Elevate the Individual Contributor | Claire Vo (CPO LaunchDarkly)

think ic's of a certain level of experience let's say 8 to 10 years of experience really start to hit the ceiling of leadership or management as the only path for them because levels have been set up in that way and I think it's a big problem it is not the same on the engineering side it's a very common ladder for high performance Engineers to continue on an icy track it is just a much less common model for PMS I think it's because product leaders have not been creative enough when it comes to how to structure their product teams and so it's something I've really focused on is ensuring that I have a ladder an IC ladder that goes all the way up to the SE Suite it's totally defined and I actually there's a chief product Innovation officer that is seite executive level person that reports to me that is an icpm and is fabulous and has been at the company for many years and it's been really effective role so you know I think that IC path is really important and I also believe that even if you Branch into management as a product leader you should still have some pretty good icpm skills and still get your hands on the work today I want to share an interview of CLA V ex Chief product officer of color and optimize CLA believes that is finally time for the individual contributor product manager to shine we spoke about why PM performance theater needs to end how to pursue the super in CPM career path and how in cpms can use AI to excel at their job Clea has so many hot ticks and I think you'll love this interview enjoy

it all right CLA well it's great to have you here today I really love your hot ticks on X and your exploration of AI yeah so let's talk about a few of your hot ticks actually let's talk about maybe we can start with you know what do you think like this PM formance theater is and like what should PM do instead yeah I you know I said recently and I say this sometimes in our team meetings when we start to Trend this direction I say can we just talk less about how we do our work and more about the content of the work itself I find often in you know product meetings and even in the discourse on X you hear a lot about sort of the abstract Frameworks of product management like how do you think about product Discovery how do you run planning how do you prioritize as a road map you know bring structure around design sense or product sense and you hear nothing about what people are actually building like the actual ideas that they have the features that they're shipping the things that they're working on the content of the work itself and even inside teams we have a PM weekly team meeting and you know on occasion we start to bias the agenda towards like how are we collaborating with stakeholders and what's our framework for solicit in customer feedback and you know is this meeting working well or is that meeting working well and I think that's all important to do it just shouldn't be you know 60 70% of what you're talking about I want to make sure that the majority of the time we spend as a team and I'm trying to influence the discourse around product management to say actually what matters is the content of your work and while Frameworks can speed up or different strategies different processes can speed up the way you come to high quality ideas and the way you execute against help you hold yourself accountable to Performance a framework itself is not going to build a great product and as I say you can't put an idea in like a framework Factory and get success out the other end it that's not how it works and so I think it's really important that we as product leaders or voices in the product Community stop rewarding performance theater more than we reward like high quality work and and proof of work and so that's something that I really think is important inside teams I think it's important when we talk about what it means to be a successful product manager yeah I totally agree I mean just

because you memorize 100 Frameworks do mean you know how to craft a good product it's very messy yeah even if you use a great framework and you build what is you know on paper or in code a great product sometimes it just doesn't work and knowing how to adapt in that situation I think is very important I do think these Frameworks give a lot of product managers a sense of false confidence when it comes to the products they build because if they do the user research if they you know design it the right way if they bring in the right stakeholders like of course a great product will come out the other end and like I've been a product manager leader for a very long time I've built a whole bunch of Duds and I think I'm pretty good so I think understanding that some of it is like you know speed which I've said some of it is luck some of it is like the right problem space right time and that Frameworks can help you accelerate again but they're not going to guarantee your success so if you look at the PM career ladder a lot of companies like a lot of it is like you know do internal stakeholders feel good about you like did you have a great review with the CEO or like you know can you grow headcount can you become a manager at least a couple years ago it was like that so how

