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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 Evans (00:00.94)
All right, welcome back to another episode of Product by Design. I am Kyle. And this week we have another awesome guest with us, Ken Gavronovitch. Ken, welcome to the show.
Ken Gavranovic (00:10.733)
Kyle, first of all, awesome job with the name, because of course that's an exciting one. Everybody has that. And just seeing your guitars in the background, that's one of my desires is one day to learn to play a guitar. That must be awesome.
Kyle Evans (00:13.23)
you
Kyle Evans (00:21.994)
It is. And I wish that there was more time for it. I feel like there's just not enough time, but I do feel like having them out and present makes it much more likely that we'll be able to like sit down and do that whenever there's a chance. that's why they're out is so that they're not hidden away somewhere. But awesome. Well, Ken, let me give a brief introduction for you and then you can tell us a little bit more about yourself. Ken is a global keynote speaker, a seasoned technology executive and the CEO.
Ken Gavranovic (00:39.065)
That's great.
Kyle Evans (00:50.208)
of Product Genius where he leads the development of AI powered tools that transform real time data into actionable customer insights. And I'm excited to talk about all of those things and much more. But before we do that, why don't you tell us a little bit more about yourself?
Ken Gavranovic (01:04.099)
Cool. Well, I'll try to give you a short snippet and then we can dig into some things that might be relevant for the audience. I always like to start off with kind of like beginnings, because I think it's interesting. We all come from beginnings, know, parents and relationship. And for me, was, know, finances were always tough, you know, just the kind of a not great childhood. But I didn't realize until much, much later that was one of my secret sauces to success because
You know, think for many people you see a lot of times first generation people that create really big business, a lot of value. Sometimes they had a tough childhood and that's a motivator. So I just always like to share that with anybody. If anybody thinks, man, I had the tough side of the ship growing up. Hey, there's some some good things that come out of that. You know, for me, you know, started beginning, you know, it's like probably 13 started reading these computer books back when you would read it. And you know, I was one of those really I'm going to say computer and I go to the library and read and all this stuff.
but there was no internet, there was not anything, you So it's like really the beginning. You know, remember my mom coming home and I had programmed assembly and there's like six guys that look like from ZZ Top that programmed the chemical refinery. So lots of those experiences, but what always got me excited is the idea with technology. Actually, I saw the movie War Games, funny enough, not the war part, but the idea that this kid could sit in his house and like change the world got me excited about technology.
and, and my passion, what I thought was great about technology, you can listen to a problem, right? And, you know, the product part, what is the problem? Like, how are we going to design something to solve it? And in my case, when I was younger, I was the product person, the engineering person, so I could put it all together. And, know, I think I was 19 when I built my first couple of million dollar software product. So I've been very blessed to do that. And we'll dig into some of those things that might be relevant for journeys, maybe that people are thinking about, whether it be.
know, startup to IPO or scaling, you know, unicorns. I've got some great stories we can share.
Kyle Evans (03:01.994)
Awesome. Well, I'm excited to hear some of those stories. think they'll be great. Before we do that, what things do you like to do outside of the office or outside of work?
Ken Gavranovic (03:11.8)
I love nature and nature adventure. So I would say I've been blessed that financially has given me some ability to travel. you know, whether it taking the kids to the Galapagos Islands, you know, and literally being in the ocean and grabbing seaweed and throwing it and the dolphin goes and grabs it like a dog and brings it back to me. you know, so traveling, hiking, we've given that to our kids. We've taken them on RV trips. But I would say, you know, really outside of work, it's probably family.
and travel and adventure is probably my big things. I say adventure, like I've done things like flying a MiG fighter jet and jump out of planes, so different versions of adventure.
Kyle Evans (03:49.39)
Wow. Do you have a favorite place to travel that you've been so far or that you would want to go to?
Ken Gavranovic (03:55.545)
That's a great question. So I would say from a chill perspective, I always like Key West. I actually just talked to my daughter. It's graduating soon. We were in Key West this past weekend. Another place I think is just beautiful Sedona. If you haven't been there, amazing, amazing place. If you're just going to like check the box, like weird kind of things in this world, if you can do it, I would say the two things I probably would think were the most interesting was the Northern Lights, like seeing that with your own eyes, simply sunny.
the Galapagos Island and I'll put one more, the most beautiful place, Banff, Canada. If you've ever been there, stunning. Like if you ever see like your Windows screen saver, if you have one of the windows where it has the blue water, like that is Banff. Check it out. It's a great place to go.
Kyle Evans (04:41.816)
Wow. Okay. We'll have to put that on the list. That does sound incredible. Awesome. Well, I'm excited to dive into some of the things that you mentioned. Maybe you can kick us off by telling us just a little bit more about your journey. You kind of started with, you know, the fundamentals or foundations of where you got started, but you've done a lot of things. So maybe give us the high level overview of what you've done and how you ended up where you are right now.
Ken Gavranovic (05:08.056)
I'll hit on some of them. Maybe we'll slow down where I think there's probably some really relevant product lessons. So as I mentioned before, I started off writing software, but I was the product guy. going back to vision, I was a wee young lad, was walking down the hallway, had my coffee at my job, and I saw this big line of people. I'm going to date myself, but again, this was like 17. And this big line of people all drinking coffee, and they were standing this thing for back.
the day they call this thing a fax machine. And I looked at it and what went in my head is, wow, that's totally inefficient. And so I went to the owner of the business and I said, I could write something where we could push a button. Everybody can fax from their desk. So I did that next year. We sold $2 million worth. The downside is going back to my childhood, I didn't know I should ask for a percentage of that business. So I proceeded in my 20s to make millions, then tens of millions.
from for other people with my ability to understand the business problem and then, you know, put either engineering resources, product design to make that happen. I'll fast forward to my 26, 27. you know, I grew up in Texas. I've lived in New York. I always say New York's a great place to like learn business skills because if not, you get taken advantage of and I did get taken advantage of. But fast forward down to Florida. I kind of had my business feed on myself.
