Mind the Product’s James Mayes on Defining a Product Manifesto

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Jerry Maguire Clip
I'm gonna show you the money.

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Jerry Maguire Clip
You're going to rub it in that. Jerry, I want you to sandwich with me, brother.

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Jerry Maguire Clip
I got Boxer on the other side. Yeah. Show you the money.

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Jerry Maguire Clip
But I show you. Show me the money. Show me the money. Yeah.

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Jerry Maguire Clip
Just show me the money.

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Jerry Maguire Clip
That's it. Yeah. Let's show me the money. I'm in the field, Jerry. Show me your money, Jerry. You better yell. Drop in the.

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Ben Hillman
Fight. An iconic scene from an iconic movie. Tom Cruise plays the eponymous Jerry Maguire, a sports agent whose come to Jesus moment results in a long time partner claiming all of his clients as well as his job. The clip that you just heard is Jerry at his lowest point after writing a heartfelt memo about focusing on the why behind what he and his agency do.

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Ben Hillman
Instead of focusing on the how much. And while this story is a fun fictional romp, it has roots with a real story. And Quibi's own Jeffrey Katzenberg headed up Disney's Motion picture division in the eighties and nineties. He released his own memo in 1991 titled The World Is Changing. Some Thoughts on Our Business, which detailed his thoughts on Disney and the state of the motion picture business, as well as warnings to heed.

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Ben Hillman
It ended up leaking to the trades and Jeffrey was ridiculed, but it ultimately proved to have insightful lessons. So much so that it inspired Cameron Crowe to include it in his film. To give you a sense of what this memo was all about, here's a little bit of an excerpt. We substituted dollars with creativity and big stars with talent we believed in.

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Ben Hillman
Success ensued. We found ourselves attracting the caliber of talent with which event movies could be made. And more and more, we began making them. Others will scramble for higher and higher ground, spending feverishly to keep their noses above water. We, on the other hand, have the internal talent, creativity and absolute ability to control our own destiny. I can dream up all I want.

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Ben Hillman
What it would be like to be in that moment. And you probably are wondering what it has to do with me to be SaaS or even today's episode. Truth be told, I just watched Jerry Maguire and I learned about the Katzenberg connection. I realize it's a pretty darn similar sentiment to what James Mays, co-founder of mine in the product, had to say when we interviewed him.

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Ben Hillman
He sat down with Neel Desai, Paddle Director of Product at SaaStock 2022 to discuss how you can create your own product manifesto, taking into consideration ethical guidelines and asking ourselves if we should really build what we build. Ultimately, James found professional success in addition to moral desserts selling Mind the Product to Pendo shortly before he spoke with Neel in 2020 to relax and let us take the notes for you.

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Ben Hillman
And by the time you're finished, you'll be ready to write your own manifesto, just like Jerry, Jeffrey and of course, James names from Paddle. It's Protect the Hustle, or we explore the truth behind the strategy and tactics of beta business growth to make you an outstanding operator. On today's episode, James Mays helps you define your product manifesto. We talk about going from pandemic uncertainties to a pandemic exit.

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Ben Hillman
Should we build what we build? Thinking through ethical guidelines. How to find resilient and curious product managers. And finally, how to do more with less. After you finish the episode, check out the show notes for an in-depth field guide focused on what we go over and after you leave your five star review, tell us the title of your product manifesto.

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Ben Hillman
First up, James talks about going from pandemic uncertainties to a pento exit.

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Neel Desai
James, thanks for being here, man.

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James Mayes
My pleasure. It was good to be a star stock and great to be working with pedal steel.

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Neel Desai
Yeah. Excited to jam on a bunch of different things. Product acquisition. The state of events in 2022.

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James Mayes
But nothing. Got a few things in common. Yeah, let's play like.

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Neel Desai
Yeah, I guess just to give the audience some context, like, what's your background and how do you why products, right? Why is this a thing of all the things you could be doing? I do this.

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James Mayes
I often describe my career as kind of an accidental career as the result of engineered serendipity, I came out at university with a bunch of different degrees, didn't know what to do, fell into recruitment by accident, built a bunch of high woolens technology teams. Then we started looking at start ups. I know I'm going to go do start ups.

