How to Be a Great Product Manager (Philosophy Friday #1)

all right we're on hey everybody today we will be starting a new and experimental series we call philosophy friday where we talk about specific topics concerning the business of free-to-play games and by the way the definition of philosophy is quote the study of the fundamental nature of knowledge reality and existence according to the oxford dictionary so that's what we're going to talk about we're going to talk about the final mental nature of the business of free to play games and what we're going to talk about today is a topic that i think both brett and i in particular are pretty well suited to talk about and that is what makes a great product manager and if i'm being honest i actually do think there's a lot of bad product managers out there just just keeping it real so i thought this would be a good

topic to start this series off of and uh your hosts myself joseph kim brett novak and just to like establish a little bit of our credentials so you don't think that we're just a couple of yahoos talking about product management so for me i'm currently in the ceo of a startup working on new kind of shooter game but before that i was svp nbc universal leading the game publishing group there also chief product officer at sega for the western games mobile division but biggest success came from actually zero to one launching a new game product at fun plus launched uh led the overall development was the overall lead on king of avalon which became a top grossing game helped propel uh fun plus with reskins like you know guns of glory state of survival to become number one publisher in in 4x so know a little bit you know headed product there know a little bit about product management just just flex a little bit

but then brett uh ceo of liquid and grit but rhett i mean you've got you've got some serious flex as well so and actually interestingly and you know we may talk about this concept the peter thiel concept is zero to one versus one to end but um you know this is a great kind of i i think balance between getting different perspectives on pm as well but brett if you can go over your background for the audience well as you mentioned i am the ceo and founder of liquid and grit so we work with a lot of companies in mobile gaming many if not most of the top grossing companies in the world before i started this company which helps product managers i was director of product at blue shell games which i managed a team of product managers and the top top grossing social casino app but prior to that i was lead product manager of revenue on zynga and specifically on zynga poker and back then we had we had something like 16 product managers on zinga poker so

i think it was a lot of product management stuff going on on that team for a good reason what we managed 22 of the revenue of the company which was obviously a public company and it still is so a lot of product management stuff going on then and then prior to that i was at business school dartmouth dartmouth tuck i i learned some leadership and product stuff as well there and uh so that's my flex for product management all right so i thought we could open it up and if you're an experienced product manager don't click out now but we're going to start with something that's kind of base a basic and fundamental question but also important in the context of some of the other things we're going to talk about later later on in this discussion but wants to start off with what do you what do you think a pm should do and this can mean different things at different companies but in terms of right your perspectives as far as responsibilities of a pm what does that look like for you

well the first thing i want to establish before i define it is that i'm going to make a i'm going to make a statement that i'm basing my response on the assumption that the main purpose of product development is to make money and i added in an ethical and positive means right i mean we're going to make the assumption and that doesn't always happen that doesn't always happen but i think if you're looking at long-term revenue growth that that that isn't should be implied but i'm just adding it yeah so with that in mind i think the three main things for a product manager to do is the first is to help the team make better economic decisions so in other words really be the voice of profitability of a business and one quote i pulled from a book i love is while you may ignore economics it won't ignore you and i think that's a perfect way of summarizing that you need to have somebody that is a voice of profitability of revenue of money and improving those numbers

the second is to create a single cohesive vision of the product and this could be your vision it could be someone else's vision and i i want to clarify that because i think when i say things like that it's like oh the pm running the show it does not necessarily have to be the vision of the pm it's just that the pm has to make sure that there is a cohesive clear vision of the product so that everyone can work off of that and the third is to help improve the flow of production and this is where you get into really the people management the ideally the standardization of repeatable processes the motivation of the team the up all the other little things that help basically get products out to make money right so those are the three right and so from my perspective and just to be clear the audience like you know brett and i aren't going to agree on everything and we might have slightly different perspectives because you know like as i mentioned like

a lot of my experience comes from like that zero to one trying to create a new product perspective but like um i actually agree with everything that brett has suggested but like for me a little bit a lot maybe a little bit of nuance from my experience is also just kind of like understanding the key basis of competition in the market for you right and so in in some cases if you already have a product that has achieved product market fit and you're turning the crank that's a little bit less important but if you're trying to do something new i think it is really really important to understand like the macro operating environment in which you're executing against and then really understanding what's going to make a difference what is going to allow this product to be successful or not so then that means understanding there's a lot of nuance in terms of understanding situational context how is this situation different from another situation can i you know am i just going to use my hammer that i've used on these five

other games or do i bring in the wrench right and so like for for me for a product manager it really is about understanding again the key bases of competition as brett mentioned completely agree then against that specific strategy understanding how do you create like aligning different teams in such a way that you're able to get like a hundred percent solution right because in some cases if you have ninety percent of the solution but you're missing that 10 percent well you might be [ __ ] so then how do you like get where where's that what are the key things that are going to make a difference or not that's another thing the key base of the competition and then being able to align resources and get [ __ ] together so that you can execute against the product vision in a successful way and so like in that way especially for like a zero to one product manager like what you are good at or where you focus your time or how

you structure your team could ultimately be a little bit different depending on your situation you might have a super strong game designer but a really shitty artist you might you know like there's different things that may happen and especially for zero to one it's like how do i take what i have the tools that i have and then deliver on a successful product vision and by and large not everyone's going to be you know funded by you know [ __ ] you know the best venture company and have enough capital and have like a superstar team you're not going to have like a netflix or tesla team and so then it's about how do i succeed with the [ __ ] that i got right and so that's that's that's kind of in in in my view that part but understanding product understanding design you know potentially leading product development including engineering now there's different team structures and maybe we can go into that or not owning

the p l creating quantitative models determining feature and content roadmap a bunch of these things absolutely yes all that kind of stuff but you know ultimately and i think this underscores brett's point how do you deliver a successful product meaning a profitable and growing business so that's my sorry long-winded view but that that's that's that's kind of my view on that yeah um and then maybe maybe like the next question or discussion point to talk about would be you know in your experience but what what about the specific skills so like if you're trying to build build up your skills as a pm what are some of the things that pm should be aware of or should be working on to become a better pm of over their career yeah that's a that's a great question i think i'm going to keep on stressing this but i think the economics of product development is really really important

