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Fascinating conversations with founders, leaders, and experts about product management, artificial intelligence (AI), user experience design, technology, and how we can create the best product experiences for users and our businesses.
Kyle (00:02.198)
All right, welcome to another episode of Product by Design. I am Kyle, and this week we have another awesome guest with us, Hubert Pallon. Hubert, welcome to the podcast.
Hubert Palan (00:15.214)
Thanks for having me, Kyle. Awesome to be here.
Kyle (00:17.706)
Yeah, I am super excited to talk with you today. Let me do a brief intro, and then you can tell us a little bit more about yourself. But Hubert is the founder and CEO of Product Board, a company focused on product management. He was previously the VP of product management at Good Data. He holds a master's degree in computer science from Czech Technical University in Prague and an MBA in entrepreneurship from UC Berkeley, and probably many, many more things.
But why don't you tell us a little bit more about yourself?
Hubert Palan (00:50.046)
Yeah, thanks. Again, great to be here with everybody today. Look, I'm an engineer turned product guy, turned CEO, I guess, of this product management platform, Product Board. And so yeah, I started my career in engineering and then I always had a passion for the business side and for understanding these cases and kind of figuring out how to solve the problems or maybe identifying the f***.
the problem first and then figuring out how to solve them the best. She kind of led me to the product side of things. And then as I was a product manager, this BI startup, I was living the product managers life and facing all the frustrations with like chasing all the different stakeholders and trying to understand what's in everyone's head and how different or similar.
people's expectations and understanding of what is it that we should be building are. And it's like herding the cats. And I realized that for all the great software that we had on the engineering side, like JIRA, GitHub, there's many tools and there's more and more new entrants in that space. All these systems have been historically focused on the optimization of what to build.
It is like a task management, right? It's project management basically for software, but product management is not project management. Product management is not about tasks and milestones, or I should say the right product management. It's not about tasks and milestones. The right product management is about who's the customer, what are the pain points, and then what are you gonna do about it? And there was no system that had customers and pain points in it, which was mind boggling to me.
I mean, you have CRMs on the business side, right? But like on the R&D or the engineering product design side, there was literally no customer data. There's no customer data in JIRA. There's no customer data in GitHub. And so that's product board. And then the rest is history. 6,000 companies as customers, including large companies, small companies, Microsoft's of the world and small startups alike. Still trying to solve the same product management challenges with product board.
Kyle (02:41.631)
Yeah.
Hubert Palan (03:09.994)
So that's in a nutshell what I'm doing.
Kyle (03:13.09)
Awesome. Well, I'm excited to dive more into that because I think that those are some great, great topics. But before we do, why don't you tell us a little bit more about what you like to do outside of the office and maybe outside of work?
Hubert Palan (03:27.622)
Oh, so I mean, I don't know how differentiated I am. I have two kids and a third on the way, and I run a startup. And so there's not much more outside of work and family. I run to stay sane and just in general work out to stay sane. But I like to learn about other people that were top of their craft. And
I actually, you know, whenever I welcome people to product board, I always call, I always talk on this like intro call or meeting about this Japanese concept of a shokunin, which is somebody who's a master of their profession, craft, discipline. And I just love learning about people who are really the best in their fields and just trying to understand how their brains work and what got them there. So that's my side passion.
that when I have a little time, listen to podcasts or read books. That's what I do.
Kyle (04:29.014)
Okay, well, we're gonna circle back to that because we'll be interested in if there's anything that you'd recommend towards the end. But diving into, you know, a little bit more about what you were talking about. I'm really interested in this idea of going from engineer into product management and then from product management into founding a company. What were some of the things that kind of...
drove you to make some of those shifts from, first from engineering into product and then eventually into founding a company, a product management focused company, but founding a company.
Hubert Palan (05:10.606)
The first one, the engineering to product management is probably because my mom was a very high empathy person and I talked to her a lot. She was in marketing, which is kind of, you know, if you want to be a good marketer, you need to have high empathy for customers, which by the way, actually is the same. If you want to be a great salesperson, if you're going to be a great marketer, if you're going to be a great product manager, if you want to create in business, you need to understand people. And so that...
somehow kind of tipped me that while I love coding and I love the art of creating and having the super short feedback loop that you get in software engineering, that something is literally happening right away in front of your eyes, right? As you deploy the code. I wanted to understand the people's challenges and what makes people excited and what is the, not just the utilitarian aspect of the products, but the delightful aspect of it.
thus I kind of gravitated towards product management. And I went through management consulting, Accenture like a systems integrations consulting. So it was a lot of business, but with understanding of the technology. So that was the first one. And then the second one is, I guess I already told a little bit of a story, right? Because I just had a big pain point that I wanted to solve. And I talked about my mom, but my dad was the person who would criticize everything in a theoretical way. He was a theoretical professor of theory of light. So he was super.
impractical, but that got me to this kind of mindset that I'm not happy with what exists and I just want to change it. And so that was like, okay, if I really want to change it, I need to start a company that's going to make a bigger dent than just being an IC, like an individual contributor. Yeah.
