161 - Clifton Gilley
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[00:00:00] Cliff: When product management is involved in strategic decisions, that makes you more likely to succeed, which reinforces everything that we've always said, but also challenges the current and historical use of product management as a delivery organization, as making sure the thing gets made.

[00:00:17] Nils: That's my guest on this episode, Cliff Gilley. He's an Analyst with Gartner's Tech Product Manager team within the Technology and Service Providers research unit. It's kind of a mouthful. You'll hear more about that team in the episode and what Gartner is doing related to product management. 

Cliff, himself a long time enterprise software product manager, and also the person behind the Clever PM blog, where he remained hidden in the background. 

Five years ago, he joined Gartner because as he says in this interview " What really made me gravitate toward Gardner. Is, I knew that they did research." 

Among other things he wanted to work with Gartner's research arm to find out if the things we think we know about product management -that it should be strategic, that it's about more than delivering features -as he said in this quote- are actually true. 

Hi, this is Nils Davis, and you're listening to episode 161 of the Secrets of Product Management podcast. In this episode, Clifton Gilley is my guest. 

Cliff started in the product world as an attorney, sliding into legal tech as a product manager, and then into more general product management roles. 

And at one point he started his Clever PM blog, which still doesn't have his name on it, by the way. 

And that led to internet fame and perhaps partly to his Gartner job. Partly because Gartner wants people that are great communicators and he showed that he was in that blog.

I started the interview by asking Cliff to answer the burning question:

What should product management teams do to help ensure their companies are successful? And of course there's an implied flip side, which is what should companies desire their product management teams do to help them be successful? 

Cliff, welcome to the Secrets of Product Management podcast. It's great to have you here. I've been looking forward to this ever since we first met on LinkedIn and what really attracted me amongst other things to you on LinkedIn was that you have all this data.

You seem to have a bunch of data. So I think of you now as the person with the product management data, the product management data guy. Now I know that you haven't done all the research in the world, but you've done some and you have some actual things that you've learned about, actual practices and how they impact actual outcomes.

So the first thing I really want to ask about is, what is the most important thing you learned about what helps make a company successful from the standpoint of their product management practice?

[00:02:39] Cliff: So to be honest, that's what really made me gravitate toward Gartner is I knew that they did research and I know that there's a significant lack of direct research on product management, right? I think, everyone who's been a product manager, I was a product manager for 20 years before joining Gartner.

We're always looking for that, that really great data point that we can use to define, one, what product management is, what can be successful, what can't, so that it's not all opinion based. I think that's we see that on LinkedIn all the time. We see all of these people of varying levels of experience in product posting, this is what worked for me, therefore it's the be all end all solution for everyone.

And those of us that have been in the trenches know, one, that's not true and two, it's not true. That's your experience and your, what was it anecdote is not data. It's interesting, right? It's good to look and see if there's consistencies. But it's weird, because I think Most of the research that we do confirms many of the hypotheses that older or more, more experienced product managers have about what works and what doesn't.

And the deeper I get into that data and the more we look at leaders versus laggards The more my own perspectives seem to be reinforced, which I think, is good. Things like let's see, we've got a survey from 2022 where 84, 84 percent of leaders involve product managers in business strategy discussion and only 48 percent of laggards do the same, right?

That's a huge difference. That's almost two times difference. And it tells us that When product management is involved in strategic decisions, that makes you more likely to succeed, which reinforces everything that we've always said, but also challenges the current and historical use of product management as a delivery organization, as making sure the thing gets made.

We have, I have the unpopular ish opinion that product management and product ownership need to sit next to each other. There needs to be two roles, one that's focused on external, one that's focused on strategic decisions, one that's really, is 80 percent focused on discovery and validation, and the other one is 80 percent focused on delivery management, and managing backlogs, and all the tactical stuff that needs to happen.

I grew up in the bad old days where product managers were expected to do the birth to death everything, know everything and manage everything in your product. And when I look back, yeah, I was happy because I had this feeling of control and influence. But the reality was I was always doing the delivery stuff.

