In this episode of the Next Gen Builders, Francois is joined by Hubert Palan, Founder & CEO of Productboard, the customer-driven product management tool, who shares how relentlessly focusing on customer pain points has helped them build a product that not only serves but delights its users.
In this episode of the Next Gen Builders, Francois is joined by Hubert Palan, Founder & CEO of Productboard, the customer-driven product management tool, who shares how relentlessly focusing on customer pain points has helped them build a product that not only serves but delights its users.
When Hubert Palan founded Productboard, he had one goal: Help companies make better product decisions by understanding their customers on a deeper level. Now, with over 6,000 companies—like Zoom, Salesforce, and Toyota—using the product management platform, it’s clear that customer obsession is more than just a buzzword for Hubert and the Productboard team; it’s the driving force behind their business.
Throughout their conversation, you’ll hear about why customer obsession matters, the art of prioritizing customer feedback, and how AI enhances customer understanding. Hubert also dives into the lessons learned related to balancing customer feedback, prioritizing product roadmaps, and sometimes saying “no” to customers to best serve them.
—
Guest Bio
Hubert Palan is Founder and CEO of Productboard, the customer-centric product management platform that helps organizations get the right products to market, faster. Over 6,000 companies, including Toyota, Microsoft, Zoom, Volkswagen, and UiPath, use Productboard to understand what customers need, prioritize what to build next, and align everyone around their roadmap. The company has raised a total of $262M and is headquartered in San Francisco with additional offices around the world.
Hubert received his MBA from the University of California, Berkeley and MSc. in Computer Science from Czech Technical University. He lives in the San Francisco Bay area with his wife, Jenna, and their three kids.
—
Guest Quote
"For a company to be really customer-centric, everybody at the company needs to share that understanding of what is it that the people need. And that's where you really reach the goal of being customer obsessed as a company." – Hubert Palan
—
Time Stamps
00:00 Episode Start
01:06 The origins of Productboard
03:09 How to make your company truly customer centric
05:25 Measuring the success of your efforts
10:56 The power of staying aligned to your roadmap
16:08 Tying your decision making directly to your users' feedback
18:48 Avoiding recency bias
21:56 Why you need to dedicate time to information sharing
27:37 Knowing when to listen
34:09 How AI will shape the Next Gen Builder
—
Links
0:00:00.0 Francois Ajenstat: For a company to be really customer-centric, like everybody at the company needs to share that understanding of what is it that the people need. And that's where you really reach the goal of being customer-centric or customer obsessed as a company.
[music]
0:00:18.8 Francois Ajenstat: This is Next Gen Builders, the show for the growth and product leaders of tomorrow. Today we're talking all about customers, truly the end all, and be all of your business. You need to understand them not just as the target market, but as the fuel for growth and impact. So what does it truly mean to be customer obsessed in practice? Well, today, talking with us is someone who built an entire business on being customer obsessed. Hubert Palan is CEO of Productboard. Hubert, welcome to the podcast.
0:00:53.9 Hubert Palan: Thanks for having me. Great to be here.
0:00:56.3 Francois Ajenstat: Oh, it's so great to have you here. And first, let's talk about Productboard. Tell us about the company and why you started it.
0:01:04.1 Hubert Palan: Yeah, I mean, as you said Productboard, Productboard really started in the roots of customer-centricity and Insights. We're a product management platform, so we're helping product managers, product makers, product builders, to make the right decisions with regards to what to build next based on really deep understanding of the customers and their needs. And the reason why I started this company is because I was a product manager at a B2B SaaS company, and I had all the tools that helped me with managing tasks and milestone and doing kind of the project management work of what it is to be a product leader. But I realized with this is 10 years ago almost that, lean Startup was happening and everybody was talking about validating everything with customers and having a really deep empathy for the customers and their needs.