And this thing called the internet was starting. is back when AOL was there. like this. was probably like 26. And I was like, wow, this is fantastic. Every business is going to run their business on the internet. And back then, South Florida only had a 45-meg connection. So we think about it like I've got a gig to my house, a 45-meg connection to everything in South Florida. And so I said, wow, this isn't going to work. And I looked at the cheapest place to live with the highest density of backbone, dark fiber.
and moved to Atlanta, which is still where I live in the outskirts of Atlanta right now, took all of my savings, rented half of a floor and started a company that became Web.com, took it from zero to 200 million IPO, all the fun stuff, all the challenging stuff, zero to 600 employees when I was 28. And again, but it all started with product. The first person I hired, in that case, I was no longer gonna code, because I was doing the product piece, is I hired an engineer.
Ken Gavranovic (07:27.84)
And I said, great, well, one of the things that I'm going to do, if I'm going to have thousands and thousands of servers, I've got to write some software so that I can quickly provision, automate, do all those things. And this is kind of sad, but for years, we actually had a patent on automating and provisioning because we built really, really great software. Microsoft licensed it. And later after we merged the company, it became web.com. You may have heard of it. That company went around with my license and started suing everybody for automation.
not something I would have done. But I remember one time I met Bob Parsons at GoDaddy and we were at some conference or whatever. And I was like, Hey, you know, web.com, you know, and he's like, you guys sue me, you know, I'm like, Oh, it wasn't me, man. So anyways, adventures and those things. But again, great example of right time. So you think about product, know, if you have that, you know, momentum has to be with you. Like if you're fighting upstream and no one wants to buy it, no one understands the problem you're solving, you could build really great product, but it's, that's tough.
And then, you know, going back to what's the biggest problem I need to solve, because in some cases you might be doing product internally for your company. You know, I think with AI, you're going to see a lot of how do we automate parts of our business that are very manual right now, a lot of internal product work. So that was kind of the early stages. And then I can dive in more from there, but that kind of give you the kickoff to the career. You know, I've actually going through an IPO as a 20 something year old. Usually you get pushed out.
Staying there post IPO and all that experience was great and set me up for the things that I did later.
Kyle Evans (09:02.35)
I think that's fascinating. And there's a couple of things I want to kind of dive into a little bit there. Tell us more about, first off, the founding and running of a company. What were some of the things that you found out during maybe those early stages or you found out since that really drive a lot of the success in creating something new, especially a new company and building it up to where it was?
Ken Gavranovic (09:28.662)
Yeah, well, would say like even because I've done angel investing, I think anything a new company is luck, skill and timing, right? So you can call it luck. You know, if you're I'm a spiritual guy, whatever you want to call it. But those three things have to come there. So, you know, when I think about the things that I've seen is if you get in the right space at the right time and then, you know, have the skills to take advantage of it, that's I think when you can build a big business. I think as a skill for an entrepreneur or product person,
because maybe what you're doing hasn't been done yet. You need to have conviction, right? If you're someone that can't make decisions and it's decision by committee, you need to listen to everybody, but you're gonna have to make some bold decisions and you're gonna have great things that are going amazing. And then you're gonna have this thing that's gonna fall off. It's not a steady state. So not everybody's built for that, you know, to really listen to it. And then I'd say, finally, this is consistent. And I've worked with multiple people that are billionaires that have built businesses.
I've built a great business to four or 500 million, but people have built it to multi-billions. And there's a key thing is a real passion for the customer and a real curiosity on what are the real problems that I'm solving for the customer and how will I know that I'm successful? And that's one of the things like, how do I know I'm successful? Because I see a lot of times and even product people that have worked for me, success is check the box, I ship something. Or even engineering, success is I ship the box.
And then you've seen that you've seen projects that have gone on six months, nine months, and they launch it and then it quote fails. But if you go back, they usually don't have a good definition of success to start with. Hopefully I answered your question.
Kyle Evans (11:09.066)
Yeah, I think that's great. And that's one of the things that I see frequently as well is this idea that success is measured in feature releases or the launch of something as opposed to addressing whatever the problem is or the need is. So I'm interested, know, how have you helped either change some of that mindset or in the companies you've been involved in, either building or involved in as an angel investor or from the outside?
How do you address that problem that something isn't just about releasing a feature or releasing a product, it's about solving a problem and then the metrics behind that for the business and for the customer?
Ken Gavranovic (11:51.609)
Good. I'll hit on two, I think pretty things. One Cox, maybe you've heard of Auto Trader, Kelley, Blue Book, all of those things. And then I'll do another one, was New Relic, which it was the mini, we went from like 300 to 600 million. So really that kind of hyper stage already public, all that kind of good stuff. So when I went into Cox, this is in the, I'll call it the digital transformation. So in a lot of times people were defining digital transformation is we go to the cloud.
which is a terrible definition of digital transformation or digital transformation is, you know, we're quote agile versus water gel or whatever it may be. I think all of those things are a little bit, you know, questionable to me. But when I went into Cox, it was the biggest business unit. So this is something that put a hundred billion dollars a year. And what this is, is when you go, it's a company called Mannheim. And when you trade in your car,
they actually take it to an auction and then that really defines what's the wholesale rate for car as a whole thing. And again, I've done many different industries, I didn't, know, all right, let me, could figure out any industry and I've been able to. anyways, with that, they built a lot of software and a lot of times that software didn't work consistently and they didn't know. So there would be like one out of 5,000 customers that are horrible experience. And hopefully that wasn't a big customer because then that was a big problem.
And so this goes back to tooling first. The first thing I did is I said, okay, we had no visibility. We had no visibility of this good or bad. And again, you'll the new relic tying in a little bit. So the concept observability, which I actually launched that when I was at New Relic, you know, it's called this observability, but we started investing in tools that allow the product managers and the engineering leaders to understand what dashboards, the quality and the consistency of the products that they were delivering. And that was
a big changer. I think most companies have kind of realized that. I think that's kind of like table stakes at this point. But, you know, at the time that was something new is really getting people focused. And the other part is getting the product team and the engineering team out in the field, talking to customers. You know, you've seen this time and time again, where there's somebody in the, just an echo loop. I'm so busy launching the next feature, fighting off the sales team, all of those types of things.
