{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"On the Subject of Leadership","title":"Ken Sandy: Influence Was Always the Point","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":4771,"description":"Most conversations about artificial intelligence and the product manager begin by asking whether the role survives. This one begins somewhere more useful: by asking what the role was ever actually for. In this episode of On the Subject of Leadership, I speak with Ken Sandy—author of The Influential Product Manager, the lecturer who built the first product management course in the engineering school at UC Berkeley, a longtime executive coach to founders and executives, and an adviser to boards—about what is left of product leadership once the artifacts that used to define it can be produced in seconds.Ken's argument is not the reassuring one. The documents, specifications, and roadmaps product managers are most often judged by, he contends, were never the work; they were the residue of the work. The work was always the influence—the grounding in evidence, the advocacy for the customer, the patient assembly of agreement among people who do not report to you. If that is right, the commoditisation of the artifacts is not a threat to the discipline but a solvent applied to it: it dissolves what was never essential and leaves the essential in plain view.This is a conversation about leadership at least as much as product. It moves from the counter-intuitive proposition that having no authority is an advantage, through the documents organisations cling to long after anyone reads them, to the questions boards are asking about AI—and the rather better questions Ken believes they should be asking instead.TakeawaysWhy the absence of formal authority is not a constraint to work around, but the very thing that forces sound product judgement.Renewal as subtraction: why growth is often a matter of forgetting the right things, not learning new ones.The artifacts organisations sustain as ceremony, long after the people demanding them have stopped reading them.The two anti-behaviours of AI-era product work: skipping the thinking, and feeding the beast.Why boards ask risk-aversion...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/n7396SRNOJ5QQRNYb3151ptWu-tBfRZHnU8wen1gxQY/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS8wNzE3/ZjNmZjNiNTg4ZDdj/ODQ1ZmFhYTI0OTU5/YjY5Yi5wbmc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}