0:01:56.3 Hubert Palan: And I realized that all these project management tools that we have were tools that are based on ticketing, workflows like Jira or GitHub or project management tools, Asana and so on. They don't have, the core entities of customers and pain points and needs in them at all. You can't capture it in any way. And so that was the realization, like, hey why don't we build a system that is really built for product management, not project management, and that is gonna be rooted in customers and their needs and pain points, and, in a way that it will inform the decisions for the makers. What is it you should build given your target audience? And so fast forward overnight success. We're now a platform that has, 6000, companies as customers and including logos like Zoom, Salesforce, or Toyota. So there we go.
0:02:50.0 Francois Ajenstat: That's truly amazing. So I know we all wanna be customer-centric or customer obsessed, but knowing what you know now, what does it look like to be truly customer obsessed? And how would you compare a company that is customer-centric versus one that isn't?
0:03:07.5 Hubert Palan: It's a good question because I would say that there's two aspects. One is there's companies that are customer obsessed or customer-centric, as you said, in the way they offer the service and in the way they treat the customers. Like Amazon is a great example. It really is rooted in let's create an amazing experience for the customer through the service and satisfy their needs and so on. But on the other side, I would say that there's, there's companies that are customer obsessed or customer-centric in the sense of making sure that the digital product and the digital experience is really incredibly well designed and built for the needs of the customers. And, whenever I talk about this, I always draw the important focus on, it's not just the individual people that are making, product decisions. It's like the entire company needs to understand and have a real deep, empathy about the customers that they're serving.
0:04:02.4 Hubert Palan: And I'll give you an example. I had in the early days when I started Productboard, an advisor who used to be on the quality engineering team or assurance team at Apple. And he told me, you know at Apple as a quality engineer, the goal wasn't to make sure that something is built to spec. It was to make sure that what we built is gonna be really delighting the user or the customer. And that is a very different mindset that now if you translate it into everybody who is part of that product, development procreation process has like, you really increase the chances that you build something that the customers are gonna like, as opposed to kind of having this cascading, process where maybe the product managers do a good user research job and then they hand it over to designers, and designers hand it to engineers and engineers hand it to QA and QA then releases it. And then product marketers kind of go and figure out what is it that we built. And so my point is that for a customer, for a company to be really customer-centric, like everybody, the company needs to share that understanding of what is it that the people need. And that's where you really reach the goal of being customer-centric or customer obsessed as a company.
0:05:17.1 Francois Ajenstat: Are there some metrics that you look at to say, this company is doing the right things or how, like how do you know you got there?
0:05:24.6 Hubert Palan: Yeah, good question. I think that you can measure the quality of the experience or the delight because you can measure like, customer satisfaction or you can measure the feedback, right? The happiness or and NPS score of how the customers perceive your product and offering you can also measure through engagement, like whether they're using it, right? Because like usage is actually a good proxy for whether you like using it, like how frequently. And what use cases, obviously are working, but I say in terms of how the company itself is customer obsessed, it's more about how many conversations you're having with the customers. Like are the people that are making the decisions, going to the source and not always right like I always say you know doing research primary research and going all the way to the customers it's like the most precise and the best way to learn about the customers and you know figure out what they need it's also the slowest one.
0:06:28.6 Hubert Palan: Right and there's there's typically people at the company who've already done the research. You've already had the conversations and so the measure of the customer obsession doesn't have to be just necessarily directed to the customers but like internally how people are asking questions about the customers people who already did it in the past and so kind of like collaboratively. You could you could figure it out. One one more thing that I would say the time it takes to get to the quality that you need is an is actually a very interesting measure because you can do you know 10 iterations and get to the excellent outcome that is gonna get the high NPS and CSAT score or you can do it in one right like if you have if you have the the decision makers deciding about the design or you know the the use case who's done a lot of customer research analysis in the past. And who has the empathy like you're gonna make the decision it's kind of like if you're giving if you're giving a gift to a friend like if you really know the friend you're gonna give them like an amazing gift that they're gonna appreciate, right?