and i stress that because i feel like that's the skill that's slipping the most in product management and because of that i think product managers more broadly are more like what i would consider a producer and that is bringing down the value of product managers and one of the reasons why i don't like that is because at the time my salary was based on product management but i'm going to stress that and i think people may be wondering what do i mean by that and i i think the best metaphor is if you're playing poker and you're a professional poker player there's obviously a lot of different nuances to being a great poker player but one of them is knowing the odds of what your hand creates and what is what is how it changes in the course of a a poker hand right like pre-flop post flop and that is what a great product manager from an economic value standpoint can do they can look at the product process whether it be testing or spec design or

delaying or iterating all these different variables all the economic objectives which we can talk about in more detail and they can help improve that so that the company is more likely to succeed and again success being defined as what i said earlier as being profitable in an ethical and positive way and and that's really probably the first thing i think the second thing that i used to always tell new product managers is that the heart of product of being a product manager is really that spec that clear definition of what the product is going to be it's it just makes everybody and it doesn't have to be written i know you have different ways of doing it we could go down we can go down that rabbit hole at some point but it's bringing sitting down and clearly defining what you're about to build as clearly as it needs to be

defined by the culture of the company right and different you know different companies define it but whatever the culture may be and that i always felt like those two components were so important for product managers because product managers generally don't have skills that are really necessary to release a product right you can release a bad product without product management or you can release a good one without it too but yeah you don't need product managers and those two were always at the core because you had to establish hey you're valuable within the team therefore we're going to keep you in the team we're going to include you in the team because you're really this this person that gets responsibility without neces completely necessary skills like engineering or design right and and i think those two are really the most important i think the third that wasn't emphasized as much in in zynga we talked about this on on our my other podcast is is the people aspect right i mean there are i always say there's spreadsheets and there's people

and man the people aspect is super important and and that's a whole third component that you really need to be excellent at to to be great product management and not to be long-winded but the last one which i think is also super important it kind of is just like an intangible is discipline you gotta be disciplined to like sit down write specs do analysis 100 do do deep thought work and not just be a project manager which is someone who just responds to pings man and that's i i can't stand those those type of pms you just sit there all day waiting for someone to ask me a question on slack like that that to me is that's like where the project manage project managers are like pro product managers getting defined as product managers but really they're project managers and also the opinion product manager who's just like i think purple's cool that those are like the two worst archetypes of product management that i can't stand but anyways

yeah no i totally agree with you on like the discipline part i i mean i literally just had a conversation with uh one of the pms that in my company where i basically said the difference between mediocre and great for a pm is discipline like without discipline you're not going to get anywhere um and then for me like the way that i look at this the the skills of a product manager i actually developed a framework many years ago which i call like the i just call it like the four ps pm operating system and by the way this is way before scope lee suggested they have like a company operating system but i actually have like a pm operating system and the 4p stands for like at the top layer something that i call the practice meaning the work things like the tools that you use like the type of valuation else that you use like understanding the product customer things like that the second p is processes meaning you know like you need to understand the different processes that you are executing against the product now whether that's the product development

process so understanding agile or scrum understanding things like you know brett and i have had a previous podcast we talked about you know how do you how do you hold a meeting what's an efficient way of holding a meeting but these kind of processes around communication meetings best practice understanding again situational awareness of applying different processes at different times and how do you adapt different processes in different ways the third is personality meaning that ultimately i do think like for me to some degree like the practice and the process is a little bit less important than personality because if you as a pm don't have the right personality i think you can never be successful you could be a little cog you can make a little impact but the the kind of pms that are needle movers are people who are so i i kind of have this um what i call

the two two spirit animals for product management and the first is the bulldog and the second is a cockroach and you know what i what i tell you know pm's how to work with is that like it's really [ __ ] easy to design a process install is a hundred times harder right and so when you design a process it's not not like hey guys here's a new process here it is and then and there's like you know three weeks later nobody's using my process what the folks go they suck they're so bad it's like wait a minute [ __ ] it's your fault right you can't just design [ __ ] and [ __ ] send it out in an email it's like oh nobody's using my [ __ ] process so that's why you know it's important to be the bulldog and the cockroach you have to like get on people you have to have the personality to be able to install [ __ ] that's going to help the company and the product and you have to like just be persistent and survive that [ __ ] the cockroach

i think the other thing about personality for a lot of pms is just and this is just like a fundamental issue amongst i would say 99 of people meaning yeah i actually believe that out of 100 pm's only one's good is basically this notion about communication um something that that you know um that i call rebuking your neighbor meaning you know you see a fault in somebody and you know and just to be fair at some companies you can't do this because you know you got to cover your ass and you know if you criticize somebody you're you're like [ __ ] but in a healthy in a healthy good operating environment if you're working at like amazon or tesla or netflix you'd be able to say you know hey bill hey sally you know and with resp you know when we say at our company direct communication with respect that you're able to have a conversation that says i think you're doing these things wrong for these reasons and like

being able to have that conversation surprisingly i would argue 99 out of 100 people literally cannot do which is why i said i suggest that actually the majority of pms are not that great and then finally the fourth p underlying all of this is something that i call philosophy which is like how do you approach different kinds of problems right and so you know um so i have like this collection of different types of um you know like philosophies or beliefs about things like whether it's you know um and i grabbed these from a lot of different places so you know some people are familiar with the isaiah berlin concept the hedgehog concept are focus you know some people are familiar with you know commitment versus involve versus involvement uh there's this you know just not to go too deep but like holism versus reductionism not having

two in a box you know um [ __ ] versus a [ __ ] sandwich in terms of community there's like a whole bunch of different types of philosophies that over a career you like you as a pm will like see different [ __ ] work or not in different companies and you start to form a of an opinion and you start to see patterns of ways in which if you operated in this way in these situations it will lead you to success and so for me that rare pm who has all of this this operating system the practice processes the personality in the right philosophies that is the rare pm that can actually make the difference between success or failure in a sort of zero to one new game development product and so i know i went a little a little long on that but uh that that's kind of my my thoughts on that i don't know if you have any any any thoughts on on on that brett

