Welcome to Season 02 of Next Gen Builders! Today, Francois sits down with fellow podcast host Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia, Founder & CEO of Product School, the global leader in Product Management training. Their conversation covers how Carlos scaled Product School from the ground up, why community building has been a key factor in his success, and what truly makes a great product leader.
Welcome to Season 02 of Next Gen Builders! Today, Francois sits down with fellow podcast host Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia, Founder & CEO of Product School, the global leader in Product Management training. Their conversation covers how Carlos scaled Product School from the ground up, why community building has been a key factor in his success, and what truly makes a great product leader.
Carlos founded Product School in 2014 with a vision of democratizing access to education and has since grown the community to over 2M members. He reflects upon what ingredients have led to the organization’s success alongside what he may have done differently if given the opportunity again. Ultimately though, Product School is proof that community matters regardless of the business you are in.
Additionally, Francois and Carlos talk about The Product Podcast and how impactful it has been in tandem with Product School. With over 260 interviews featuring product executives from brands such as Nike, the NBA, Duolingo, and Amplitude, Carlos has had the opportunity to truly understand the makeup of a great product leader. So right after tuning into Next Gen Builders, check out The Product Podcast!
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Guest Bio
Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia is an entrepreneur with over 15 years of experience building global companies and digital products.
He founded Product School in 2014, which is the global leader in product training with a community of over two million members. All of Product School's instructors are real-world Product Leaders working at top Silicon Valley companies including Google, Meta, Netflix, Airbnb, Uber, and Amazon. Prior to Product School, he founded Floqq, the largest online education marketplace in Spanish and Portuguese at the time. Floqq joined the 500 Startups and Startup Chile accelerator programs.
Additionally, Carlos co-authored the Amazon bestseller The Product Book, and has participated as a speaker in more than 1,000 events, conferences, and classes around the world. Outside of work, he loves skiing and playing tennis.
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Guest Quote
" Community is a term that is now being overused and sometimes misunderstood as,
‘Oh, let's just start giving something away with an expectation of getting something in return.’
And I think that kind of defeats the definition of a community. True, you as a business need to have a business model to keep the lights on and grow, but building a community to me is a strategy, it's not a tactic. To me that meant I'm going to build something for the long term. I have a mission which is helping people build better products and democratize access to education in ways that some of the people that actually benefit from the community might never be able to pay economically.
And I'm okay with that. And so it starts from that mindset, without obviously forgetting about the business model. That is how I think of community, as a strategy.” – Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia
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Time Stamps
00:00 Episode Start
01:45 What is Product School?
04:00 How Carlos was able to scale
08:05 Lessons learned along the way
10:55 Creating & measuring meaningful communities
14:30 The Product Podcast
18:00 What makes a great product leader
21:10 Transforming with AI effectively
26:20 Overcoming doubts and hesitations
29:40 Carlos' advice for others leaning into innovations
33:20 Maintaining flexibility throughout a transformation
34:50 What Product School is focused on in 2025
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Links
0:00:00.2 Carlos De Gonzalez Villaumbrosia: We go inside large companies that are using the word transformation as a way to drive behavioral change. And the crazy stat is that over 70% of those transformations fail. And I get it. Because the number one reason why all of these transformations before AI and probably now with AI, we continue failing, is because.
0:00:25.6 Francois Ajenstat: This is Next Gen Builders, the show for the growth and product leaders of tomorrow. Building high growth products is no joke. But what about high growth communities? Today we're going to dive into a product community with over 2 million members. We'll hear how they've reached such massive growth and how they've pivoted to the top trends that are on the minds of product people, including the elephant in the room, AI, and how it's changing the product management game. Joining us to day to talk through all of this is Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia, founder and CEO of the Product School Welcome, Carlos.
0:01:09.5 Carlos De Gonzalez Villaumbrosia: Thank you for having me, Francois. It's a pleasure to be on the audited side of the table, given that I hosted you on my podcast a few months ago.
0:01:17.1 Francois Ajenstat: I know, it's super awesome. Such a great conversation.
0:01:21.3 Carlos De Gonzalez Villaumbrosia: So let's see what you have in store for me. I'm usually the one asking all the questions.