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James Mayes
My first startup, I did the classic move. I raised about 150 grand in Angel Money and then made every single decision wrong so that for that I need to go work for start up the slightly further ahead, you know, learn the ropes a little better and ended up working with a startup was building a recruiting platform in London where I could do some commercial work and ended up working quite closely with the head of product, John Barstow, and from there John introduced me to these foreign management events.

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James Mayes
But this is cool. I really like where these events are going. So I started getting a little bit more involved, particularly on the commercial side and helping to grow the business. I kind of lets me join in on the products full time. I spent the last 12 years bootstrapping that to the exit earlier this year.

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Neel Desai
I feel like the last two or three years I've been particularly, I've had both. Are you right to state the obvious where you probably had COVID upended everything about the way you probably did your business? Walk me through what March 2020 was like for you as the world shut down running at Events Company with a real employees and payroll to have?

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James Mayes
Absolutely. I mean, at this point, March 2020, we were maybe 20 people on the payroll. We spent ten years growing the business. We spent 2019 investing hard in both staff and platform. 2020 was the year it was going to pay out, Right? We were ready at the start, moderate. And then these news headlines started appearing is like that.

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James Mayes
Event's not running anymore. And at that event, guys, we might be in trouble here.

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Neel Desai
Yes.

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James Mayes
March 2020 landed UK goes into lockdown. Our revenue disappeared overnight. I mean, 2019 we turned over 5 million in a week. Got nothing. So we looked at the runways like this. Nine months runway, the bank account. We can do something with this. Right. And then you realize the bank account that's mostly also deposits and ticket sales were stuff that you still call from.

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James Mayes
Okay, well, we live and die by our reputation, So we're going to offer refunds. We're going to do this right. If you want us to keep your money, roll it for us. We will. But if you want a refund, say the word. Is that so? We did that that nine month Rob, like the guy that two months from my we're real fast.

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Neel Desai
How was your mental state at that point I'm like how I'm sure it couldn't have been easy just like with your team and.

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James Mayes
We had a we had a tough time. I'm not going to lie. That was a tough time I'm on. The product was built by product managers. Initially, I was the only one of the founding team who wasn't actually a product guy. I was the commercial guy. So we did some product thinking to say, okay, what do we know?

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James Mayes
We've got that solid. I've got 300,000 product managers around the world who love us. We've got ten years worth of amazing content. We've got all these speakers we're putting on stage and there was, right, what can we do this digital? So our first move was actually to say we've built a membership model, premium subscription content Sprite. You've all been using one to put product for the last ten years.

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James Mayes
We've been amazing resource for all of you. We are going to have to switch the lights off if the world stays like this. So if you want it to stay alive, we need you to pay just a few bucks a month to keep us afloat. Subscription membership. Let's do this. Let's get this out quick and dirty. We did this site rankings like, let's make a list of all the things that might go in a membership product, but that after the community people came back and said, Yeah, that's we all do this.

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James Mayes
That one word will, but this one, we learn a lot of things if we're built. What we thought was you felt it would have been wrong. So that's not rank. It was crucial. And then that first version again, it was how fast can we put something in the hands of customers and whether is right so.

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Neel Desai
That you had an audience that you've curated over ten years, right? I mean, you knew these people.

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James Mayes
Yeah. I mean, the audience was there, they were ready for it. So we put that first version out. It went live in, I want to say about six weeks, it was filthy dirty.

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Neel Desai
So, I mean, you got to get something out there, right?

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James Mayes
Absolutely. Absolutely. And actually, this is where we started working with Pablo in the first instance, because we were looking at this and saying, we can take subscription payments, we can take credit cards. And those companies that do that. But much of record and tax, yeah, double that. So I was trying to add fraud and the paddle says, well, I think we've got a solution here.

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James Mayes
So paddle were a key part of actually getting us to market incredibly fast. And it was that product that actually saved the business.

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Neel Desai
Yeah, that's, uh, I feel like that's an awesome story and like turning what could have been the downfall of ten years of hard work, but finding the silver lining in that and in giving value to the people that really found, you know, community in the things you had to build. Yeah. Walk me through the six week MVP of that membership model to selling the business on who they are is probably familiar with like how did that how did you get from there to there.