do we design a better ladder you know to kind of incentivize the right Behavior yeah and you know I'm maybe part of why this exists because when I was at optim L and I was CPO there we actually published at least a partial PM letter that I know a lot of people refer to and it had you know work streams of competencies including communication decision-making collaboration and inclusivity resilience adaptability all those things are important but yet you're right the things underneath those competencies are you know a combination of trying to assess hard and soft product skills at on an individual level whether it's managing risk managing cross functional stakeholders sharing robust and robust requirements all those things and what you typically find in PM ladders is that once you switch sort of the like principal PM group PM depending on how you level it and you sort of getting to this director level it really your growth as a product leader is constrained by the size of your product team and unlike engineering organizations which I run both product and engineering and design and data so I can actually compare the structure of the organizations PM organizations are by necessity small PMS are ratioed against many Engineers sort of like one PM is supposed to you know care for and help guide the work of a larger team and so PM headcount tends to grow more slowly than other sort of like producer roles inside building teams and so there are just less PMS there's less need for hierarchy in product teams and you become naturally constrained if management is the only growth path you can imagine for yourself because there just aren't that many management roles there certainly are less director roles there are certainly less VP roles in most mid you know small to midsize companies now of course in very large organizations you can have very large product organizations where those are more available but I think at the end of the day they're still naturally constrained because we all operate in this hierarchical system where like one person as many people and so I think ic's of a certain level of experience let's say that like 5 to8 or 8 to 10 years of experience really start to hit the ceiling of leadership or management as the only path for them because levels have been set up in that way and I think it's a big problem because you know again I said I run an engineering organization as well it is not the same on the engineering side you can very happily and very successfully and there's lots of Frameworks for very senior even up into the SE Suite engineering ic's people know how to use it all the way up to the CTO there's like Architects there these staff and principal Engineers it's a very common ladder for high performance Engineers to continue on an IC track it is just a much less common model for PMS now I think that happens for a couple reasons one is PMS tend you know there's a subset of PMS that come out of this like MBA management style background where that really is their career ambition and they see product management as explicitly a path into more generalized management or like a GM Ro and so that's one reason but candidly I think it's because product leaders have not been creative enough when it comes to how to structure their product teams and so it's something I've really focused on is ensuring that I have a ladder an IC ladder that goes all the way up to the SE Suite it's totally defined you can Branch into management if you want but it is not necessary we have comp bands we have titles we have role expectations for PMS to be ic's all the way up and I actually there's a chief product Innovation officer that is seite executive level person that reports to me that is an icpm and is fabulous and has been at the company for many years and it's been a really effective role so you know I think that IC path is really important and I also believe that even if you branch into management as a product leader you should still have some pretty good icpm skills and still get your hands on the work so those are maybe my two strong opinions on this topic do you think like the industry is

changing a little bit like when you talk to your VP or CPO peers do they have the same opinion like they want to make an icy track or is it still very much you know I think that 2022 2023 has not been particularly kind to tech companies in general we've seen a lot of reorganizations a lot of layoffs a l lot of like constraints on expenses and spend teams are getting smaller and so I do think there's an industrywide sort of reality that all teams are being asked to do more with less headcount I this is not 2020 2021 where everybody was hiring everybody you could get headcount in a minute most teams are just operating in a very different reality that reality means that leaders are having to adapt to running a different style of team with different expectations and in a you know more resource constrained or scrappier team structure you're going to look at people for example who only do management work you know only do the care of feeding of like one-on ones and prioritization and managing stakeholders and bringing the team together all those things and say you know what friend like we need you to jump in and icpm something actually get handson with some of our product because we are just simply capacity constrained and so I think you're seeing that just across the board as a necessity of the way teams are changing and then I think that's allowing people that's giving people a moment to say hey what was really working about the time where maybe I had a larger team and people were more specialized and what do I want to continue but what if that wasn't serving my product organization company or what wasn't serving my culture and I think in these times of industry or economic shifts people really rethink management and Leadership practices and really you know I'm not saying there weren't great things and you know everybody doesn't want a bigger team and that good work can come out of that but I do think it's a moment that teams are re-evaluating their operating model and saying is there a different way is there a better way or just candid is there a more appropriate way for the time we're at right now yeah and I think with this AI stuff it might not change anytime soon right yeah so you have this model called

