it yet, but I think, you know, yeah, we can apply AI in places that like save us some time, but is that really where we can best use it? And, and it's, and look, and the answer might be, Hey, it's still an hour rather than three days. And that's good. Yeah. But I think it's also, you know, there's a, there's a saying, I'm not sure who to attribute this to.

Jeff Lash: 'cause I've heard it from multiple people. I'm not sure what the original author is. You know, when, when Agile was all the rage, it was, you know, agile can help make bad, help you develop bad products quicker. Right. And I feel like with AI now, yeah, anyone, anyone in their brother, anyone in their brother and sister can create a thing with, with a vibe coding tool.

Jeff Lash: Doesn't mean that it's actually what people want, doesn't mean it's actually designed the way people want. It has the right features. Right. Not to mention even all the technical safe security stuff backend. So yes, I mean, there's a lot of talk about, you know, how is product management gonna change in the era of AI?

Jeff Lash: And, and it certainly will, but at the end of the day, someone still needs to be responsible and [00:20:00] accountable for. What are our client's needs? You know, what is, what is the customer problems we're trying to solve? What is the market opportunity and what is the best way or a, a good way to solve it? Yeah.

Jeff Lash: 'cause I can create a product very quickly, but it might not. Address needs. It might not be a pervasive problem, might not be a problem that people will pay to have it solved and they're, it might not be the best way to solve the problem. So, yeah, I can create something quick, but maybe if I spent more time actually answering those questions, I mean, I I think you're right.

Jeff Lash: Feed that into the AI tool. 

Trisha Price: I actually think AI really magnifies the need for great product sense and product taste. Yeah. And the role of product managers. And I do think it's amazing how fast we can go, and I think it's changing everything. But what it isn't changing is great product managers means you understand customer value, you understand what you're trying to deliver, and that is just more important than ever.

Trisha Price: So I couldn't agree with you more on that. You know, another thing that that is hard for product managers [00:21:00] is this always balance between short term demands. Right. There's this constant pressure, customer requests. Sales has the biggest deal ever, and they can't possibly close it if you don't magically deliver something with long-term product strategy.

Trisha Price: How do you, how do you handle that? How do you coach teams to handle that? To decide what deserves attention and, and what's noise? 

Jeff Lash: There's a lot of frameworks and approaches. You can say, all right, we're gonna devote X percent of our development resources to. Sales requests and X percent to bug fixes and things like that.

Jeff Lash: Or we're gonna allow people to, you know, give sales a budget or give executives over like things like that. And I think those are all good. I think those are good general frameworks. I don't think there's one right one, I think, but having some sort of structure like that is good. The thing that I've found that is more important is the fact that that approach.

Jeff Lash: How you [00:22:00] answer those questions really depends on where your product is at, where your company is at. So, you know, look, if you are a, and I've never worked at environment like this, but if you're in a startup that is running out of funding and you're worried about getting to the next paycheck, yeah, you might say, all right, we're gonna do some things that are gonna help land a big client, even if that's not exactly what we wanna do long term, but because we need to pay people next month.

Jeff Lash: Right? So I think that is completely reasonable. Now, obviously, if it pushes you way in the wrong direction, it might actually, you know, sink the company. But within the, within the realm of reason. I think that's appropriate. If you have a situation where, you know, customers are generally very happy, but you're you're kind of like in the middle of the market and not really doing anything exceptional and you've got a really visionary Cee o or executive that is one of these people that sometimes comes up with these.

Jeff Lash: Amazing blockbuster ideas and they come to you with an idea. It's like, I might [00:23:00] be more likely to try that, maybe experiment with it, not like Yeah. Put all my resources towards it. 

Trisha Price: Yeah. 

Jeff Lash: I've been in situations where I've managed products where retention is really good, but new client growth is not. So we foc, we, we rotate and focus on that.

Jeff Lash: I've been in situations where we had multiple different personas and one persona is really happy and another is not. So we focus on that. So I think. This idea of like, oh, you al you, you always say no to a customer or you always say no to executive. Like, I think, I don't, I I think those are sometimes too broad.

Jeff Lash: I think the context of where your product's at, where it is in its lifecycle, how it's performing, how the company is doing. You know, are you in a startup? Are you an established company? Are you. PE backed and looking for an exit, right? All these sort of things like are factors that, yeah, there's no formula I can give you to do it, but I think thinking about those sort of things, and again, I think it's also aligning your stakeholders so it's not just a product manager sitting in their office on their own, making that decision.