0:01:27.6 Francois Ajenstat: We're going to have some tough ones today, but the most important one to start with is I've had the great pleasure of learning about you and all the great things that you've done at the Product School But a lot of people may not know what the Product School is. Can you tell us a little bit about what you've been doing there and how you started it?
0:01:46.7 Carlos De Gonzalez Villaumbrosia: Yeah. So I started the company 11 years ago, before product management was cool. Today, Product School is the global leader in product management training with a community of over 2 million members. It's crazy just to think about that number because I was the first member of my community. We do training for product managers and product teams to help these teams build better products that drive revenue growth. So as an example, we've trained many companies, financial services in healthcare, retail, and many others. Because this is not a secret anymore. And that's awesome to see that this thing that kind of started in Silicon Valley for a lot of tech companies is becoming a mainstream discipline pretty much for any company in any industry.
0:02:29.9 Francois Ajenstat: And so what was like the genesis, like, what was the idea to start this thing?
0:02:33.0 Carlos De Gonzalez Villaumbrosia: A solution to my own problem. I am a rebel and I have a love hate relationship with education. So as a traditional student, I always question, why am I going to how helpful is this thing that someone is teaching me and in a way, I always felt inspired by some of my professors. So I'm originally from Spain. I started computer science, moved to Silicon Valley for business school. And I also realized that it's not about the location, it's just sometimes like I wasn't finding the right mentors or even learning the things that I really wanted to learn. So I ultimately decided to build a school I wish I had when I was getting started. And that wasn't obvious back in the day because there's technical schools and there are business schools. I created this kind of middle ground product school that tries to get the best out of both worlds. And it's tailored for professionals because this is not for high school students or college students. We're talking about people who are busy, they have a job, they have a life. So the magic part, I think is first the format. This is always on weeknights or weekends, so you don't have to put your life on hold.
0:03:39.8 Carlos De Gonzalez Villaumbrosia: But also the instructors, these are not teachers. They are all awesome product leaders from some of the best companies in the world, such as Netflix, Airbnb and Uber. And I think when you put all of these elements together, you can hopefully generate that next generation of product leaders.
0:03:54.3 Francois Ajenstat: That's awesome. So, I mean, you've really gone not just 0 to 1 or 0 to 100, you've gone like 0 to 2 million. That's amazing.
0:04:03.4 Carlos De Gonzalez Villaumbrosia: Yeah, one step at a time. I mean, if I were to kind of segment the different stages of growth, I think there were specific growth levers that I had to pull at different stages. At the very beginning, like many startups, you have to do things that don't scale and you are pretty much the product. So when I started, I just had an idea. I decided to test it by just starting to talk about it online. There was a lot of online forums at Reddit or Quora where there were people asking questions about product. A lot of them were about how to break into product, or what's the difference between project and product management? Do I need an MBA? Do I need to code, you know, things that. Now I hear a smile because obviously we're way beyond that phase. But at that point I was like, revolutionary, right? So I literally became the most viewed author in those discussion, discussion forums, mostly because there was nobody talking about it enough. But that was a good way for me to generate a little bit of traction because ultimately I wasn't trying to go for 2 million, I was going for 10.
0:05:03.4 Carlos De Gonzalez Villaumbrosia: I just wanted to know if there was enough people who care about the Same problem that I had. And then I connected that with some in person events in San Francisco. So I was also leveraging some free online tools like Eventbrite or meetup where I could host or publish an event and I was the speaker. So I was like, okay, let's see if I put this out. How many people actually show up? And I was using co working spaces that were letting me to use their space for free. So I was so scrappy. But it worked like there were consistently 50 to 100 people in San Francisco every week. And I was covering different aspects of product management from like how to build a prototype without code to how to run an AB test and everything in between. From there that was. It probably took me to the first 100 or so users, it was always free. So I started monetizing by offering training paid programs where I was also the instructor. I was literally a one man show for the first two years and that took me to maybe 1,000. I think at that point the system broke and I had to start delegating.
