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Oji & Ezinne Udezue: How AI shifts PMs to sharp problems

How four-hour prototypes have collapsed the PRD-led PM model; the Udezues bet on sharp problems, shipyard teams, humility, and hands-on agency.

Ezinne UdezueguestLenny RachitskyhostOji (Ogbunuaka) Udezueguest
Sep 7, 20251h 18mWatch on YouTube ↗

EVERY SPOKEN WORD

  1. 0:00 – 4:14

    Introduction to Oji and Ezinne

    1. EU

      It really irked me when, in 2024, most people were saying AI is here and now the PM job is gone. There are others who are saying AI is here, so now we can do the things we don't like to do with AI. (laughs)

    2. LR

      What do you find is most common across the companies that are succeeding?

    3. EU

      Companies that recognize that AI is not this magic thing that you're going to slather onto your product. The problems are still the problem.

    4. LR

      Something else that I think is also really important is getting super hands-on with the tech.

    5. OU

      I've written more code in the last one year than I have in the last 10 years, because code is now essentially architecture and English. I'll pick a project that touches a lot of the things that I need to learn. One of the passion projects I have is to automate my house. The idea is that I give the house eyes and ears. The coolest thing is I've specced out a super sensor. It will see people, hear them. It will sense humidity and temperature. And I'm building the hardware myself.

    6. LR

      Today my guests are Adji and Ezinne Udezue. They are married, both longtime product leaders with over 50 years of combined product experience. They're also the authors of a new book that I love called Building Rocketships: Product Management for High Growth Companies, which is a synthesis of their biggest product lessons over the course of their entire career. Adji was chief product officer at Calendly and Typeform, and led product teams at Twitter, Atlassian, and Microsoft. Ezinne was CPO at WP Engine and VP of product at Procore. We chat about what is changing in the role of product management, also what is staying the same. We also get into the shift of PM-to-eng ratios that AI is introducing, the five skills becoming most important in being a successful PM over the coming years, and the single biggest lesson that each of them have learned over the course of their careers. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It helps tremendously. And if you become an annual subscriber of my newsletter, you get a year free of 15 incredible products, including Lovable, Repl.it, Bolt, n8n, Linear, Superhuman, Descript, Whisperflow, Gamma, Perplexity, Worp, Granola Magic Patterns, Raycast, ChatPRD, and Mobben. Head over to lennysnewsletter.com and click Product Pass. With that, I bring you Adji and Ezinne Udezue. This episode is brought to you by Mercury. I've been banking with Mercury for years, and honestly, I can't imagine banking any other way at this point. I switched from Chase and holy moly, what a difference. Sending wires, tracking spend, giving people on my team access to move money around, so freaking easy. Where most traditional banking websites and apps are clunky and hard to use, Mercury is meticulously designed to be an intuitive and simple experience. And Mercury brings all the ways that you use money into a single product, including credit cards, invoicing, bill pay, reimbursements for your teammates, and capital. Whether you're a funded tech startup looking for ways to pay contractors and earn yield on your idle cash, or an agency that needs to invoice customers and keep them current, or an e-commerce brand that needs to stay on top of cashflow and access capital, Mercury can be tailored to help your business perform at its highest level. See what over 200,000 entrepreneurs love about Mercury. Visit mercury.com to apply online in 10 minutes. Mercury is a fintech, not a bank. Banking services provided through Mercury's FDIC-insured partner banks. For more details, check out the show notes. My podcast guests and I love talking about craft and taste and agency and product market fit. You know what we don't love talking about? SOC 2. That's where Vanta comes in. Vanta helps companies of all sizes get compliant fast and stay that way with industry-leading AI, automation, and continuous monitoring. Whether you're a startup tackling your first SOC 2 or ISO 27001, or an enterprise managing vendor risk, Vanta's Trust Management Platform makes it quicker, easier, and more scalable. Vanta also helps you complete security questionnaires up to five times faster so that you could win bigger deals sooner. The result? According to a recent IDC study, Vanta customers slashed over $500,000 a year and are three times more productive. Establishing trust isn't optional. Vanta makes it automatic. Get $1,000 off at vanta.com/lenny.

  2. 4:14 – 8:01

    The evolving role of product managers

    1. LR

      Adji and Ezinne, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.

    2. EU

      Thank you for having us, Lenny.

    3. LR

      It's absolutely my pleasure. You guys are a, a rare guest duo. You two are married. You're both longtime product leaders. You've been in product combined for over 50 years. The cool thing about the fact that you guys have been in product for so long is that you've seen a lot of change in the role of a PM and the role of building products. You've also seen what doesn't change. And so let me actually start here, and I'll throw this to Ezinne. What are you seeing changing most in the role and day-to-day job of a product manager, and what are you seeing staying the same?

    4. EU

      At a high level, the core value that a PM has to deliver hasn't changed. Um, it really is, uh, de-risking the product delivery process while also really trying to maximize the value the business gets from these investments. But tactically, I think that the good thing is that we're finding out that PMs are freed up more, and as a result, they're, they can actually invest more in true, developing true insights about their customer. So you're, you're seeing or a- you're, you're finding out your engineering leaders, engineering team is a- they're asking you to really confirm your insight and your instinct about the customer. The second thing I would say is that there's a need to orchestrate a little differently. So in the past, it was around people, orchestrating people, getting them into the room, et cetera.But now there are many moving pieces. Not... There's the software, there's, there are also the feedback loops, the LLMs that are... The multiple touchpoints that you have in technology. Ensuring that those are also being built in a way that allows for true learning with- within your software. So that idea of working static software isn't true anymore. It's almost like living, breathing software, and ensuring that the things that allow it to breathe actually occur. The other piece, two other pieces, data literacy, um, an understanding of what it is that your product is learning from. Uh, what, where's the data going and how is it being used? How is it being organized so that it could be leveraged for future insight about your product use and customer use? And then the last I would say is just creating the right guardrails within your product to ensure that it actually continues to do what it needs to do. You know, we spoke earlier and I have a whole thing about ethics of AI, et cetera, and I think that we have a responsibility as product fo- uh, people. And I'm seeing PMs ask the questions that we didn't get to see them ask when we were building social media. So that, those are the kind of things I would say.

    5. LR

      I definitely wanna come back to that topic. There's something you just talked about that ref- uh, connects so deeply with something a recent guest talked about. Asha Sharma, she's a s- chief vice president at Microsoft working on AI, and she had this concept that products are evolving from product as artifact, where it's this, like, done thing you ship, to a product as organism that continues to evolve based on data that it's feeding and this metabolism of data.

    6. EU

      S- in our book you'll see we talk about systems, and I have this innate passion around the idea of what a system is, and it has to do with that living, breathing, and interaction with every, with other things. So yes.