0:07:32.5 Hubert Palan: Because you know that they're Inside into cycling and you buy like the perfect thing versus if you're just like don't know them That much like you're gonna give them a Bottle of wine or you know bouquet of roses or whatever. And it's like it's nice but Like it's not as great right it's not that precise and so yeah you can figure it out you could ask questions and you know get to it but you know if you know them in the first place you're just gonna make the decision immediately faster.
0:07:55.4 Francois Ajenstat: You know it's interesting as you're describing the various examples you know being customer centric is a combination of things it's not one thing. It's customer conversations it's you know getting feedback it's surveys. I'll say it's also experimentation so you have like analytics to understand what works what doesn't work it's understanding the user journey there's a lot of different facets in there. Is there one that you like weigh more than the others or how do you kind of balance out. All those inputs you might be getting to know what is truly like the delightful customer experience.
0:08:30.8 Hubert Palan: You know it's both.
0:08:33.8 Francois Ajenstat: Of course.
0:08:35.0 Hubert Palan: There's no single one no you need to have the qualitative. You need to do the research you need to talk to people you need to look at the data you need to look at the usage. You need to analyze what is it that people are actually doing because sometimes they mislead you and they tell you the hopes and wishes that they have but it is actually not what they do. It's kind of like when you ask people in a survey how often they work out or you know how healthy they eat like they always like exaggerate exactly. So my point is that you need you need to watch all those all those signals but I do want to emphasize that a lot of the times the knowledge is in the company already and you know I tell you as a founder that the number of times that I'm frustrated that somebody is trying to do a research and go to the customers you know to learn what I've already talked to customers a thousand times literally about.
0:09:32.9 Hubert Palan: And I sometimes you know think like if you only came to me just at least directionally right like and then I completely agree and I get it that people need to go and kind of hear it right from the horse's mouth like you need to have that. You can develop empathy if somebody else is describing the person like you ultimately need to have these data points where you're interacting directly. But in aggregate and directionally you know is it a pain point worth going after or not. Like there should be the conversations happening internally and so engaging stakeholders that either have more experience because they are domain experts or because they are longer in the company and they're just like more tenured and they've seen more. Like it's actually a huge underestimated source of insights and you know the deep understanding.
0:10:20.4 Francois Ajenstat: Yeah I mean it's, it is true like his feedback comes from everywhere. One of the things I know a lot of people struggle with is prioritization. When you get feedback from customers you can't do it all but you wanna please everyone. Do you have any guidance on one like how do you prioritize that feedback and figure out what to build and second is how do you say no and you know be afraid the fear of saying no and disappointing somebody.
0:10:54.4 Hubert Palan: Yeah that you have to say no, you have to say no because the market is not homogeneous not everybody is the same and you need to make the hard choice who are you gonna serve and you need realize that especially in the digital world in the software world, it's even a harder decision because there's no constraints there's no limits like software. You can always have another button there's no physical constraints to a physical product you know buttons that you have like you can have only limited limited number right. But in the software world you don't. And so that makes the job harder but it also means that you need to be more disciplined about that and you need to like I said earlier realize that your future vision you know there's a lot of people with different needs and different use cases that you might satisfy one day. But at every single point in time you need to be very disciplined about what are you gonna satisfy now versus what you're gonna build later versus never. And so having that clarity of you know when you're having the conversation with the with the customer to say like. Hey this is totally part of our vision this is where we're going and we're gonna get there so we are aligned that's wonderful. You're in the right place like this is the company and the product for you to bet on but it's coming later because we're focused at this stage on ABCD which is different.
0:12:20.6 Hubert Palan: And I found personally that it's basically an art how to say the no in a way that is actually inviting conversation and assuring people that you're on the right track. Obviously there's there's situations where you would say like hey sorry you know this is not something that's part of our vision and you know strategic direction and we're not gonna serve that and so then the customer I hope would be grateful. To learn that as opposed to hoping that you're gonna build it and because you'll be shooting yourself in the foot right. That that's another thing actually if you don't say no. You are basically making your job harder because the people are just gonna have the expectations. And then you know we all love the situation right when somebody was promised something that wasn't delivered. Such nobody ever so like yeah that's Yeah, saying no is actually in your interest.