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James Mayes
So they the membership stuff that would live on, say April, May 2020, very fast. We all off your first few hundred customers. It's like a validation. We are building something people want. They will pay for this. This is good. So let me start. I find shooting at productions like getting rid of a lot of the plug ins and the patchwork that it got.

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James Mayes
It's a market that's not signing that up. So we lived on that for a good six months or so, and then from there it was going to continue to grow those numbers, but also move the workshops online, Look at hybrid conferences. We were up in customer, so we started down that side of things and then towards the end of last year, I mean, those conversations of, okay, let's take a beat.

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James Mayes
We have been firefighting for the last two years trying to keep the lights on. We have successfully achieved that. What do we actually want to go next? We've been so busy trying to fight those fires and trying to keep the lights on that we have not had time to say, what do we want to be in five years time?

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James Mayes
So we started that conversation and we cut out a few different ideas, worked around internally. But again, it's like there are we fact Nani opinions inside the building. You only get outside the building and fun facts. So I started talking to other conference organizers, other training providers, previous event sponsors that we'd worked with on the major conferences. It's like these are the things that might have right?

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James Mayes
Does if we look forward five years ago, five years forward, is this stuff we should sunset? Is this stuff that we should go harder on? Is there stuff that we don't do that we should? What should we be looking at next? And four or five of those companies started turning around to saying, does this mean you're for sale?

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James Mayes
Well, we don't need to, but we've got shareholders. I mean, if you put a number down on that, I have to take it to the board who will have that discussion and see where it goes. And a few companies actually. So yeah, we want to put a number that for this we want to start this conversation. Okay, let's see where this goes.

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James Mayes
And then Bento was the one where we started looking at what their strategic goals were and where they were headed, what mine the product does. And it was it was pretty early, pretty obvious early on, but there's actually a really good fit there. And I was saying we want to be more than just software, whereas one, the product was often described as we're everything a product manager needs except software.

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James Mayes
Well, okay, I guess that fits.

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Neel Desai
That's, that's, that's great. I feel like a first reading in a place where you don't want to sell is a perfect place to be. Right in terms of an entrepreneur and on really doing what's right for you guys in the long term. And Pando has a great brand and product for for product managers. And so it seems like a really good fit.

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Neel Desai
How's it been so far?

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James Mayes
I mean, there's there's a lot of ways in which it was a pretty good fit. One of the things that we did early on in those conversations also was we looked at the company values to see whether we have match there or not. And I would say we're maniacal about the customer mind. The product would say the customer breaks the tie.

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James Mayes
Okay, So we're both pretty focused on customer aptitude being the most important thing. We are both very, very customer centric. That's great. There's another guy from who was from there, but then you kind you do find this, I suppose culture clash is the best by putting that from among the product perspective. We were a small team of less than 20 people, UK based and very lumpy event revenues for the most part overseas.

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James Mayes
No. And then you got Pando, who are a thousand people, US based VC funded stable subscription revenue. Very, very different, very model. So yeah, there was a good sort of six months worth of, I would say hard times just going through the integration and getting those details right. But one of the things we were able to keep able to do is on a regular basis, check back in is like the reasons that we did this acquisition, the reasons that we did this deal, are they still valid?

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James Mayes
They still hold are we still true if we're all good at the big picture, the vision here is still right. So it's details that we're working through these are all solvable problems.

00:11:05:20 - 00:11:17:22
Neel Desai
Moment bug good graduations is its first really special and I think it's really cool to see you transition from pre-COVID to what happened during COVID. And now with Hendo, I'm excited to see where my the product goes.

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James Mayes
This is this is very much what my product is doing at the moment and saying we've now got over most of the integration work. Now let's take a look at the next couple of years. You know, economic landscape has shifted since the deal was done. So that obviously has an impact that we need to think about some other products not having that conversation with and about what is the most staff, what are the crucial things from the product over the last ten years is being can we stay commercially sustainable as a bootstrap business?

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James Mayes
But we're now part of a much larger organization, so maybe we can think differently. Maybe some of that stuff is behind subscription paywalls. Maybe we should challenge that thinking. Is that still the right approach or is there a different way? So keep an open mind about over the next couple of months and I think you'll start to see signs coming out to market as they move through that strategic exercise and figure out what's the next most important thing.