Ken Gavranovic (14:11.316)
into really getting focused guys. What are we ladies? What are we doing? And how is it important? So I would say during that time, like I brought Andy Jassy in, I said, Hey, we can't wait three weeks for a server. Like that's crazy. And they had V block and you know, all of the, but the public clouds much, much faster, you know, changing that same thing is everybody was afraid, know, cat, you know, customer advisory board or sometimes a release board.
You've seen that sometimes the product person has to present. What is this thing and can we release it? Is it safe? Just friction. Like I destroyed all of that, automated all of that at a big company, which was scary for people. And really get people that we need to release fast. It's OK if we fail. If we have good instrumentation, we'll know that we failed and we can roll back very quickly. And that goes, of course, to the automation, which then allows product managers to have a lot more flexibility. And I think the next story I'll dig into.
with New Relic really is going to be, think, specifically to some of the challenges, I think, many product managers.
Kyle Evans (15:12.756)
Awesome. Well, yeah, I'd love to hear that story because I think you've touched on a couple of points that are just so critical in my mind. The idea of being connected to the customer. So getting out of the office and out of just the work so that you know you're doing the solving the problems right. And then being able to observe and then also just rapidly changing. once you have the insights, the observability, you can move much more confidently.
than if you were just kind of launching features based on what an executive said, like, need to launch. So, would love to hear how that played out at New Relic as well.
Ken Gavranovic (15:52.845)
Yeah, well, I think that's interesting. So I met Jim Ghoshy at when I was at Cox, because I had a quarter billion dollar budget. So I was doing transformation, not just at Mannheim, but at all business units and redoing how we operated, going to the cloud, changing how we thought about success, over activities. And so introducing all of those kinds of concepts. And so I met Jim and he said, hey, listen, we're really
getting having a lot of success in enterprise, but we don't know how to sell enterprise like you've been living it. You've been transforming it. And for those of us that haven't done transformation at big enterprises that have been around 75 years, it's a little hard, right? You have a lot of people issues. You know, it's what people process and technology is the easiest part of any type of transformation. Everybody thinks it's techno. People process. That's the hard part. So anyways, I had left Cox and was going to take a little time. So I want to do next and Jim reached out. said, Hey, would you like to come to New Relic?
And I said, okay, well, what do you guys want me to do? And they go, well, we need somebody that could talk to our customers. So we want you to do all the keynotes, all the public speaking and like go out and meet with customers. And I was like, oh, this is great. I only have like 500 employees. How many people have reports? I'm like, no, you can just do it yourself. I'm like, this is the best thing ever. Are you kidding me? So, you know, I started flying around and I would, took over for the CEO doing all the customer keynotes globally.
do all the big customer meetings. It was great because I've been a big customer. I was very, very effective in it. But I also started noticing all of the gaps in the product. And I started hearing that New Relic hadn't released at the velocity that it used to. And of course, I'm embedded right in all of that. And I would write these little reports that would go to the leadership team. so one day, having a great time, I get a call from the CEO of the company. He's like, hey, I really like your notes and all those kind of things. Can you just come do that in product?
And I'm like, well, yeah, I can. And I was thinking to myself, all right, here I go. Another transformation thing. But, I really like the company and a great, great CEO and, you know, Jim. So came there, but it was tough because like I land, I'm in Atlanta, right? And I've been working in New York companies and, know, basically traveling because my wife said you can't move. And this is on the West Coast. And so I'm like flying to the West Coast and flying all over the country. And
Ken Gavranovic (18:14.916)
where I got, where I started landing was the firing of the product manager that was the product leader. And so we had 700 people. So suddenly 700 people reporting to me with product and engineering, and we hadn't delivered much in three years. And so when I landed kind of analyzing what happened was kind of the first step. of course, know, there, know, West coast, some guy from the East coast, you know, it was a lot of fun stuff.
And then if you want, could just dig into kind of, this, what I'm about to say next, I've, I've done a lot of advising. see time and time again, in all different companies. So it's a pretty common pattern and I'll dig right in, but I don't know if you had any questions first.
Kyle Evans (18:55.438)
Yeah, I would love to dig into that and understand the specifics of that and then we can maybe step it back out to some of the general questions. But tell us more about what that process was like and especially around, like you mentioned, not just the technology change, but the cultural and people and process changes.
Ken Gavranovic (19:14.284)
Yeah, people process, yeah. So what you see very common is silos, right? So you see this, like some companies have gone and created a CPTO where product and engineering reports them to the same person. Sometimes you haven't, but what typically happens is you have product and products got its own vision. And then oftentimes there's a lot of pressure from the sales team to do feature X, Y, or Z.
quickly so that they can close X, Y, or Z deals. So you've kind of got, I'll call it product vision and conflict with sales vision to close the deal tomorrow, right? Then you've got engineering that wonders why product keeps changing its mind. Now, meanwhile, we know that's because that's that friction, that balance between that. And then you might have a CEO that's a visionary in himself and...
And I won't say specific to New York, Lou Gray guy, but I'll say I've been in companies where like the CEO will loop in and override product and engineering team. So suddenly the product has been working on this and suddenly the CEO, I've got this great vision. And by the way, he had some great visions. That's how you built a billion, multi-billion dollar business. So he's like, want to discount those things. So, but when you have all of those things, you've got the, maybe the, the CEO or they have this idea. The sales team's got this idea. Products got this idea.
Engineering is like no, we don't need any of those things. Often they have their own idea. Plus they wonder why everybody else keeps changing their mind. Because as you know, when engineering gets flipped around, it's a very expensive thing. And so that was kind of the situation that I saw myself. We hadn't delivered much. We like we did a done a big deal with IBM that required a complete rewrite to do some things from a GDPR perspective. It's a lot of different things, and so all the share with the process and.
And the CEO and I were aligned is that we wanted to move to a general manager model. And I'm sure you've seen that's pretty popular these days. So get somebody that's in a pod federated over the product and engineering, over a part of the thing, but it has some accountability to numbers, not just shipping, not just features and those things. so, kind of steps that I take, and I think this is a pretty common playbook if you could do it is, first go back with the sales team.