0:13:11.4 Francois Ajenstat: I totally agree. And it is hard sometimes to say no. But actually, customers trust you better when you say no. Because they're like, oh, he's not like bullshitting me. He's not telling me what I wanna hear. He's telling me what it truly is and respects my point of view. And then they can actually plan, right? Better because they know you're not gonna do that. So maybe they need to go solve that problem somewhere else.
0:13:34.4 Hubert Palan: Yeah, yeah. And look like we know that there's these conversations when you have a very large opportunity and you need to kind of reshuffle the roadmap to adjust for that. But it's a very different thing to reshuffle priorities in the short term for the business needs versus kind of build something that's completely outside of the direction and the strategic vision that you have, right? And so you need to be very disciplined there. But I saw people a lot of the times kind of obsess whether you should build feature A versus feature B, like this sprint or next sprint, or this month or next month. That doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things, right? So like that's kind of a not a necessary stress about that.
0:14:18.1 Francois Ajenstat: Well, I think there's the other little technique is to really make sure that you're explaining the why. You know, if you're going to say no, don't just say, no, we're not building it. Explain the why you made that decision. Here's what we're focused on. This doesn't align. Or yes, it might align, but not this year. Here's what we're focused on this year and why we prioritize it this way.
0:14:39.5 Hubert Palan: Yeah. And I would also add that adding the context, not just like for this individual customer that you're having the conversation with, but explain that there's other companies that are customers and that we satisfy multiple use cases. And the focus right now is on the different use case in the broader market context. That's helpful too, right? Because sometimes people, I actually have a conversation with them and they say like, I really need to build this and how come that you're not building it? And when I explain what we're building and why we're building it, they're just like, oh wow, that's actually interesting. That would really benefit us as well, right? Because they don't necessarily have that context that you have because you're the expert in these cases. They are like so obsessed in that moment. Like, oh, I need this today. But yeah, it helps to earn as you said, their trust and also just make them more patient.
0:15:35.5 Francois Ajenstat: Absolutely. If we rewind the conversation, we talked about Amazon as a great example of somebody who is customer obsessed, especially on the customer service side. But one of the mechanisms that they have in place is the working backwards process, which is really making sure that you're starting with the customer problem, customer benefits and working back from that. Have you seen good techniques to help teams think about how to really infuse the customer in their design process, their building process?
0:16:08.9 Hubert Palan: Yeah, yeah, I have. I mean, the one I'm just gonna repeat because it is like start with the customer and user or human pain point in mind and frame it that way is actually a great technique because it puts people into the right mindset and it's not the feature-centric thinking. It is the customer problem or jobs to be done or need... Like pick whatever you're kind of like a customer-centric framework is. The other one, I think that not just having the conversation for you to internalize the need of the customer, that actually is an interesting thing. You know, you can get a lot of empathy by watching a recording or reading a support ticket, even though you're not the person having the conversation, you are not in the room, like people still feel like, oh yeah, I got it from the source.
0:17:04.5 Hubert Palan: And so justifying the decisions or your line of thoughts by quoting specific insights or quoting specific snippets of the conversations is actually very, very useful technique that you can do at a much higher scale. Because now with AI and that's why we build Productboard, like in Productboard, every feature that you prioritize can be justified and backed by like a specific insight, which is basically a small snippet of a customer conversation or a support ticket. And it like really changes the conversation when you show it, like in the meeting, people are like, I don't believe this is important. It's like, well, actually here's 427 people talking about this problem that they have. Let me just show you. Let's look at the 20 top strategic customers that we have and let me show you what exactly they said, right? And there's that quote from the email that they send with the emojis and with the language that is sometimes like you know, not very PC. And like, that helps a lot. That helps a lot.
