Why great AI products are all about the data | Shaun Clowes (CPO Confluent, ex-Salesforce, Atlassian)

I love that you have very strong opinion about this, which is just the state of the product management career and how it most PMs are not That great. Why is it that product management is still such a relatively undeveloped discipline? Like we're like fifteen to twenty years into this thing. And so there's something about the current state of product management that isn't getting at the truly important things, the truly value added things. If we were doctors, you'd be like that's totally unceptable. What's the answer, Sean? How do we solve this problem in everything? Always talk from the Customers' perspective, from the market's perspective, from the compender's perspective. A very small number of PMs do that. They get dragged into internal politics, they get dragged into Scrum management or Scrum execution or product delivery. And you just can't win that way. You kind of have this hot take that the way AI will most impact product management is data management. Well, you've got this synthesis machine, which is LLM thing that's gonna help you do synthesis. But if it hasn't got all that data to do synthesis on top of, it's got nothing. And so that means that LMs can only be as good as the data they are given and how recent that data is. In the future, if you can easily clone a B2B SaaS app like Salesforce or Atlassian, what happens to these businesses long term? Do they just become are they all in trouble. estimate where the value is created in these applications and they just kinda get it completely wrong.

Today my guest is Sean Klaus. Sean is chief product officer at Confluent. Previously, he was chief product officer at MuleSoft, which is a billion dollar business within Salesforce. Before that he was chief product officer of Metro Mile, a public auto insurance technology company.

And prior to that, he spent six years at Atlassian, where he ran the Jira Agile and also built the first ever B2B growth team. He also created two of the most popular Reforge courses, one on retention and engagement, and one on data for product managers. Sean is awesome because he is both very tactical and execution oriented. While also being very philosophical and insightful. About the craft of product and growth.

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript, segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

10 free credits is 10 episodes like this one a month. Episodes nobody has transcribed yet cost their length in hours, because we have to actually transcribe them.