  3. 8:01 – 10:34

    Challenges and opportunities in product management

    1. EU

      Yes, yes, and yes. (laughs)

    2. LR

      Let me throw over to Ogji. This first point you made, uh, I, I love this idea that PMs, there's more time spent almost at the kind of the top of the funnel, the top of the product development life cycle, confirming insights from customer data, deciding what to build. Uh, there's talk recently of just PMs are almost becoming the bottleneck for teams, because engineers are moving so much faster and PMs are the same, just like sitting acr- And maybe docs are easier to write. Uh, what do you, what do you see there? What do you think about just the, the, I don't know, this ratio shift potentially for PMs almost become a bottleneck, uh, with AI accelerating other functions?

    3. OU

      For the last 20 years, we've had, like, m- very fixed ratios in terms of how work gets done. Like, PM takes this amount of time, developers take this amount of time, go to market takes this amount of time. And I think that contract is basically exploding, because the bill process, you know, sort of the, the, the c- close solutioning process and go process is accelerating so fast. And so a, a company we work with told us that, you know, they're sort of like a build contract build company. They said they would get off the phone from a pitch and in four hours they would have a prototype. And so the question is like, what is a PM doing? This person listening to that is half PM, half developer, in order to be able to produce that. And so what we're seeing is that the way... You know, PMs do three things. We think about what the customers want that is profitable, so working on sharp problems and designing sharp problems and what's in the customer's mind that makes it sharp. We support the solutioning and the build of it, and then we don't do this enough, but we need to support the go to market of it. And so what's happening is that this middle thing is becoming more capable and much faster, and so the way we support it has to change. Uh, PRD writing is insufficient at the moment, um, you know, sort of like the static way we ask questions about what's in the customer's minds, it's like that stuff ha- needs to be, like, faster. The cycle time is so fast now. And so PMs need to adapt, and that means new toolsets, new skillsets, and so on and so forth. I think that's where the most pressure is. But at the same time, like Azina said, PMs can take some of the... If they adapt to this really well, they can spend a lot more time on here, right? And that's where there's a lot of opportunity. And, you know, the thing that we want PMs to do is not be in a crouch, not worry about people saying, "Oh, you're the bottleneck." No. Don't be the bottleneck first of all. But also since you see everything, add value in other places where

  4. 10:34 – 12:37

    Sharp problems

    1. OU

      traditionally you haven't spent time.

    2. LR

      I wanna pull on this sharp problem thread. This is my favorite Oggi meme. We talked about this a bit in your... when you visited the podcast last. I think it's such a useful f- concept, so I just wanna make sure people learn this while we're talking about it. Talk about what a sharp problem is and why that's important.

    3. OU

      One of the things I learned from failing a lot at building companies is that sometimes, you know, the way that YCO, the people pitch it, is that, you know, you build something and if it doesn't work, you pivot, da da da. You know, stuff like that. But it turns out that i- in the world of high technology and the world of w- figuring out what customers need, there are many shortcuts that mean that pivoting isn't just, like, a habit, something you walk around drunkenly doing, right? A lot of the most successful people, you know, Bill Gates, Facebook and so on, they didn't even pivot. They had an idea, but it turned out that the idea was a sharp problem. So, like, the way to avoid drunken startup building is pick things that are old. They're, they're, they're, they're core needs, and, and the way you profit is when you reimagine old needs in new technological ways, and that's important. Now, let's frame it in the sharp problem. What do people feel they need help with? What is still difficult to the point that if you improve it three to five times, maybe 10X, or you take cost out of it, like 10X the cost, right? Like, one-tenth.... they'll be like, "This is so compelling, you should take my money now." And that's what most founders should really, really focus on, if they can. Um, there's extended stuff we talked about over the years, like the unicorn framework, which is like if you're building for B2B specifically, how do you draw a quadrant around a problem so you know if it's highly frequent? 'Cause frequency also means a lot of pain, and, and figure it out. But that's something people can read on the sub stack.

    4. LR

      Yeah. And we, we talked about that in our last chat, so I'll point people to that.

  5. 12:37 – 17:02

    The shipyard model for product development

    1. LR

    2. OU

      (laughs)

    3. LR

      Okay, so building on this idea of being a drunken walk of figuring out what to build, you have this concept of the, uh, shipyard. And this is kind of a way to think about, uh, how to think about what product development might look like going forward, and just a model for how to work in this chaotic world that we're in. Talk about what that looks like, and the, and the advice here.

    4. OU

      I'm gonna give some credit. When I was at Atlassian, the first time I encountered the idea was with Jock Redfern, who's now, like, a VC. And he talked about it. But, you know, I've taken the idea, 'cause I loved it, to maybe a whole different level and maybe a sense of clarity. A shipyard is to evoke controlled chaos. If you go to a shipyard at peak, you know, long beach or whatever it is, there's so much going on. And there's, like, big, heavy machinery moving around. Trucks and containers from China, from Malaysia, jumping around. But this chaos, underlying it is careful communication, high skill, right? And so what looks like, you know, cha- you know, Brownian motion is actually orchestrated progress. And you know, these are... These shipyards are the center of GDP for a lot of nations, because this is where trade happens. So this is what it's supposed to evoke, is controlled chaos. And so what a shipyard team looks like is a six-person team. It is a PM, it is engineering, it is design, it is user research, it's data, ML, AI expertise, AI PMs, whatever you want to call it. It is, um, product marketing in a pod. Problem-solving. You know, in this... Certainly in AI age, the idea of stand-ups isn't really even make as much sense, right? These people should be, you know, communicating and collaborating hourly, basically, to solve a problem, because certainly they're working on new problem states. So I think that's what a core shipyard team means. And then there are these tendrils to... You know, we call salespeople, customer service people, the, the nervous... It's on the skin. Like, think about the shipyard team as the brain, but this is the skin. This is how you feel customers. And so here's a concrete example. Before I shipped anything at Calendly, I did the design review with a s- a support manager, right? A support manager had to be in the room because the design people and engineering people, as much as we cared, we would shift problems all the time, you know, uh, feature death. But a support manager looks at it and is like, "That's not gonna work." I've had 10, a thousand conversations, and it was so useful. And so having the shipyard team have the tendrils of connection to customer teams was so important.

    5. LR

      So what I'm hearing is essentially embrace chaos. Things are gonna get only weirder. There's something, I forget who, maybe the CPO at, uh, OpenAI said just like, "It's only gonna get weirder." This is the least... This is the most normal the world will be.

    6. EU

      It's gonna be, yep.

    7. OU

      A- and, and, and that's important because if the world is weird and you want to make sense of it, you need people who are highly motivated and have the right skillsets to continuously create it as it moves, as it gets weird.