yeah i mean i think it's a great framework if people want to check it out i'm looking at it right now and i think there's it's it's an awesome way to to think about things i i think that it it's obviously very difficult to be able to hit all of these i think that you can and in fact we this is kind of skipping ahead i was talking to uh taber about this on our pod other podcast is that he doesn't have a product manager i mean and i'm saying that because you can have a great product manager know what they're great at and not great at right and i look at this for example and i might see things like process oh i am more process oriented but maybe i wasn't and you can fill in gaps right which i think is okay but you need to i make sure that these are getting solved somehow right and that goes back to the culture of the company and things like that what is important as a product manager to really nail

and to develop those other skills if you don't have them because inevitably you want to be able to fill in the blanks and and things like that right um one thing i wanted to bring in since i know we're both kind of uh football buffs but i was watching a football life nick saban and two things that uh he said in the football life that i took away from that i want to mention is one was be comfortable with uncomfortable conversations right so you were 100 rebuking your neighbor and this is this is something i've been working on as from as a personal journey actually of mine for the last probably four months is being better at having difficult conversations because even though i come from like an aggressive background of playing professional hockey and being at zynga it's almost like i didn't really have the ability to have a difficult conversation because i was so used to sort of like more of this combat state and i think if you want to do it inside of a team yeah

you have to be able to do it like you said while still maintaining the relationship right like while being able to respect like keep that respect right this is also where you have to understand your situational context because at some companies if you do have that direct conversation you will get stabbed in the back you will get assassinated just to keep it real this is this conversation we're all real yes 100 in fact i often joke that i didn't choose to be an entrepreneur i was i had to become an entrepreneur because in the company i was working at after i left gaming a hundred percent i like i embassy and uh empathize with anyone out there who who is in that type of culture and and i know this is skipping ahead but i think if you're in a culture that puts too much of a premium on the emotional well-being of the people

in their company right which in in and i haven't i can't believe i've taken this long to reference it but you should just go read the principles of product development flow the book it's the greatest book on product product management economics okay the the economic framework that improves the value of your company through numbers right that's that's the the one side of the brain that you need to develop the other is the people side but um if you have a company that's emphasizing too much of this proxy variables of everyone being happy with each other and everybody being smiling and nice which isn't it's obviously ideal to have if you can but if they value that too much and you say something that is against that's gonna make people feel upset which i did i i went in and basically told him to cut this thing that was like this like really fancy thing that they gave everybody well i can't even go into it but um it was it was costing us like

four percent on our overall margin and we and um i was like we should cut this thing and it was like literally i had it was as if i had slapped people across the face or something and i really i really i i really feel empath i really have empathy for people who are in those companies it's very difficult that said you have to kind of be able to motivate as well but um yeah so maybe we should talk about that a little bit situational context right because there are like for you to do so a couple of things for you to do well at your job you should understand the type of company that you're working for and while while it's easy for us to say you know you should be able to have direct conversations again you can get like i i got assassinated on my laptop for speaking truth right because whereas in my philosophy you know i i think it's very important one of the most important skills for me is to be able to say stop the train there's a train wreck

coming if we don't do these things we're gonna be [ __ ] here's the solution but you know let's address this problem now versus at some companies it's like you know there might be a six-hour meeting on hey how do we what's our story what's our story how do we you know let's only show these metrics and these about and i'm like what the [ __ ] are you guys doing that's [ __ ] [ __ ] that and then you get assassinated right so like you so be careful like so listen to us but again you know be careful because like if you listen to us and then you get assassinated at your confidence and uh you know don't blame us so you understand the culture you're working in because like some companies are gonna be like what we're saying famously netflix famously amazon tesla not every company is like that well i mean i guess since we are philosophers i guess it begs the question

whether getting is assassinated but getting kicked out of the company whether or not that's a good thing or a bad thing for example i spoke my mind at this company and it was very clear to me that they did not value saving money over over everyone feeling good and happy right and ultimately i got the meeting where the hr person was joining you know um terry's gonna be joining us for this meeting um today brett okay i got that coming from being like top-notch pm of another company and going to another one and getting the whole like terry uh is joining us here i mean it was very it was very alarming so i guess the philoso the philosophical side of me is asking the question whether or not and here i am in a much better place so i'm saying that because i think if alarms are going off in your head and you're saying that's the company i work in i think that you should ask yourself the next

question whether you are better at the political side of of work or the product management economic side of work and obviously ideally you're good at both but if you're not if you're if you're good at the economic side which is where more of the money is can be made then you want to go change jobs because you don't want to rely you want your your career the income your your well-being your happiness based off of the somewhat arbitrary perspectives of your co-workers and for because yeah because it's just it's too risky and that's why zynga was great for me and that's why i liked working there and that's one of the reasons why i left to make my own thing is because at zynga they they could quantify the value i created for the company so regardless of what people thought of me their perception of me whether they liked me or not i could tell them i made this company a

million dollars this quarter i made them an additional million dollars therefore you should give me a raise right and so yeah i think that it's kind of okay to be there now like don't just go and quit tomorrow and do a jerry maguire move but because changing your culture is so hard it's like the hardest thing it's impossible i mean i don't pretend like you can really do that but if it's like that and bells are going off your head you may want to be thinking about okay what's my exit strategy how can i how can i basically build a career off of my ability as a product manager create great profit for a company because man that that's where the real money is right that's where the but speaking to your point though brett like i do think that the other thing that some pm's may not consider is the cost of working at certain types of companies so if you are at one of these companies where you know you're not because so there the vast majority of companies like

there are a lot of companies that are more product oriented rather than organizationally oriented meaning that you know they spend a lot of time all this complexity you know random forest blah blah blah blah you know multivariate testing you know uh one arm bandit against the product but then when it comes to the organization and the people and the processes it's just like oh let's not let's not touch that let's not try to put any effort improving the people or the processes or the organization we're just going to put all all of our energy on the on on the product and what i have seen are people who you know i felt had incredible potential were incredibly smart but they went to the wrong [ __ ] company and five years later like but i've got a pm right now who i've been training for nine months i i would put them against anyone at many of the major game companies right now that have been working there for like five years it's

just like the potential to like work on a new game product seeing all the problems having an open culture having me like [ __ ] yell at you and just say hey no this is wrong so getting that continuous feedback is so much more valuable from a growth perspective than like hey guys well shucks we kind of screwed up let's just move on to the next thing let's not fix anything no one has accountability there's not going to be any transparency i'm not going to give you any feedback just keep doing your [ __ ] thing the the [ __ ] way you're doing it and [ __ ] it let's just keep going and you know there's there's way way different ways of putting in your 10 000 hours there's a good way and i'm telling you there's a really really [ __ ] bad way and a lot of people are doing it the bad way so there is a cost yeah yeah i mean we'll have to find i'll have to just start disagreeing about some some things but yeah please i don't i 100 agree with this one all right so the other quote from the nick saban thing that i took