00:12:00:00 - 00:12:04:03
Ben Hillman
Next, James and Neel talk about should we really build what we build.

00:12:07:08 - 00:12:24:13
Neel Desai
Something you and I were talking about a little bit earlier before the interview was product ethics. You've seen inside a lot of different you talk to thousands of PMS over the years, seasons and a lot of pride. The organization's one thing as an industry I don't think we've thought a lot about is beyond what to build, Should we be building it, when to be building in what?

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Neel Desai
What are those sort of hard lines that define the things we're building? Talk to me a little bit about this. How do you think about product ethics on a high level? And then we can be.

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James Mayes
I mean, I think it's something that people have been raising their awareness of over the last couple of years. Like I was having this conversation other day, I've never tried to into my phone, but now I'm seeing advertising. Does this mean my TV is listening to me? You're starting to see a little bit. My paranoia created and I started to see some people saying, I don't like the way Facebook is influencing Democratic decisions.

00:12:51:11 - 00:13:13:12
James Mayes
So you start to see delete Facebook account campaigns and things like that. So I do think consumers generally are becoming more conscious of it. Likewise, you see some of the way, some of the things the software can do in terms of tracking your habits, sharing data, looking at the analytics. I think product managers themselves are starting to become a little bit more conscious of that and asking the question just because we cam doesn't necessarily mean we should and we still are right side of the creepy line on this one.

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James Mayes
And then you see things like the way abortion laws changing in the U.S. and if you're buying certain things from pharmacies, there is that data being shared with it does not give any indication as to a lady in a practice situation where she can't be sharing that information. So I think these ethical considerations are becoming more and more top of mind, and it's something that we've been putting more speakers on stage on on the last couple of years to actually start raising those questions and have more of managers thinking about this stuff.

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James Mayes
And the reason is this doesn't matter who you talk to in software, pretty much everybody is familiar with that old and recent quote, software is eating the world's right, has been going around a good ten years now. Everyone now is like, I'll give you an updated version of it. If software managers are reaching the world, product managers are writing the menu.

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James Mayes
You are the people that we need to influence. We don't necessarily need to tell you how to make the decision, but we need to make sure that you are considering the decision. We need to make sure that you are asking those questions. And my colleague on the product is now managing director there. Emily Tate has one of the best framings for this that I've ever seen.

00:14:07:10 - 00:14:16:03
James Mayes
What would foreshadow that deepest, darkest corner of the Internet where all the real trolls lurk? If you build this feature, what would they do? Just consider that before taking another step.

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Neel Desai
And as as I see you, I used to be a nice IPM. Now I'm leading a product team whose responsibility is it? The kind of set the guardrails are a framework around this because on one hand you don't want to micromanage PMS and and these things have nuance to them and it's a case by case basis. There's also a lot of other stakeholders like data teams, right?

00:14:34:09 - 00:14:45:12
Neel Desai
Engineering. Obviously, when you think about instilling product ethics at a larger company, whose responsibility is it? They kind of set those values and framework so that the team can kind of adhere to them if that's the right way to go about it.

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James Mayes
I think there's a large responsibility does fall to the product lead ahead in the same way that as a product leader you might have a fleet of product managers working for you and you'll say these are the tests that we will do. These are the ways in which we will test confidence before we build something. These are the things that we want to understand about our ISP's before we go build this feature.

00:15:00:17 - 00:15:15:17
James Mayes
Well, the same is true of risk, right? So if we're building these things, what are the risk considerations that we have? Are there certain steps that I expect every product manager to go through before we start work on a feature? And I think it's for the product leader to say, here are certain steps that we should always consider when we build a new thing.

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James Mayes
How might it be misused if this thing were available to trolls? What damage might it do? And maybe it's just for the product leader to say four or five questions and say to each product manager, When you consider a new feature, just do this. This is enough for the staff. I just want to know is considered.

00:15:27:15 - 00:15:42:03
Neel Desai
I think to your point and needs to be baked into the process, right? It can't just be a hoping that a PM on their own volition thinks of this because there's a lot going on. Right? And then so oftentimes it's it's hard to think before you get started, right. What are the things you need to look out for once you actually dive deeper?