I was always doing the tactical stuff and occasionally going to a marketing conference where I might talk to two customers. Otherwise I was standing in the booth, right? Those kinds of things. So I think, the key thing for me was strategic involvement of product actually makes a difference.

[00:05:18] Nils: Fantastic. Essentially, you're saying that all of us product managers who feel like we should be more strategic, whether we are being or not, that's probably aligned with the reality of success.

One thing you mentioned, this idea of leader versus laggard, for people that aren't familiar with the Gartner speak, can you just quickly explain what that means? What the definitions of those two are?

[00:05:40] Cliff: Sure. So we do different cuts of data and we used to do growth versus non growth, and that was just, pure revenue, right? Are you increasing revenue or are you not? We changed that a little bit because we didn't think that was really necessarily an indicator of the trajectory of the company over time.

You might have a good year and that might look like things are going well. So we added another. So a leader in this research is someone who is grown revenue year over year and self reports as being ahead of their competitors. So it's a perception piece. It's self reporting.

We all know the biases that come into that, but it seems to pan out pretty well. Laggards are flat or declining growth year over year and report themselves on par or behind their competition. So we're actually, and we actually get. pretty decent number of people saying that. So it's not like we're using, we have a minimum N for any of this stuff, all that fun stuff as far as statistics go.

[00:06:33] Nils: I guess one following question on that is it sounds like there may be a third category of growing, but feeling they're behind. How big a segment is that?

[00:06:43] Cliff: I'd have to look. I don't think it's that big. I think people,

[00:06:46] Nils: wouldn't be that big, would it?

[00:06:47] Cliff: Yeah. And when we, we did a round a couple of years ago where we asked, how is your product team performing and, those kinds of questions. And every single one was leaders were 90 percent high performing.

We're 90 percent high skilled. We're 90% All of the good things and the laggards were 90 percent or not 90, maybe 60 to 70 percent the other direction. So it feels like it's a pretty consistent flow where people who are growing, understand whether they're ahead of the competition or not. And there are markets where you could be growing, but still behind the competition.

I think that's that critical piece that we tried to capture is where. You're in a nascent market. That market overall is growing rapidly, but you might not be growing as fast as someone else in the market.

[00:07:30] Nils: What have you learned that's counterintuitive, if anything? Yeah,

[00:07:34] Cliff: So there was a weird data point from our survey in 2022 that we did a key driver analysis of some of the results and whether the product management teams themselves were performing well or not. And interestingly enough, the managing and planning of pilots and proofs of concept, which I don't think is a product management job made companies 3.

3 times more likely to be a high performing product team which is interesting, and I still assert that product managers aren't sales engineers. We shouldn't be doing, all of the demos and all of the proofs of concept and things like that. But to me, I think what it really reflects is that someone doing those things knows so much about their product, the ins and outs and the use cases, that It enables them to do that more effectively than maybe a sales engineer or someone on the marketing team. So we step in and fill that gap and by doing so, it actually shows an interesting connection.

[00:08:35] Nils: yeah, that's a significant factor. I'm wondering if it's should we think of the design of a proof of concept or trial, whatever it might be. as part of the package of go to market activities that product needs to be involved in. So we don't actually, we don't actually lead it, but we say, make sure you do these things in the trial or make sure the proof of concept has these outcomes defined, so that when the sales engineer goes in there to create it or to guide them, they know they have a checklist or something to do.

I'm a big, I'm a big believer that product management has a huge amount of influence on good go to market, which I think we often don't get as involved in as we should. I'd love to hear your feedback on that,

[00:09:17] Cliff: One of the things that I did at the last company I worked for before Gartner that was really impactful we had a geo diverse development teams. We had development teams here in the U. S. and in South Africa, which is, I think it was a seven hours difference, but it was enough that it was difficult to sync up and, we tried to split work between the teams so that, the South African teams were doing certain stuff and the U. S. teams were doing certain things. That never really, Boiled down to how we expected it to, but having that distance required us, and I'll connect this back, I promise, having that distance required us to think up creative solutions, right? So we started, instead of doing the sprint demo at the end of the sprint, we started having people record videos of the capabilities when they thought it was done.

