Why great AI products are all about the data | Shaun Clowes (CPO Confluent, ex-Salesforce, Atlassian)

Lenny's Podcast: Product | Growth | Career

Lenny Rachitsky

Technology, Business, Entrepreneurship

5 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 29 December 2024

⏱️ 82 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Shaun Clowes is the chief product officer at Confluent and former CPO at Salesforce’s MuleSoft and at Metromile. He was also the first head of growth at Atlassian, where he led product for Jira Agile and built the first-ever B2B growth team. In our conversation, we discuss:

• Why most PMs are bad, and how to fix this

• Why great AI products are all about the data

• Why he changed his mind about being data-driven

• How to build your B2B growth team

• How to choose your next career stop

• Much more

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Brought to you by:

• Enterpret—Transform customer feedback into product growth

• BuildBetter—AI for product teams

• Wix Studio—The web creation platform built for agencies

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Find the transcript at: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/why-great-ai-products-are-all-about-the-data-shaun-clowes

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Where to find Shaun Clowes:

• X: https://x.com/ShaunMClowes

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shaun-clowes-80795014/

• Website: https://shaunclowes.com/about-shaun

• Reforge: https://www.reforge.com/profiles/shaun-clowes

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Where to find Lenny:

• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com

• X: https://twitter.com/lennysan

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/

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In this episode, we cover:

(00:00) Shaun’s background

(05:08) The state of product management

(09:33) Becoming a 10x product manager

(13:23) Specific ways to leverage AI in product management

(17:15) Feedback rivers

(19:20) AI's impact on data management

(24:35) The future of enterprise businesses with AI

(35:41) Data-driven decision-making

(45:50) Building effective growth teams

(50:18) The evolution of product-led growth

(56:16) Career insights and decision-making

(01:07:45) Failure corner

(01:12:32) Final thoughts and lightning round

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Referenced:

• Steve Blank’s website: https://steveblank.com/

• Getting Out of the Building. 2 Minutes to See Why: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbMgWr1YVfs

• OpenAI: https://openai.com/

• Claude: https://claude.ai/

• Sachin Rekhi on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sachinrekhi/

• Video: Building Your Product Intuition with Feedback Rivers: https://www.sachinrekhi.com/video-building-your-product-intuition-with-feedback-rivers

• Confluent: https://www.confluent.io

• Workday: https://www.workday.com/

• Lenny and Friends Summit: https://lennyssummit.com/

• A conversation with OpenAI’s CPO Kevin Weil, Anthropic’s CPO Mike Krieger, and Sarah Guo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxkvVZua28k

• Anthropic: https://www.anthropic.com/

• Salesforce: https://www.salesforce.com/

• Atlassian: https://www.atlassian.com/

• Jira: https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira

• Ashby: https://www.ashbyhq.com/

• Occam’s razor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor

• Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/shopifys-growth-archie-abrams

• Charlie Munger quote: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/11903426-show-me-the-incentive-and-i-ll-show-you-the-outcome

• Elena Verna on how B2B growth is changing, product-led growth, product-led sales, why you should go freemium not trial, what features to make free, and much more: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/elena-verna-on-why-every-company

• The ultimate guide to product-led sales | Elena Verna: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/the-ultimate-guide-to-product-led

• Metromile: https://www.metromile.com/

• Tom Kennedy on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tom-kennedy-37356b2b/

• Building Wiz: the fastest-growing startup in history | Raaz Herzberg (CMO and VP Product Strategy): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/building-wiz-raaz-herzberg

• Wiz: https://www.wiz.io

• Colin Powell’s 40-70 rule: https://www.42courses.com/blog/home/2019/12/10/colin-powells-40-70-rule

• Detroiters on Netflix: https://www.netflix.com/title/80165019

• Glean: https://www.glean.com/

• Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity: https://www.amazon.com/Radical-Candor-Kick-Ass-Without-Humanity/dp/1250103509

• Listen: Five Simple Tools to Meet Your Everyday Parenting Challenges: https://www.amazon.com/Listen-Simple-Everyday-Parenting-Challenges/dp/0997459301

• Empress Falls Canyon and abseiling: https://bmac.com.au/blue-mountains-canyoning/empress-falls-canyon-and-abseiling

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Recommended books:

• The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses: https://www.amazon.com/Lean-Startup-Entrepreneurs-Continuous-Innovation/dp/0307887898

• Inspired: How to Create Products Customers Love: https://www.amazon.com/Inspired-Create-Products-Customers-Love/dp/0981690408

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Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected].

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Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed.

Get full access to Lenny's Newsletter at www.lennysnewsletter.com/subscribe

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	I love that you have very strong opinion about this, which is just the state of the product
0:04.7	management career and how most PMs are not that great.
0:08.7	Why is it that product management is still such a relatively undeveloped discipline?
0:12.9	We're like 15 to 20 years into this.
0:15.0	And so there's something about the current state of product management that isn't getting
0:18.4	at the truly important things, the truly valued things. If we were doctors, you'd be like, that's totally I'd set for it.
0:23.9	What's the answer, Sean? How do we solve this problem? Everything, always talk from the customer's
0:28.3	perspective, from the market's perspective, from the competitors' perspective. A very small
0:31.5	number of PMs do that. They get dragged into internal politics. They get dragged into scrum management or scrum execution or product delivery.
0:39.5	And you just can't win that way.
0:40.6	You kind of have this hot take that the way AI will most impact product management is data
0:45.2	management.
0:45.8	Well, you've got this synthesis machine, which is this LLM thing that's going to help you do synthesis.
0:49.7	But if it hasn't got all that data to do synthesis on top of, it's got nothing. And so that means that L&Ms can only be as good as the data they are given and how recent that data is.
0:58.3	In the future, if you can easily clone a B2B SaaS app like Salesforce or Atlassian,
1:02.6	what happens to these businesses long term?
1:04.8	Do they just become, are they all in trouble?
1:06.5	People really underestimate where the value is created in these applications,
1:12.8	and they just kind of get it completely wrong.
1:26.5	Today, my guest is Sean Klaus. Sean is Chief Product Officer at Confluent. Previously, he was Chief Product Officer at Mulesoft, which is a billion-dollar business within Salesforce.
1:28.1	Before that, he was Chief Product Officer of Metromile, a public auto insurance technology company. And prior to that,
1:33.2	he spent six years at Atlassian, where he ran the GERA Agile and also built the first ever
	...

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