Ken Gavranovic (21:33.069)
Say, guys, listen, we haven't delivered much in three years. Let's be honest. OK? Got it. If we keep doing what we're doing, which is whatever you ask us to do at the last minute and we shift to it, we're also not going to deliver what our customers want. Because we have to close our new deals, but we've got to take care of our customers, especially if you've got a product that grows. So I've got kind of the sales team aligned. Here's what we think the most important things are. Got the product team. Here's what they think is the most important thing.
got the engineering to understand why that was the most important thing. And then did that restructuring into general manager models into the various groups. So that kind of helped people. So now we've got this alignment. And then I'm gonna say, this is probably a little bit tough, but what we said is we're gonna give the product and engineering team 20 % flexibility. So if anything new comes in that's not on the roadmap, that's not our quarterly plan, we went to quarterly planning, then as long as you could do it in your 20%,
You don't need to escalate that. can make the decision at the lowest levels of that organization. So you can be very responsive, but to an extent, 20 % of your capacity. And then we said anything that impacts the roadmap, you no longer had permissions to change it. So that way we weren't changing. I would call it purposeful trade-offs. We no longer made trade-offs without really understanding what it was.
and we set up a cross-functional group. anytime, and this also gave the product team coverage. So when someone would come to them and say, hey, I need this to close this $10 million deal, they could say, hey, I'm sorry, that's gonna go over my flex capacity. You have to go to this meeting. And that meeting had somebody higher up from sales, from product and engineering, myself, me and the CEO. And so then we would have a business conversation. What are the trade-offs of doing this thing versus what our plan was? And at first it was a lot of friction.
But after a little bit became great. And we actually delivered more in the first eight months in the company, according to like Disney, according to Capital One, had really big customers than they had in years because of that very simple structure. And then there's a couple of details I want to go into with product going back to, know, what is shipping success?
Kyle Evans (23:42.146)
Yeah. I'm interested in, us one, were there any specific difficulties in kind of that cultural change? Because I know it can happen with, many people can be on board or they can mentally be on board, but when it actually starts to hit, I can no longer, if I'm a salesperson, I can no longer just kind of interrupt the roadmap. How did you...
overcome some of those difficulties, especially initially, until you started to see the success. And then we'd love to hear some of the product specific things that go along with that as well.
Ken Gavranovic (24:17.56)
Yeah, have you ever heard of the Kubler curve? Yeah, so, you know, if you look at it, there's this graph and it has a bunch of words, but I'll say is that typically there's kind of like, we've heard this before, we've tried this before, we don't believe this, productivity goes down, assuming you're actually successful, they start to see it, productivity goes up. And so your goal, whenever you're a transformational leader is to minimize that debt. Now, what I shared with you, I was probably able to be more successful, A, because I was reporting to the CEO. So that course gave me political,
firepower. I already had a great relationship with the sales team, high trust. And I had done everybody's role. I'd led engineering teams, I've led product, I've led go to market sales. And so I think that, you know, that probably helped me with the powers. I think for a lot of times when you're a product leader, you know, navigating those things that you know, product sometimes is a pretty tough, you know, this political situation to be in a company, you've got a lot of competing interests for a limited set of resources, right? You've got your existing customers, you got all those things.
And so there were certainly a lot of challenges. So the first thing with the product team is to really reiterate, are going to do this. This is going to happen with confidence and then follow it up with execution, show people that we're doing things differently. And once they start to see it, and that goes back to transparency. So I had regular meetings. Here's what we're doing. Here's why we're doing it. Here's the steps of lots of weekly reports, lots of transparency, I think is probably one of the key things that you have to do.
and getting everybody aligned. And then I think, you know, to me, I've done this now from a consulting advisor for a number of private equity companies and so forth every single time it's worked, I think giving a certain level of flexibility to make decisions at a low level, because sometimes that's held too high. So a certain level of capacity to go there. And then the other part, really a lot more hurdles to change it. And then instead of it being like the product leader just says, no, we're not going to do that.
Cause then they're going to get overwritten because the salesperson, it's this thing, it's the quarter. So having a cross-functional at the top leadership, what that does is it forces everybody lower in the organization to say, this something that I want to go make an argument in front of the head of sales, in front of the head of product in front, know, instead of the leaders. And I think that that's, that's one key part, I think that probably helps. So a credibility, or if you don't have that credibility, building that credibility cross-functionally, getting people aligned and then having
Ken Gavranovic (26:40.382)
structurally a process so that when there is friction, the friction hires, it happens in a point. And we had a meeting and we would say, we're going to make a decision in this meeting. either you're there or you're not, but we're not going to, it's not going to drag. Cause that's the other part that hurts people's people don't make decisions that friction exists lower often with product team, you know, with other people they're fighting. And then it just makes people spin. And that's where you see like engineering velocity goes.
terribly because the product person might have been pushing really hard and they got overwritten by their boss or somebody else. I'm sure you've heard that many times.
Kyle Evans (27:12.152)
Yeah, think... Yeah, heard and seen numerous, numerous times. So I love that idea of having the transparency, like you said, the credibility to do some of those things, the transparency where everybody can understand what we're doing, and then the almost like a forced prioritization. I think that that's such a critical thing because we all, I think most people want all the things and it's difficult to make trade-offs. And so...
How are we systematically going to make those trade-offs? Is this thing worth more than these other things that we already determined were the highest priority? And if so, then we have to make a decision and understand it's going to have costs associated with it. We can't just put everything in and expect everything to get done. There's the trade-off and then the costs associated with that as well.
Ken Gavranovic (28:05.688)
I agree. And I think I didn't really emphasize much, but I put a pretty structured quarterly planning process. So I am a fan of a quarterly plan. Does that mean you're going to lock and load no matter what? And going back to you could dial up the flexibility. Like I said, you could say give 40 % flexibility and 60 % is quote fixed and has this higher override. But what I've seen, a lot of people don't have anything. And so then it's just constant feature factory. And it's really, really hard to execute a coherent strategy in the marketplace.
when you're just constantly reacting. So I'm a big believer that you should have a quarterly plan. You should have that, but you can dial up like how much is that fixed capacity that has a lot more constraints on changing it. And then that flex capacity.