So two to three minute quick demo videos. And what we realized was. That accelerated the product team side. So we started doing that with product marketing and with sales. Like when we got near the end toward a release, rather than just saying, Hey, marketing, here's the demo site, go play around with it in staging.

We'd actually create quick no more than three minute videos about the capability and give a quick, walkthrough of what it did, how it worked. And that actually allowed us to accelerate the adoption of those things in demos because it wasn't that they were showing our videos.

That wasn't the point. And although I'm sure some salespeople did right, the point was we were doing just that little bit of work to give them a framing mechanism for how to talk about those things. And I think that's the involvement of product management in go to market is making sure the teams have what they need to deliver the value, right?

I don't want to demo for sales, but I want to make sure sales knows how to demo or has a sales engineer that's experienced enough. Or if they don't, we need to figure out how to make that happen. And I think that also plays into the gap filling problem that we have as product managers because Often we are the most knowledgeable about the product.

So we are the quote unquote best person to demo the product. And I think that weakens us because the more we do that anyone else can do, or anyone else should do, the less clear it is what unique value we bring to the table.

[00:11:24] Nils: Yeah, that makes sense. Was there any other surprising things that you've learned in the data recently? 

[00:11:29] Cliff: I wouldn't say surprising. A lot of this is really confirming what we already know. We ask about how people make decisions, right? And we use customer driven for product led. There's a whole product led. We don't want to confuse product led decisions with product led growth. So we chose customer driven as the terminology.

But again, there's a big difference. Difference between leaders and laggards in, in how you make your decisions. Leaders, 43 percent of them make customer driven decisions and laggards, 39 percent of them make technology driven decisions. We're building this collection of data and year over year, it seems similar.

It doesn't change a lot, which frustrates some folks here, right? They're looking for the big change, that thing to hang your hat on and say, this is a huge shift But we're confirming our suspicions a lot of the time. I would say 90 percent of the time we confirm the hypotheses we go out for.

Another one was an interesting point was when we asked product managers what the biggest blockers are for them in dealing with senior leadership 25 percent of them said the fact that leadership doesn't understand product management. was one of the top three answers. Again, that's that internal marketing.

That's making sure people understand what it is you do and what you bring to the table. Because if they don't, then, you may not be in that role for much longer.

[00:12:43] Nils: and that actually then brings up the next question. And it's actually where we first started conversing on LinkedIn, which is from Gartner's perspective, what is product management and what should the business leaders know and expect from the product organization? 

[00:12:59] Cliff: I hinted this, I hinted at this a little bit earlier, right? I think it's that external focus, strategic, research, strategic discovery pushing people within the organization to make data informed decisions, not opinion informed decisions. And there's a lot of conversation right now about whether product marketing can do the job, or whether user experience can do the job, things like that.

And First, everyone does research in a company, right? Every, every department does some kind of research. So to say, one team owns the research or one team owns the voice of customer, I think is really misleading and just asks us to build silos. So we have to understand, sales is going to do their research to identify leads and marketing is going to do their research to identify positioning.

But when we look at how different parts of that organization talk to customers. Everyone has a bias, and we have to understand that bias affects how they talk to customers, what they uncover, what the conversations are. Yes, PMM can talk to customers, absolutely, and they absolutely should.

But their interest, their bias, is toward building that messaging framework, creating that lead funnel driving more business. That's why they report to CROs and CMOs. Same with sales. When they're talking with customers, they're looking for the next deal. They're looking for the money. They're looking for the dollar bills.

And that's okay. There's nothing wrong with that. But if they're the ones that are then taking those discussions and trying to decide the priority of stuff that you're going to put out to market, you're going to be biased towards those dollar bills. You're going to be biased towards those big customers.