    8. EU

      Oge, you said, uh, EP... I remember Lenny asked how many, you know, what, what, how, what is, what is, uh, shipyard comprised of? You said six people, person team. I know that's gonna come up and people are gonna go, "Sorry-

    9. OU

      Oh, six-

    10. EU

      ... really? Why? How?"

    11. OU

      ... six, wait, six-

    12. EU

      Person team.

    13. OU

      ... capability team, right?

    14. EU

      Okay, just making sure. (laughs)

    15. OU

      It is not a person thing. It is-

    16. EU

      It's-

    17. OU

      It's engineering, how, however many you need.

    18. EU

      You need, exactly.

    19. OU

      Again, it's all about admission. It's PM, it's design.

    20. EU

      Perfect.

    21. OU

      It's the capabilities I'm, I'm optimizing for, right?

    22. EU

      For, not the-

    23. OU

      It's the data-

    24. EU

      ... not the count.

    25. OU

      ... and the ML. It's product marketing and it's the user research if PMs can't do it. You need-

    26. EU

      Yeah.

    27. OU

      ... the capabilities. And whether it's a fractional person within, matrix into that EPD team or it's 10 people because of developers, that's what you need.

    28. EU

      Yeah.

    29. LR

      Yeah, so what I'm hearing there is, uh, it... Roles will become blurrier, that PMs need to do more design, engineers need to do more PMing, people need more data skills, so I... So th- I... To me, those are the two takeaways, is just learn to be more comfortable with chaotic world, just AI cons... Every week there's like, "Oh, this is changing everything. Rethink the whole roadmap." And then, also, the roles will be less divided. People will need to learn to do many roles-

    30. EU

      More than one thing.

  6. 17:02 – 24:55

    Hiring PMs in the AI era

    1. LR

      building on that, uh, Ezinne, when you hire PMs these days, when you're looking for product leaders, what do you... Is there something you're looking for more and more because you believe this will be more important to be successful in a world where AI is just changing everything?

    2. EU

      I think Oge started... Uh, he laid the foundation when he said it's day one. And when you're working and thinking, um, about building product in this type of area or space, it's important that you remember that. So I'm gonna talk about what it is that I typically will look for from an attitudes, values and behaviors point of view, as well as a skills, uh, point of view. Um, I'm currently working with, uh, a firm in LA and we're building curriculum for their PMs, as well as helping them recruit. And the things that we've honed o- honed in on are curiosity, and I know it's been said over and over (laughs) again, but it matters more now. It is, is, are peop- uh, is this person humble and curious enough to admit they don't know and are willing to start as a learner? Do they truly have a growth mindset where they are okay...... being taught by someone else, no matter how senior they have become. That is very important, that humility and curiosity mixed together. The second part is what I call agency, being able to see opportunity and not ask others for permission to go execute on that opportunity, but actually take the opportunity themselves, have a strong, um... There's another word most people use for this. Um, it's not coming to me, but just-

    3. LR

      Take the bull, take the bull by the horns?

    4. EU

      ... bull by the horn. But no, there's another characteristic, uh, value, behavior. Um, but high agency, being able to just move forward, and feel, act like an owner, right? Ownership, that's the word. (laughs) High ownership. Um, but I think ownership is seeing that you can run, but I think agency assumes that you control... yo- you're more of a thermostat than a thermometer. And that means that, hey, a thermometer is always measuring the temperature of the room, while a thermostat will change the temperature of the room. So I'm looking for that in, in people and I want people who can move from a position of strength. It really irked me when, in 2024, most people were saying AI is here and now the PM job is gone, and there were others who were saying AI is here, so now we can do the things we don't like to do with AI-

    5. LR

      (laughs)

    6. EU

      ... and then go focus on the things that we need to do. So people who spoke that way are the types of people I want on my team. From a skills perspective, obviously, an understanding of data, right? Just high, h- high level of how is it organized? How is it leveraged in the, in this new world of AI? Um, there's this skill of being able to write evals. I know everybody can write prompts, prompt engineering. You can try and focus the LLM so that it can, uh, offer better insights and offer better results. But even as your LM actually provide, pro- produces results, you need to verify that it actually is smart and it hasn't hallucinated or gone off, uh, by creating true evals, right? I... So those are some hardcore skills. Being able to constrain hallucination, knowing what sk- wha- what ways you do that, being able to use multiple models, um, and figure out what is good about this model versus that. Um, one of the things I love to talk about is what do, what does intelligence mean? Intelligence, often people say, is connecting dots. And the beauty of what it is that we have an opportunity to do is that with AI, you can find, you can train it so that it's very specific to a very particular task, right? It can become really smart in one area. And the idea now is how do you combine the smarts of what maybe Claude does, right, with something that GPT does better and make something even greater than each of them, right? So that's on- one of the things I'm looking for in a PM. And then being able to tweak for best for performance, whether it's choosing, whether it's just fine-tuning, doing the weight adjustments. Oggi is very passionate about this one. We talk about it quite a bit. Um, but that's the attitudes point of view where, you know, just strong ownership, strong agency, curiosity, being humble, and then this idea of understanding beyond prompts, like, you know, really knowing that AI is just toolbox, right? And it can make major mistakes and how do you constrain it such that constrain it, optimize it, um, tweak it so that it can actually work on your behalf and not... Like, it, it... You need to make it work for you versus being lost in all the things that it's able to do.

    7. LR

      I love this answer and it resonates so well with so many other people's, uh, advice, which is, uh, curiosity, skills that matter most. And this actually, curiosity comes up a lot when I ask people, "What skills are you focusing on teaching your kids?" Uh, the number one, uh, skill people mention is curiosity. Uh, I love that you included humbleness. I want to come back to that. So essentially, curiosity, hum- humbleness, agency, s- such a meme these days, and what PMs need to build and be strong at high agency. So, so great. And then evals, I like, I like that a lot. That's also super common. I have a really cool guest post coming out really soon that'll teach you more than you ever thought you needed to know about how to become really good at evals. But I want to double down on something you just said, which, uh, I love, uh, so much, which is this idea of instead of waiting to see what jobs AI takes, it's almost like the way you phrased it essentially is what jobs can you take as a PM? What can you do? Can you do more engineering? Can you do more design? Such an empowering way to think about it.