from it was the outcome is a distraction to the process right so meaning you know the process people focus on the outcome and what you're saying is the product is the outcome right yeah and i do think that we over emphasize the focus on product and the the the outcome of it and if you focus on developing your people and having a good process that's going to create the product or removing waste or some of these other things all those things are interconnected and the product will improve because of it and so uh i i agree so even though most of the values in the product a lot of the opportunity is in the other stuff so right yeah picking i mean picking the right company to work at i feel like is probably is definitely the most important decision you make around right around product development i mean yeah and again particularly because i was just sort of alluding to it is

there's a lot of companies that call you a product manager and yet when you go there you're basically a project manager or a producer and in my mind the project manager is someone who is really a task focused person right yeah when is this going to be due tuesday okay is it done no okay that and then a producer is someone who's more opinion based right like i r the voice of the player i really feel like and these people add value but a product manager generally as in terms of most companies makes more has more ownership can generally create more value and has like i think more applicable skills elsewhere to other things like entrepreneurship i think they're all great but i'm just saying if you want to be a product manager for your career make sure that they define it as what i what we're talking about as a product manager because you don't want to you don't want to be a product manager who really is a producer

or project manager right like and maybe we could talk about that a little bit more and i i can kind of go over like what i've seen in terms of because i think the other thing to understand is that at different companies you know sometimes a producer is called a pm sometimes the pm is called a producer sometimes a product manager is basically probably defined let's see if we should probably define that earlier but so so here's what you'll likely see across the industry and and there's kind of like the spectrum between first of all from a scope perspective and so depending on the company you're gonna see like the scope of your responsibilities be either narrow or broad and so on two sides of the spectrum you'll generally see at more of the startups and more the smaller companies more of what you know the compact cross-functional pm meaning you're doing a little bit of everything you're doing a lot versus large and siloed where you know it could be a company like maybe like an ea or maybe a zinger or scopely where you know there could be you know in even

like different kind like a revenue pm or a growth pm or a features pm or whatever with more narrow bands of responsibility and potentially being even more focused on a specific thing like hey you own uh you own you know the user funnel or you own you know like long-term monetization or whatever so there's like that scope and then you know in some cases you're gonna have uh you know brett mentioned like 16 product managers they probably were responsible for various i would assume that they were responsible for various pieces of the game right versus having a small buttons buttons like literally having a smaller team you know and where there might be a few pms but you've got larger responsibilities and that's that's just difference and like the other thing that you'll see in terms of like differences between a producer and a pm for example is like what is the what is your level of

relationship with development and so that in a traditional structure the producer will be the one who interfaces with development right now in the the you know more the silicon valley style startup style or more of the smaller cross compact cross-functional teams it might actually be the pm that works directly with engineering but otherwise it might be like like let's say it's inga you know what i've heard and right you could check me on this is that a lot of pms don't actually interface directly with engineering they will you know own like let's say the the product backlog uh create like the you know list of features expected outcomes table and do the prioritization and then they'll throw that to uh producers and the producers would then then interface with engineering to do the execution of that stuff and so from that perspective in terms of like you know who how you interface with the engineering

that's also another point of distinction between a lot of other a lot of other companies and some of the differences that you you'll see amongst different companies and so again it just kind of depends in terms of where you orient yourself around like is it important for me to understand agile scrum like engineering processes and things like that in some companies as a pm yes in other companies no so again going back to situational context you should understand the kind of pm the scope of responsibility and the kind of environment that you're going to be in so that you can understand how to orient yourself and and develop your skills so that you could be you know good at your particular job yeah and i'm gonna be the voice of tabor here and say you do not need to have a product manager which is wild for me to say it was wild for me to say i haven't been like i'm a i'm a pm like

like fan super fan i read books on it but you do not need to have a pm but i do think that you need to have the pm capabilities being executed in your company by somebody right yeah taber's whole point was and i think he was you know i said this in the podcast i think he was leaning a little bit away from product managers because he had bad experiences with bad product managers right like he he hated product managers like we're not going to have any product managers because i don't want to meet you know i don't want people just telling me what to do and it sounds like you had crappy product managers it sounds like you don't want crappy product managers which i totally get right but if you if you don't want to have product managers like it's just a title you but you do need somebody who like said from the beginning is going to be that voice of uh profitability which not isn't necessarily fun to be i mean i'm a ceo

of a company and it's like yeah sometimes i have to say things to people that like the difficult conversations i'm even beyond that right i need to let people go i need to change jobs completely i need to change processes completely i need to scrap projects that they've been working on for months like these are difficult things to do when you have an emotional attachment to humans like we all do right and and it comes easier to some people and it comes easier over time but you got to have something doing that right and whether it's a ceo or whatever you know it's just it's an unfortunate part of business right it's like ideally we could just make stuff that was fun and we all thought was you know like the most beautiful flower and whatever but that that's just not how it works you got to have someone be like hey how are we going to make money on this how much is it going to cost how risky is it who's going to buy it how much they're going to buy it for you know like we can't build that thing we do five iterations on it because you want to make it perfect because we got

to get this out we all got to get paid we got to live we got to feed our kids you know what i mean like it kind of comes down to that yeah so i mean i think this goes back to situational context right because i mean i remember having a talk with the guy the the two guys that made plants vs zombies right and basically like they they had low low fixed costs you know they weren't in a rush to do stuff and so you know i was talking about how did you how did you build plants versus zombies like well we kind of built this little prototype then we just kept iterating on it and changing it refactoring it changing and refactoring changing it and at the end of this long process out pop plants versus zombies there's no product manager in that process but they're also in a different situation right like if if if you're a venture-backed startup and you gotta hit certain targets you better have a [ __ ] pm yeah well but you can apply the product development process to that right and in product development flow we can geek out on this but there's generally certain economic objectives that you can