0:18:19.3 Francois Ajenstat: I like that. You know, one of my little technique is I just always ask who's the customer? Have you talked to them? What data points do you have on them? One of the things I've seen a pitfall is sometimes we have a recency bias. Oh, or the last customer meeting you had, they said this. Therefore, it's the thing we should go to. Any techniques on like making sure that you're balancing out the now versus the broader context?
0:18:48.3 Hubert Palan: Yeah, I mean, recency bias is a... It's like a fallacy of human brain, right? Like we tend to forget. And I think that there needs to be a vision and strategy that is kind of much longer term thinking and the horizon is much longer. And then to the extent you have a system or you have a ability to look at longer trends in the feedback, like that helps you with that. And then you don't fall for, hey, this last month something happened and, you kind of, yeah, fall for the bias. Just like the longer term thinking, having a structured system is the same for... We're talking about like qualitative and, the sentiment that you wanna understand about customers, but it's the same for data engagement. Like, if there's one spike in one month, like you will... The first thing that you're gonna ask is like, well, is it a pattern? Is it like a longer term trend? Or like, what is... I mean, if you're kind of...
0:19:44.5 Hubert Palan: If you're kind of doing your job well you should ask those questions, right? And it's the same thing with the qualitative conversations that you need to realize that the trend matters. And by the way, this is the difficult part for people who are new to a, like, you join a new company or you're you just move to a different domain. Or you're you know, existing company, existing product, but you're branching to out to some adjacent use cases. And that's a similar thing, right? Like, you have some few recent conversations and you believe that you understand the market and you know, it might be a biased set of information and you need to kind of step back and really dig deeper and longer.
0:20:27.0 Francois Ajenstat: Yeah, I agree with that. I want to switch gears a little bit by talking about like product board and you started a company 10 years ago had tremendous success and tremendous impact. You know, if you were to go back in time and you know, know then what you know now, how would you have approached building in a different way? Is there some big like learnings that you've had through that experience?
0:21:00.9 Hubert Palan: Okay. So [laughter], I'll be very blunt and specific. I wish we didn't build in the early days the application all in front end and all the data being loaded into a massive JSON, because it doesn't scale when you have a massive, large enterprise customers. And I know that everybody has been through the journey 'cause it's easier to build it that way, but that was a massive re-architecture that we had to do. And it's just so costly and it just takes so much time and it's like, if only you could predict the future, the future and the scale, right? It's like, that's hard because it's the balance, like how much we're building for now versus the future that might never come. That's art, right? So that's one. The other, and that's more on the kind of personal leadership level and ties to this customer empathy and understanding. I made the mistake many times, right? Kind of didn't appreciate the fact that I've been doing this for years and I've had literally thousands of conversations. And I as a result I have a very deep empathy and understanding of the customers in the market. But I wouldn't be patient enough with the people who I would hire. And I would be kind of, "Hey, go and figure this out."
0:22:17.9 Hubert Palan: This is so easy, right? Like in a couple of weeks, like I expect you to come up with a [laughter] with a full spec and you know, prototype and so on. And it [laughter] it's really, it is hard for somebody who just joined and even it's a few months, right? It's just today, right? It's, it's easy kind of to what you said, "It's the opposite of the recency bias." It's kind of like forgetting that the context that you have is so deep and unique that it's almost unfair to expect that same level of decision making and clarity from somebody who joined the company three months ago. And so the lesson that I learned there is that this doesn't matter whether you're a founder or you know, and whatever your title is, but you need to spend time to share the knowledge that you have with others and that the, the payback that you get from onboarding people and finding in your business schedule the long three hour, four hour longer sessions where you can actually get really deep like that ROI on the time is massive. And I made that mistake many times that I wouldn't spend it. I would hire somebody, put them in the seat, good luck. You're smart. You figure it out. And then yeah, they might be smart and they figure it out.
0:23:34.8 Hubert Palan: It's just like they will go through all the learnings, it'll take forever for them to figure it out while you already have been through it. So why don't you spend time to share it with them? So like, if you could somehow figure out like a the machine that would transfer the knowledge, it's really a problem of information sharing, right? That's what the problem is.