00:15:42:06 - 00:16:00:08
James Mayes
Yeah. And I think the other thing is that there's a lot of startup ethics that is about the sort of move fast and break things. Sure, it's okay sometimes for a piece of code to fall over and roll it back. People's personal safety, that's not a move fast to break things. You know, those considerations need to be early in the process.

00:16:00:08 - 00:16:07:00
Ben Hillman
And now James talks about thinking through ethical guidelines.

00:16:07:00 - 00:16:27:23
Neel Desai
How do you think about when balancing that line is at odds with a business objective or a metric that commercial cares about? Because I think it's easier for us on the product team to say, Look, we have this hard line here, but it gets complicated, right? When we have stakeholders outside of the product team. Is there an element of this that requires alignment across the company beyond just product and engineer?

00:16:27:23 - 00:16:46:15
James Mayes
Yeah, I mean, I mentioned earlier that both Mind the Products and, and I share this customer value, right? And they're being maniacal about the customer mind, the product, the customer breaks the tie. I think that's what that you can bake into your company values that helps you make the right decisions so you can weigh up any decision. Say we could do this, we could do this, which one would the customer want you to do?

00:16:46:15 - 00:16:52:07
James Mayes
Which one would they be more comfortable with? And it's a really, really simple thing, but it helps guide you to the right choice every time.

00:16:52:09 - 00:17:10:07
Neel Desai
Yeah, I think on the flip side of this too, I feel like the regulations are coming around as well. The for consumer protection, right? I think in the states there are some states now, for example, require self-serve cancellation in the product, like you have to give your customers a way to cancel their subscription without having a bunch of dark UX patterns or obsolete things like that.

00:17:10:15 - 00:17:23:01
James Mayes
This is because you built product for years and years, years where there was no self-serve cancellation and fundamentally, if you misbehave and you do bad things, you will get regulated. Well, you could get a break yourselves and then the chances are the regulators will actually leave you alone. So which would you rather.

00:17:23:05 - 00:17:35:18
Neel Desai
I joke that I don't want the regulators to be a shadow PM on our teams, right? It should be us that proactively make these decisions. And then the regulators are there as a safety net, not actually defining the use of your product.

00:17:35:18 - 00:17:47:02
James Mayes
They are. They're not going to catch everything. You should be catching everything. And if you do, they will come to you. They'll happily leave you alone. But the moment customers start complaining or the moment you start seeing front page news stories, that's where the regulators are going to come sniffing around.

00:17:47:02 - 00:17:47:09
Neel Desai
Yeah.

00:17:47:18 - 00:17:49:15
James Mayes
It's in your power to avoid that if you so wish.

00:17:49:22 - 00:18:02:01
Neel Desai
If you have a newer PM listening to this, their company tracks a lot of data, but they're not doing anything around this. Where does one start in terms of defining values around product and thinking through the ethical kind of guidelines around the impact of your product?

00:18:02:01 - 00:18:05:17
James Mayes
I think in many ways product is still a nascent discipline, right? There's a lot of companies with a very imagining.

00:18:05:17 - 00:18:08:23
Neel Desai
So different that every company like what product really is, is so.

00:18:08:23 - 00:18:27:12
James Mayes
Different. I mean, if I ask ten product leaders and CBOs, what does good product manager look like, I will get ten different answers drawn to you. So I think on this one, I would say start by looking at product organizations that you actually admire and then look at their values. If they turned into an organization that you admire, that you believe does things well and hold itself to high standards, take a look at the values.

00:18:27:18 - 00:18:38:20
James Mayes
What have they got as guiding their decisions? What can you replicate from that? How can you learn from them? Now? There be some stuff that you learn and you test these. I actually that's not quite right for us. But you started from a good place and you're then able to iterate.

00:18:38:20 - 00:18:42:07
Neel Desai
Are there any that come to mind as having done a particular great job of this?

00:18:42:07 - 00:18:58:16
James Mayes
I think wise, probably transfer wise in London I was strict taking the product and growth team, but again they focus on long term value for their customers. Again, is that customer centricity? Right? And they're financially regulated organization, but they tend to stay the right size by having those good guiding principles in mind. I think that'll do a great job.

00:18:58:16 - 00:19:13:11
James Mayes
I think one of the things I was talking to Patrick and Christine about a previous event was this idea of this generation of the web is about making it easier for you, whereas model of driving is message of the next generation is going to be out. We do it for you and again you keeping the customer at the heart of that conversation.