uh fast Beast right and I really love it because what I observed is like as companies get bigger they become more riverse and like you know as a PM you're trying to incrementally move some Metric so I guess how do you keep this like why is it important to keep alive and how do you keep this principle alive as a company scales yeah I often again I think this goes back to where we started this conversation is PMS often believe there is like a capital R right answer to every problem right if I just if I do the right user research if I just talk to the right customer if I think really hard if I structure my PRD and make sure I have a problem statement and Metro like I will nail it on its head I will build the right thing and goodness will come out of the other end of that process and just honestly after two decades of being in Tech and being a founder and working for amazing startups like that is just not true it's not how the Real Worlds works out if people are really honest with themselves good work can sometimes turn into bad outcomes sloppy work can sometimes trip into good outcomes and so you want to be right-sized with how much you convince yourself you can gold plate your thinking to get the right answer on the other side and what I can tell you is absolutely true is the more at bats you have the more likely you are to strike gold in the pursuit of something interesting and so I do believe fast more iterations getting real things into Market that customers can actually touch feel talk about use is the path towards ACR more and more wins over time and I don't think this is just the fact in larger companies where maybe like risk aversion or process or any of those things may slow down the process I also believe this to be true at a very startup kind of like early stage and one of the things that I tell the startups that I sometimes advise is they sometimes get kind of paralyzed or you know really try to get on paper like what their strategy is and they're like well we have option A or option b or option C and all seem pretty good and which and I say you know what there we're probably in a world in which all of those are viable six billion you know multi-billion dollar businesses like it is possible you know in technology in products there's a lot of Green Field for great products but you're never going to be that if you don't pick one and so I actually think the confidence of like picking a direction and starting to execute is actually the thing you need to do to drive good outcomes and so I just I've always seen this the team that F ships faster the team that makes decisions quickly often AC Cruise the market Insight the customer feedback and candidly the capacity to build that wins versus the team that like can run a beautiful process and have gold plating thinking but can only ship a couple things a year yeah because if you ship like they just you probably make mistakes and you learn faster right like that feedback loop is like so important yeah to get going yeah and you know the other thing that I say here is like fast beats right and the other thing I say is like no genius product managers in that I don't think product managers sort of like Divine from the universe what's right and what's wrong I also think it's important in this pursuit of speed to be able to take in input and ideas from anywhere I think Engineers often have great ideas that get overseen because they're looking you know constantly looking to the product manager for what's important or what needs to be prioritized I certainly think we as an industry undervalue designers and I think there's there should be more of a design voice in product ideation and execution and those sorts of things and like people won't like that I say this but you know sales is the tip of the spear and I wish sometimes we weren't so actively friction full when it comes to the product sort of sales relationship as sort of like a practice so I really do think two things that are really effective are moving fast and recognizing great ideas can come from anywhere yeah this is the problem this is my pet peeve with the term like product sense it kind of implies that you know you kind of build it once and that you're done with it but like you know the market is changing all the time customers Chang all the time like you gotta be humble and like listen to other people listen to customers to figure out what you want to build yeah exactly so let's talk a little bit more about the superi I see as a alternative career path for PMS I listen to your podcast

with Brian and he had this good framework about coaches captains and players do you remember what that is or can you quickly recap I think my best Brian will do it better but yeah you know and I actually like this metaphor because I use a similar one when it comes to Frameworks so I'll start that first which is like if you think about a great sports team a great soccer team and like my metaphor is going to fall apart because I don't watch a lot of sports but's say a great soccer team no soccer team says like if I just run this framework I'm gonna win what they do is they attract star Talent they develop plays so they have a predictable way of working together and a common language on the field but they also know there's luck and competitors and weather and all these things that play that result in a good outcome and so I think Brian's you know model of thinking about three types of teammates is very important you have coaches recruit and manage the team manage the resources of the team you have captains who are star players but also are seen as sort of leaders on the field the sort of like super IC Tech lead sometimes icpm and then you have players talented people that are out there executing plays you know kicking balls doing the work on the ground and there are again as I said by necessity there are never going to be as many coaches as players and there are also never going to be as many captains as players because of the way the team is structured and that's okay and you should accept that but you want to make it sort of like more attractive to be a player and a captain or at least equally as it is to be a coach because not everybody can be the coach and quite frankly the coach job is very different from the captain job or the player job and so I think this is a really interesting framework and the thing that Brian says that I love is like in order to make coaches captions and players equally attractive they have to be equally attractive from a title perspective and comp perspective and I that's where we you know kind of mess up which is like why is it a necessary fact of physics that quote unquote managers get paid more than equally leveled ic's it's not always the case but it can kind of be the case if you do any of these comp studies I don't think that's necessarily true and so if you can level out sort of on a level adjusted basis compensation across these like sort of three types of players I think you can make it attractive to be other take other roles especially that more align with your strength I like this framework because like you know like Captain itself kind of gives it a little bit of uh Prestige like people say like just an IC but you're not going to call like Tom Brady just an IC right it's kind of like a nice label for the super pracy yeah yeah totally and Tom Brady's bringing home a lot of money defensive coordinator and you mentioned you have this like Chief