    8. EU

      Let me, let me talk about something that's really personal. Um, I'm part of the Women in Product organization, and the, I was asked to guest write, uh, end of last year because there was a lot of fear in the, in the community, and there was this thing called the rise of the CTPO. It's this thing, it's been in the background there, where th- I think many venture VCs, many PEs were asking, "Do I need bu- bu... A CPO as well as a CTO?" Right? And, um, I, I was always amazed at how many people were leaned back in this, (laughs) in this thing versus actually showing and proving the value of what a CPO could be. So in many places, it is right that maybe you do only want one person, particularly when it's very well-known spaces, right? It's clear they're not doing anything revolutionary, but it's like saying an engineer is the same as a product person when you think about it that way. There is a conflict between the CPO and the CTO that actually drives innovation in my opinion, because one person is trying to optimize the resourcing, the fixed, right? While another person is actually trying to field opportunities and figure out how to wait and decide what is best to do. At the higher level, that is their, those are their jobs, and that tension is really good.... because you, you need them to sharpen each other as you try to maximize the value of your organiza- of the organization. I say all this to say that there are folks who are not stopping to figure out what, how do we make the pie bigger? But they're looking at instead, how do we divide this pie as it gets smaller? Versus asking the question of really, what is the opportunity to increase this for all of us? And that is a skillset I also look out for.

  7. 24:55 – 27:16

    The importance of staying humble

    1. LR

      Awesome. I'm gonna, I'm gonna go to Yaji in a second, but I wanna come back on this humble idea. I haven't heard this before. Why is, why is it, why do you find it really important for people to be humble? I haven't heard that piece of advice yet.

    2. EU

      Oh my gosh. Um, particularly now it is really important to be, um, because I would say, okay, I, I went to school. I actually did neural networks in school when I was doing a project. And you know, you get to this part of your career where you go, I kind of know a lot of what product is. And I do see folks who are not willing to go sign up for that new junior AIPM course because well, they're CPO or they're head of product or they're X, Y, or Z. Or they're a principal PM now. And I think that that's a mistake. I think that it's important to realize that you don't know everything. You can't know everything. And even as a leader, CPO, head of product, et cetera, I fo- I come from this school, uh, where I believe that in order to lead an organization, sometimes you actually nee- do need to know how to do the work. And I think I lead better that way. So being able to sign up and say, "You know what? Let me sit in and figure out how we're going to build this thing." And number one, learn for yourself, but also figure out what questions other PMs are asking in that course, right? So it's about taking courses from people you may have considered, uh, junior. Figuring out and sitting and reading books that you thought, y- you know, just going back to the day one of how do you build product in, in an AI world. So that's where humility comes to play in, in, in this period where we are. It's you just don't know everything, can't know everything, and things will change faster than you're able to, uh, stay ahead of. So lean on your team as well.

    3. LR

      I just had, uh, this guy Chip Connolly on the podcast. He's in his 60s. He joined Airbnb in, when he was 52 as an intern. And he said exactly the same thing, to be successful ... And it's interesting as a metaphor, as an older person, you need to be really good at being open to learning from people younger t- than you. And that's a really interesting, I think, lens and heuristic almost for just people that aren't as AI savvy yet. Uh, just leaning into that idea of just like, okay, I can actually learn a lot from people around me even if they're much younger than me.

    4. EU

      Mm-hmm.

  8. 27:16 – 39:10

    Hands-on learning and personal projects

    1. EU

    2. LR

      Okay. So Yaji, something else that I think that you're really good at and you've been spending time on that I think is also really important is getting super hands-on with the tech. Not just like reading and not just listening to podcasts like this. Not just reading newsletters. But like actually building stuff. Talk about just like why that's important, what you've been doing to learn and to stay ahead and not just be like a pontificator guy in the clouds.

    3. OU

      I just love, you know, everything we've said in the last few minutes. You know, I, you know, I think the shorthand I have for humility is humility is teachability. Um, and when do you need teachability? You need teachability when, you know, sort of everything has changed, where there is no blueprint. And whatever you think is a blueprint, uh, of AI in the last few years, you know, whether, O wow, Lavabo is so successful. Replit is so successful. It's actually quite possible that any one of those companies won't be around in two, three years, right? Because we're still writing the playbook for what success looks like. So humility is teachability, and teachability is survivability, uh, if you're thinking about careers. And if you also, if you're thinking about building something that's important, it's also important like that. Um, in terms of how we ... how to keep your hand sharp. Uh, what, what I would say is a couple of things. One is, I have written... Izini and I both have a master's in engineering, but we very quickly figured out that the thing that we were gifted at was inv- tr- helping to invent the future, where customers' thinking, you know, how do we work with developers to do that? And so, we've been PMs forever. And being a PM means that even though we could, we don't write code. We work with developers and we work with other people in the market. But I've written more code in the last one year than I have in the last 10 years. Because code is now essentially architecture and English or whatever language that you have. As well as that mean, I've taken the opportunity to write more code. I've taken the opportunity to convert PRD writing into prototype writing. I've taken the opportunity to write more API interfaces and actually call those API interfaces with Postman myself. I've taken the opportunity to subscribe to all the AI tools, right?And take that as a cost of learning so that I can understand what each model is useful for. I've taken the opportunity to understand MCPs, right? And connect different things to it. Like right now, one of my pet projects or one of the things I do in order to learn is I pick a project that, it's almost like writing an eval, what's an eval for my life to learn is I'll take a, pick a project that touches a lot of the things that I need to learn that I'm interested and passionate about. And as I get into it because of my passion, I start to learn more and more. And so one of the fashion projects I've ha- I have is to automate my house. So I've been doing this for years and years, but now I'm trying to build a very smart house run on a processor that has AI chip and inference in it, while the house looks dumb. So 'cause I don't want anyone to know about it. And so what am I doing? I'm-... buil- getting models. I am think- learning about how to, what quantization of those models means. I am learning how to fine-tune some of them. I'm feeding them and build an MCP server in my house that talks to the home entities. And then I can collaborate with Claude on how to build and make it sort of super dynamic. Uh, but beyond that, you know, one of the things we're spending time on is a venture studio, uh, raising, and raising capital for ventures because that's what I want to spend the next decade on building seminal AI companies beyond the book. I'm collaborating with some of the smartest people into AI right now who can teach me how to do this, how to write agents, what agents really mean. And so everything is, as I said, writing evils, being humble, going back after 25 years of being a PM to being teachable is how I stay sharp.

    4. LR

      I wanted to go back to this house. What do you, what do you, what is your house doing? How, how smart is this house?

    5. OU

      The, the idea is that, um, I give the house eyes and ears, and its senses ha- the coolest thing is I've specced out what I call like a super sensor. It will see people. It will feel their heat. It will hear them. It will sense humidity and temperature and it, it will just be scattered around the house. All right? And I'm building the hardware myself. And basically, as you walk into the house, it starts to adapt itself to you, right? It manages energy in the house. It knows you're in a room. If you leave, my kids are not in their, in, in their rooms right now, well, the HVAC around them just stopped and said, "Oh, they're not here." They, when they come back, before they come back, an hour before they come back, it starts to pre-cool their space. And then when they come back, it says, "Oh, they're here." And it starts to do cool things. So there's a lot of stuff like that that we're building. And the question is you don't want that to be completely inflexible. You want it to be super dynamic and superhuman. And so that's part of the AI.