Kyle (07:00.238)
That's great. I'm interested, you obviously have worked in product management and now work with a lot of product management teams and groups. What have been some of the biggest changes that you've seen both in your career and just in product management in the industry in general as we've kind of moved through time?
Hubert Palan (07:24.19)
Yeah, I, you know, depends like what, what kind of a time span you look at. If you really, really want to go to the early days, um, which probably we don't like, we want to be more practical, but what I wanted to say is, you know, there's companies like HP or Intuit that were very product companies or Apple, right? Like product, product management and understanding of the, of the people has been always at the root of some of these, um, companies and that, that role of a product manager was really the, or has been the, the leading.
role in all the product decision-making. But as an industry that hasn't been the status quo for most companies, a lot of the, especially in the tech world, right? Like a lot of the decisions has been led by engineers and by having the insight about the technology in the first place rather than the customer, you know, people aspect of it. But that's changed. So if you're asking me, like, it's way more...
Product management is way more about customer pain points, right? At least the great companies realize that that's what's important. And the, the shift in the, in the power of product leaders is indisputable. Like you see chief product officers in the C-suite. It's slightly different in like the core product companies, like software companies, like product board or zoom or Autodesk, right? Where the product, the software is the business because there you have a very clear. Okay. So.
There's a product manager owns a product, one product or product line or, you know, whatever part of the product in the digital transformation companies. There's a change that's been happening recently where, you know, they're not necessarily selling the product. They're selling banking or cars, right? Or healthcare services. But they still need to build incredible differentiated digital experiences, whether it is the e-commerce
if you're selling groceries, but the experience is online, right? Or if you're providing banking services, you have mobile banking and patient booking. One of our customers is one medical, and so they're booking patients, right? Which is a healthcare provider here in California and some other states as well, I believe. Autonomous cloud infrastructure. So what I was saying is the role of
Hubert Palan (09:44.546)
product in these companies is slightly different because it's not really the core of the business, it's more like supporting function. But I feel like the companies that are really doing well and that are leading are realizing the importance of it and that even though they might not have like a Chief Product Officer, but the person is the Chief Digital E-Commerce Chief E-Commerce Officer or the Chief Digital Transformation Officer. And it might roll up to CIO or even...
Hubert Palan (10:16.419)
like CTO in some cases, but they realize that it's critical and that the decision-making needs to stem from that function. So I think that that's a change that is still happening. The best companies are the ones that get it and empower the people in those roles to make the decisions.
Kyle (10:33.778)
Yeah, absolutely. How do you approach product management at a product company like Product Board? I'm interested in what have been some of the approaches that you've taken and what does that look like for your organization specifically?
Hubert Palan (10:51.378)
I'd say honest answer is imperfectly, because the excellence is unattainable, but I believe that it's the journey that matters and that you need to be on the path to excellence, even though you never get there. But I mean, look like we just live and breathe all the latest, greatest approaches and really
tight collaboration and customer centricity as a company, everything is informed by insights from customers. Like a lot of customer conversations, which by the way, doesn't mean that you necessarily go and test everything with the customers, because while that is the ideal way to de-risk everything, it's also the slowest one. If you go to the source and do all the primary research, right, and every product manager goes and tests everything, like I said, it's ideal, but takes a long time. And sometimes you just need to rely on
people's experience that they already hopefully through very tight interaction with customers acquired, right? And internalized into intuition. Intuition is a great thing as long as it's informed and it's not just like a naive guess, right? Um, and so I'm trying to balance that, like to your question, like, you know, how do you balance the, the fact that I've been thinking about is for 10 years now. And I've had literally.
thousands, probably tens of thousands of conversations with product managers at this point. And how do you translate that to somebody who just joined the company and who's relatively early in their career? And this is kind of a, by the way, this is on the meta level, this is just like a human knowledge management and information sharing problem, right? This is not unique to product management. But in product management...
I sometimes talk about the fact that it's so easy to forget that you've spent so much time thinking about it and that you get impatient and that the person you just hired doesn't get it and grok it. How come they don't see it and how come they don't make the right decision right away and how come they want to go talk to customers to validate things? Isn't this obvious? Well, you know, I guess that's the humility and the kind of the bigger picture that needs to come in play.