You're going to be biased toward the short term gain over the long term benefit. And I think that's the piece where product management lands is, One. balancing out all of those other biases, and two, going to the market with the As open a mind as we can to not be bound by a specific bias or a specific solution or just to have open ended conversations to discover something that we didn't know existed.

And that's not really in the wheelhouse of most of those other teams. And I think, there's a big thing with UX and PM right now for some reason on LinkedIn. UX should help us, right? We should leverage UX researchers to do some of this work. We should ask them to help us be better researchers, right?

It's not the role of UX to do the research and then report back. It's a collaborative effort between all of those teams to ask the right questions to the right people at the right time in the right way, so that we get all of those perspectives and then can say, yeah, this idea will sell more product and will be compelling to the market and we can create a usable functional thing.

Let's do it. But if not, all those things don't align, which they rarely do, we have to have someone that makes that decision. And, we've seen the Airbnb swap out for where product management is now kind of design slash PMM. But that's in a really specific culture. And when Snap let go a bunch of their product managers, it, It seems like they were just trying to remove a layer of decision making so that it could be more directive from the senior leaders.

And there's benefits and drawbacks to that, right? Airbnb wants to be a design driven company, so having the designers make those decisions makes sense. And Chesky wants to run the company as his company, and that's fine, but that's not gonna scale to a $250 million SaaS platform, B2B product.

And I think we need to remember that product right now and historically is a function of culture more so than it is a set definition of responsibilities that someone will do.

[00:16:35] Nils: Yeah, makes sense. Totally. So tell us a little more about the Gartner's actual product practice. Like how recent is it? I feel like it's relatively new. How has it been built up? What's its charter?

[00:16:47] Cliff: The product has been around for seven years roughly, give or take. I've been here for five years. , I was one of the first group of practitioner product managers that were brought in from outside to join the team. Previously, it was Gartner analysts who were former product managers who were working on the team. The goal of the program, it's called Gartner for product teams or Gartner for product leaders, depending on which website you land on. But the idea is to extend what Gartner is traditionally known for industry tech market insights to a practical, pragmatic, practitioner levels of advice.

When I'm talking with companies, I'm not talking about any market or tech or or industry. Quite frankly, not my expertise. I've worked in probably seven different industries over my 20 years as product manager. I'm talking about practical stuff like, hey, should we have a product operations team?

What does that look like? What's the definition? How do I get my product owners who report to development teams to be more business oriented? It's that day to day practical stuff. And what I love about it is I talk to companies of all shapes and sizes. Our product, Gartner for Product Teams, is technically only for $250 million and above, but we have a separate product for growth and startup organizations.

And I work with both sides of that. So it's fun. One day I might be talking to a $20 million startup that's trying to get to 40, get to 60, get to 80 and the next day I'm talking with a massive international conglomerate that's thinking about restructuring their product teams.

And no one knows we have this, right? It's it's outside of the general perspective of what Gartner is and does. So that's one of the reasons I'm here is just to talk about it, to let people know that we have this. I like to tell people when we're talking about what we offer, You have 50 product managers on call at any time to bounce an idea off of, or to review a process workflow with, or to talk about a vendor briefing or a fundraising deck that you're putting together, right?

All of that stuff can be bounced off of a group of people who collectively have, I don't know, thousands of years of experience if you add it all up, but it's that external perspective. And what I. What I really stress when I'm doing proof of concept calls and talking with potential clients is, even if you've got 20 years of experience in product management, if you've been with the same company for 18 years, you only know what your company does because we don't have a standard book of practices, right?

There's been several attempts that I've seen to create a book of knowledge for PMs and, half of it is probably generally applicable and half of it is really specific to those people's experience. So having that ability to bring in an external perspective to say, yeah, that makes sense given your culture, given your org structure, given your company's, product or maybe it doesn't, Right?