00:19:13:15 - 00:19:18:18
James Mayes
And I think if you do that, you will continue to find the right voice in these conversations.

00:19:19:16 - 00:19:26:23
Ben Hillman
Next up, James talks about how to find resilient and curious product managers.

00:19:26:23 - 00:19:50:19
Neel Desai
Speaking of KPIs and finding teams, I want to transition you a little bit about how to build product teams that lead to strong product cultures, right? Given that this is still relative to other disciplines in its nascent SI product means different things are different companies of different sizes and different verticals. How having spoken to a lot of PMS, how do we find and build the next generation of PMS for this industry?

00:19:50:19 - 00:20:05:07
Neel Desai
I know this is a particular topic you're particular passionate about and someone that works closely with a lot of like universities in my area, mentoring students, whatnot. I think it's something I spend a lot of time thinking about too. But it's hard. It's hard and the requirements shift a lot. Product 20 years ago means a product different today.

00:20:05:20 - 00:20:18:06
James Mayes
Than it two years ago. If you were a product manager, like you had to wrap up a year in a backlog. Yeah. Whereas now you also have go to market positioning your pricing strategies, you have competitive benchmarking. The Porter I think knows is so much broader than I ever was. Right. I think there's a couple of things that feed into this.

00:20:18:06 - 00:20:36:21
James Mayes
First, I think there are some organizations that do a great job of defining a product manifesto. And what I mean by that is they lay out the statement of this is product in this organization. This is what we expect of a business and this is what the business expect of us. So you have those guardrails, you have that sort of those rules of engagement based you set up and you can go back and review that every year or whatever it needed.

00:20:37:02 - 00:20:51:23
James Mayes
So you have that nice model set. I will be different from one organization to another. Secondly, I think one of the things that's become clear for them on the product events over the last decade or so is there is no one right way to do products. There are probably about 10,000. Almost the cheapest mistake to learn from is someone else's.

00:20:51:23 - 00:21:05:14
James Mayes
So we run these products like events that are free in over 200 cities. Go find your community, meet with all the product managers, have those conversations and learn from the mistakes that they've made. What are the earliest products and events I went to? I saw a lady who was new to the audience. Is that is this your first product tank?

00:21:05:14 - 00:21:15:14
James Mayes
How did you find it? As you said, something that stayed with me for the last decade as we built this thing. She said, My CEO is insane and my engineers will hate me. This has been therapy and I can see this is resonating.

00:21:15:19 - 00:21:35:05
Neel Desai
Because it's a very especially early stage. It's a very lonely job, right? There's a very few people at a company in early stage product that have the same vantage point that you do in between the leadership engineering your commercial teams. So you are getting a community of other teams around you. It's very therapeutic and just learning from others.

00:21:35:05 - 00:21:36:18
Neel Desai
On how they approach similar problems.

00:21:36:19 - 00:21:56:11
James Mayes
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, we're all in there. What are the other conversations I get asked on a fairly regular basis is where what we're find new PMS, where can I find it and what's, what are the most valuable attributes in your career managers. So we worked with a few companies on this recently and something that seems to be resonating and working well is you start talking to your engineers and ask them who they know in customer success.

00:21:56:16 - 00:22:13:15
James Mayes
Do you find a customer success person who cares enough about the problem to go talk to engineers? He's not afraid to start beating engineers over the head design The solution. There you have a customer success person who has all the makings of a product manager. And I would say the two most important personality attributes are probably resilience and curiosity.

00:22:13:16 - 00:22:17:08
James Mayes
So you just add as a way to identify somebody in your organization. You've demonstrated both of those.

00:22:17:10 - 00:22:34:08
Neel Desai
I couldn't agree more. We have a couple of great examples. A panel of folks who used to do CSS that have additions of product, and I think there are of all the traits of PMS, some of the things are easier to coach and train than others. Right? And I think CSB in the front lines there are immediately product experts, domain experts talking to customers all the time.

00:22:34:08 - 00:22:39:19
Neel Desai
Right. And so to your point, right, that's such a underrated way of recruiting new PMS, especially in a scaling organization.