Jeff Lash: It might be, hey, like go go to your marketing colleagues and say, Hey, you know, I've noticed [00:24:00] we've got, this product, you know, it's for administrators and teachers, and the administrators seem really happy, but you know, the usage among teachers is not what we want. Like, so I think maybe next. Quarter, we need to focus more on teachers.

Jeff Lash: You know, like just even that conversation and then talking to sales and getting people on board with that. Again, it's not a scientific waiting process, but I think even just my experience with a lot of products is. There's no one right answer. There might be a couple wrong answers, but there's no one perfect right answer.

Jeff Lash: So it's more like, Hey, we've got five things we could do, and all these five things probably need to be done. And, you know, there's not, we're not gonna have terribly different outcomes if we choose one or the other. Yeah. So it's more about getting agreement and alignment and just moving forward. 

Trisha Price: I, I really, you know, agree with you on alignment and getting input from, you know, other parts of the business and other stakeholders.

Trisha Price: I also. I'm gonna be even one step more severe than you were in agreement, which is, I hate when people make decisions based on formulas and spreadsheets and, and [00:25:00] set percentages. To me, that just means you're not. Helping run the business. You're not in the business, you're not understanding, and so you're relying on a spreadsheet and you're relying on a formula to make a decision for you.

Trisha Price: I'm not saying I'm not data driven. I am always looking at data to make a decision. ARR impact, you know, time to value. Is retention a problem? Is new growth a problem? I'm always looking at data, right? Are where, how? How much is this particular product or feature being used? Why is this the right strategy?

Trisha Price: How is this chasing our scorecards and North Star metrics? Yeah, but. When you're making a decision because you like had some weighted formula of three different people's opinion, you know, or you set it and forget it and say, this percentage of my R&D budget goes to X, Y, and Z. Like to me it's just like you're giving up.

Trisha Price: Actually participating and understanding the business. 'cause business pivot all the time and there's new data and information all the time. [00:26:00] And so I am in violent agreement, but even one step further that those tools are not helpful and that you really have to do the work to make the decisions. 

Jeff Lash: So a classic example of this is like feature prioritization. 

Trisha Price: Yeah. 

Jeff Lash: you know, I've, I, when I was at Serious Decisions, we built a feature prioritization tool and we, you know, used it a lot with clients. But when we, when I did that, and I did this a little bit in my time at Forrester as well, when I did that, I always was very careful to talk to them about how to use it.

Jeff Lash: So, for example, I don't remember how, like imagine and, and most people have built or used some sort of peach or prioritization thing before, right? You have a bunch of different criteria. You weight them, you score each feature on it and you come up with the numbers. Let's imagine your scale goes from zero to 100, and you have one feature that's a 94.2 and another that's a 94.9.

Jeff Lash: Like to me, I a hundred percent would agree with you that like that doesn't mean the 94.9 is better because it's scored. Point seven better. Depending on Steven's mood that day, he could have scored it a little higher or [00:27:00] lower, like, you know. But what I have found is that these things kind of clumped together.

Jeff Lash: So I could probably say the things that scored in the nineties are probably more valuable than the thing that scored in the sixties. Right? So my, my coaching to people was always like, don't rely too much on the numbers, but they do tend to sort themselves out, right? The cream of the crop seems to rise to the top and the stuff that's not good seems to rise to the bottom.

Jeff Lash: So don't obsess over the details of it. I, I'm gonna take, maybe take a more moderate view. Like, I think they can be helpful tools to help, but they are not going to give you the answer. Right? They're not, to your point. Like, it's not like just rely on this directly. and it's, and oftentimes some of those nuances I talked about are not captured in a, any formula, right?

Jeff Lash: It's, oh, you know, did we lose a big client last week? Or is this something that, you know, our investors are asking for? Like, those sort of things are the. That's the gut part of it. And that's the where you need to just make, make the hard calls as you make the hard calls.

Trisha Price: And, and I just see too often that people who rely on spreadsheets are the people who [00:28:00] haven't put the work in to build a real product sense.

Trisha Price: Yeah. And really understand the business and really understand the customer value and jobs to be done. And so, you know, it's like an easy fallback mechanism. And to your point, it's not that you know, any kind of prioritization numbers or. Frameworks can never be helpful to make decisions. It's just when people begin to rely on the framework instead of understanding the business, they get themselves in trouble.