0:23:53.3 Francois Ajenstat: Well thankfully AI is gonna solve all that, but we'll come back to talk about AI.
0:23:57.3 Hubert Palan: Yeah.
0:23:58.5 Francois Ajenstat: I mean those are great learnings and I like that you talked about onboarding people into the company and how do you think through that? And I kinda want to jump on that and talk about how do you bring people and create the culture of customer centricity? Is it a value? Are there rituals that should be in place? Because you may have that you are the customer centric company, that's what you guys do. But a new person coming in doesn't have that same mindset necessarily on day one. They may believe in the mission, but how do you instill this mindset onto the team? You beat it down to them. Do you have metrics? Like how does that work?
0:24:44.5 Hubert Palan: Yeah, I think I first of all, I think it's important [laughter] 'cause without saying, probably like to spend time on it, but I think that it's a little different if you're the leader and you're kind of leading the organization in that way. Because if you lead by example, people see it like you have way more influence. And I'm sure that there's many more people like the other way around, like bottom up. Like how do you influence that? And if you join a company that maybe doesn't have that mindset, and you have that mindset and you know, like, how do you do that? So we can talk separately, but the tops down, it's really like you need to walk the walk. You need to, as a leader, I remember I had dinner once with joint chambers, the famous ex CEO of Cisco, and he said like, look, I spend 50% of my time internally and 50% of my time with customers. So that I make sure that obviously on the business side he's helping on the business side. But just like he said it from the perspective of making sure that I really understand what they need. Because then I can go and I can evaluate what are we working on as a company?
0:25:44.6 Hubert Palan: And this is Cisco, right? This is like a massive company. And so you have no excuse to do it on a smaller scale. Like you need to be out there, you need to be having the conversations, you need to be meeting people in person and then reading the insights. Like I go to product board and I look at, hey what's the findings from the recent customer call with our largest customer? And you know, I just wanna make sure that I am on top of what's happening because then I'm informed and then I can steer things and then I can say like when I hear something from one part of the company, like, "Hey, it doesn't quite chime with what I just heard." And then processes, having voice of the customer process and kind of voice of the go-to market process where you do, you have a simple way for the sales team and customer success team to submit or let the product team know in a structured way and in a predictable way. And so the other way around is harder. Like if you're a junior person who joins the company and you feel like your boss doesn't get it.
0:26:44.9 Hubert Palan: But few things get those people to meet other customer centric leaders that are their peers. I've seen that work well. Look, I was in a situation in the previous company where I had this struggle with the CEO. It was very much like, oh, let's go I just talked to this customer that we need to build this immediately. I was like, really, like it's not really the pattern. This is not how you do it. And then, I was like somebody else as a CEO that I know, can you guys go and have a dinner? And you know, again, it's not as easy to do that. But my point is that people listen to their peers more than they listen to the people like Bill and the hierarchy. And so that is one interesting, technique or tip I would share.
0:27:32.2 Francois Ajenstat: And I like the leading by example. If you want that mindset, one of the things I've done is I just... It's the questions that I ask the team. Less so than what they do it's the questions. So they know that it matters to me. And then the next time, they'll keep answering it with that customer mindset. So they have to go do the work. Because now you're reinforcing what matters.
0:27:57.5 Hubert Palan: Yeah, yeah, I this is another leader that I learned from Scott Cook at Intuit. He said that he's going on to these listening tours. That he goes through the... Through the organization. And it's really hard for him not to say anything. But he's just like, hey, how is it? Like, what are you guys working on? How are you approaching it? And just like shuts up and like, okay, just listen. And don't try to steer things right away. And you get much better understanding of what is it that people are working on and what their struggles are and how they're thinking about things. And then you can change that. And as a leadership technique I always try to instill the culture of like, people should come to me and say, this is what I intend to do. And then I might say, oh, this is amazing. Totally you should do it. Or I might say, hey, based on my experience and so like, it doesn't feel quite right. Like, go and explore that. But it's a very different mindset and leadership style than telling people like, hey, go do this, right?