0:06:02.8 Carlos De Gonzalez Villaumbrosia: That was probably the next lever for me. It's like, okay, I love this thing and I have a lot of passion, but ultimately there are better product leaders out there and I also need time back so I can reinvest in more growth. So I had to figure out how to find this type of amazing product leaders and convince them to participate as instructors. So that was kind of another lever. Another thing for me which I think about community was okay, in order to grow faster, I also need to do a lot of things that are just free and good for the community. Not everybody can afford or is ready to pay for something. We started opening up the community to offer a lot of events, a lot of templates, a lot of things for free. And that created incredible momentum because on the one hand it allowed product leaders to contribute in ways that they weren't able to before. They were excited to co create the set of best practices for the product industry because they didn't have that before. But it also helped so many people just get value upfront. And ultimately, if we think about this long term, this helped us just get bigger while maintaining a really good quality bar that ultimately allowed us for some of these community members to decide to take some of our paid offerings.
0:07:15.5 Francois Ajenstat: Fascinating. So when I think about, you know, the way you describe that journey, it sounds like you had a lot of product market fit. Pretty early in the journey there was a reception for this. Did you know that right away? Or you know, are there things that you discovered later that you wish you could have applied much earlier.
0:07:34.2 Carlos De Gonzalez Villaumbrosia: I had no idea and no data to back anything, any of this up. It was pure intuition based on my own experience as a former engineer that didn't want to spend the rest of his life coding. I knew there was a small percentage of us out there, and that was pretty much it, right? And then I went to business school, and then I saw a bunch of people that wanted to do finance and consulting. And I was also kind of the outlier who wanted to work in tech. The thing is, there were more of us, and as the world evolved, there were more and more, not just technical folks, but other people that wanted to work in tech and didn't have a technical background or just didn't want to code. So that was pretty much the hypothesis at that time. And I was like, you know what? I'm going to bootstrap this thing instead of. And I've started two companies before. I know what it is to go out there, borrow money. It's like, let me just try, let me be the product, and this way I can move faster, I can test my hypothesis, and if it doesn't work, I can try something else.
0:08:28.4 Carlos De Gonzalez Villaumbrosia: But I think I got also lucky in a way because it actually worked very quickly. And I think there was another trend that I wasn't seeing at the time, which is the coding bootcamps. There were a lot of new schools that were training engineers, but also their value proposition was you do not need four years of engineering school. You can just learn how to code. And there's a lot of companies, especially in Silicon Valley, that are willing to hire you just because they don't have enough supply. So I created the first non coding school in a way that's amazing.
0:08:58.1 Francois Ajenstat: So if you could go back in time, go back 11 years ago, meet the younger version of yourself and say, like, here's something that I learned along the way that you should do now to accelerate the amazing success that you had.
0:09:12.7 Carlos De Gonzalez Villaumbrosia: I wish I had dedicated a little earlier and I had taken care of my health a little more. This is something that I don't share, especially in public. But I, you know, since you asked, I think this is important. It's not about tech, it's just life. I ended up in the hospital two years in, just because of the amount of stress, work and everything that I had, I was doing it all myself. I was bootstrapped. So every single penny counted. And given that this was more of a service than an actual product, I knew everybody's name. I was really feeling afraid of delegating too soon, or like, what if the new person is not going to do as good of a job as I think I can do? So that was probably my biggest takeaway. Now, I mean, I was also single. Right. So I was probably more naive. I had more time. Now I'm married, I have two kids. So I am being forced to ruthlessly prioritize much better. And take care of myself, not just for myself, but also for my kids.
0:10:08.5 Francois Ajenstat: Yeah. Well, first, thank you for sharing that. I know, especially when you start something new, it's like you're birthing. It's a baby. Right. It's the thing. You put your whole soul, your whole life into it, but you are also part of the product and you have to take care of yourself. And I think one thing I've realized in scaling is there's a lot of people that are actually in your camp and actually asking for help or figuring out how to scale or how to say no is super important because you can't do it all. If you were to give advice to another company that's trying to build a community, obviously a different kind of community, But I'm a big fan of communities. It was one of the secret weapons that we had at tableau. What would you tell them on how to create meaningful communities?
0:10:54.1 Carlos De Gonzalez Villaumbrosia: I love that because community is a term that has now been overused and sometimes misunderstood as, oh, let's just start giving something away with an expectation of getting something in return. And I think that kind of befits the definition of a community. True, you as a business need to have a business model to keep the lights on and grow. But building a community to me is a strategy, it's not a tactic. And to me, that meant I'm going to build something for the long term. I have a mission which is helping people build better products and democratize access to education in ways that some of the people that actually benefit from the community might never be able to pay economically. And I'm okay with that. And so it starts from that mindset without obviously forgetting about the business model. But that is kind of how I think of community as strategy. You can still launch a community as a tactic, in which case maybe there is a different angle to that.