Maybe there's, there are tweaks that we can make. And I think what we're seeing broadly. is a big shift to being more customer driven, to being more product oriented which we know works from our data, but how do you do that, right? How do you transform a technology driven organization that's been super successful for the past 25, 30, 40, 50, years in that mode?

To something that is more customer oriented, that is a little bit more agile, that is a little bit more distributed in its decision making. And I'll tell you, the answer is not SAfe. But there are certain things that we can suggest people do and try. It's been a great experience for me and hopefully we can have some conversations with other folks listening to the podcast.

[00:20:14] Nils: That's right. That sounds great. And that's why one of the reasons I was really excited to have you on is because it is a new thing. Seven years doesn't seem that new, but in Gartner time, it's actually pretty new.

[00:20:23] Cliff: Yes, that is true.

[00:20:25] Nils: And as you say, not many people know about it. And so being able to publicize it and the fact that you have this data and do this research, really great stuff.

So how did you get into it?

[00:20:35] Cliff: That's a really twisty windy story. Honestly, I'm a lawyer by training. I graduated law school, got my license way back in I won't say the year, but it's been almost a quarter of a century. And wound up falling into legal tech, and from there, I got into product management, and from there, I bounced around because of non competes that legal tech companies are likely to enforce against you, unlike some others.

So I bounced around a little bit, and I, around, I think it was 2016, 20, that would have been 2014, wow, it's been that long, 10 years ago I got laid off. from a job that I had, and it was tough. The job market wasn't great here in Seattle. I was trying to figure out what to do. So I started a blog called The Clever PM.

Just to write my ideas down and keep my thinking sharp about product and stuff like that. And that blew up much more than I expected it to. It was back before we really had the glut of what I'd call thought leaders. I don't consider myself one of those, I just know product. So it took off, it was super popular, I started doing a couple speaking engagements, I ghost wrote a book I started doing all the things that you do as this thought leader while still doing my normal job.

And at some point I started thinking, oh I'm let's go into consulting let's start a consulting practice. I knew some people that had I am not a business dev guy, I'm like the evangelist guy, not the close the business guy and somehow, somewhere they had posted this job and they were reaching out to thought leaders in the product space to ask if they were interested.

And many of them have their own consultancies where they're probably making more money per year than they would as a Gartner analyst. But they referenced me. So building that network of connections to people like Rich Mironov, Steve Johnson Melissa Perry, Teresa Torres, just through, internet connections.

Although I did know Rich personally from some work he did with us at Product Camp Seattle. That just led to that exposure and over a nine month period of time I went through the hiring process here at Gartner and got the job. It was the most grueling job interview process I've ever been through.

They are Just absolutely adamant about your ability to present to defend your ideas, to write in a compelling way. And I think all of that thought leadership and writing a blog, what was it, twice a week or so, whatever it was I was doing back then, really set me up for this, and for success.

[00:22:54] Nils: Great story. And that was about when I started my blog too, but it didn't get as famous as yours. 

[00:23:00] Cliff: Bugs are a weird thing though, like it either catches or it doesn't, and that's, I,

[00:23:05] Nils: that seems to be true.

[00:23:06] Cliff: too tricky.

[00:23:07] Nils: And so how do you work as a Gartner product analyst, whatever they call it?

[00:23:14] Cliff: I'd say it's roughly a third that's how they pitch it to new Gartner analysts. A third of my time is spent doing research I did, I started doing, Quick polls out on LinkedIn but also being involved in our primary research and other research efforts that we have.

So that's about a third of the job. A third of the job is writing, right? Taking that research, creating actionable insights. , I am not involved in any of the like magic quadrants or critical capabilities or those kinds of things. So my research is much more directly focused on the practical, pragmatic product management side of things.

And then a third of it is talking with clients. Every week I've got roughly 5 to 10, 30 minute sessions with a client that's asked a question and the system has told them to come talk to me. Some of those are repeat clients, some of those are iterative, right? I think the big difference that I described between a typical engagement with a market analyst versus me the market analyst you go to with the question, how big is this market?