focus on cycle time product cost product value development expense and risk are the five like most common and there are other variables too and if you think about that example you even alluded to some of them right they had low cost so they or they had low risk probably because they could go back to another job so you already like you already checked off two they did it naturally right and so that what they focused on is product value and cycle time right you said they were iterative so that's cycle time so they kind of intuitively did it if you if you went and took like sort of a classic as i think of a classic pm and brought them in like they wouldn't probably have changed much because they're saying okay well we don't have risk here we don't have cost here and we're doing iterative and and we don't really know because we're creating completely like new product so we gotta experiment like all these things you know and that's what i'm saying is as long as it's kind of getting executed either either like consciously or unconsciously or

subconsciously that's fine yeah you know somehow you do have it and i'll give you an example like what i do is i realize that i am kind of a softie for people like i i don't want to let people go and it's kind of weird saying that because when people know about my company like well but you do it all the time i'm like yeah i do it all the time because it's very good for our the economics of my business that said i don't like doing it so i detach myself from meeting 80 of people who join my company who are contractors right so it's a different it's very but it's it's it's like something that i i know is necessary to create create good profit margins and it's totally like not a fun thing or anything i enjoy or want to ever do right so it's like this like conflicting thing that it's really good for the business it's it's really not something that you really love to do and so how are we going to kind of like create a system that allows us to do it

and stay profitable and kind of get around some of the humanistic side of things weaknesses in a way i mean they're really kind of weaknesses that humans have when we when we get in there and we want you know but i love this you know i love and the players just want us to give them free free coins all day long you know it's like okay i we get it but we kind of need to we need to play by the rules of the game which is we need to make more money than we cost right and maybe before i forget i also had you know you mentioned a good book in terms of for for pm's and before i forget maybe i should mention some of the books that highly influenced me but um i would highly recommend as a pm you read uh first of all principles by ray dalio that had a very significant impact in me in terms of thinking about systems and kind of structure and philosophy and in ways of developing that kind of stuff over time and so i highly recommend that book there's also a book let's talk about that book for a second actually before you jump to the next one

yeah i love that book too and i actually he wrote a pdf i don't know what guy got on the internet but i had that pdf uh bookmarked on i can remember it was like internet explorer so just to date like when this it was way before you wrote the book i mean i'm talking 10 12 years ago i i've read this and it blew my mind and i think when you say process if you haven't read the book i think people too generally think and particularly in america that then that needs to be like robotic processing right like you take this thing and you type it on your keyboard whereas what ray really talked about and what i've taken to my business and what i think you're talking about is it's almost like um non-process oriented things having processes right like you talked about a little bit like like liquid grit one of our hypothesis or processes is that we don't believe you can accurately interview right like that's a that's kind of a statement that leads to a process that doesn't generally

people don't generally think of being a process right another one that you alluded to was that it's better for us to be completely honest frank and transparent to each other that is a process that's been defined it doesn't fit under the classic process definition right where okay and then you hand in the paper and then you know it's it it's it's a little bit vaguer but man those things are so powerful because it it's like no one wants to do it but when you do it it really opens up doors because you can build frameworks around it and if you can all gather around this core hypothesis interviewing doesn't work or it's better for us to be frank then you can kind of build a culture or soften the negatives of it all these other things and man i am yeah i i can go down the line at my company and tell you the hypotheses that i have for that lead to the way that we do things right and

those are i'm i really like that book um too i'm a big fan second book uh extreme that's definitely a warning one though jk like don't walk in tomorrow and go throwing out your you know viewpoints at your company alert alert right you know freeze that one and practice on uh something that doesn't have as much risk which is another at the last thing i was gonna say it's good product management yeah works for yourself in your career as well right like if you apply the same principles to your own self that's kind of why i started my company i like applied those same principles which is like what's my upside probably you too it's like what's your upside for your career what's your risk what's your you know what i mean and the same thing is walking in tomorrow and taking reading ray's book and walking in tomorrow and speaking your mind like that's pretty risky be careful of that one yeah i think the second book i would recommend is extreme ownership by jaco

willink who's like a retired navy seal but just the the concept of owning problems and mistakes there's a really great story that that's told in that book in that book about a boat race and so basically the navy seals had a boat race amongst a bunch of different teams and basically what happened was they took the team that won and they took the the boat captain from the team that won and they took the last place team team boat six and they swapped the boat captains then they raced again and then the team that came in last place came in first place and so like as as a leader i think you really have to understand like there's so much [ __ ] where leadership blames everyone else but the person they really should be blaming which is themselves

and and so i think that's a really important book from the perspective of understanding you know what is within your capability of changing and what what should you be responsible for and then um a third book i would recommend is the hard thing about hard things a little dated but ben horowitz has a lot of like little um anecdotes and stories about how to be successful as a ceo and he was a he was a very successful uh ceo in his prior career and maybe the the last book i would recommend is atomic habits by james clare just you know uh thought we spoke about discipline but ways in which you can actually try and improve yourself how do you create habits that last build discipline building good habits as a product manager and so i would definitely recommend those books i don't know if you have any others to recognize i've read two of those two of the four so i have to read well i think i've oh i don't know if i've read atomic habits but the extreme ownership one is definitely

i mean i'm a big jocko fan in fact i used to listen to him like when i started my company and found it very very insightful and i i think this is harder for i mean if you start your own company it's like the best training ground for being because it's kind of funny i have nobody to complain to like i have no there's no sympathy that i can receive because i have complete control over my entire company right like if there's anything that bothers me it's like i tell my wife she's like well why don't you just fix it you know what i mean it's like literally that's the conversation i have every i mean i don't have it anymore because and i think you and i'll give a shout out to pinkus because i i mean i really loved a lot of the things that pinkus did and he he did that at zynga i remember him meeting with all these product managers and one of them said something about something he didn't like in the company and he just point blank turned to him and said you're a product manager at zynga i don't see any red tape buddy like why haven't you fixed

it yeah who i have never i've never told anyone that they couldn't do something in this company right like what's stopping you from fixing why are you telling me that there's a problem that you want me to solve your product manager at zynga yeah and i really took that to the heart and it was amazing how much bonuses and i got from i always call them pet projects each quarter i would do one thing that wasn't assigned to me yeah that i'd solve in the organization and my assumption was that if i didn't like it and it was always something i was passionate about solving because if something annoyed me it was amazing how many times i got like promotions and bonuses based on those things and they weren't even that hard to do right it's like we it's like people just sit around and complain and it's like dude this thing probably would take like a week to fix and if you do everyone's gonna be blown away because nobody asks you to do it you know it's just like actually i should you know i actually wrote a blog post about that phenomenon