0:11:50.2 Francois Ajenstat: And then how do you think about the value exchange or how do you measure the success of the community? In your case, there might be revenue associated with it, but if you're a traditional enterprise or even a digital company, what are the measures you would look to say success or not?
0:12:06.9 Carlos De Gonzalez Villaumbrosia: You can't. And that's the critic thing. That's a tricky thing. I wish I could give you a perfect ROI. And that's why, to me, it's part of my strategy. I have to believe that this is going to pay off in unexpected ways. Of course, I have indications that some of these things are actually working, but I don't have an answer. It's a lot of things that we do for the community that are good for them, and I just don't know how will that convert into ROI for me.
0:12:36.2 Francois Ajenstat: Right. Yeah, it's hard. It's really hard. When I was at Tableau and we were building community, we debated a lot of things. Is it number of people in the community? Is it the amount of engagement? Is it the amount of things that they share, the assets that are produced? But I think at the end of the day, is a little bit more about the connection, more so than the number of people with it. I don't know if you agree with that.
0:13:00.8 Carlos De Gonzalez Villaumbrosia: The connection piece is another key element of what defines a community versus what's considered an audience. Right. And in an audience environment is one person that is publishing information, and it's another group of people who are consuming that information. Part of a community means that there is value between members. It's not just about me as product school anymore. There's so many other stakeholders, and that's when you have. That's when you know that this is truly a community and not an audience.
0:13:29.6 Francois Ajenstat: Absolutely agree. So let's switch gears and talk about. One of the other things in which you've kind of broadened your impact is you've created a podcast. I was on that podcast a little while ago. Thank you for having me. And you've had some incredible interviews, talked to some incredible leaders. What are some of the things, like your favorite stories from those podcasts and what makes these leaders so unique?
0:13:56.2 Carlos De Gonzalez Villaumbrosia: Great segue, because I started the podcast, gosh, five, six years ago, again, before podcast became cool again, and it was part of Trailblazer. I was part of my community strategy, and someone asked me, what's the ROI? And I was like, I don't know. I think this is very valuable for me. First and foremost, selfishly, I learn a lot by just asking questions to product leaders like yourself. But also it's part of also our mission of democratizing access to education and see how it goes. Right. And if nobody's listening and we don't have to continue. Although I kind of didn't give up for the first few years, nobody listened, and I kept going anyway. At this point, we've done 260 interviews with incredible product executives. And I think of podcast and community similarly to way Nike has thought about their own community. And they elevate athletes, right? They don't talk only about their products. They talk about the athletes, and they are the ones who represent their values. We are trying to elevate product leaders and give them our platform so they can also share those good practices that weren't commonly known back in the day. So examples of some of these executives, I'll give you one like the SVP of product at the NBA.
0:15:07.4 Carlos De Gonzalez Villaumbrosia: This guy, his name is Jay Lee, is fascinating because he's in charge of the billion plus funds that follow the NBA. And he said that 99% of these people will never set foot in an arena. So through basically digital experiences, he's able to take some of that magic to their people's homes. And we talked about immersive experiences in VR all the way to how he's localizing the app to make sure that people who want to watch an NBA game and they're in Europe don't see the score before they actually enjoy the game. And so many other things. But ultimately, the responsibility of this person is so strategic, so much bigger than what others could imagine. So that was one. I mean, I had the VP of product at Duolingo. That guy's fascinating, fascinating Turkish guy living in the US Joined that company early when Duolingo was a free translation app. And now this is a $15 billion plus public business that had incredible growth trajectory. So going deep into the growth levers and how he thought about changing the business model is I love that. I think the common theme that I'm seeing now with this type of product executives, well, first of all, they're real executives.
0:16:20.0 Carlos De Gonzalez Villaumbrosia: They are not under a CTO or a CMO, regardless of the title, CPO, SVP of product, whatnot. These are people who are at the very top reporting into the CEO and owning revenue numbers. We talk business, we talk about GTM. Back in the day was more about, how did you become a product manager? What is product? What's your favorite book? And now it's all about, okay, how are you doing product expansion? What is the competitive intelligence framework that you use? How did you change this business model? We're geeking out on stuff that is not just technical, but actually business.