    6. EU

      I, I am the recipient of all of this.

    7. OU

      (laughs)

    8. EU

      But I... (laughs)

    9. OU

      (laughs)

    10. EU

      I'm like wha- I, I, I woke up at 1:00 AM and I want toast. Why is the toast not working?

    11. OU

      Wait, hold on, hold on.

    12. EU

      That's because he shut off the power in the pantry.

    13. LR

      It's not good for you. That's why.

    14. EU

      Right? (laughs)

    15. OU

      No, but look at, look, Ezinne walks into lots of rooms in the house and the light just turns on, and when she leaves she just walks out and then it knows she's not there and it turns it off and she's taking it for granted. Okay?

    16. LR

      Wait, it's actually doing all this.

    17. EU

      No, I'm not.

    18. LR

      Wow.

    19. EU

      It is. It is. (laughs)

    20. LR

      There's also... L- but there's also like a horror movie version of this.

    21. OU

      (laughs)

    22. EU

      Yes, there is. (laughs)

    23. OU

      Well, I'll, what I will say is that my family should not piss me off because, you know, I could do crazy things to them, so...

    24. EU

      You sure could.

    25. LR

      Oh, man.

    26. OU

      (laughs)

    27. LR

      Okay. (laughs) And this is built on like a, uh, like an LLM that you trained? Is that, is that what, what the power is?

    28. OU

      So, so multiple levels. There's this open source software called Home Assistant...

    29. LR

      Mm-hmm.

    30. OU

      ... that I use and you can, uh, it's very extensible, so I can put in like fine-tune LLMs. I can use, uh, the big LLMs. There, there are, there are things like smaller, like spoken whisper models you can use to, like I can just say, "Hey Jarvis, like Iron Man," and it, it'll s- the house will start talking to me and telling me things about what's going on. So things like that.

  9. 39:10 – 46:25

    Companies succeeding with AI adoption

    1. LR

      So let me take this opportunity to zoom out a little bit. We've been talking a lot about personal skills, what you think people need to get better at, what it takes to be successful. I want to talk about at the company level. You two work with a bunch of different companies, you've both worked at a bunch of different companies. When you look at the companies that seem to be doing well in this new AI world, adopting the best practices, seeing productivity gains, versus the companies that are just struggling and not getting anywhere and just having a hard time, what do you find is most common across the one, the companies that are succeeding shifting their culture and the way they work in this world of AI? And I'll, I'll throw this to Ezinne first.

    2. EU

      I think the, the main thing I will say is, um, recognizing, companies that recognize that AI is a core set of multiple capabilities that they've been gifted. I think that you need to understand that it is not this magic thing that you're going to slather on to your product and it will do perfectly. The problems are still the problems. The customer is still the prob- is still the customer. And their pain or sharp problems still exist as they, they have. The idea now is how do you take AI and not have it be something y- we call it you put at the edge alone, but you actually re-transform the way you solve the customer's problem. So we have this phrase called AI at the core and AI at the edge. And the fa- the best way to think about it is that with AI at the edge, you're probably still using software as you always have, the bits and bytes that you wrote before still are there. You're instead inserting LLMs or AI at different intersections or connection points. Okay? AI at the core means fundamentally looking at the problem space and the workflows and using AI to solve the problem, not just sprinkling it at the intersections of, you know, gooeys or user interfaces that are out there or using it to just accelerate things. So the way we talk about it is that companies where their code base remains and they are attaching, uh, (laughs) AI to it often aren't the ones who are going to revolutionize, uh, th- their industry. Companies for whom their code base perhaps shrinks and the LLM becomes a core part of what it is that they use to solve the problem are companies that actually are doing it right. Another, uh, characteristic is specificity. We've seen a lot of companies want to do so many things and expect LLMs to be as broad as the problem sets they want to solve for. And we, in our experience have seen that to do that, you actually will need to have specialized first and then create a layer of a connective tissue that can offer intelligence. So we've seen companies instead just stay on top, try to build this massive solution set or LLM that can do it all.... but the successful ones that we've consulted with, partnered with, are talking to, are those who instead have seen, "You know what? I can find ... I can build ... This team that I have on here can actually build this very specific solution set. This other team can do this, and then my job is to tie it all together with a broader, uh, multi-mod- model solution, um, and build it a- and create an offering for the customer." I think those are two core things. I'm sure Ogji can remember a few others.

    3. OU

      Yeah. (laughs) No, I think ... No, I, I, I love ... I, I was humble listening to you. (laughs) No, um, so maybe I'll, uh, I'll, I'll embellish the point, we're seeing companies that are starting from a blank slate, taking an old problem, a sharp problem, and saying, "If we built it today, with LLM as the core capability, as a core sort of blob of code, how would it look?" And often these people are finding a lot of acceleration and they actually like taking on adjacencies. When at Formless, Typeform, you know, a, a new product built by, (sniffs) uh, Davit Okunev, and, you know, and me, and a small group of people. We built a new Typeform, and we ended up building more than it because it also became like a sales lead agent. So like, it did pre-sales, which ordinarily Typeform gets you in to qualification before you talk to a salesperson, but the product itself did pre-sale, so that capability was so strong. We're also seeing this shrinking thing. It's funny, in the last week I've seen companies that have been around for five years who, once LLMs came, they just re-imagined their product, like Clay.ai, is, is a six-year-old company, super successful. Um, so in the first categories, like things like lovable, but in the second category are people who are like, "Okay, we're gonna rethink this and we're gonna do it." Um, now, the problem for the rest of the industry is, there's, you know, innovator's dilemma. They have lots of revenue tied to old code bases, and so they, their job is to, and, you know, we tell PM leaders all the time, is to navigate how you use LLMs in the old thing, but navigate to the new thing before someone eats your lunch. And it's not co- it's complicated and it's hard, but you have to do it. Now, let me s- make maybe a couple of smaller things. Um, the people who are succeeding are taking chances on user experiences. We don't believe the chat interface is the final boss, (laughs) for AI user experience. We think that there's a reason viewers exist and the command line didn't work, otherwise DOS would be the biggest operating system. Uh, and so people have to do different things, uh, and be dynamic. You know, one of the big things is dynamic user experiences that are just personalized to the customer. Uh, so we'll see a lot of, uh ... We see a lot of people succeeding there. And one of the things that we don't see people doing actually that we want people to do, is something Azina mentioned, which is ethics. You know, like, we think of AI and its core capabilities as ordinance level, meaning like e- at, at some point we'll think of this as more powerful than the, the fusion, the fusion bomb. And we have, (laughs) a bunch of software people who have no consideration of ethics playing with this stuff all the time. And so, one thing we'd like to see the be- best companies do is lead on that. Like, think about the responsibility we have to the human race when we build new digital products that will give them superpowers.