Jeff Lash: A hundred percent. Yeah. Yeah, and the framework's only as good as your, the data behind it, like if you don't know answers to the question, just making up answers and putting numbers in there is. This is gonna be worse than not gonna be. Yeah. 

Trisha Price: Or not being opinionated as a product manager and just saying, I collected everybody else's opinion and waited these things.

Trisha Price: And this is giving me the answer. I think great product managers are very opinionated. 

Jeff Lash: I like to say product management, product development is not a democracy. 

Trisha Price: Agree a hundred percent with you. Yeah. So I know Jeff, you've had some really interesting [00:29:00] experiences in bringing product lead processes, mindsets, behaviors, and product management principles to companies that are more traditional enterprises or non-software companies.

Trisha Price: The product itself wasn't software, but the way things were delivered was using software. Tell us some, some key lessons. I know a lot of our listeners are in the same boat. I say all the time. Every company is a software company now, and so, you know, what are some key lessons that you've learned specifically through driving mindset change from the inside?

Jeff Lash: Yeah, and, and just to for context though, I've worked in a couple different industries, but there's some commonalities among both the products and portfolios I've managed as well as when I was doing what I was in an analyst advisor role. A lot of the clients I was working with were not technology companies.

Jeff Lash: When I say technology companies, like in the classic sense, meaning like. Creating software or hardware that is sold into the IT department. So most [00:30:00] of my work, most of the clients I work with, and I would imagine a lot of your listeners are financial services companies, healthcare companies, manufacturing companies, even consumer goods, where like technology or software is part of the value proposition.

Jeff Lash: Either it is literally part of what the user is paying, the customer's paying for, or it is an enabling factor. you know, we have online checking accounts and really the checking account is, provides some value on its own. But the online portal and the. Mobile app and all that stuff. so I think the first thing is really kind of understanding, like you said, like understanding the business and thinking about it from a business perspective.

Jeff Lash: Like how does the company make money? What, what are people actually paying money for? What are they buying? And understanding how your products fit into that and how the technology fits into that. most recently, the past, you know. 10, 15 years I've worked in companies where we are selling subscription services [00:31:00] where part of the value is actually access to human experts.

Jeff Lash: So literally the fact that I could talk to someone on the phone who is an expert, I can call them up, I can set up an appointment with them and they can give me guidance, right? That is, that is truly a human delivered service. So understanding, yes, we can do great things with technology, but that's part of the value proposition as well.

Jeff Lash: So I think that number one is just understanding that that bigger picture, how the company makes money. How we sell our services and where the, the products and the technology fits into it. I think the second thing is probably trying to not talk in product language or technology language as much as possible.

Trisha Price: Yeah. Use real words. Don't try to just confuse people. 

Jeff Lash: I, I had a, I had a boss who was fond of saying like, you know, don't use a multi-syllable world word when a single syllable word will do. You know, and I, and I'm probably as guilty of that as any one way to really try to simplify. You know, fewer words, simpler words, not 'cause people are not intelligent, but just really to kind of step back and think about your audience, right?

Jeff Lash: So [00:32:00] if you, if I'm working with a technology group inside a company, like, yeah, I'll be able to talk about technology stuff. But most of the people in the company are not technology people. They are, you know, I worked with nurses and doctors. I work now with HR experts and, payroll experts and things like that.

Jeff Lash: So, so try to understand their language, talk their language, and, and love that. Simplify things in ways that works for them. 

Trisha Price: You know, I, I love that, that that is like sometimes product people can, and engineers do this too, you know, either use complex product language in terms to hide behind the fact that they don't really wanna get into the meat of the discussion.

Trisha Price: Or sometimes people can use it, you know. Unintentionally, like they're just, it's, it's just the way they do things, you know? And that's, that's okay. And, and understandable. and sometimes I think people use it to sort of hide behind things, you know? And so I love that advice. I love it for, to your point, when you're in a traditional [00:33:00] company and making sure you bring everyone along because other people in the company have great ideas and have input.

Trisha Price: And when you kind of like, product geek out, which I love to do, but they you've lost them. Yeah. But I think that's great advice, even in the most, you know, modern technical SaaS companies too, because forcing ourselves to use real words and language versus just our fun product speak, brings everyone along.

Trisha Price: So I love that advice. 

Jeff Lash: I'll give you a real example. So I, I started with Insperity just about a year ago, and, you know, one of the. First things at the top of my list was to obviously understand our clients, understand the market. And so, you know, when I worked, when I would talk with salespeople we would call our business performance advisors, or I talked with our client liaisons, who are the people that manage that relationship.