0:16:52.3 Francois Ajenstat: That's amazing. And do you see these people as being willing to take bigger, bolder bets? Do they see the world in a different way? What's the secret to their success?
0:17:04.4 Carlos De Gonzalez Villaumbrosia: Well, the ones that I host on the podcast. Yes. Otherwise I wouldn't host them.
0:17:10.1 Francois Ajenstat: I'm glad I was a guest then.
0:17:12.2 Carlos De Gonzalez Villaumbrosia: Yes, you came. Actually, you came referred by another guest, which is obviously the best validation. So, yes, these are ultimately curious people. Right. It's people that just do not take anything for granted. And they are obviously extremely smart, they're extremely hardworking. But those are now table sticks. Like at this level you are expected to do all of those things. Like what actually I see that is setting them apart is that they are owning the revenue number, is that these are the people who are driving business forward. They are just not saying, well, I'm just in the business of keeping my users happy, which is kind of how product got.
0:17:48.9 Francois Ajenstat: That's actually really interesting. You know, the outcome focused is they truly feel like they own the outcome. Right. Which in this case is the business. Is there a similar pattern across all these, whether they're the executive or the doer? You mentioned curiosity. What are some of the attributes that you've seen from these leaders?
0:18:10.3 Carlos De Gonzalez Villaumbrosia: Executives are doers, and that is the number one thing that sets the tone. Absolutely. And so as I think about the composition of what makes a leader, sure, there are certain admin work that you hate, but you have to do. There's certain people leadership work that you hopefully love and you have to do. But there is no replacement for being in the details. And those are the ones that I love the most.
0:18:33.0 Francois Ajenstat: I 100% agree. Sometimes executives think that they're beyond the details. No, you have to know the details. You may not be the one in like every piece of it, but you have to deeply understand it, otherwise you'll never be successful. Let's switch a little bit to kind of the broader themes of like the product industry. You know, in 11 years, you mentioned how product shifted from what is a product manager to how do you drive business strategy? What are some of the ways in which you think the role of product has evolved in that period of time?
0:19:09.0 Carlos De Gonzalez Villaumbrosia: Yeah, so the first thing that is kind of driving everything else is the rise of the chief product officer. Today there's over 50% of Fortune 100 companies that already have a chief product officer that is directly reported to the CEO. And some companies might call it chief Digital Officer or other terms, but clearly this is a person that is in between technology and go to market. That is revolutionary because that kind of started with tech companies in Silicon Valley and now this is happening across any industry. You look at the Fortune 100 and we train clients that are in Oil and gas, financial services, healthcare, retail consumer. When I use the word product, they're not like, is this something physical? No, no, no. They've been doing digital products and digital experiences for a very long time. So that's huge for all of us. The second thing is what we were briefly mentioning before is the shift from like just the building, the thing that someone asked me to do, because maybe it's a large client, maybe it's marketing, maybe sales into now being into go to market. Like product is connecting technology with go to market.
0:20:12.8 Carlos De Gonzalez Villaumbrosia: It's not just kind of at the playing defense, waiting for go to market to tell them what to do. And I think part of it is now having accountability over ultimate business outcomes, including revenue growth. And I know that can sound like a dirty word for people who are not in sales, but I love that word. And I expect product leaders to embrace that not in the detriment of punishing users, but as a way to ultimate validate that what they are building is something that users love and are willing to pay for.
0:20:44.9 Francois Ajenstat: Of course, when you talk about the trends, we have to say the trend du jour. AI. How have you seen AI really? Either change the game, add confusion, provide new superpowers. What do you think it's doing to the role of product and the impact on companies?
0:21:03.7 Carlos De Gonzalez Villaumbrosia: Yeah, we have to talk about AI, otherwise this wouldn't be a good interview.
0:21:08.3 Francois Ajenstat: Absolutely, I agree.