Hubert Palan (13:09.118)
and the realization that you need to give people a break or that you need to share the context with them and then expect that they will leverage it. Yeah, so I would really summarize it. Customer-centric, very collaborative approach to product management. That's what we see every time there's a best team, super-jelled, super-customer-centric, super-high information density and throughput.
Kyle (13:40.926)
I think you've hit a couple of things that are absolutely spot on in one, how you're approaching product management. And I think we all approach it imperfectly from my experience. But some of those key principles of really understanding the customer and having that high collaboration, high information density, like you said, that really brings.
all of the learning and all of the team together into what it is that you're trying to ultimately accomplish. I'm interested in... Please.
Hubert Palan (14:13.45)
You know, can I, sorry to interrupt. I just like one thought, what we've learned.
We, you know, throughout the history of the company, we have been very fluid in terms of how the organization was designed and people would move from one part or from one initiative to another. And we historically haven't had much stability because the context is a startup that's growing, there's a lot of changes, right? Like the organization scaling and so on. So there's...
Stability is probably the opposite of describing that environment for any fast growing company. But what we've learned and what we realized is that it's really hurting the deep customer understanding, the lack of stability and moving people around from domain to domain or engineers from one code base to another is really hurting the depth of understanding. So we had a lot of
Kyle (14:54.376)
Yeah.
Hubert Palan (15:19.03)
like a good but relatively shallow understanding, like good understanding, broad understanding, but relatively shallow, as opposed to having the continuity in understanding a specific part of the product, which hopefully is aligned with specific set of use cases for a specific persona or segment. And so that just basically a mistake that we've made that we recently corrected where we say like, hey, we're gonna have stability and the teams are gonna...
course, you might be working on different initiatives, different missions, but you're going to be very much aligned around the use case and, and that persona. Um, and the, the outcome is like, um, not just deeper understanding of the, of the, of the people, um, but also even kind of like a stability and more, you know, happiness of the people is like, Hey, this is what I own and I'm gonna really become an expert. Um,
And then the key though is like, how do you facilitate the sharing? How do you make sure that like all the product managers like whatever what's happening somewhere else, you know, and then, and so on and so on. Yeah. I don't know. That's the thought.
Kyle (16:26.498)
Yeah, I think, and I think that that's such an important part in really being able to, one, develop the ownership like you talked about, and then two, being able to have that depth of understanding for a certain area, as opposed to kind of moving from project to project and reforming teams around, we're gonna work on this, and then it gets reformed into something else. Really, being deep.
in a certain area and driving the outcomes that you're looking for, kind of like you were saying. I think that is, it's such an important part. And something that I think I tend to see as I talk and work with a variety of companies and teams that is, it's super valuable. I'm interested in, as you have...
met with lots of product teams and have your own product teams. What are some of those? Are there other things that you've seen that really make for high functioning teams and high functioning product organizations?
Hubert Palan (17:32.162)
Okay, I'm going to really emphasize the need for the deep customer understanding and the context and that the and it's, you know, it's twofold, right? It's like, of course, the bigger you are and the higher you are in the hierarchy in the organization, the more disconnected to some extent you are from the front lines. And that's the same for CEO as well as, you know, product management and product leadership or any other function.
Kyle (17:54.189)
Yeah.
Hubert Palan (18:02.018)
top CEOs, they always tell you like you need to spend half of the time with customers so that you never lose that touch because knowledge of the customer is the most important. Even actually I was just watching this and Tesla just announced the Cybertruck, right? And there was like, hey, the reaction of the market. And there was the CEO of Ford who was saying, well, we are not afraid because we know our customers way better than Tesla does. And Tesla is
designing a track for the techies in Silicon Valley. And of course, you can argue with that, right? But like my point is that the customer understanding is frequently brought up by the CEOs. You cannot go higher in the organization as a super important competitive differentiator. And so it really boils down to how do you make sure that the customer understanding is shared across the company on all levels. And I always thought about the...
kind of if you think about the hierarchy of the product manager, even if you're the most junior, um, first job out of college product manager, uh, and, and your scope is very limited, like you should have, you know, maybe narrow scope, but be really, really deep in it and make sure that you understand all the nuances of the different, uh, use cases within that, within that scope and that you understand the segmentation and how the different personas or segments again, differ.
