The essence of product management | Christian Idiodi (SVPG)

I, I try to explain to people that the real essence of this job is that you wake up on behalf of someone else. To solve a problem for them. And you have to do it well enough that they give you something back in return. That's kind of the, the real essence of it, and that's the, I always call like a certificate of appreciation. You know? And it can be in the form of revenue, engagement, loyalty, you know, co-... Reference. All of those things. In fact, that's the real essence of this job, eh, you know. If it's not fun, you're probably not doing it right. So if it's not hard, you're probably also not doing it right. (laughs)

(instrumental music) Today my guest is Christian Idiodi. Christian is a partner at Silicon Valley Product Group alongside Marty Cagan, who, when he introduced us, called Christian "the most interesting man in the world." After meeting him, I tend to agree. After a long career in product, Christian now spends his time working closely with companies big and small, implementing and improving their discipline of product management. In our conversation, we discussed why the product management field is so often disliked, and what you can do to avoid becoming a product manager people don't want on their team. We spent a lot of time on coaching, how to get better at coaching your reports, how to get better coaching from your manager, and some really clever tactics for building trust with leaders within your company. Also, Christian shares his one favorite go-to method out of all of the discovery methods out there for figuring out what to build. Also, we spent some time on the great work that he's doing in Africa to help product builders and founders build great companies. That and so much more. Christian is awesome. With that, I bring you Christian Idiodi after a short word from our sponsors. You fell in love with building products for a reason. But sometimes the day-to-day reality is a little different than you imagined. Instead of dreaming up big ideas, talking to customers, and crafting a strategy, you're drowning in spreadsheets and roadmap updates and you're spending your days basically putting out fires. A better way is possible. Introducing Jira Product Discovery, the new prioritization and road mapping tool built for product teams by Atlassian. With Jira Product Discovery, you can gather all your product ideas and insights in one place and prioritize confidently, finally replacing those endless spreadsheets. Create and share custom product roadmaps with any stakeholder in seconds. And it's all built on Jira, where your engineering team's already working, so true collaboration is finally possible. Great products are built by great teams, not just engineers. Sales, support, leadership, even Greg from finance. Anyone that you want can contribute ideas, feedback and insights in Jira Product Discovery for free. No catch. And it's only $10 a month for you. Say goodbye to your spreadsheets and the never-ending alignment efforts. The old way of doing product management is over. Rediscover what's possible with Jira Product Discovery. Try it for free at atlassian.com/lenny. That's atlassian.com/lenny. This episode is brought to you by Vanta, helping you streamline your security compliance to accelerate your growth. Thousands of fast-growing companies like Gusto, Calm, Quora, and Modern Treasury trust Vanta to help build, scale, manage, and demonstrate their security and compliance programs, and get ready for audits in weeks, not months. By offering the most in-demand security and privacy frameworks such as SOC2, ISO 27001, GDPR, HIPAA, and many more, Vanta helps companies obtain the reports they need to accelerate growth, build efficient compliance processes, mitigate risks to their businesses, and build trust with external stakeholders. Over 5,000 fast-growing companies use Vanta to automate up to 90% of the work involved with SOC2 and these other frameworks. For a limited time, Lenny's Podcast listeners get $1,000 off Vanta. Go to vanta.com/lenny. That's V-A-N-T-A dot com slash Lenny to learn more and to claim your discounts. Get started today. (instrumental music) Christian, thank you so much for being here, and welcome to the podcast.