0:21:11.4 Carlos De Gonzalez Villaumbrosia: So, I mean, I would take this in two ways, I think One is the macro aspect that we are all aware of, which is the fact that AI is reducing a lot of jobs, including new product. And I actually believe that type of correction hasn't impacted business outcomes. In fact, we've seen how a lot of product teams are able to ship much more and do much more with way less. The expectation, though, is that the product teams lead the charge. These are the early adopters that now are proving how this is possible and are inspiring other teams to do the same. Now, here is the trick, and that's the second piece. This is kind of what we do for a living. We go inside large companies that are using the word transformation as a way to drive behavioral change. And the crazy stat is that over 70% of those transformations fail. And I get it. Because the number one reason why all of these transformations before AI and probably now with AI will continue failing is because they do not have first the right CEO involvement. It's very easy to say CEO support. Of course, what CEO wouldn't want to use AI to reduce Cost and improve their bottom line.
0:22:21.5 Carlos De Gonzalez Villaumbrosia: Duh. But what does that really mean in reality? Well, it means getting in the weeds. If we're saying that we expect our executives to also be doers, the CEO also has to get their hands dirty in this new paradigm. So involving the CEO is an absolute must in order to start this type of transformations. The second piece is the management buying. I've seen this enough. A lot of managers kind of believe that this is below their pay grade and they just have to kick the can down the road to the ICS. The ICS are the ones that need the training or the new shiny tool. And that's just another recipe for failure. It's how do you get that type of buy in from the next layer? So they truly believe that this thing is here and what's in for them. So then they can come with the next layer and so on to everybody in between. So of course we can talk about the recipe. Right. And like the training, the processes, the technology. And because it's true, you need all of that in order to make transformation. But ultimately it's the CEO push from the top and the management layer, buying into that and helping evangelize that message down.
0:23:28.7 Francois Ajenstat: It's fascinating. Can I break down a couple of the themes that are in there? So first is in the pushback, it sounds a little bit like there's some fear in there. Will AI take my job away? How would you address that? Because I think sometimes with that fear, they're afraid to even explore it because they think their job's at risk.
0:23:52.4 Carlos De Gonzalez Villaumbrosia: The two most common emotions in any company are fear and anger. So AI is triggering that even more. So I think just by acknowledging that and naming it is such a good way to start the conversation instead of saying, no, no, no, don't worry, your job is safe. Your job is not safe. Why should your job be safe? If I am the CEO, I obviously want the peace in the world, but I also want to run a profitable business. That is my obligation is to my shareholders. So I'm looking into an opportunity to improve my outcomes. And I want you to be part of that. Because ultimately, any transformation, AI, transformation is about people. It's about people transformation. So I think phrasing it in a way that is realistic and treats people like adults and say, yes, your job is at stake. And here is what I wish you can do as part of this so you can be part of the winners and not the ones who are affected. It can be extremely motivating.
0:24:53.4 Francois Ajenstat: Yeah. And I always like to use examples from the past, there was fear when desktop productivity was desktop productivity tools came out like Word and spreadsheet, all of that. And guess what? It enabled more people to communicate and enabled more creative thinking than less. And so I actually think these tools will augment the human and remove some of the drudgery, the boring stuff that people have to do every day. So it could be seen as a positive and like, flipping that around.
0:25:25.6 Carlos De Gonzalez Villaumbrosia: I use this framework usually when I talk to people. First of all, I learned to treat people like adults. I remember back in the day, I was trying to go too much into the rah rah speech. That doesn't seem fly anymore. The second piece is thinking about what's in for them. Yes, sure, there's a lot of benefits that we can rationalize for the business, but truly, what's in for you and how can we make the most out of it? If we phrase it as. As a win win, it's. It's part of what we're talking about, transformation. Like getting that buy in in a way that feels like an opportunity and not a punishment.
0:26:01.1 Francois Ajenstat: Right. And that's a great way of saying it. When I hear the word transformation, I also hear the word change. And people are afraid of change. We've always done it this way. I think AI opens up more opportunities to do things differently. How do you break through and get people to want to change or see the world as it could be versus how it is?
0:26:25.9 Carlos De Gonzalez Villaumbrosia: I remember having some of these interactions with my team members saying, oh my God, yet another change. And at some point I was like, why am I trying to play that game and justify and feel bad for making another change? It got to a point where I said, look, yes, it's another change. And the only thing I can promise is that we're going to keep changing things. And I felt so relieved because now I started treating them like adults and telling them what's truly in my mind. And now, of course, change can still be scary. And change doesn't always mean good for you. But let's also talk about why I'm making this change. What's in for you? And sometimes, look, as the CEO, as an executive, you are a tiebreaker, right? Like, you are not in the business of making everybody happy at all times, but turning this around and saying, yes, it's another change. Yes, change is scary. Yes, I'm here to try to demystify it as much as possible. And yet I can't fully remove the fear and anger that you may feel because in some cases, this might not be good for you. That ultimately helped me make more productive conversations and decisions in the interest of the business, not always in the interest of one or two individuals that are more vocal than the others.