Kyle Evans (28:48.226)
Yeah, I love that. I think that's great. I'm interested too. You mentioned some of the product side of that as well. So how did you go about implementing some of these things down at the product level? And were there hurdles there initially to overcome? And what were some of the ways that you were able to reach that delivery, reach that we're actually delivering and executing on these things that we said we were going to?
Ken Gavranovic (29:11.768)
Yeah. Yeah. Great question. So I would say, first of all, it was a little challenging because we actually had people that would fly in. We did agile very, very well. You know, we had 70 different teams. We released literally hundreds of times straight to production, had full rollback. So, you you think about the dream Nirvana, we kind of were already there, but where, where it lacked was again, is what is that success and let's lock and load. are we doing that? And so one of the things that I'm a big fan of
is when you think about I'm gonna build something is why. Okay, and I'll give you, always like to the, instead of talking about generically, I always like to go to a real life scenario. So one of the things I would say is when you built your quarterly plan and the social about the quarterly plan, you can say, I wanna do this and here's why we think it's good. But I would say, okay, and how do we know that's gonna be successful? And so this is true life story. Somebody had come into my office and.
At that point, we had built software that set on servers and sent this data that told us that the server was working well. And increasingly, customers were engaging in Kubernetes and different types of open source tools, and they wanted to send that data too. So they didn't want it. There was no agent. And at that point, we didn't have an agentless approach. And so the great product manager for that team is the general manager actually came to me and said, hey, the team wants to build this and the customers have been asking for it. And great.
Makes a lot of sense. I'm pretty aligned. Okay, so what is success? And they said, well, we're going to deliver it by, you know, the quarterly plan. And I said, well, that's that's that really doesn't work for me. And they go, what do you mean? I said, so if we deliver it, how will we know that we were successful? And they said, well, we're going to generate some revenue. I okay, revenue. That's great. So how much revenue are we going do? Well, I don't know. It depends on how many. I said, great. So how many transactions are we going to do? They'll kind of like the five Y's. How many transactions are we do?
What we're going to do these many transactions. And I said, okay, so would that be success? And I could see their eyes light up. go, well, let me get back to you. We're going to review our plan and come back to you. And I said, they came back to me and they said, well, yeah, we think we looked at it. And with the demand, we think I'm making this number up. don't remember right now. We think that we could do a million API calls in the first 30 days and that I said, okay, great. So I just want to be clear as what you're committing to me and the company.
Ken Gavranovic (31:34.841)
is you're going to deliver and have customers deliver a million of those in whatever, 60 days. And they looked at me and they go, but then I'm going to have, but hold on, I got to do sales training and I got it. Yeah. And so, you know, it was, but it was cool. Cause I saw like their eyes opening up. And so then they came back to me then they thought through a more detailed plan. Well,
we need to build it at this date and then we need to train the sales team and then we need to make the skew and then when you talk to the accounting team to make it something that they can actually put on the order form and all of these different things. And they said, but, we got a problem. I said, yeah. And they said, well, we've looked at it and we think that 80 % of our volume is going to be from Kubernetes. And we were just going to give people an API. And I said, okay, well, you're going to get the million. Well, no, we couldn't do that unless we built some sort of light wrapper that made it very easy for people to send us that data in Kubernetes.
And I said, okay, so that's another thing you have to do. So what you just learned from having that target of a million, all of the things you had to do in pre-sales, all of the extra features beyond this core API wrappers for Kubernetes, likely candidates that you also had to build. But if they, if I hadn't asked that question, none of that would have been done. It would have been the other, and you've seen this many times where someone rushes to build something. They launch it, the sales team doesn't know how to sell it.
It's not there. You know, there's they hadn't coordinated with the other team that puts it as a skew. And then it's confusing how the package was rolled out by getting people to focus on success and say, I'm going to measure you and the team on what you came up. I didn't come up with it. That success, you drive incredible behaviors throughout the organization. That's where I always say outcomes over activity. And so that's kind of like, so when we would do the quarterly plan, it would have in there.
the success was they're going to do a million by this date. And I would always frame it as a goal versus a commitment. I'll just share this one of my other product things I always say. So goal is I'm going to do my best or the team's going to do their best to get there. A commitment is I'm going to do it even if it isn't in the company's vested interest to hit what I said I'm going to do that. Because sometimes maybe you got a contractual commitment or legal things. Sometimes you have to make a commitment. But I always like to make it very, very clear.
Ken Gavranovic (33:54.295)
what you lose in making a commitment is I'm going to have less flexibility because I'm going to say, no, I'm not going to do that. You're saying, but Ken, that makes a ton of sense to do it. We need to close. Great. It does. But I made a commitment. So I lost that flexibility. And when you do that, that really helps people feel comfortable. And using that terminology, because some people get nervous like a million, come goal. That's your goal, which means you're going to do your best to get there. said a lot there. Hopefully I give you a few thoughts.
Kyle Evans (34:19.308)
Yeah, I love that. And I love the differentiation between the goal and the commitment because most of what we're trying to do is some of those targets. But there are times when we have to actually commit to either certain numbers or certain dates, but making that more of an exception or a very well thought out thing that if we make a commitment here, this becomes very inflexible. Like you said, this is something that... Yeah.
Ken Gavranovic (34:44.716)
Right, constraints.
Kyle Evans (34:46.956)
we're now doing and everybody needs to understand that as opposed to, here's our goal for these metrics. We think by doing this, it will drive a million API calls or a million signups or whatever the number is. And here's all the things that we're going to do, not just to release the product, which I think so many people get hung up on. If we just release it, that's the thing. But no, it's...
There's the training, there's the business process, there's all the things that have to happen in order to make it a success and reach that goal or reach those success metrics because otherwise it's just another feature that people are cranking out.