    4. LR

      I wanna

  10. 46:25 – 49:22

    Lessons from 50 years in product

    1. LR

      zoom out even further. So we started talking about individual people, skills, what's gonna be most important. We've been talking rec- just now about what companies are doing well, the ones that are succeeding in this crazy world of AI. I wanna now zoom out just your entire product career. I'm curious just when you look back at, you know, the, m- 50 plus years of combined experience you two have, what are some of the biggest product lessons that have you f- that you've learned that you would love to share that you think people can avoid having to learn the hard way?

    2. OU

      I, I think what I wanna reiterate the thing that we talked about, sharp problems. Your ... The problem you focus on is probably the most predictive of your success. Pick a sharp problem. Pick something that if you really solve it, people will come. You know, it's, it's ... Watching Jeff Bezos from the '80s feels prescient. He's like, "Look, people always shop. I'm gonna be the guy," (laughs) all right? And he, and he did it. So, do that. Uh, and I say this f- humbly because I've failed, 'cause sometimes we build things that we are passionate about, but being a founder is not an exercise, and even an operator in a company, it's not an exercise in your passion and your brilliance. It's an exercise in finding what the market needs. So do that. Be disciplined in doing that. We also talk about simplicity a lot. Um, even this morning I was talking to a designer and he had a convoluted, uh, user experience and I said, "Only 20% of people who come to this will see that." And so the point of design is first simplicity and clarity before we get fancy. And so there's a lot. Steve Jobs embodied this earlier on. I think iOS has become complicated. But like, start with simplicity, and simple is hard. Um, and in 2025, we're designing for distracted brains. There's a couple things that are happening. People are super distracted. People are no longer wowed by technology, call it AI all you want. They just assume that it is what it is. And so, simplicity is really good for 2025 and beyond, basically. Um, and then, you know, we talk a lot about fundamentals, I'm gonna throw this to A- Azina, like, there are ways to figure out the fundamentals. What we do, I know we operate in the software layer, but at ... It's-... most basic. We're trying to predict what humans would do, what they will want, how their soft- you know, workflow will go. And there's some, there's some, you know, uh, there's a, there's a layer of that that is quite similar, you know. Because our friends, the anthropologists and the psychologists really understand those. And I think if we understand it, we can build better software. So but, Esin, I want to let you, uh, I'm just gonna throw this off to you so I don't take up all the space. Go for it.

    3. EU

      No, I think, I think you're onto something about, um, just...

  11. 49:22 – 51:24

    Simplicity in design

    1. EU

      So when I think about the hard lessons I've learned, you talked about simplicity, and I'm saying this also from (laughs) humility and just having learned a lot from past failures. One of the reasons people create complicated solutions is because they're afraid to make, take a stab. To, to, to, to put their point of view out there-

    2. OU

      Opinion. Opinionated.

    3. EU

      ... opinion out there, right?

    4. OU

      They're not opinionated. Yeah.

    5. EU

      It's they're not opinionated enough. And that often comes from not having high conviction because you're not sure that you've spent the time with the customer. So, with that, I know it sounds trite, but spend time and understand the customer or borrow from others who do. But you've got to not just lay it all out and have them choose which way, because it is so effing confusing. The experience-

    6. OU

      10,000 options because you can't pick one.

    7. EU

      (laughs) Yeah. The experience is so murky, chalky. Nobody knows what the hell to do because you can't make a decision. Make it simple. Come up, come up with an opinion and put your opinion out there. You can change. Leave the configurations and the options behind, but leave them behind in a sense if you must. But try and create the most compelling, the simplest experience and you will actually have better adoption. You are better off doing that and being wrong. Many times we leave and ship convoluted experiences because we don't have the, the, the courage, number one, to make a decision, create a point of view and ship it out there. The reality is, and my experience has shown that you're better off picking an opinion, shipping it, shipping it out there, being wrong, and then adjusting, than leaving too many options, 'cause you then can never learn what was the better experience overall. So that's one thing. The other

  12. 51:24 – 55:17

    The role of communication in strategy

    1. EU

      major lesson I've learned is actually one about strategy. It is that the best way to go from strategy to execution in a way that activates the entire organization is communication. Y- you will never, never spend too much time communicating the why to your organization over and over and over again. I, I don't remember what movie it was. I think it was, uh, ah, the movie about sending someone to the moon, right? Uh, um, hm, I'm forgetting what it is. But the idea that everybody in NASA knew that we were working to send a man to the moon, even the janitor did, knew that. So that idea of ensuring that everybody in the team understands the why behind what we're doing and can speak to it. I saw something on LinkedIn the other day, I think it was Martin Eriksson who actually push, uh, p- posted this. It talked about how the same way we talk about crossing the chasm and figuring out who it is that will adopt a product, we should think about the change management required for strategy communication through that lens. There will be early adopters. Think about those people. Those people will hear the message, the strategy, and by the time others are just (laughs) beginning to understand what it is, they're probably on the next version of the strategy asking, "What can change? What should change?" And that was so clarifying for me, 'cause I always wondered why strategy could get muddy sometimes is because when you look at your entire population, about 5% are gonna be the early adopters. They get it, they buy into it, and they're moving. Four months later, they're onto something wondering what the next version of the strategy will look like. How do we build on top of this? At that same time, some people are just beginning to get it. And honestly, that answered a lot of questions for me as to how it is that you can be working on a strategy some people get it, can recite it, tell you why we're doing what we're doing, while some PMs are still struggling with, "Well, why? How come? Can we do this?" Because they are in fact laggards out there. So that idea of trying to really activate a strategy into pure execution, if you think about communication as a critical element, and then also look at it as how many people, what is the crossing the chasm version? Who is at what point in this change management journey? I think that is actually, that, that was one of the major lessons I've learned as a leader in product.

    2. LR

      I love these sorts of conversations where you two spend 50 years learning and then you just tell us, "Here's all the answers. Here's a bunch of stuff that'll save you a bunch of pain and suffering." Let me try to summarize what you shared and tell me what I missed. So some of the biggest things you two have learned over the past 50 years, I know it's not in the right order, but, uh, communicating the why. Making s- n- you never, you can never spend too much time helping people understand why what, what you're working on is important. And then there's just the change management component of not underestimating the work that it'll take to convince people, uh, to adopt something, and then this whole idea of crossing the chasm. We had Geoffrey Moore on the podcast, so I'll point to that if you wanna deeply understand what that's all about. Then this lesson of simplicity, just keep per- just the value of keeping things simple, easier said than done, and having as- an opinion, having the courage almost to do something really simple, not give people all the options.And then this Oge meant... You talked about the idea of most times when something fails, it's the wrong... You're going after the wrong problem. It's not sharp enough or it's just not solving people... Something people actually care about. And then just talking to customers, uh, always easy to say, most people don't actually do it enough.