that occurs where there's like people in the company who who i call whiners all they do is complain warners who like point out at least they point out problems and then you know the the optimists who actually saw that stuff but i also do think just just to get back to like if you want to be a great pm i also think that and this is maybe this is controversial but i there's two things that i learned when i went to when i worked at phone plus and we launched this you know pretty successful game and i learned it from both co-founders of phone plus and from andy zhong the ceo from plus he taught me that actually optimism is really important like for you to believe in the product and for you to like try to infect others with optimism about being successful is really actually it's really [ __ ] important it's it's really understated just how important that is

and then from yitao the uh the other co-founder of fun plus you know i i remember like i would be writing him some some emails or i'd be talking about like this thing's [ __ ] up this thing's [ __ ] up this thing's [ __ ] up and he's like okay cool and exactly to your point like what pink has told that pm what the [ __ ] are you gonna do about it and then so shifting my mindset to be more solutions oriented like having more of a proactive filter right okay yes yes we have these problems you should identify those problems but then is it constructive to just like whine and go on about the problem or okay here's a problem here's a solution here's a problem here's a solution and so that was if i'm being very honest about my experience at fundplus those two lessons were the most valuable lessons that that i took away and before i forget one last book we were talking about taber a really great book that he recommended the score takes care of itself by bill

walsh bill walsh and football actually does you know sorry to some people who want more you know like whatever diverse world but football actually has a lot of relevance as a performance-based sport to companies and startups so there are actually a lot of lessons you can learn and i would highly recommend that book as well totally yeah on that point i think when i was managing product managers i used to say pms point out problems senior pms point out problems and propose solutions leads point them out propose solutions and then solve them and directors directors they don't even tell you about stuff it's already that whole process is already done yeah right and so i i think that's that's really that evolution that you can have as a product manager is trying to start thinking that way and and just

try to solve it on your own um it's right it's not easy to do what was what was the other the other founders there was what does the first founder tell you because there was something else optimal optimism the other story i was going to tell about optimism i learned this early on in my career so i i leave professional hockey i joined this startup and i it's in the back of like literally faces a wall like the back of a real estate office it's in one room there's like seven of us sitting in a dark room and i was surrounded by the founder of it was who is now the ceo of bungie studios and was before that and now he's like on the board of bungie studios pete parsons so he he's he helped create a little game called halo like this dude was legit and he was surrounded by these amazing developers and he was he didn't code he didn't design and he was kind of a scatter brain like he would be on like a little like a member like a macbook air like typing on the ground he wouldn't be seeing a chair with seven

chats open like he had chat on with seven different people i mean just talking to him was like whoa dude are you even listening to me like what's going on right and i was thinking to myself when i first joined like how does this dude how do you raise money how does he have these amazing devs surrounded like in this dark terrible office and and i realized over time this dude brought fun every single day to work every single day to work this dude was fired up and hilarious and awesome to be around i mean the stories the energy the excitement he brought every single day it wasn't like oh you know my cat died no he that dude he came in it was hilarious and i realized that if you can bring it every day like if you can bring that fun optimism that you're talking about the energy it's incredibly valuable because devs can pretty much work at any shop in in silicon valley right like they can get they can get jobs but if you can show up and be fired up every single day and it goes back to the discipline man that that has a tremendous impact like people

just want to be around you and you're like fired up it's not easy to do two people like oh well that's easy brett it's not dude you gotta i'm talking yeah every day you know what i mean like yeah and that dude he did it it was hilarious and i think from my perspective when i think about optimism i kind of think about it in two ways and so you know some people believe in manifestation and to some degree i've kind of come to believe that too but i also in terms of belief when you believe in something so much i think your brain just kind of figures out a way it just finds the solution somehow and so you know whatever your your internal belief structure is at least from my experience i i've seen that this this ha this happens the optimism the belief somehow some way however however it happens it just it works in maybe that okay when i think i mean it reminds me of and this is why i think you need to be careful as a

product manager not to spread yourself too thin and you really need to nail again i think this like defining of the pro the product and the economic view of it because you get that optimism when you think about something and you know about something so well that it's it's kind of obvious that you're the one that is the expert on it and that doesn't mean that you need to be a know-it-all it actually allows you not to be to know it all because you have the confidence to hang your hat on this little aspect that it's a lot it allows you to go oh you know what i didn't think about that because you're you're still feel like the expert in it whereas when you're spread too thin and i feel like product managers sometimes glom on to making arbitrary decisions because they don't have anything to hang their hat on they don't they can't they're not really bringing the spec writing they're not really bringing the economic view and so they they kind of hold on to well i make all these grand decisions and it's like no you don't do like you're just an opinion everyone's opinion is

moderately accurate but not that accurate and uh i think that's so important that's why it's really key that you kind of nail one of these things and really own that um it kind of reminds me of my my company because like people will talk about my company and how it's built and it's not the most perfect company obviously but i think it's built very well for what we do and i'm like hey i'm not trying to like when they say stuff to me i'm not trying to be jerk mommy i've literally spent i mean thousands of hours thinking about this like thousand like you're coming in at hour three right it's like you're talking to tom brady about i'm not tom brady but you're talking to like a college level quarterback probably about football and you've been playing football like in the backyard you know it's like but i think if you talked to tom brady and brought something up just like i think pinkus did this too you could email pinkus anything right like and a biggest gets a lot of flack but you could literally email that guy any point and if it had data back it up he'd email you back in five ten

minutes and he'd call you in and you meet with them because he he had the comments he's like yeah i know the process i i can hang my hat on this part i don't care i think i think bray would be the same thing like he wouldn't be a jerk about it if you if you ask him a question and they say that about bill belichick it's like you can bring something up to bill belichick he's he'll consider it he probably thought about it 20 years ago but that's okay he's not gonna like crap on you he's just gonna be like oh yeah okay maybe we'll think about that and they talk about that i mean dude i'm happy to bring in the football analogies here because i completely agree it's like that's why i love football because it's sort of like a microcosm of of business you can and you can kind of see things play out and you can learn things from it right yeah it's like kind of yeah maybe speaking to that i do think like like look whether it's football or whatever you can you can bring in lessons from anything you know there's like uh i i don't think it's tabor but you know i actually really like the ata guys because they are very philosophical but