And you need to really, really focus on that. And then, you know, the higher you are in the organization, the broader your scope is and the broader understanding you need to have at the market. But again, you know, the best companies, this information flows and there's a regular collaboration within the product organization, but then within R&D and across R&D and go to market teams so that it's really shared and there's no confusion about who is the ideal customer. And it's not like,
And I'm going to probably describe something that people might laugh at. It was like, I don't know, maybe you wouldn't be surprised, but I've seen so many companies where the ideal customer profile that sales has is different from what the marketing persona for messaging is from what the product management, you know, segmentation and kind of definition is from what the design personas are.
Hubert Palan (20:26.426)
And this is just crazy chaos, right? So ultimately to the extent you can bring it all together, like that's critical. And again, to your question that is the holy grail, like bring everybody on the same page. And that's what then hopefully leads to products that are really, really incredibly well designed and executed and brought to the market.
Kyle (20:52.842)
Yeah, absolutely. I'm interested, how do you bring those things together in your experience? So how do you bring both the customer insights and the knowledge sharing and all of these, even diverse stakeholders and teams together and really make that something that is cohesive for the product and for the business?
Hubert Palan (21:11.986)
Yeah.
Hubert Palan (21:20.606)
Yeah, yeah. And so this goes back to the challenge of how do you share information and knowledge and how do you kind of, the one mental model that you have in your head, how do you make sure that everyone else is aligned with it? Maybe like, be very specific. I've always thought that it's very important for the leadership on the product side to be really crisp about the strategy and the vision of what is it that you're...
building and the market and how you're seeing the structure of the market landscape, the competition, your key differentiators, how are you outlining the milestones in the year one, two, three from now. And that needs to be fairly... And people are like, oh yeah, we have a strategic one-pager. This needs to be a very detailed document. There's a lot of context and there is really no short...
It's not like, oh, you're just like, right, right. A one pager and there it is. It's like, imagine that you would want to be a medical doctor. And he was like, oh, yeah, I'm just going to read a one pager on how to be a great doctor. It was like, well, kind of, you know, it's not going to work. There's no shortcut. You have to go deep. And so, um, ultimately I feel like it's the role of the, of the leaders. And you know, again, like the scope changes, but the depth should be always there on any level of the, of the hierarchy in the organization that you need to outline as much content.
And then you can also, of course, summarize and do a one-pager as a shorthand, but it's only as an additional asset on top of something that needs to be much more robust. And then the job of the leadership is to make sure that you do a roadshow and that you do workshops and that you ask questions and that you facilitate the conversations and that you have regular Q&A and AMAs and just debates. And it's not just like a...
you know, 30 minute, an hour thing that you do. And it's more like a half a day workshop where you really have time to dive deeper and you really have time to answer questions. And you see in people's eyes, the confusion and you just do a big uncomfortable pause until you get out of them, the real questions that they have because you know, they might be afraid to ask because they're just new to the company. And so that is something
Hubert Palan (23:43.47)
practical that I feel like we need to be doing better, be crisp and doing this communication. And you need to engineer it because it's not natural. It's especially not natural because you have to repeat it. And as humans, we feel like, oh, I just told everybody the vision and the strategy and we had a whole workshop about it a quarter ago. But the reality is that since you hired new people who've never heard that. And so...
You kind of need to be, you need to engineer the fact that you need to repeat it. And even though to you, it sounds like, oh yeah, I'm going to repeat it again. I've said it already 27 times. It's like, guess what? You have to say it for the 28th time. Because, um, again, people don't have that deep concept as you and repetition is key. And because there's people who've never heard it. So that's one thing that I pointed out that, because I do think that's the crux of it all.
Kyle (24:39.694)
I really like this idea, a couple of the ideas that you talked about, but really going deep in these things and then reiterating them so that it's continually ingrained into the culture and into what everybody's doing. Because I think you're right. I feel like oftentimes it's so easy to breeze over some of the things that we're doing, whether that's the vision or strategy or anything like that, and create the...
the brief narrative and then never talk about it again. It's like, we did it, it's there, it's on a page, you can look at it. But that really doesn't create the alignment that you're talking about because we haven't gone deep and we haven't made sure that everybody has gone deep with us. It may be, I may have a really good understanding because I've thought about it for a long time and put a lot of time into it, but other people won't have that.
unless we help and guide everybody into like what is the context? How do we really get deep with this? And how do we make sure everybody is on board and aligned going forward? I think that's so critical.
Hubert Palan (25:47.954)
Yeah. And, and, you know, it's hard, like, you know, I felt it often, like, you know, I, I know I can be better. I know I can spend more time, right? It's always a balance. Like, how do you balance knowledge? Or like, how do you balance the time that you invest into it to make sure that the knowledge is transferred to the extent needed? Yeah, it's, it's hard.