Innovation officer right and so like what are some traits of really great I's who can really get to this level yeah so incredibly High context on the company is one like they need to be reference point for the company on the details of the product on the business model I mean it they contain a lot of internal knowledge I've seen in most super senior it they're highly capable at their craft so if they are a PM they are exceptionally capable at hard and soft skills of product management meaning that literally anything you toss to them they can catch and execute well so they are highly skilled but then these ic's are really detail oriented like they know the detail details they sweat the details they're very flexible when it comes to the type of work that they do they know how to make decisions and drive teams towards decisions they basically they know how to I wouldn't say influence without Authority they know how to direct without Authority which is like I think very different it's not like they're Whispering into somebody's ear saying I think we should do like they're like they have the cultural carry inside the company to say we're going to do X doesn't matter that you don't report to them like people believe and get it done they tend to be you know pretty low drama well-liked like it's hard to be a super cater I see that people don't really love and then I also think one of the things that they do really well is they're very just well networked internally so you know they know every engineer they know every PM they it's not weird for them to like DM the CMO all those sorts of things I think are very important so those are some of the things but mostly they just get stuff done really fast okay so do you think as a super IC you need some sort of like air cover from exx or like it's kind of hard to come into a new company as a supery and like succeed right because you don't have those relationships or like you know what you done more on the engineering side you know I rarely see somebody hired in to like very senior icpm role it's often more of a promotion path for somebody internally who has a lot of credibility that doesn't want to go into management right so I do think there it's sort of usually is a more of a promotion path than a higher in although on the engineering side I've absolutely seen super IC Engineers hired in and be very effective and it's because they're excellent at their craft they're quick and they know how to build consensus in community so I don't think it's impossible I've seen it done many times before I think on the product side it's often a result though of just having done good work and proof in the company got it so like let's say some PMS hearing just this thing and like you know they want to you know they love like you know work the engineers and designers they love crafting products but like you know in their current company their lad is just like hey you know if you want to get paid more you got to become a manager like how do they find a company that actually cares about superise yeah or yeah I mean find I think there are a lot of I mean there's not that many actually but like people that actually still work at companies and are influencing product sort of thinking in the broad Community but you can't find people like me who talk about this who can probably connect you to other leaders who are thinking like this I think the other thing is I really believe in shooting your shot when it comes to careers and roles that you want and so I often believe that there are like no hard and fast rules when it comes to what roles exist inside most technology companies just no one's going to go out of their way to change something for you out of the goodness of their heart so I've had personally a lot of success I've done this multiple times in my career where I have walked in with a one sheet like one pager on this is the job that I want to do sometimes it's promotion sometimes it's a new team sometimes it's restructure sometimes it's just I this is the job I want to do how do we get there and your manager or your leader can then partner on you with you getting you into that role I think it's very different to be like can you figure this out for me like no come with an answer and like help me execute versus asking me to solve a problem for you so I really I always say this to anybody who's asking me for career advice know what you want out of this job and your next job to be always have an answer to that question very crisp because then people can help you more than they could if you you're not clear on that yeah I think that's really good advice because a lot of times these like really good ic's might not be working on the most important problem for the company or like because of Oregon or whatever so maybe you come in like you actually like hey I actually want to work on this problem I think it's more important yeah exactly so like you also spend time like building chat PRD and your own a stu maybe this wrap a section with like you can may give me some idea of like what your time is like