i think uh josh one of the lead designers um he also has a philosophy based upon cooking which is i i he talked about like this maison plus or i don't and i don't speak french but like the the whole notion of like it's like when the cooks have all this [ __ ] like all prepared ready to go and like that concept of as you know if you're working to have your work set up all [ __ ] ready to go like you know you're you you click a button all your [ __ ] tabs come up or however it is whatever for your job being able to get your work to be as automated ready to go in place so that you know at like a like a professional cook just kind of goes and all his shit's all laid out and he can just go like that's a concept from cooking and so while we draw concepts from football because that's kind of what we know like draw your concepts and lessons from whatever the [ __ ] is relevant to you and there are lessons from literally everywhere but i will say

football is a little bit better for business just just because you know there's teamwork involved there's leadership involved there's a lot more repetitions so just like you know i would say even like investment you know so like professional that's why there's so many lessons we can learn from something like ray dalio because you have faster iterations against investing in different companies versus an industry like ours where you know the cycle time might be a year two years three years for a game to come out and so the lessons learned are generally slower so get your lessons get them from anywhere you can and don't be prejudiced dude i play [ __ ] you know max three games i don't like them but i study them study whatever you can get your lessons all right maybe the next thing we could talk about you know we kind of literally

talking about company culture what are some of the things that can go awry and so maybe i can start like what i've seen but when you don't have a good company culture in these type of cultures that lead to actually yeah you're going to become a shitty pm because you're in one of these cultures i'll [ __ ] say it all right god damn it but i would say one is where we talked about the importance of having real discussions where you know if you can't have real discussions then you can't get feedback you can't improve i think a second thing to understand is more around the ability to do root cause analysis so how does that manifest well basically if there's a problem in the company but because you know ed is friends with sally and

you can't point out any problems with sally you can't do a true root cause analysis and get just like hey actually you [ __ ] up here you [ __ ] up there you know you the other thing kind of happened here and if you don't have like a safe environment but also have accountability and be able to trace things back you can't have root cause analysis and if you can't do the root cause analysis then you're not going to be able to solve your problems you're just going to be papering over it and then the other thing is you know what kind of skills are you building are you building storytelling skills where you're like trying to dress up numbers and you get really great at making powerpoint presentations that paint a rosy picture but really you're just papering over problems and like i said are you solutions oriented or are you narrative oriented you know what i mean like you're just you're trying to convince management oh no no don't worry things are fine look look look at the the western market tier one numbers from paid user acquisition you know these

numbers are great but yeah don't worry about all the other stuff [ __ ] that right and so like so that's another problem and that kind of and maybe even tying this back to optimism there is a difference between being narrative driven telling stories covering people's asses that's very tied to what i call blind optimism hey why are you being such a [ __ ] downer don't don't like raise these issues or problems you're not you're not being a team player you're not being optimistic no no no there's blind optimism which is papering over problems and just [ __ ] praying for some [ __ ] miracle to come save your ass and then there's practical optimism meaning i know the problems and i know i can figure out a solution any any other thoughts on culture right i mean it's i think with with product development product

management like we talked about it's so unique to each culture and i think definitely spending some time to figure out what what it is at your company is super important but that that said i think it's always and we've we're philosophers here jk but i think that it's been a difficult road in my life to be almost 100 percent transparent in in many of the ways not 100 very transparent and it certainly creates bumps but i think ultimately it gets you to a a better place and and so i think that's really important where you know it's like well my my culture is not like that or it's like well if you really believe in your heart that that's not a good thing bring it up and and i honestly think that even if you get like the worst reaction which i have

that's that's a that's good for you because you got you need to know that and i think i've in my life i've steered away from some of those conflicts and found that they come and bite you in the ass later on yeah it's better to just bring them up and and face them earlier because it's kind of like product it's probably kind of like mean lean methodology it's it's kind of better to find out about the the defects in your your environment now than it is to find out later but let me present an alternative perspective on this which is i actually think in a lot of companies no one will ever have those conversations and why because like if you're just working at a company and especially if you're like working on a com a product that's already kind of profitable and whatever like what incentive do you have to have those hard conversations you know one of our advisors is um a guy by the name of christian sugerstall very successful entrepreneur and one of the things that he advised me about is like

for a lot of the startups that he's worked with they have had like a what he calls come to jesus moment because you know they're running out of cash [ __ ] a lot of problems happen and then they have the hard conversations right like so there's one kind of potential perspective where you know if you're at a large company i don't know if you're ever gonna have those hard conversations because unless you're facing death like you're you're staring death in the face and it's like god damn it either i have this conversation or we're gonna [ __ ] die right like i actually don't think for at a lot of large you're working at facebook or google why would you ever have that conversation so i i guess i'm just presenting this alternative view yeah it's easy for me to say you know hey you should have that conversation but i think it's you know it's part of it is personality part of it is also situational like

you know you're you're you're at a you're you're live operating a profitable game you're just i don't know i'm kind of doubtful some people are ever going to have that conversation uh see i i think yeah yeah and and i think you have to i mean i think if you want to be successful i mean i my i don't know why i've always felt this way in life but it's like i always feel like this shadow is is running after me and it's this shadow of people saying well that's life brett you know you got to get a job where you don't like and you gotta do this and you gotta have meetings and um you're gonna have to drive to work and you're gonna have to [ __ ] have one-on-ones just a list of those you know and you're you're gonna have to you know you're gonna have to be able to like it just i just heard that so often and i was like [ __ ] that [ __ ] you and [ __ ] that that narrative yeah but the only way that i've been able to achieve not having those things happen to me is working really hard and

being able to kind of like face those difficult conversations in the face either in in my own face or like like you know like looking in the mirror and going is this really how i should live or in someone else's face and being like yo this is whack you know what i mean and and seeing the reaction and the reaction being well you're out and and for me it's like okay well i guess then i gotta go start my own thing because i had the conversation about what i thought was right and the person kicked me out and what do i do now and so and i and i think it's it's like this is a jocko thing it's like you got to be careful about those those little things like because they creep up on you it's like you do it for a couple weeks and then also you get comfortable at big company and they're paying you dollars all of a sudden a couple weeks is a couple months all of a sudden you're there what two years all of a sudden you're making the equity oh they gave me the more stock and i said all of a sudden you're 35 you're 40. you're 45. wait a minute what now i'm