00:22:40:00 - 00:22:55:04
James Mayes
Absolutely. Most of the product people that I know, one of their biggest challenges is actually getting enough time talking to customers. You get somebody from that background who feels really comfortable with that, really knows your customers, really understands their context of their problems, what they're trying to achieve.

00:22:55:04 - 00:23:01:22
Ben Hillman
And now James talks about doing more with less.

00:23:01:22 - 00:23:18:16
Neel Desai
Where do you think we talked about product is getting more complex as a role, as a as a discipline? Where do you see this going in the next 5 to 10 years as to what's become more sophisticated, data becomes more sophisticated, Do our roles become even narrower in scope? Is it something else? There's a lot of like means and jokes about big tech planning these days.

00:23:18:16 - 00:23:23:06
Neel Desai
What is 80 trends or patterns do you think our field is kind of transitioning into?

00:23:23:07 - 00:23:37:06
James Mayes
I think the current economic climate is actually going to lean quite hard on product managers in one particular area. Fundamentally, there are two ways to add to a company's bottom line, right? You can either make more money or you can spend less. Those are the only two things that are going to affect your bottom line at the end of the year.

00:23:37:06 - 00:23:53:06
James Mayes
And a lot of part managers, that's the other conversations I've been involved in over the last couple years is people focused on product like growth. Let's grow the revenue, let's find new customers, let's upsell, let's cross-sell this, reduce churn. Well, they're all good, but there's other great things that product can do too. So I was talking to a customer a couple of weeks ago who says we've been digging down in our product analytics recently.

00:23:53:07 - 00:24:13:22
James Mayes
There's one particular feature it costs us an absolute bomb to maintain. We spend about 200,000 a year on this and we realize the usage look kind of weird. So we started to get into the analytics a little bit more and then they realize, well, actually now this feature is still used. I guess we have to keep it. People do sleep connect and they like deeper and then they dig deeper and they find that actually the only people who go to that feature are people who navigated there by accident.

00:24:13:23 - 00:24:27:09
James Mayes
Nobody used it. Oh, okay. This is a quick test. How would you feel if we took this feature away then? Okay, well, I guess we can kill that and save 200,000 a year. I go straight to the bottom line. So I think the product role is actually going to continue to evolve and there's going to be a little bit more of a look at things like that.

00:24:27:09 - 00:24:31:06
James Mayes
Right now in this economic climate, you have to do more with less, right? Is one way you can do that.

00:24:31:06 - 00:24:54:07
Neel Desai
I also think it's up to product leaders to make sure that incentives are aligned or we look out for those things too, because, yeah, that premium is going to go to an all hands and say, Look, I killed this feature, but it was the right thing to do, right? And so I think it's it's up to leadership to also be cognizant that success as a PM all the definition of what a success will be and looks like also evolves into a more holistic definition than just who's launching or shipping.

00:24:54:07 - 00:24:58:12
Neel Desai
They're more like number of newest features, which isn't always correlating to customer value.

00:24:58:19 - 00:25:12:06
James Mayes
Absolutely. We were at a four hour tank event last night in Dublin and John was talking a lot about, okay, here's an idea. Okay, I'll draft and but how many people have had okay hours, How many people have dropped them by the wayside? And there's a lot of that does happen. And it's partly because you're not using the right or you're making them too weighty.

00:25:12:06 - 00:25:33:17
James Mayes
But it's also because, as you say, they're sometimes not aligned well enough with where the company is actually trying to get to, particularly what it's trying to deliver for its customers. They mind was like made a great point last night asking the question, what user behavior do you have to change in order to unlock customer value? So again, asking questions like that I think is the future of the world is getting closer and closer to what does the customer really want, how are we delivering value?

00:25:33:17 - 00:25:36:13
James Mayes
And all those two things actually tied close enough together in the work that we're doing.

00:25:36:13 - 00:25:48:22
Neel Desai
What are you most excited about? James Obviously you've gone through a bunch of change in the last year. He's been working with the team at Penn. No now, but I'm sure you have more free time to think about other things too. Like what are you most excited about it as you think about your personal journey in the next couple of years?

00:25:48:22 - 00:25:54:16
James Mayes
I think for me, I'm just going to take a little bit of time out next and wear a few things up and see what opportunities look interesting.