as a CPO and like you know how do you protect your own Craft Time yeah so I've talked about this pretty broadly and you know everything changes with the season but one of the things I realized earlier this year is I was in meetings 80% of my day and I have a pretty strong philosophy that no one in my or including me gets away with not producing IC work and if you're in meetings 80% of your day you have no Builder capacity so I am privileged enough I lead a senior team right I'm Chief product officer I have many VPS and directors Etc very senior folks in their career reporting to me and I just canceled my one ones I said I'm spending 40% of my time meeting in silos with individuals and they're in these 30 minute fragments and we spend 10 minutes you know just catching up personally and figuring out a couple things but not actually getting deep on them and then we move on with our lives and I just I couldn't do it anymore personally it wasn't serving the company I don't think we were getting effective production out of those meetings and so I just canel them and I got back half of my time and then I could consolidate all my time to where I was getting like full afternoons off or like full Fridays where I could be more responsive to the team available actually go heads down and work on things produce documents PM projects all those sorts of things that I think are actually critical to my success as a job or as a leader and it may I mean like trans life-changing I don't know how to just Des describe how good this thing was for me it's like lifechanging it TR and also I don't think anybody like wakes up as a you know kindergartener and says when I grow up I really hope that I'm in one-on ones all week in on a zoom meeting like no one dream dreams of that maybe there are people out there I don't want to erase uh people's Ambitions but I want to create I want to build I got into technology because I like building things and so protecting building time is actually a very productive Force for me as a leader because it keeps me engaged in why I choose to do this work and have these kinds of roles and so that's been really important for me and something that's been successful and then when I replaced those when I once were with were much longer like hour and a half long meetings with either individuals or groups of people actually go deep on the problems that we're solving we had a lot more sort of casual synchronous time together where we'd all just like hop on a zoom With No Agenda and just hang out and work together it just really changed how I thought about how I could work and I think it's been really effective and I highly recommend rethinking your schedule as a product manager or leader how about your reports are they happy to get ped back or do they miss you or they good we check every now and they get me that's the thing is what was really interesting is when I was so booked people couldn't get me when they needed me right if you have something come up well Claire's back toback so I'll talk to her tomorrow or if you're like I really need to go deep but I can only find 30 minutes on your calendar like it actually has made me more available if that makes sense then less it's not like I don't allow a one-on-one it's just that people can choose to put it on my calendar when they want and then we have these like more infrequent but regular check-ins where it's like I meet with everybody at least once a month we get together as a team every week it's not like I don't see people it's just I'm not sitting serializing like 30 minute check-ins with yeah very senior adults who know how to do their job and can like slack me anytime so you know and I think it would be harder it's maybe harder to do if you have to day coach like a more Junior sort of employee who needs more active coaching but I have just a very strong very Senior Team the questions they come to me with are more strategic in nature really discussing long-term things about the business you know if they need my advice they can give me a call on something tactical but it's worked for me now would it work it's also worked because I have three years of credibility with this organization this company like do I think you can show up as a new product leader and do that right off the back probably not you could think about how do I want to structure how I meet with my team for maximum effect and don't just default to one on ones yeah I think bottom line is like most product people like you said want to spend time crafting stuff right like that's what gives them energy yeah so maybe your reports also like to spend more time through that too yeah yeah exactly so let's talk about your AI uh Journey so like you recently had a hackathon right or something in your company oh we have hackathons all we're in the middle of a hackathon right now I need after this I'm going to go code so we do we have two big hackathons a year it's usually like hot hack summer and hacky holidays so we do one in the summer and one in the winter but this year with all