0:29:10.4 Hubert Palan: They're expected to come up with an opinion and a direction that you might overrule as a boss or CEO, that you totally have the right. But it's much more empowering approach.
0:29:24.8 Francois Ajenstat: So I mean, on that note, I mean, you're a founder, you're a CEO, you're the boss. And you've got a lot of builders on your team who wanna innovate, do incredible things. How do you want them to interact with you or work with you? How, What's a great technique to help them share their ideas or their convictions with you? 'Cause you're the founder, you're the person at the top. What do you expect from them to really get their ideas moving along or accelerate it?
0:29:58.7 Hubert Palan: Demonstrate that whatever you're proposing and suggesting is rooted in deep understanding of the customers. I'm not I'm not joking. Like, I actually do think that, well, first of all, I do think we've been talking about builders, but I do think that the greatest people in whatever profession within a company that's delivering some product to the market are the people who really understand the customers the most. And it's better, it's product people, engineers, designers, or sales or marketers or customer support or customer success people. The more, the better you understand the customers, the better you're going to be at your job period. And then like developing the empathy, for the builders, like I that's more important than the technology understanding and understanding how to solve it.
0:30:46.8 Hubert Palan: You kind of need both, like as a great builder, like you need to be able to turn that understanding of the pain point into an incredibly differentiated and delightful alternative product, right that's better than anyone else is. So it's kind of, non-answered is like, you need to have both. But throughout my career, I would always go and watch videos of the best leaders and the best makers. I literally was like super disciplined. I would have a library that I would, I mean, library, like it was like an Evernote doc with links right. And I watched all the videos of the best product and technology leaders. And I went, if I watched Steve jobs, I would think like, this guy's not an engineer, he's not a designer, but he's the guy who can call whether something is amazing or it's a piece of junk. And that was his ability because it was rooted in the deep understanding of the customers.
0:31:40.6 Hubert Palan: And so if somebody comes to me and proposes something, and if I ask them, why do you want to do that? You know, what, what is your, like, how is it rooted? Who needs that? What is the problem? How many people are there in that segment? Why are you starting here? Why are you not starting somewhere else? And I get like a deer in the headlight look like, well, go back and do the homework right. Because it, it just shows that it's kind of a guess. And sometimes it's fine, right? Sometimes you don't know. And I don't have all the answers either, but you know, then the conversation should be like, Hey, I don't know, like you actually need to go and ask the questions and test it and run an experiment, you know? So it depends if you're innovating, like, yeah, it depends. It's contextual.
0:32:29.4 Francois Ajenstat: Yeah. Someday I'll love to see your, Evernote link of, some of the top builders and leaders out there.
0:32:38.0 Hubert Palan: I Switch to Evernote send, but yeah... I actually did a blog post back in the, it might be still somewhere and it was like 20 top CEO talks, yeah, I did, I did post that I'll find it.
0:32:51.2 Francois Ajenstat: It's amazing. I did a similar thing except with politicians and public speakers to figure out how they communicate their ideas effectively to land and repeat that really, really strong.
0:33:03.4 Hubert Palan: Yeah. By the way speaking of politics, right, we are talking customer understanding and understanding of the needs and pain points as a builder. This is the same thing as a politician, right? Like as a politician, you need to understand what is the base needs to maximize the chances of, you know getting elected right. And so the pollsters, it's like market research on the product side is basically like polling people and finding their preferences. It's the same thing. You need to go through that understanding and have that rigor. Yeah, if people don't know market research techniques, like go read marketing research or marketing strategy 101. There's this thick textbook, Malhotra, I think it's called. Like I remember back from my MBA days, like I actually read it. It was gruesome, but it was super helpful. Behavioral segments, right, Versus like demographic segmentation, like it all actually is really useful.