  13. 55:17 – 1:00:00

    Career intentions and personal growth

    1. OU

      I want to add one more thing-

    2. LR

      Please.

    3. OU

      ... and I'll be brief. This is more, more, uh, about people's careers, like PMs. In our career we have... You know, we started out as engineers basically, became mainline PMs, got an MBA, became... You know, worked harder, became executives and so on and so forth. So some, you know, people look at my careers and his career and they're like, "Oh, this is amazing." But behind that is a lot of intention. Like, we always held in our brains what we want to do next. Like, what is the next step? What is the hunger that drives us? And there's nothing more powerful, uh, than intention, than, like, imagination. It's like, you know, a little b- bit of cheese in front of the mouse, like it chases after. Being able to visualize and chase the thing that you see about where you want to be is so powerful. I talked to, uh, a guy who gave me a break. So when I was... You know, the last two years of my time at Microsoft, I switched to become a marketing lead, right? 'Cause I was a little tired of PM at Microsoft specifically, and I was getting an MBA. And I talked to Dave Mendelian, he was vice president, you know, or senior director in the... And worked, you know, eventually for Satya. And he gave me a break and became a product marketer for a couple years. But I... He came back and talked to me this year and he said, "Oge, everything you told me you wanted to do, from afar I saw that you have done. And you told me about them 10 years ago." And I didn't even know that. And so it's very powerful thing, I think, that this is not just about how to build better products, but how to manage your own career is super important.

    4. LR

      I just went to a talk, a storytelling event, and there was a very similar theme. This guy just always wanted to be a stand-up comedian and he... The lesson he learned is just you need to... The ba- The best motivator is desire. Having de- Having that desire not fade because that'll... It's kind of like going back to our idea of the project. Having a project to work on because you need a problem solved, uh, is a really good way to just get to where you want to go.

    5. EU

      Yeah.

    6. LR

      Ezeine, I think you had something else you wanted to add.

    7. EU

      Yeah. You know, you, you, you said this thing about, you know, know the customer, know the customer, and I think there's a lot of infor- Well, there's a lot of noise out there about customer interviews, et cetera, right? But I do want to remind people that there's a difference between what the customer says, right? Customer discovery, asking them things, right? And AI is really good at that right now. Like, it can help you get all the transcriptions. But just remember that what they do is actually more important. So e- Earlier in my career, um, I had the opportunity to have a UX lab that I worked in, and ethnographic research, watching what people truly were doing, still is top-notch. It's the best thing you can ever do. So how, what does that look like digitally? It's still the core instrumentation, figuring out how people finish things, but also true customer insight comes from not using AI to read all the transcripts of your customer interviews. That isn't what it is. (laughs) It's actually s- trying to figure out how to best walk in their shoes. And whatever it, it takes, you've got to figure out how to do that, because it's not what they say they do, it's not what they say they want. Those aren't... That's not the true intimacy you want with a customer. You actually want to observe them as much as possible and understand the why behind the actions they're taking. And I, I think that's a really important thing to point out right now, 'cause I think people are cheating with AI through interviews, et cetera, and thinking that they're going to figure it out. But there's a different type of insight that comes from what I call true ethnographic research, studying, observing, understanding the driver behind their need, their, their, their, their problem or the need that they're trying to solve. Um, and I just want to make sure we say that because I think people think AI has come to save it all. But no, it's going to give you junk, because people don't always say what they mean or they don't realize that they're lying about their reasons for doing a thing.

    8. LR

      I think some of these lessons, especially that last one, is the kind of lesson that you can hear it and be like, "Yeah, yeah, I get it." And then you have to actually learn it and s- and find the times, "Oh, wow. Okay, everyone told me they wanted this thing and nobody actually used it. Okay, I remember Ezeine said that on a podcast. Oh, I get it now."

    9. EU

      (laughs)

    10. LR

      And so I think, you know, there's only so much we can do to help people learn these things. Sometimes you just have to fail-

    11. EU

      Experience it. (laughs)

    12. LR

      ... and have the pain to learn. Okay.

  14. 1:00:00 – 1:03:09

    Ethics and responsibility in product management

    1. LR

      Is there anything that we have not touched on, anything that you wanted to share before we get to our very exciting lightning round?

    2. EU

      I think we didn't talk about ethics and as, you know, people of color and parents (laughs) I think that having a, having a call to action for our PMs to really be thoughtful about what it is they're building and, and what it is they're integrating into their product is really important to, to us.

    3. OU

      We just want to call PMs that this awesome power we have to direct lots of developers comes with responsibility. You know, the Spider-Man trope and, um... You know, we created social media. I worked at Twitter, and I always like, "Oh my God," like, how many mistakes did we make? Like, the... I remember the person who invented deepfakes was interviewed one time and she said... And they're like, "What are the implications of your stuff?" And she's like, "I don't care." And I was so shocked. I was like, "What? Software engineer, you don't care?" She's like, "Oh, it's all inventive countermeasure." I'm like, "Oh my God." So PMs, we shouldn't be like that. Um-... we shouldn't be like that. I, I guess, the one thing I also wanted to say, like one pain point we hear a lot is the strategy. You know (laughs) , PMs who are like senior PM, principal PM worry about, "Oh my God, how can I do product strategy?" And, um, in the book, we talk a lot about the sources of strategy, and there's a l- i- it's not mysterious. I, I think there's things you need to learn about like the sources of competitive advantage and even what that means, like, you know, intellectual property or like, um, economies of scale, economies of scope. Because there's no formal indication about this stuff, PMs don't have the fundamentals they need. 'Cause you know, it's easy to learn customer discovery, but like, learning the f- seven levers of competitive advantage maybe you've never seen, or learning the 10 ways that companies can grow, which is not just product. Sometimes it's distribution, sometimes it's superior business strategy. And these are ideas that if PMs had good material, uh, it's sort of like packed in the middle of business school, you can actually become a person who helps direct your company on where to go, and do it in such a way that's so compelling you can talk about it that, you know, it's good for your career.

    4. EU

      I remember like, I think one time I saw that... Maybe a long time ago, I saw something you had written around how do you make money, you know? You sell a thing, you rent a thing, you know? There, there, there are... Many people think that it's... There are many, many... Like, it's this amorphous thing, but you may not have the truly exhaustive list, right? But there are fixed number of things that you can know to create strategy to make money, and just doing the work or doing the research to figure out, okay, hey, how, how does one make money, how does one get competitive advantage...