Kyle (26:16.614)
Yeah, definitely. So I'm interested, you know, we've talked a little bit about, you know, how things have been and where they are. Where do you see the future of product management going and the future of product development in general as we look forward?
Hubert Palan (26:36.018)
I, you know, on the, on the same theme, I think that with the advancements with AI and large language models, there's really even less excuse for understanding the world around you and the context and the customers because the, the models, obviously there's many use cases that you can use them, the models for, right? But the, the summarization use case and the research.
Hopefully you have critical evaluation skills and you have a deep first principle understanding and some knowledge that helps you filter out the hallucination. But anyway, my point is that it can shorten the time and you can do so much more research in a shorter period of time than ever before. And then I also definitely foresee the future where the...
AI itself will be able to multiply the research capabilities. And you can have, you know, kind of like a guided interview with an AI that, that is going to be trained and that will have the full context of your product and your use cases. And you can suddenly do that at scale as opposed to do it one off. You still somehow need to get it into people's heads, right? But like, you know, you can.
summarize it and you do more of them and then the pain points get distilled. And it's awesome. Like we do it now in product board. We just launched this feature where you can distill out of customer support conversations or research notes or any kind of qualitative feedback, you can, you can distill pain points into the feature specification. And again, you need to apply critical, you know, critical thinking and, and make sure that it makes sense. But my, my larger point here is that.
no excuses for not doing the research and understanding what is it that people need, what they complain about or what competition is doing. Because you can do it in the past, like, oh, I need to go, I need to do a study and it's going to take the weeks or months. And, you know, yeah, like, no, this is like you can do it in a couple hours. And that hopefully will lead to better understanding of the people and their needs and thus to better products.
Hubert Palan (29:00.542)
And you know, probably, and again, this is like a complete, you know, future sci-fi, but like we're probably gonna be in, in a moment where the AI is actually gonna be able to critically evaluate the product experience and tell you like, Hey, these are not the right patterns that you're using here, right? Or like, Hey, be aware, there's a new emerging pattern. Think about what is it that the context that people are using some other products that is becoming dominant and it has this new pattern and you should really consider that because it's, it's formulating new habits in your.
user base and you should reflect that. Anyway, so it's just going to be smarter. But in terms of the job of the product manager, of the core, of the center of it, I don't think it's changing. Still understand the people. It hasn't changed in thousands of years. If you think about product creators, where is hardware or software products? Understand who the people are, what are the pain points, and what are you going to do about it?
What are the solution alternatives? Come up with the best one. Just will get me just so much better and efficient and more productive.
Kyle (30:07.834)
Yeah, you've hit on, I think what I absolutely agree with in that the fundamentals really won't necessarily change, but our ability to understand and create and execute and deliver is going to be so much more augmented by a lot of the technology and tools that we'll have are disposable. Being able to, like you said, do the research. Go ahead.
Hubert Palan (30:31.883)
You said...
Yeah, but you said you actually added a great point, right? Because it's not just the research and understand, you said deliver. And that's also like, how do you then package it and how do you translate it to the audience? Because as a PM, you're ingesting, you're understanding, but then you're also sharing and communicating and you need to talk to the audience, you need to do it through product marketing, right? You need to explain what you're doing, all the stakeholders and align everybody. And so that is also gonna be much easier. And already now, like we are, you know, again, in product world, we're working on this functionality where...
can have like a guided walkthrough through the roadmap that is auto-generated based on the feedback. But you can do it in kind of like a storytelling way that is optimized and you can leverage the function of the large language models. It's amazing. I did this with complete tension, but then I have the new daughter on the way. I named my kids, my older kid is Hubert, the second one is Nicholas, but I named...
I named them because of the meaning. Nicholas means Victor of the people, Hubert means bright-minded. And so I said, like, it's great to have kids that the story of the names is victory of bright-minded people. And now we're talking about, like, hey, what should be the name of the daughter to make? And I went to Chagipi and I was like, hey, tell the story of these names and what would be like a great story? And it's the same thing. It's like, hey, tell me a story for a roadmap. I have these features, I have these objectives, I have these...
you know, initiate this, like, you know, do it in an engaging way where it makes sense. And, and, um, uh, based on the audience that, that is delivering it, like adjust it. The AI is awesome at it. So that's exciting.