this gen stuff we have basically done a hack half week like two or three days about every six weeks because there's just so many ideas and so much energy and we're able to carve out and protect the time and have it not be disruptive and we think it's a priority so uh I think this will be the last hack week of the year but we've definitely done a handful this year so like for chap PRD like maybe we can talk a b about it what actually does yeah so chat BRD comes out of me trying to build myself a co-pilot as I said I do I see work for product management and I have a lot of company product context but the communication of that context especially in an asynchronous working environment it takes investment of time to get your thoughts that are inside your head pretty clear into a structured document or something that could be shared to be discussed in a remote or a distributed team and so with chat GPT I was consistently working on like how do I prompt chat gbt to actually be an effective co-pilot and I think over several months got to something that I think really works for me and so chat PRD basically me productizing the product co-pilot that I have built for myself and the things that is particularly good at it is very good at scaffolding fairly robust prds from ideas or like low context outlines of what you want to build into something that I think is much more robust that can be completed by a product manager but I say it can type I mean it can think faster than you can type kind of situation where like it could take the 22 seconds of GPT processing time and get out like what you would probably have done but had to sit down for like an hour and really get it from your brain into your fingers so it's very good at taking ideas and expanding them out to prds it is also I think pretty excellent at taking existing prds and inspecting them for gaps in like reasoning gaps in features it often finds features that are like in my mind obviously table Stakes features that like I just kind of forget to put in so it's pretty good at giving feedback on prds and then it's a good sort of like thought partner or coach given some of that context on how you as a PM could do better so it'll give you Reflections like you know based on this PRD or the set of prds that you shared you really under you underinvested talking about metrics and outcomes in your documents like you're very vague about those things you should probably develop more hard data skills so I think those are the three things it does really well and I've gotten a lot of positive feedback from it and basically PM saying like I was going to spend an hour and a half on this thing and I was able to get it to like 80% in five minutes and then I could spend the time really going into the details and going deep and it just saved me a lot of time and it helped me with this like blank page problem and I've also hadm say it just compared to out of the box chat GPT is a lot more effective so I think it's working people are signing up people are using it I use it daily so we'll see maybe give me some like how the sausag is made like is this just like a very long prompt or are you using like a yeah as people say I say it is just a prompt but it is my prompt so a lot it's a very long prompt and a lot of energy has gone into it it's a prompt plus I did actually you know I distributed it as a GPT on chat GPT I think like over 5,000 chats have been PRD so people are out there generating PRD with chat PRD but it's also its own Standalone web app so I launched it on chat pr. if you don't have a chat GPT Plus subscription you don't have 20 bucks a month to pay for it pretty affordable price point directly that you can use it as a web app and then once I have that web app I'm going to be able to do things like extended into Google Docs and extended into jira or Confluence so yeah know we'll build more stuff I have a goal to do a release every weekend so while my kids nap and then on Sunday I do a release and you will get improvements on the like web app the chat pr. that you won't get on the GPT that's amazing yeah I play around with a little bit and yeah it takes away a lot of like the boorder play stuff that you have to do around writing PRD so it helps a lot yeah great so I guess uh we can wrap up with this question last question like a year

or two from now like how will PM's job change with this AI stuff like do you think like all the like the meting notes and like all this stuff will be like Abra way or like how do you think of PM yeah what I'm really excited about my friend whan who's one of the co-founders of this company called patch it's like patch. Tech he worked for me at optimiz Lee he's Superstar product thinker I mean top tier and he has this idea of like the Proto manager which is like a prototype manager and I actually think that's the more interesting way product management could go with these AI tools which is like sure summarizing meetings and creating requirements documents and all these things yes we're going to have tools in H agents that are going to automate those things but like that's not the interesting part of the job is like actually participating in the building of something and what I love in terms of gen AI is the ability to go from idea to product without necessarily strong technical skills now I'm a software engineer I can code so like it's easy for me to say that but I do think we're at this place where you can take natural language and ideas and actually get a prototype going that you could put in front of customers or you can iterate yourself on like no that's not exactly how I want the experience to work that doesn't feel right you can sit side by side with designers so I think product managers are going to be forced to candidly build more because the tools will allow them to build more without necessarily coding or software development skills so that's how I hope it changes is that the lines between prod and design sort of blur and allows everybody to be more creative allows people to contribute more to the business yeah so then we can actually product manager can actually like deliver stuff for the customer as opposed to like only internal stuff internal State order yeah exactly or they can at least produce artifacts that are much more closely aligned to what the actual experience would be versus a document yeah my Engineers say like you know like my engine say that I can write better AI prompts in them so like they actually rely on me to write the prompts exactly yeah cool all right well thanks so much CLA for your time yeah this was a great conversation super fun