    5. OU

      In the book, we wrote about 10 growth levers and seven levers of competitive advantage, and I think if you masters that, you have like 80% of your toolset that makes you a compelling director or CPO that can play at that level, um, and it's super important. Otherwise, you're sort of guessing. You're like, "Oh, did this deck work for my CEO?" No, that's not what you should be thinking about.

    6. LR

      I,

  15. 1:03:09 – 1:06:42

    Introducing Building Rocketships

    1. LR

      I'll point to the post that you're mentioning, Ezinne, that, uh, is all the ways to make money. But let's use this opportunity to talk about your book, just what people would get out of it, why they should buy it. Do the pitch, and then we'll get to the very exciting lightning round.

    2. OU

      In our career, 50 plus years, we... When we started this product management thing, we thought, "Oh, this is gonna be mainstream. There's development. There are 30 million developers, whatever, and there's gonna be product managers all over the world." But operating in the US, operating in Europe, in Africa, it turns out the best PMs are sort of ghettoed (laughs) somewhere in the West Coast of the United States, right? We know this. And we don't like it at all, right? We think opportunity should be everywhere, so we wrote Building Rocketships to help people figure out how to build not only great products, but companies that build great products to make sure that people have the knowledge not to be one hit wonders. And the book is divided into two. One is the fundamentals. If you're a senior to principal PM, the fundamentals of building a great product, right? All the way from simplicity to even pricing. And then the second part is how do you lead a high performing shipyard and how do you go from motivating people to charting the course for the future, depending on where you are in the market to make... You know, like Ezinne said, to commanding a shipyard that is kick ass. That's, that's the book. And, um, you know, in the latter part, we also talk about like what's gonna happen in terms of AI over the next few years. Um, so we are... It's called Building Rocket Ships. We're very proud of it. It's right over here, and, um, we think it's awesome because it represents a lot of, uh, of the experience that we've had over these years and a lot of the success.

    3. LR

      And where do folks find it if they wanna go check it out, maybe even buy one or two or 10 or 100?

    4. OU

      Some companies have been buying a lot, actually, uh, in bulk, so this is a note for the companies. But you can buy it on Amazon. Uh, you can find it on Shopify. On Shopify, if you go for it, you will... There's an additional pro edition. The pro edition is like a team product. It... The book is on coda.io, and you can share it with your team. You can take notes. There's almost double the amount of content because it contains checklists, uh, um, um, templates, tools for PMs that they can download and just use immediately. It's almost like code for you, for your PM career.

    5. EU

      We have the, the book and then we have the Coda version, and one of the things we really worked on was making it actionable. So the minute you... If you get the Coda version, um, you can read a, a, a chapter and then you'll have templates, frameworks, step checklists. Whatever it is that we f- felt made sense, um, we made that available via the Coda version.

    6. LR

      What a mother load of value. Where... Uh, people always have a issue saying the dom- the URL on podcasts. I just want to make sure. What's that? How do you actually find this version? You said it's on Shopify, but there's probably a domain name to get there.

    7. OU

      So if you go to www.productmind.co/brpro, you can buy the pro edition, and if you've bought it, you can also use it to log into the Coda edition and you're off to the races.

    8. LR

      There we go. Amazing.

  16. 1:06:42 – 1:18:21

    Lightning round and final thoughts

    1. LR

      We'll also link to it in the show notes. And with that, we've reached our very exciting lightning round. I've got five questions for you two. Are you ready?

    2. EU

      (laughs)

    3. OU

      Yes.

    4. LR

      First question is, what are two or three books you find yourself recommending most to other people?

    5. EU

      (laughs) We just did one, Building Rocket Ships. (laughs)

    6. OU

      Building Rocket Ships is the first one, so we're not afraid to self-promote. But also, the other one for me is Build, Tony Faadal. You know, uh, I ran into Tony...... um, in Nigeria, building an accelerator and, uh, he... It was just an incredible book, so I totally recommend it.

    7. EU

      One for me, and it's both for work and life, et cetera, is this one called The Let Them Theory. I think it was Mel Robbins. I, I love it. I just think that many times PMs are control freaks or (laughs) A type, and, um, being able to leave people (laughs) to their own (laughs) uh, devices sometimes is hard. So Let Them reminds us that we get a lot more, uh, rest for ourselves when we let people be.

    8. LR

      I was just listening to that book on audio.

    9. EU

      (laughs)

    10. LR

      I was like, "It's sitting at the top of the bestseller like every freaking week. What is this book?" (laughs)

    11. EU

      (laughs)

    12. OU

      (laughs)

    13. LR

      And it's so good. I saw it in your background actually. I noticed that-

    14. EU

      (laughs)

    15. LR

      ... you were reading, uh, yeah. It's so good. It's such a simple idea.

    16. EU

      Yeah, it is.

    17. LR

      And, and the thing I learned by listening to it is there's a second part to it that isn't just Let Them. I don't know if you got to that.

    18. EU

      Let Them. It's, uh, yeah, it is. It's about let me.

    19. LR

      Let Them, Let Me. Yeah, exactly.

    20. EU

      Yeah, let me.

    21. LR

      Such a good... I've been using it. It's really powerful. I get why it's so

    22. NA

      (laughs)

    23. EU

      I, I, I didn't... I mean, the book is good, yeah. Let's give her credit. But it's such a simple thing that other people in, in many religions, et cetera, have, have used. But it... She grounds, she grounds, she makes... She, she, she shows you why it's necessary and how we, how we show up trying to control others in other s- in d- s- situations that are very common to most people, so I liked that.

    24. LR

      I never thought of it in the PM context. That is very cool.

    25. EU

      (laughs)

    26. LR

      Uh, and it's by Mel Robinson, by the way.

    27. EU

      Yes, Mel Robbins.

    28. LR

      Okay, next question. Is there a favorite recent movie or TV show that you really enjoyed?

    29. EU

      So we watched a few shows together recently, (laughs) so I would say, uh, one that we loved and we couldn't... We kept saying, "Gosh, I c- we can't wait for our kids to be old enough to watch," it was one called (snaps fingers) Forever. It's... It was just really, really good. Um, it's, uh, it's a love story. It's, uh, one of these b- it was a book reimagined, um, done from a African American point of view. It was just really well done. So that's a TV show. It was called Forever. And another one that we really liked (laughs) 'cause I think it was St- Sterling K. Brown is Paradise. Really enjoyed it. It was interesting. It, it kept us-

    30. OU

      E- Excellent.

Episode duration: 1:18:22

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