Kyle (32:10.842)
that's super exciting because I feel like we have, at least in my experience, there is a love-hate relationship with product roadmaps. There's something that can be very, very useful, but also something that can be very, very difficult or misused or any number of things. And like you said, being able to take some of these tools and really not just have, you know,
the roadmap or features, but be able to cohesively tell a story that puts all of that in context for stakeholders or for customers or for whoever it is could potentially make a huge difference. And I feel like this is just something that is, I mean, it's so new. We've been doing product roadmaps for a long time, but the ability to take some of these things and really make it much more meaningful. I mean, that's, I feel like that's, we're on the cusp of some really, really great.
things coming down the pike. I guess what's your take on product roadmap specifically and how this, a lot of the tools can start to change the way we use them in the conversation around them.
Hubert Palan (33:21.258)
Yeah, I'm not going to go into dates or not on the roadmap. I know this is a very old conversation in this space. For the practitioners, you can probably point out the periods where it was like the hot topic in the industry to talk about, should we have dates or not. I would like to point out that you really start thinking about the roadmaps differently if you don't think of them as only unidirectional sharing of the plans.
but if you think of them as a conversation starter, where you are basically saying like, hey, this is what I intend to work on. Is it the right thing for you? And different customers, different needs. And so you're gonna have different perspectives. And so if you treat the roadmaps in such way, in the collaborative way, then,
you're going to start thinking about the roadmap differently because the way to the point that we just had, right? Like the way you presented, the way you tell the story, the way you're articulating why you're presenting, why the things are on the roadmap, it suddenly changes the context and it really forces you to think less about just, hey, this is the laundry list of things that you're building.
And it forces you to think about who is the audience and what is it that they um, represent in terms of the, the segment, right? Like the, the behavior, the behaviors, and then how it translates into the needs. And so that I've always applied that, um, the thinking of like, I'm going to put myself into the shoes of the person that's looking at this artifact and how do I make it crisper? How do I make it more?
memorable, how do I make it organized in such a way that the right level of detail is captured, like board presentation deck is different and like a very detailed, one team working on a specific very detailed thing or internal kind of planning for a sprint. It's like very different kind of artifacts. And everything else flows from that.
Hubert Palan (35:45.282)
There's no one roadmap, you need to have multiple, it needs to be flexible, you need to be able to adjust it, you need to be able to filter it, you need to be able to pivot it, like I said, adjust the granularity, because it all depends on the audience. It's a conversation, roadmap is a conversation. So think about it that.
Kyle (36:01.93)
Yeah, I could not agree more with that, that it's not just a document, it is a collaboration and a communication tool. And it goes both ways on what from the product side that we're doing, and then from whoever that you're working with, whether that's internal stakeholders or customers in order to get that feedback and kind of have that continual loop of what is it that we should be doing and what problems should be
and what are the biggest opportunities in all of those things. I think that that's absolutely spot on. I love it. I'm interested as we kind of maybe zoom out just a little bit, you know, what have been some of the things that you have learned over the years and especially you being a startup founder that you know, potentially you wish you would have learned or knew a little bit earlier.
Hubert Palan (36:57.77)
I call the tricks of the trade and summarize the wisdom in one sentence here. As a startup founder, there's definitely mistakes that I've made. I made all the mistakes. I made poor product decisions. I misunderstood.
everything that I'm describing here. And I was like, Oh yeah, I get it. I understand the segment underneath. And I was like, Oh wow, I actually missed this thing. So I think that the learning there is like the humility about it and that you need to have strong opinions but weakly held. It's very important and be open-minded and listen to people where sometimes we talked a lot about the experience and if somebody is new to the...
to the team or to the company and doesn't have much overall years of experience. But they still can bring in an insight that you haven't heard of, right? There's little gems that you need to be open to adjust your mental model and kind of understanding. One thing that I would highlight that is the same for product managers or founders, it's
It's sometimes stressful and you need to make decisions with not enough data. And you have absence of, you know, the knowledge is not as deep, but you still need to make a decision. It's the business reality. Just like in, uh, in other fields, right. Whether it's, uh, in sports and you're kind of like assessing what the competitor is going to do and like, you don't know, right? Like you're guessing. So in business as well, you don't necessarily know. Um,
What I want to say is that it creates stress that you should not necessarily share with people who don't deserve it, like your partners and spouses. It's like try to shield them away a little bit from that. And then on the product side, I...
Hubert Palan (39:19.298)
You know, product management is an interesting discipline because it's such a intersection of so many things. You know, we talked about the market and the business and the customers, but you do need to understand the technology because otherwise you don't know what's possible on the solution side. You need to understand the legal environment and you know, all the constraints that you have in terms of compliance and what is possible, not just from technical perspective, but from business compliance perspective. So it's a very broad...