Ken Gavranovic (35:26.968)
I agree. And I think from an organizational design, I always say, listen, if you, if you set the right goals, you'll drive the right behaviors. And so if you think about it, how many people were going to have to have project meetings and this, that, and the other to get all of those other things that need to be done. But if you set the right goal, it's a forcing function to make sure all of those things happen.
Kyle Evans (35:49.474)
Yeah, I think that's exactly right because it then goes beyond just a product and engineering thing and it's now an entire business goal. Like you said, general manager style that we have to get everybody involved in order to reach this. Otherwise, it won't be successful. You could ship a feature, but it won't hit any of the business goals that you have in mind.
Ken Gavranovic (36:13.1)
I agree. And I think one thing is I'll just go back to the goal versus commitment. Cause I I'm sure you've seen this and I think it's a challenge that I've seen a lot of companies, maybe they're fast growing a certain page and it works at a certain point, but it doesn't scale where they say, we're agile. We don't do goals or commitments. We just go as fast as we can. And this is my opinion. I know some people feel different. I just don't think that works at scale. I've never actually seen that work at scale anywhere.
It works when you're building it and when everything's in line. But once you start getting some competition or you get a bigger customer base, you have to have a plan. You have to have business metrics and you have to have the differentiation. Now, I think again, where a lot of people get hung up is that definition. So if anybody's listening out there and we have, wrote a bit on transformation business breakthrough 3.0, I hit on this, but I think that really articulating everybody is we are, we're going to make goals.
we're going to make commitments and they're two different things and not just to the product team, but to all of your partners, your sales team. If you have a project management team to be really clear about terminology because that has a huge, huge impact around people, how they operate. Um, and when you, it's particularly around those, that constraint conversation, it makes sense. Like usually if you could go to a sales leader and you say, listen, I'll make commitments all day long, but let me just make sure what that means is I can't be flexible.
If you want me to deliver on all my commitments, I'm going to commit less because I'm always going to run into things that are unknown. I'm going to have some engineering thing. There's going to be some bug. There's going to be some distractions. And so the more you want me to commit, the less flexibility, the less risk I could take on a goal perspective. I can take lots of risks because I'm going to do my best.
Kyle Evans (38:01.57)
Yeah, totally agree and agree with you on the scale that having worked with very, very small companies to very large ones, like when you reach a certain point in size of company, the things that we're working for very, very small just no longer work. It would be great if they did, but you have to have more of that structure and framework in place in order to be successful as far as like what the plan is, what are the metrics, all of those things, because you just...
You don't have as much flexibility as you do when you're in a very, very small startup, early stage company, that type of thing.
Ken Gavranovic (38:38.584)
Yeah, and I think that's going to get even tougher with AI because, you know, and I don't know if this is good part of the transfer, but I think AI is going to give us insights into how our customers are using our product, what they really think, what they really want. And then making sure that you can react to that. Because again, if you don't, it's a big issue. So like I do sometimes advising for private equity and some venture capital and so forth.
And like right now what's happening from an engineering side, what used to take $20 million and let's call it 20 engineers now costs a million dollars in four engineers. So if you've got somebody that's got a really clear product vision. so you were seeing is there's companies that haven't innovated in a long time. And now there's people that basically almost like copying their business model, but they can build it faster and cheaper than ever before. So I think this AI component and how it's going to impact engineering and product.
I think is gonna be really, really impactful. It's ultimately great for consumers, but that efficiency curve as it comes up to speed is gonna be scary for all of us.
Kyle Evans (39:44.694)
Yeah, I'd love to touch on more of that. Where are you seeing AI playing a role right now, especially in product and engineering? And how do you see that changing the way that we are creating not just the products and experiences, but also businesses in general?
Ken Gavranovic (40:04.184)
Yeah, well, I've been doing AI for seven years, which when I say this to people, they think, wait, it's only been around for two and a half. No, no, that's chat GPT, right? But AI has been around for a long time. So like, for example, at New Relic, New Relic had all this instrumentation, all this metadata from mobile apps and this and that. And so what's the challenge? It's one thing when everything falls over and it's just hard down. But as you move to microservices architecture, it's a little bit more complex. And so we rolled out
called New Relic AI where we took and we built anomaly detection. So we took all of the metadata, all time series align and started using AI to look for anomalies, which then allow people to set thresholds for anomalies. And so now you're detecting things before even customers knew about it. So that was kind of a thing that I was in another company called Blameless that we had the software. So like when Ticketmaster have an outage, there's a lot they have to coordinate with.
And so you've got people, you've got product, know, engineering, lots of people on calls and so forth. And so one of the, had the software that people would use to facilitate, you know, both fixing and then after what happened, but we built some AI. we looked at like, for example, the Slack channels, because when you, you've been in an outage, right? You know, something weird happens, somebody released it. And so it's a lot of time getting everybody up to speed. So great example for AI, because again, it could take all of that unstructured data and uncover the pattern. So.
We were able to basically take the hours of outage information and say, okay, here's what's happened. Here's what people have tried. Here's the players on the call. And so people would get up to speed, you know, faster. And then, you know, the, company I'm involved with right now, product genius.guru is the, and there's lots of people at medium and enterprise, but I said, what if we could build like a tool set that you could use to embed? Because you think about like Slack channels. It's a great, you know, how much unstructured data is there? You think about.
all the historical product tooling. How many times do products product get feature requests and then they put it here and they put it there. The human being can't look at all of that unstructured data to put patterns. So now you're seeing people put AI and focusing it. You're seeing that in tools. So now you can take all of this noise of sales feedback, customer feedback, and kind of uncover what are the true patterns. And then once you release it,
Ken Gavranovic (42:25.272)
You can also now monitor what's that experience. Whereas the delay factor, as you know, like sometimes you release something and four months later or two months later, you really get a good idea of is this working or it's not. I think now, because you can put something in your end user application where someone can ask a question. Well, that's really valuable. If you released a new feature and customers are asking a lot of questions about that new feature, that tells you that feature is not designed well.
There's some sort of issue, but you might not have known that. Whereas now, if you incorporate all those interaction points of your customers, you get those clear insights.