00:25:54:16 - 00:25:56:19
Neel Desai
So any plans or interesting things you have?

00:25:56:19 - 00:25:59:17
James Mayes
I mean, I haven't been on a mountain in five years. I need to get so boring.

00:25:59:17 - 00:26:00:10
Neel Desai
And where are you gonna go?

00:26:00:10 - 00:26:17:02
James Mayes
I think it's got to be Austria. Love Austria. Great place to visit. There's a little bit more travel I want to do, but to be honest, it'd be nice to do some travel for pleasure and not business. Growing your business, you end up in an awful lot of warehouses like this, which I think kind of fun. But once you say one and I think the Internet is actually just going to become a really, really interesting place over the next couple years.

00:26:17:02 - 00:26:31:01
James Mayes
There's been so much noise about crypto and nfts and Web 3.0 over the last couple of years, and so much of it is frankly rubbish. But I think, you know, next year or two we might actually start to see some interesting real world problems being solved by some of this tech. So I'm kind of interested to see where that goes.

00:26:31:06 - 00:26:34:03
James Mayes
But still on the fries my brain a little bit. So I'll be taking a step back from that.

00:26:34:03 - 00:26:42:09
Neel Desai
You know, in a few years I'll probably want to pick your brain around how playing in that context is different than B2B SaaS company, for example, right?

00:26:42:09 - 00:26:57:09
James Mayes
Absolutely. One of the things that we're starting to do now is are doing more and more episodes on the podcast and suicide by white papers on the minor product side. But we're saying product management in machine learning or AI or WEB3. How does that differ from the product management that we've been learning about for the last ten years?

00:26:57:13 - 00:27:15:05
James Mayes
All that different considerations that we need to work through? Absolutely. There are so much on the books Future is actually providing those primers and saying as a product manager, some of your core skillset is highly transferable. The ability to talk to users, the ability to do discovery, the ability to talk to engineers, the ability to frame problems and help them proposed solutions.

00:27:15:07 - 00:27:32:10
James Mayes
But some of it is actually different. You know, they the long term implications of an AI engine that can rebuild itself or rewrite its own code or make itself opaque to you different, that's a very different set of risks. So there are some areas where we need to start providing those primers and say for product manager going into these newer areas, these are some of the considerations that you might want in mind.

00:27:32:12 - 00:27:40:05
Neel Desai
If just a proposal. James, if folks listening to this want to find more about you, more about Mind the Product, where can they go? Where can they.

00:27:40:11 - 00:27:44:16
James Mayes
Get into it? I'm super easy to find. I quite like, yeah, you'll find it easy enough.

00:27:45:05 - 00:27:50:19
Neel Desai
And if there are PMS that need more community, the more resources. What's your advice on leveling up?

00:27:50:19 - 00:28:06:01
James Mayes
Get it, Get them on the products. You know, most of the site is free and open access. It's only some very small areas that are behind the premium paywall. 80% of it is open to anyone. There's ten years with the product management content there. There's meetups in 200 cities around the world newsletters, podcasts, all kinds of stuff. So start there.

00:28:06:05 - 00:28:10:13
James Mayes
If you can't find what you're looking for, give me a shout and be there on Twitter. LinkedIn. I'm always happy to help.

00:28:10:14 - 00:28:21:04
Neel Desai
Love it. Well, James, I really appreciate your time. I've been a fan for a long time and I think our industry and product in general is better off given the work that you've done. So I really appreciate it and thanks for being here for the.

00:28:21:04 - 00:28:22:02
James Mayes
Great to hear. Thanks for having me.

00:28:22:02 - 00:28:44:04
Ben Hillman
I'll a massive shout out to James for doing this podcast. Now you have what it takes to craft your own product manifesto. Today we talked about going from pandemic uncertainties to a pending exit. Should we build what we build, thinking through ethical guidelines, how to find resilient and curious product managers, and finally, how to do more with less.

00:28:44:09 - 00:29:00:12
Ben Hillman
Make sure to give Protect the Hustle a five star review. And don't forget to tell us the title of your product manifesto. Thanks for listening. Make sure you subscribe to and tell your friends about Protect the Hustle, a podcast from Battle Studios dedicated to helping you build better SaaS.