Jeff Lash: I didn't go to them and say, I would love to do some product discovery work, particularly contextual inquiry, and then maybe some card sorting, I would say. Because if I did, they would've, you know, their eyes would've rolled back. Like what? 

Trisha Price: No, no, no. 

Jeff Lash: They'd say, [00:34:00] I'd say I, I would say like, Hey, I would love to talk with some clients to understand.

Jeff Lash: Why they chose us as a vendor, you know, how, what they like about our product and what we can improve. And I would also like to see how they use our products and services in the course of their day. I'm saying the same thing, I'm just saying it in language and to your point, I that's probably good language use with anyone as well.

Jeff Lash: So I think just to your point, I don't, I don't think most people do that intentionally. I think it is just, we're so used to talking our language that we just assume that everyone else talks that language as well. And it can happen even with. Words that are simple. The classic example I use is the word roadmap, right?

Jeff Lash: Roadmap means something very specific to a product manager. I bet if you go to a salesperson and a marketer and a developer and you know a customer and say the word roadmap, they're gonna have very different pictures, something in your mind. So, 

Trisha Price: mm-hmm. 

Jeff Lash: I'm not gonna say a roadmap is good or bad, or you should or shouldn't.

Jeff Lash: It's, but like, rather than saying roadmap, like what is, what really are we talking about? Is it a. Promise of what we are [00:35:00] going to deliver. It is a vision of the future, is it? Things like that. So even just simple words like that can often get misunderstood and misinterpreted. And I think it's, to your point, probably common everywhere, but certainly more so in companies that that did not grow up as technology companies like.

Jeff Lash: 'cause I read your point, I think most companies. Are or have a major component of technology, but I think it's more like, did you grow up in that world or did you, you know, come over and realize that needs to be part of your, your culture over time. 

Trisha Price: Yeah. Jeff, I, I totally agree with you. in terms of language and being inclusive for our other stakeholders, I think that's such a great, a great approach. Any other key learnings that you wanna share with our listeners in terms of, you know, bringing a product mindset and product practices to a traditional company? 

Jeff Lash: I think the only other product I'd say is just that, that whole stakeholder management and understanding the ecosystem partners, again, I, I think it's, I'm not gonna say it's more important, but I think there's a really big part of [00:36:00] that.

Jeff Lash: So much of the. The stuff I read and the stuff people talk about is about like, you know, product management and developers and your engineering counterparts and your design converts, which again are very, very important. But my experience is that those relationships with finance, with legal, with customer support, with sales are, are just as important, if not more.

Jeff Lash: Totally. Yeah. and I think again, because in a non-software company, that's how. The company, again, makes money. That's how, that's how they become. That's the how they deliver. And maybe not just make money. That's how they deliver value to an organization, right? So understanding how those other factors number one, it gets you an understanding of how the organization works.

Jeff Lash: Number two, it gives you credibility, right? If you're just focused on. My technology that they're gonna, you're gonna be perceived different as understanding, oh, well here's how our support team operates. Here's how our call center operates. Here's how, here's what legal's prioritizing, you know, for right now.

Jeff Lash: That certainly gives you a level of credibility and I [00:37:00] think, and ultimately all that information will help make your products better too, because you're not just designing something in a silo. You're understanding how the product you're in charge of a creating will work in this giant ecosystem where.

Jeff Lash: Most companies are delivering value through many other mechanisms, not just through the one product. If you've got a, if you're a one product company and your entire revenue is based on, you know. Sales or subscription revenue of your one product, maybe a little different. But even then still you've got support.

Jeff Lash: You've got marketing, you've got legal, you've got finance, got all these other people. 

Trisha Price: I call that Jeff, I often call that whole product, right? Yeah. It's like we think about shipping our product as just the technology, but it's not. It's the experience. It's everything around it. So I love that. Well, Jeff, it has been absolutely incredible to have you on Hard Calls today.

Trisha Price: Thank you for sharing your experience and your wisdom all the way from irreversible and reversible decisions to the impact of AI and to [00:38:00] helping build a product mindset and making sure all your stakeholders are included. I know it's a lot of great information for our listeners, so thank you so much for being on the show today.

Jeff Lash: Thank you very much for having me. I enjoyed the conversation and I appreciate the opportunity. 

Trisha Price: Thank you for listening to Hard Calls, the product podcast, where we share best practices and all the things you need to succeed. If you enjoyed the show today, share with your friends and come back for more.