Kyle Evans (43:03.19)
Yeah, I think that's a great call out. Where do you see this going into the future? So obviously AI is a very hot topic, especially over the last few years. How do you see that changing as we go forward, both the things that we're doing as product people, as businesses, but also for customers as well?
Ken Gavranovic (43:25.276)
Well, I had a couple of them, so it's about engineering. So engineering, they don't need to reinvent the wheel. Like my background, I did development of the product. A lot of times it's like, that's a hard problem. I was asked, has somebody else solved this problem? Well, now that's more clear than ever. So what I'm seeing when I work with private equity companies, and we basically get the engineering to go full on on AI, we literally get for every three developers, we effectively get another full developer philosophy.
So that means that you're gonna go faster with less people or the same amount of people maybe you're gonna hire less. So that's something that you're gonna see on the engineering side. On the product side, I think you're gonna be able to have better data as you start to instrument what the sales team, for example, think about all of the, you're an enterprise sales, they have extensive data of why they won or didn't lose deals. Sometimes that's buried in a PowerPoint or some other tool. Well, smart companies,
are taking that and say, me take AI and grab all of the sales after action deals we won, didn't won. Why do we, from a sales perspective, let me go grab the customer feedback. Maybe had people out in the field, there's field reports, which a lot of times are just documents sitting there. Let me take all of those pieces in. Now let me take all that unstructured data, break it in if I've got general managers or products, and then that should be really impactful data for that quarterly panelling process. So I think,
Product managers are really in the goal of assimilating all of that data, working with other people to make sure they have it, then looking at it, and then taking a look and making sure that what they're building is the thing that's going to deliver the next best value, not that thing that annoys them, right? Or that should be this way. Cause again, sometimes parts of your application are KTLO, keep the lights on, you know, and that sucks as a product manager, especially if that's your product. You're like, I don't want that, right? But.
You gotta think about it, we're in it to actually make our business successful. That's why we get paid, right? To solve problems and use resources in the best ways. And so I think you're gonna see a lot more data driven, which is gonna make it a lot more efficient. And then I'll answer your last question, just even going back to mom and pop. with Product Genius, it does a lot of different things. You can embed it in website and applications and all that stuff. But we also made it so you could do a QR code. So we have literally retail stores that put QR codes and now...
Ken Gavranovic (45:45.869)
the customer can scan the QR code on their store. They can give feedback. They can ask a question. If it's on the website, it can literally have a full conversation to answer any single question. And what's interesting is not just, you know, what are the questions tell you? Because again, it builds patterns. So literally people that have brought the product, they run a, like one guy has nine Marcos. And what it tells them is who his best employees are, who are his worst employees every single week. It tells them like, Hey, you've got a staffing problem on Wednesdays at this location.
because the data tells you. And so I think you're gonna see efficiency, which ultimately means a better consumer experience. So I think people are gonna have less time pushing buttons. think about you check into a hotel, there's gonna be less pushing buttons and more having a conversation with you, because the pushing buttons can be automated. And that's wasn't a good use of human time anyway. Like I always think about like to me, I mean, I think there's gonna be some repetitive jobs that are gonna cease to exist.
But I think AI ultimately takes away the work that really wasn't a good investment of a human's time because AI can't do original thoughts, at least currently. None of the AI can do original thoughts. Only humans can have original thought. If we have better data, I think we're going to make better decisions.
Kyle Evans (46:57.73)
Yeah, I think that's a great call out. I'm interested. You made a reference to your book that you wrote, Business Breakthrough 3.0. Tell us, what was the impetus for writing that and what have you seen since you wrote that?
Ken Gavranovic (47:15.32)
Well, I would say the impetus is there's clear patterns. you like I've seen, you know, Fortune 50 healthcare companies, I've seen banks, I've seen, you know, I just had a tremendous experience and I've seen a lot of people, a lot of times I would come in and advise, maybe I sold a tool that helps a transformational leader do something. And what they would most be interested in talking to me was not the technology, was what is the people process to dive change in their organization?
And so I would spend a lot of time in that. I thought, hey, you know what? I've seen so much. There really are clear patterns around success and failure and design, you know, around that people process part. And so I wanted to write a book really just hopefully helping some people. Because, you know, again, one of my good friends said, hey, I know transformation leaders. They're the guys that get fired. But I mean, you have to deal with the you're moving a lot of cheese, right? And so, you know, but it's it's how companies grow. So we try to put make it
Like a lot of easy, if you could just do this, implement this, it'll work. And here's six different stories of why that approach works well for what you're trying to do.
Kyle Evans (48:23.086)
That's great. I'm interested as well. What advice would you give to somebody who is either an aspiring entrepreneur or wants to get into technology or product right now based on your experience or based on what you're seeing?
Ken Gavranovic (48:38.552)
I also certified coach only because I like to help people. what I would say is the first thing is take a lot of chances when you're young. Take the most chances. Go sign up to that risky startup or go try that crazy idea when you're young. Because some people are like, oh, I'll do that later. Your risk profile is going to totally change. You're going to have kids, you're going to have this, you're going to think about how to retire. If you take a ton of risk, do it. So I would say take a lot of
risk early because then you can afford to take risk later. Like for me, I took a lot of risk early, which led to financial success, which then allowed me to choose what type of risk that's interesting to me in the work that I did later. So it gives you a lot of choices if you're successful. Even if you're not successful, you will learn more in a failed startup in two years than 10 years at a Fortune 500 company because they're going to put you in the lane. So you can always go that. So I say take risk.
a lot of risk at a young age, you're going to learn more, which is going to make you more marketable ultimately, wherever you go. So I'd say that's the biggest part. And then there's no free lunch. A lot of people like, Oh, startup. Cause they hear the one guy you make. Like I have seen people who have lost their marriages. have seen people who have lost their fortunes, you know, and I've also seen people that have made billions and I've been blessed too. Um, but it ain't easy. And it's always gone back to luck, skill and timing.