0:27:34.3 Francois Ajenstat: Right? Absolutely. And I always like to also push on the idea that product leaders in particular need to be curious. They need to think about problems and creative solutions. And so change is constant. But you need to have curiosity instead of saying no, saying, wow, what could it do? And really leaning into those possibilities. I think that's a sign of a good product leader from my standpoint.
0:28:00.9 Carlos De Gonzalez Villaumbrosia: I have two observations on that. Well, first of all, most of the transformations that we are hired to do are because things are not going well. It's almost too late. This is just, we are dying and we need a big, big change. Usually the most successful transformations are the ones that are done proactively when things are not really, really bad because someone is not afraid of change, even when things go well because they want more. So I think that is something that can help people realize that, look, this doesn't always need to happen when we are dying. Hopefully we do it in a proactive way. And number two, ideally, it doesn't always need to come from the CEO, Of course, when it comes from the top, it has more weight. And at the same time, you also need to be flexible, knowing that when I make some of these important suggestions, there's going to be pushback. I want pushback. Why would I want everybody to say, yes, sir, let's go. I would hate that I've been there before. I don't like that. And I don't think that's productive for anybody. So I kind of make that healthy friction to see how people would react. And I think the magic is kind of in those interactions to then create a solution that works for them and they feel empowered enough to then go and make happen.
0:29:17.3 Francois Ajenstat: That's fantastic. If you were to give advice to enterprises on leaning into innovation, what tips or recommendations would you give them?
0:29:28.2 Carlos De Gonzalez Villaumbrosia: Oh, my God. How much time do we have here, Francois?
0:29:32.6 Francois Ajenstat: As long as you want.
0:29:34.1 Carlos De Gonzalez Villaumbrosia: Yeah. I actually hate giving advice without context. And you know this well, right? As a product person, I want to flip that. I start asking you questions to qualify you before I start getting to that. But I'm not going to do that. Now. I can speak from experience based on what I've seen when we do this type of transformation. So first is what we were discussing earlier. Like, the companies that are the most successful doing these type of transformations usually start the Transformation before things get very ugly. So I think keeping an eye on that is helpful. The number two is truly having a CEO, not just support, but involvement in the initiative is absolutely critical.
0:30:16.6 Carlos De Gonzalez Villaumbrosia: I've never seen a single transformation go well, that was just led by a middle manager. And the number three is just once assume we have the CEO, involvement, management buy in and we are now into the execution part. The tracking piece, the actual iteration piece is critical because the word transformation is so misleading. It kind of implies that you go from A to B and then you are done, while in reality it's an iteration. So ensuring that, look, this is not pretty and that this is not easy and that we are going to screw throughout the project, but this is ultimately a product and not a project. And having the patience to continue trying things and changing things and saying it's a change without fear. It's something that is very, very important. I hate seeing consulting firms come into the boardroom, give the big PowerPoint presentation, tell people what to do, and then they leave. And then who is going to do that implementation? You know...
0:31:11.9 Francois Ajenstat: It's so true. Say more about that third topic you said, having the metrics or the way to inspect how you're heading in the right direction.
0:31:24.9 Carlos De Gonzalez Villaumbrosia: I call it adoption tracking. It's basically what we do, right, is we go in and implement a specific transformation. So I treat it as a product. So just identifying what is the set of initiatives we are going to tackle first and what is the success criteria and then put people through the process, which includes upskilling. It includes changing certain processes. That's another big topic. Processes are not bad. People talk about, oh, processes, too many processes is bad, but some processes actually very good, very healthy. You don't want to get into bureaucracy, which is what means multiple processes, but some processes. So those elements like the upskilling the processes under the technology, how can we actually do things better, faster? Not just because, well, Johnny was here and he used to do it that way. Those are the three key components of what I call the adoption tracking. Then as we do that, it's bringing in the executives because it's so easy to delegate the thing. Once you sign off on the agreement, you say, okay, this company is going to do the training great. And then let me know when everybody's trained, we all receive a certificate and then what? And we're not done yet and we are going to continue And this is never over. Any good product is never over.