Hubert Palan (39:48.882)
role, communication, we just talked about the importance of storytelling and all that. And I do think that the more self-reflection you can have about where you're really good and like where you need to dig deeper and where you need to maybe rely on other people and help you complement, the higher chances are that you're going to succeed. But I would encourage people to invest a lot into developing what I talked about earlier, the intuition.
internalize the experience and play. If you're a product person, you should know every product there is, play with it. You should have a very strong mental model of how all the products work and what are the needs that people are trying to get done with that, have critical assessment and really spend time with it because the intuition, like you're so much faster and efficient. I always
Hubert Palan (40:49.106)
and how much less productive you were compared to now. Like you can literally make decisions five times, 10 times, a hundred times faster with all the contacts, right? So just like invest into developing that intuition. And it might be, it may be kind of obvious like, hey, you know, learn more. But if you're very thoughtful about it and you actually spend time learning about, like I said, competing alternatives or other tools in this space, it...
it really helps you develop that much faster.
Kyle (41:23.162)
I think that that's really, really good advice, developing that product intuition. Kind of like you said, for not just for founders and product people, but for really anybody involved in it. And I love the approach that you kind of shared in looking at all of these different products, not just the ones that you have or your company or your team, but all different types of products and really think about
what goes into doing that and what are some of the trade-offs that the person managing, I love to do this myself. I'll look at products. My wife and I will have these conversations and she'll say, this app has gone from being good to being like really bad with this new release. And we'll talk about it. We'll go through and be like, well, okay, let's look at all of these things that are in there now.
And what are some of the trade-offs that they're making? And why would they do that? And it's made the experience worse for, I'm thinking of one specifically, it made it a worse user experience in my opinion, but I could tell the reason it was done was to make it more efficient for the company. Like they went through and they rebuilt a lot of things. And I suspect that was the big trade-off. It's not as good of an experience, but they're going to be able to do a lot more technically.
going forward and what are those types of things that you as a product manager or in product development can think about and why is it like that and what are some of those trade-offs and what potentially would you do differently if you could? I think that's a great way to develop some of that product intuition.
Hubert Palan (43:06.938)
I really like what you said that you're doing it together with your wife, which is probably unique to your relationship. I suppose not every product manager is married to somebody who's interested in product tear downs. But I think that the collaborative aspect there is super interesting. And so to the extent like people do book clubs, if you can do product clubs and sit down together and do like a brown bag lunch and do a tear down of a product together with a group of people.
Kyle (43:12.174)
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
Hubert Palan (43:36.014)
to the extent you can do it, it's just a faster way to learn and spot out things because people have different, like we said, different depths of knowledge in different areas. Plus, people represent different segments. And you can say like, hey, this is actually better for this kind of a customer and not for this other kind of a customer. Obviously, in software specifically, we have more flexibility where you can have personalized
Hubert Palan (44:05.462)
you know, made it there. If you think about it, most systems or, you know, products, the personalization is fairly basic in terms of, maybe you have favorites and maybe you have like, you know, your own structure folders or some, you know, categorization, but beyond that, remember the early days when Microsoft had the ribbon and it would kind of...
It would customize based on your knowledge of the usage of the product. It would customize like what was featured in the menus. And on one hand, it was kind of like, that was the idea of personalized. And on the other, it was so confusing because different people had different experience and so you're kind of balancing. Anyway, this is like a whole different tangent that we could go on. Like, you know, how, what does it mean for personalization? Um, but at the end of the day, do the product tear downs together with group of people and ask them always like, why do you think so?
Kyle (44:32.82)
Mm-hmm.
Hubert Palan (44:59.754)
Maybe you're a segment that I don't understand well and it might be good for you and
Kyle (45:06.806)
Absolutely. I think that is spot on. Well, Hubert, this has been an amazing conversation. And like you said, I feel like there's a couple other areas that we could dive more and more into. But is there anything else that we've talked about or haven't had a chance to talk about that you wanted to share?
Hubert Palan (45:33.29)
go be a product manager. I mean, you're probably if you're listening, like you're, you're in the product management already, but, um, I, I just love the intersection of the business and the design and technology. And so, like I said, understand where your strength is, go and learn about the gaps that you have. We like double down on the strength and compliment yourself with others. If you are not that technical, develop a super, super strong.
a relationship with your technical counterpart, right? And then the triad, product design engineering, you just need to think of it as a, not just, it's not an individual sport, it's a team that needs to gel together and you need to invest into it. And I know, you mentioned earlier, or like before we talk, like the concept of remote teams versus hybrid teams and so on, it's harder in the remote world.