All three of those have to come better. And I'll show you just one quick story because I think what's interesting, I'm sure you've heard of Benchmark Capital, right? And so one time I was having lunch with Bill Gurley, who's the guy who invested in Uber and a bunch of stuff. And at this point, Zillow was a company floundering, couldn't figure out what its market. And I'm like, Benchmark's known being very, very smart. I said, hey, I'm just curious, like, why did you guys invest in Zillow? And they said, oh, it's real simple because we knew if we put a lot of money with
the Expedia team, because basically the whole Expedia team was the original foundation of Zillow, they'll pivot, they'll pivot and figure it. So the last part I would say is take chances early and pick your partners, the CEO, whoever it is, look at the character, make sure the characters align to who you are, because there's people that just don't have the morals that I have, right? Sometimes my morals have cost me money, but I'm OK with that. Other people are flexible on morables, then great, do whatever works for you.
Ken Gavranovic (51:03.128)
But I would say, pick your partners, pick your coworkers, pick your boss, very careful.
Kyle Evans (51:09.442)
Yeah, I think that's absolutely great advice and I 100 % agree. Well, Ken, this has been a great conversation and I do have a couple of wrap up questions before we finish. before we do that, where can people find out more about you, about the things that you're working on?
Ken Gavranovic (51:26.21)
Sure. If you want to find out me, you can go to KenGaronovic.com. So K-E-N-G-A-V-R-A-N-O-V-I-C.com. Maybe we'll put a link in the notes when we do the show. And then if you want to learn the company I'm involved with right now is productgenius.guru. And I always tell people, like I have people that ping me on LinkedIn or whatever. If I can help you, I'm very much into giving back. I've seen a lot of things. So feel free to reach out if there's something you think or a question or something you're going to feel free to reach out to me. glad to help.
Kyle Evans (51:53.24)
Great. Well, yeah, we will put those links in the show notes so you can find them there. And then to wrap up, we usually like to ask a couple of questions that don't have to be business or product related, but they certainly can be. And the first one is, you read or watched or listened to anything recently that you have found interesting?
Ken Gavranovic (52:11.672)
Well, I'll tell you, it's kind of recently, but mine's book 16. If you're a sci-fi fan, Craig Allenson had this book called Columbus Day. That's like the, has this AI, have you heard of it?
Kyle Evans (52:23.95)
It's on my reading list right now. So I have most of the books. Yep.
Ken Gavranovic (52:25.88)
Oh man, you got to do it. It's up to 16 books. And this guy, like he's one of those guys where he was writing books, had a real job, self published on Amazon, turned into a huge hit. But I would say I've laughed so much and it's funny because I meet like the CTO of Disney a lot times like, Hey, what are your books? You're like, that's so common. Like inside of your heart, there's the AIs called Skippy, but it's hilarious. So would say check it out. Columbus days, the first book in that series. You'll laugh. It's fun. know, unless you're like totally not a sci-fi person, you'll have a great time with.
Kyle Evans (52:56.078)
Okay, that's a great call out. do have, I think, I don't remember if it was like the first couple of books on my list and I've got them already. So I've just, I've heard the same thing and I need to get started on them. Maybe I'll do that.
Ken Gavranovic (53:07.512)
Yeah, and R.C. Bray is one of the best narrators. So if you do it on Audible, it's amazing.
Kyle Evans (53:11.06)
Awesome. Great. And then final question. Do you have any products that you have been using and enjoying lately, either physical products or digital products?
Ken Gavranovic (53:21.656)
Well, I would say I'd still keep getting amazed. You know, like I use chat GPT, Claude and perplexity for different things is the amount of time where I can get to the information that I want. I think, I mean, I think I've gained probably 30 % productivity personally in the things that I've done. So, and, and also, you know, I'll just share this. Like I have a son that has learning disabilities and I'm the part where I go back to it. I think it's very interesting is without me telling him he came across chat GPT.
and he uses that to balance any of his life decisions on. And he's made a bunch, I'm not saying it's all chat GPT, but he's made much, much better life decisions. So I would say it's not only great for just personal productivity, but even if you wanna, you cause if you think about it, it's the knowledge of almost all mankind. know, AI doesn't build new ideas, but it's really good at looking at all the things that have been done and giving you some perspective. So I would say that's probably.
something, you know, I think the AI tools, generative AI tools, you know, are pretty amazing.
Kyle Evans (54:22.018)
Yeah, I definitely agree with that. even very recently was making, it wasn't a life decision, but it was just a small like, hey, should I do this or this? And I just typed it in. Yeah, I was like, here, and it gave me a very, very good response of like, here's the pros and cons, here's what you should probably do if you want this type of outcome. And I was like, that is, that's about what I was looking for. Cause I was actually really frustrated with something and I was like, need a cool head to just help me sort through this. And that's what I did. So it was like,
Ken Gavranovic (54:29.784)
frozen crime.
Kyle Evans (54:51.028)
one of those use cases that is not professional necessarily, but also just a very, like you said, the knowledge of everything kind of coming together and being like, okay, that is a good path to take.
Ken Gavranovic (55:00.856)
Yeah, so random. I'm I'm into anti-aging. Let me be the, finally, let me focus, be the healthiest person. But like, so there's this thing that a lot of people are doing with hyperbaric chambers. And so was like doing some research and Joe Rogan just happened to me. curious. He probably spent a ton of time researching it. So I just add, ask perplexity. I said, which brand does Joe Rogan? And so it went and found whatever episode that he happened to mention the exact brand. I would have never been able to find that. I would have gone like through,
20 pages of Google. I think being able to get pinpoint the exact piece of information or the pros and cons and have a disinterested party, bounce those pros and cons, I think is really, really powerful.
Kyle Evans (55:41.154)
Yeah, yeah, definitely agree. Well, Ken, again, this has been a great conversation. We've touched on so many things and I feel like we could have dove into a number more as well, but appreciate all of your time and insight. think this has been, again, an excellent conversation, both about product and business and AI.
Ken Gavranovic (55:58.733)
Yeah, Kyle, thanks so much for having me on.
Kyle Evans (56:00.63)
Alright, and thank you everyone for listening. We'll talk again next time.
Ken Gavranovic (56:04.707)
Take care.