making a good money can't do anything else oh [ __ ] my you know that was it yeah that's it and so uh i think you got like uh people will write two paragraphs of my company and i'll be like yo too long i'll literally email be like yeah email's too long and then they've gotta be reading it thinking what is this jerk talking about he we only 45 people like he's probably not getting that many emails but for me it's just that slippery slope you got to be so on so you have to i should have said at the beginning but it's like you have to place a lens of intensity on things that don't seem intense and it's weird for people like i kind of live my life a lot of times like in some aspects people like why do you care so much like chill out and i'm like yo like you have to place this lens of intensity on things that aren't intense so that you don't have to have that conversation they come to jesus conversation you know what i mean like i'm i'm so strict on things in my company people like why you know i'm relaxed i'm like no i'm not i'm

not gonna relax i don't want to have that jacob jesus conversation i'm having that right now on this thing that seems totally irrelevant dude you know so i don't know all right well why don't we wrap up this conversation with one last topic which is more around common mistakes and so you know we've both been in the industry for a while we've seen a lot of common pm mistakes and so for you brett what are some of the common mistakes that you see like young pm's make time and time and time again and even the senior guys make time again i mean don't [ __ ] lead with your opinion i don't not one i always said pms i do not want to hear you start a sentence with i think like [ __ ] your thought i don't give a [ __ ] like we don't need another opinion we have developers who can code we have for like producers who can think we have pro like project managers like we don't need an opinion it's okay to add your opinion after you establish the value that you

created to it right and it's it's okay to to say it within a context of of a framework or or a guess around something that you're saying well i think that they're going to like this right like and these are the reasons why but don't do that that's that's like that thing i couldn't stand i mean we already talked about don't be a project manager uh like don't don't just react to everything and think you're super sweet because you're answering all these questions like that's that's a no-go and i would say spend time learning people and human stuff because if you're in a larger business that is super important i think it's it's very it's a lot less important actually as an entrepreneur i know people like talk about that but i think you you can you have so much more ownership as an entrepreneur that i think it's less important honestly like i don't think that you have to be i mean there's just so many examples of people who are the biggest [ __ ] being super successful that i just don't think it's important in fact in some ways it's probably bad

right like i mean i don't want to list people on this podcast but there are plenty of legendary people that sounds like they were kind of a huge [ __ ] right and they were certainly successful so if you're gonna be if you're gonna go to career track get that whole human interaction down i never got it down so don't listen to me about how to do it but um yeah that one's important yeah i would say from my perspective like common mistakes is like not one just kind of like getting lost in details not seeing the force from the trees and that not only applies to product but that also applies to your career and yourself and so like whether it's developing some kind of framework or an operating system for your career your for your future career path by understanding where do you want to go from here from here and how do you get there right what does that plan look like i think a lot of pms generally just tend to just turn the crank and just kind of do what they're doing but they don't have a plan for how they get better now like part of

one of the things that we do and i would recommend for other people is to develop something that i call a skills development matrix which really like breaks down if you want to be a great product manager here the areas of skills here's kind of your assessment here's what you need to do to kind of get there so i would recommend that i'm also just thinking too small like you know i should this button be green versus blue or how about you introduce a completely new feature or you kind of blow up existing like like thinking bigger to try and you know really move the needle rather than looking for these small incremental improvements it's like oh [ __ ] we ran the a b test again it actually flipped you know it's like you're thinking way too [ __ ] small um i would also say the inability to prioritize approp appropriately right and so like i i think it's very important because even as at a larger company you don't have infinite resources so understanding again going back to basis of competition in understanding like what are the

things that are going to move the needle the most and then being able to prioritize resources against you know whether it's uh you know eo framework or ice rice or however you want to do it but being able to prioritize and probably um a couple two more things one would just be like people who do a lot of things around the root cause rather than really addressing actually focusing on the root cause and then getting to to problems and i don't know maybe probably the last mistake i would say is we already talked about a couple times situational context right just understanding can i apply this to my current situation can i apply this thing over here to my current situation everybody's always running around with their hammers right and so like um just just understand when and how to apply things and that usually comes with depth and that's and so situational context understanding situational context is

tied to depth so like if you're like well you know we should be using jira instead of asana here and you know and i ask you why and you tell me you've never actually tried asana then i'm gonna go tell you to go [ __ ] off because like that's what happens a lot well why are you doing this well i use it at my other company not [ __ ] you go study all of them and tell me why do you even understand the metaphors of these different pm tools do you understand these things at a fundamental level so that you can do the situation you can be able to understand situational context yeah all right i had one last one la one last one i thought of sorry that i should have added because i think this is the counter to what i've been talking about is it's it's okay to have less than perfect system so or numbers or or any of these things and and i think what i'm seeing in the market we talked about this probably last week jk is that if people don't

think it's 100 accurate they'll just basically rely on their intuition right like well we don't know if this is the right um like like with that tool that we built to look at average revenue it's like well it's not a hundred percent accurate it's like well what are you using now what nothing okay do you want to know that every single mission feature release has been negative for the last two years yeah you know yeah okay well then yeah sure this isn't this isn't the thing that just shows you the way i think the same thing goes for operations and product development and all these little things is it's like no one wants if it's if there's nothing there it's like they're scared to even start and these things they happen over time you chip away at them it's like okay well a known entity for example is the cost of an additional week of development time that's a known entity let's use that to make some decisions okay and then we release a couple features okay now we're learning that these type of fee you know

start building and and and it'll start forming and as you get each one of those little data points will get your your system more and more accurate and more and more valuable and but don't just go well we don't have anything so we're not going to [ __ ] start you know or it's too expensive to run this to stat sig then it says well just do the best you can yeah you get some information look at whatever you know and then build a build a sensitivity model around the known and the unknown which uh yeah so there's so much there's a it's an awesome it's awesome being a product manager man i miss it but i feel like i am kind of one right now so it's like it doesn't really bother me yeah all right everybody that's it kind of a long conversation on how to be a great product manager hopefully that was helpful to you and we have episode one of philosophy [ __ ] friday complete there we have it that's it hopefully we'll catch y'all later another time if we didn't insult you guys by now bye everybody

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