0:32:48.5 Francois Ajenstat: It's so true. When you're doing these transformations and you set it perfectly, it's not a direct line from A to B. You may want to add to B, but it's going to be a zigzag. It's going to have highs and lows. It can be easy for people to want to pull the plug because it's not going in the right direction. How do you build confidence along the way that you're heading in the right direction? And if most projects fail, should you fail sooner and give up? Or how do you become flexible along the way?
0:33:22.5 Carlos De Gonzalez Villaumbrosia: That's the strategy piece that I discuss with the executives. Because if the executive is not in the room, they might think that everybody needs to be transformed. And it's not true. As part of any transformation, you realize that you have to kill certain things or do certain things differently. And that also includes people. It's a hard reality. But not everybody is going to embrace the new paradigm. So in order to do this right, we are looking at, okay, who doesn't need more training, who doesn't literally needs to jump off the ship because it's just not going to help everybody else. So that's a big one. And then the org design, like truly identifying what is the right seat and then putting the right people in the right seat. Because part of product strategies is the people component, the org design. And there is no silver bullet, right? So we need to really go deep to understand what's the company strategy and how can we set up this team for success knowing that like in any product, we might also iterate the org design. But like all of these components need to play out and an executive needs to have enough decision making power to really incentivize change. Otherwise this ends up being just a cute training initiative that doesn't really change any behavior.
0:34:37.9 Francois Ajenstat: Last question I have is thinking about product school this year. We're starting a new year. What are some of the big priorities or big initiatives that you think are going to be really, really important to customers that product school will be focused on this year?
0:34:53.0 Carlos De Gonzalez Villaumbrosia: So the biggest priority for us is to help more organizations execute their AI transformations. Right? Which is critical. That's what we've been doing in different ways. When we started the company, we were mostly a consumer business. We were training individuals, help them grow their careers in product. Now the majority of our business is actually enterprise. We go in large organizations and transform their product teams. So AI is the next paradigm for a lot of us and ensuring that we can change even our own templates and playbooks. There are some that I'm sure will work well because they are not that different, but there are many others that are different. So being at the cutting edge to truly be the right partner to many other organizations as they navigate their AI transformation.
0:35:45.6 Francois Ajenstat: That's fantastic. And do you build this in partnership with certain customers to know that you're doing it right? How do you know that? Since we're all on the bleeding edge right now, there's a lot that we don't know that's ahead of us and it's changing so quickly. How do you manage with that change and know that we're still going in the right path?
0:36:02.2 Carlos De Gonzalez Villaumbrosia: Absolutely. We do it with partners. Like we build our community with partners. That's the only way to. To get that market validation and adoption that is required at this moment. So the key in many of these cases is really the customization part. Right. So as much as I love to talk about product and scaling, ultimately what we do is more of a service, and I love that because we can't expect that an AI transformation done for a financial service institution is going to work in a healthcare business in another continent. But there are some enough. There are enough best practices and also learned experiences that can apply to help people make some of these changes faster and mitigate some of those risks.
0:36:49.5 Francois Ajenstat: I love that. Well, Carlos, it's always a pleasure to talk to you. I love your passion, I love your energy, I love your dedication to the community, and more importantly, I'm proud of what you built. It's truly inspiring to see what you've created and starting from one individual right here and building such an amazing community, should be super proud of everything you've done and how you've contributed.
0:37:17.4 Carlos De Gonzalez Villaumbrosia: Thank you, Francois. We are in this together, co creating and in fact, as a fun story, I've been partnering with Amplitude almost since the beginning. So it's been amazing to see how this whole industry has grown. And all of the people who were early on believing in this, you've been working in product before, it was cool as well, are now suddenly on the spotlight. And I think we have a responsibility to continue evolving this industry.
0:37:40.8 Carlos De Gonzalez Villaumbrosia: So true. And I always think product has been cool because we're the cool kids now, right? Right. Well, Carlos, thank you so much for joining us. And thank you all for listening to Next Gen Builders. Look out for our next episode wherever you get your podcasts. And please don't forget to subscribe.