And you need to invest extra hard to build these relationships with people if you don't spend time together in real life. And it takes the effort. You need to invest. You need to be very engineered and structured about it. But it's so worth it because nobody knows it all. And even the greatest people, Steve Jobs, he wasn't the engineer, he wasn't the designer, he was...
He was really a product manager. In fact, he had a title VP product, a new product development when he got fired from Apple that was on his business card, he was basically a product manager, but that's the, you know, what he was bringing to the table is really representing the customer. And he could tell whether people are going to love it or whether it sucks. And he was very unapologetic about it. But, you know, again, I, you know, I.
didn't know him personally at all, right? So it's like, I don't want to go into a psychoanalysis, but my point is that you need to partner with other people who are experts in those areas where you're weaker.
Kyle (47:40.55)
Absolutely. I think that's great. Well...
Hubert Palan (47:42.782)
And go sign up for Pregboard, try Pregboard. That's what people should do.
Kyle (47:46.863)
Yeah, where can people sign up for Product Board or learn more about...
Hubert Palan (47:49.418)
Pragueware.com. Pragueware.com and I, you know, myself, I'm everywhere. I'm on LinkedIn and all the social media. So you can just reach out. I'm happy to chat with anyone.
Kyle (48:00.982)
Perfect, well, we'll put those links in the show notes as well. And I did want to wrap up with just kind of two final questions and going back to what you talked about a little bit earlier, if there's anything that you've read or watched or listened to recently that you found particularly interesting. I know you mentioned some of the people at the top of their fields, if there's anything along those lines or anything else.
Hubert Palan (48:25.342)
Oh yeah. So I mean for, for product management, like I said, you know, I love to learn from the best people in the field. And there's a podcast by Lex Friedman. I don't know if people have heard of it, but he's doing like really deep, long interviews. And so just like, you know, three and a half hours with Mark Andreessen and Mark Zuckerberg and just, you know, really, and not, not just in the business field, by the way, you know, all, all around.
but it's because it's like a deep, long conversation. It's super insightful. Plus it's not just a podcast, it's a video and you can see people's emotions. And a lot of these people have been trained a lot. And so it's kind of like hard to tell how honest the answers are because you're so well PR trained, but it's still, I've always tried to, to the extent I can, see the people and their emotions and the full communication.
And so that's something that I just recently, just like on a run today, listened actually to the Mark Zuckerberg interview, which I didn't see him. I was like, okay, how does he look like when he's saying, I would pull it out of my pocket. It's like, is he frowning? Is he smiling? Anyway, and then another book that I just recently read is a book called Outlive by Peter Attia.
I've actually been at an event with him in person and the guy is impressive. It's about how to live longer, healthier life. And it's all the basics of nutrition or basic, I would say basic questions, but he's a very first principle guy and he's a great storyteller and I've just changed a lot how I eat and sleep and, you know, work out, uh, based on his advice.
He's very convincing, so I hope it's not like a cult new religion because you know what it's like with understanding the science, but he's very first principle, so it makes sense what he's sharing.
Kyle (50:26.85)
That's great. Yeah, we'll put those links in the show notes as well. And then finally, are there any products that you've been using that you have particularly enjoyed or maybe not enjoyed? Could be digital products or physical products.
Hubert Palan (50:41.69)
I look like I'm a CEO, but I'm still a product guy and I love designing things in Figma. And I just, you know, it's awesome for the reasons what I said earlier, it's even shorter feedback loop from the effort to seeing the results and the interactive prototype, like prototypes, how quickly you can do it. And when I was starting the company, this is
way before Figma, this is before Sketch, right? It's like the, in the days of Balsamiq and Balsamiq was like low-fi and I don't like really low-fidelity prototypes. Like I wanna see the high-fidelity and I did all the high-fidelity mock-uping in Keynote back then with all the magic moves. So now you can do it in Figma so much easier. And I even frequently do my own slides in Figma just because it's better than to do it in Google Docs.
Um, yeah, so it's for the love of creation and the immediate feedback that you get, like, does it look great or not? It's awesome.
Kyle (51:45.339)
Yeah, yeah, couldn't agree more with that. Absolutely. Well, Hubert, again, this has been an amazing conversation. Appreciate all of your insights and the information that you shared. And again, I think this has been a really, really great conversation.
Hubert Palan (52:01.782)
Likewise, thanks for all the questions. I hope it's gonna help people learn something new. It was awesome to be here.
Kyle (52:10.718)
Absolutely. And thank you everyone for listening.