0:33:54.5 Francois Ajenstat: Yeah, it's super powerful.
0:33:56.0 Hubert Palan: Yeah.
0:33:57.5 Francois Ajenstat: Well, so I love, I mean, I love the conversations we've been having, but there's one topic we haven't talked about, and that's AI. I'd love to get your perspective on AI, especially as it comes to the customer centricity side. You know, in some people, some cases, people have said, well, AI will replace people. AI will tell you the answer. AI will just build it for you. Like, what's your view, both as a leader, but also as a product builder? Is AI an opportunity, a threat, or none of the above?
0:34:35.2 Hubert Palan: Yeah. Look, I think that one day it will probably replace. You know, when you reach super intelligence, like I don't know when, but I do think that it's far away. I mean, actually, I have no idea. Nobody has any idea. Even Elon Musk is just like, okay you have guesses. But the immediate future, I think, is an opportunity. Because there's just a lot that AI can help us to do. And especially the large language models the use cases for summarization and the use cases where you can find patterns or clusters, like that's, like a perfect technology to apply towards what we've been talking about, distilling pain points or understanding where the biggest gaps that people have.
0:35:22.7 Hubert Palan: And so at Product Board we're building it into our platform. Because you have all the customer conversations in your product, you have all the feature information in your product kind of catalog in the product. And so it's just like an amazing opportunity to use the AI to match it and to find the gaps and understand trends. And we have integration with you guys from Amplitude as well. You can bring behavioral segments and you can use the quantitative impact and so on. So I think that from that perspective the immediate application is an amazing opportunity. It's still, you can ask like, hey, based on these customer conversations, what do you think that we should build? But I don't think that you can just go and blindly build that without applying the broader context, right? It's just like so multidimensional discipline of product strategy and product decision making that the models are not that advanced yet. We're not talking super intelligence, right?
0:36:21.9 Hubert Palan: But it's just like a super helpful tool. To have in your toolkit, right? And so research, like when you're trying to learn about the new area, like you can get so much faster to the understanding of the concepts. You need to go then and do the kind of the first principle, go to the source and not just rely on the summarization. But it can get you to like a good understanding of a new domain way faster, right? So it's kind of like a, it's like we're kind of like cyborgs in that way. Right. Even though it's, we don't have it built into our bodies, but we're leveraging that artificial intelligence.
0:37:00.8 Francois Ajenstat: Yeah, no, I totally agree. I see it as a superpower, as an accelerant to success, not necessarily as a replacement. Especially when you're at scale, when you have so much customer feedback.
0:37:13.9 Hubert Palan: Yes, I'd love to read the 4,000 requests we get, which I read quite a few of those every day. But having, having AI helping summarize, helping identify. Some of the patterns so I can focus on the right ones, I think that is perfect use case. And I think there's just a lot of opportunities there, but it's not an either or to me. It's an and...
0:37:38.2 Francois Ajenstat: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
0:37:39.8 Hubert Palan: And like just ideation and riffing, I've been using chatGPT, the, like the voice, the voice conversation, just like, Hey, what do you think we should build? Like, Hey, I'm thinking about this and just like, It is kind of like a sparing partner that, that helps you. I've been doing it when I'm like driving by myself in the car, like when I have people to talk to, I prefer people, but when there's no people around it's been fun.
0:38:10.2 Francois Ajenstat: Well, you can call me anytime, I'm always open.
0:38:13.3 Hubert Palan: That's awesome. I appreciate that. I might call you.
0:38:18.2 Francois Ajenstat: Well, Hubert, it's been a pleasure chatting with you personally, for me, like customer obsession is a core principle. That I follow every day. And I believe it's the secret to success. The more you understand your customers, the more successful you can be and it's something you have to practice every day. And I'm glad that you're building tools to help more of us get more of those signals and become customer, obsessed and customer centric. So thank you for joining us and thanks to all of you for listening to Next Gen Builders and look out for our next episode, wherever you get your podcasts. And please don't forget to Subscribe.