What's the TAM? What, what's the growth? All that sort of stuff. You get it all answered in one call. Very rarely do we end with an answer at the end of a call on the role based side. We have suggestions, we have actions to take, right? We don't just philosophize all the time but it's more about, okay, let's try this and come back in six weeks and tell me what was successful and what wasn't.

And then iterate again and say, okay given what happened let's try this other approach, or let's tweak that a little bit, or let's see if we have some research that you can use internally to convince people that this is the right thing to do. That's about another third. And then another part of the job is building tools.

I've been involved with a few of the tools that we've built. One is called the high tech product management score. It's a maturity model. It's a quantitative behavior driven survey. That product teams can take and it basically tells you across our, what we call our priorities navigator.

It's 18 different things that product managers do. It tells you what your maturity level is for each of those. And that maturity level is based on our research, based on our data, based on other teams that have taken the assessment. And it really gives a quantitative view of how mature your product teams are, which is awesome.

And I do reviews of those with clients all the time. And that's also part of the research, updating it and maintaining it and keeping it current.

[00:25:17] Nils: that tool sounds really interesting. I another thing I didn't know about, and I bet a lot of people don't know that exists. Very cool. This this is really fascinating. One thing I do wonder, Gartner historically has been so IT oriented, right? Really internal application development or tools for IT, blah, blah, blah.

And to me, that's always been, One of the challenges of product management is we inherit all these terminologies from IT that really don't apply. Like product owner is really an IT term. That's not a, it didn't really come out of a product world, right? So I was just wondering, is there much bleed in or is there, are you able to create collaboration , with the IT side I'm just curious what the relationship is. 

[00:25:55] Cliff: The companies that I deal with are what we call technology and service providers. So they're the companies that are creating the widgets for the IT departments or for other businesses, right? The B2B software world. The IT side is the biggest part of Gartner, obviously, right?

Magic Quadrants, critical capabilities, I need a tool for CRM, which one should I use? It's been interesting over the past, I'll say, 2 to 3 years and peaking right now, so we're still working through it, but the IT world is starting to go the other way, where the IT world is trying to think about things as products rather than projects which is a really interesting thing.

perspective. And I think it's valuable. In fact, it's in some ways a lot easier because their clients or customers are captured, right? If I'm building an application for a sales team, I can just go directly to that sales team, talk to them and they have to use whatever it is I push out. So there's that benefit too.

But there, so there's been some conversations, some bleed through, where they're leaning on us to help their IT clients think more about product. We're learning a little bit about where the learnings we can take from those IT teams out to product organizations as well.

People still think of Gartner as the IT company. As, that's our stock ticker, IT. The people that advise you about what to buy. I Probably, I'd say 10 percent of my time is based in that world at all, and that's collaborating or having discussions.

[00:27:16] Cliff: The role based stuff that we work on is really strongly focused on that B2B software or services or technology approach to solving customer problems.

[00:27:26] Nils: and on the Gartner side, of course on the IT side, they do lots of tool evaluations and Are you doing any kind of tool evaluations about product management tools? Or I could even imagine you doing an evaluation of frameworks, this framework works for this or something like that.

I don't know if that would be feasible to do, but do you do tool evaluations or tool magic quadrant or anything like

[00:27:46] Cliff: not yet. I'll say there's some internal discussion going on right now about what a product management tool even is. And I think that, that's the hard part is defining what these markets are, right? I think, even if I say, even if I narrow it down to product management roadmap tools there are tools that claim to be that, that clearly weren't built for that.

Not that you can't use them for it. Tools like a Monday or an Asana, which are project management tools, that's what they were built to do, that now have roadmap capabilities and things like that. It's yeah you do it, But are you the best or optimal choice, or is this kind of a secondary, our whole company has Monday, so therefore we're going to use Monday?

My personal perspective is the product management road mapping tool space, and I'll narrow it just to that, because we talk about product analytics and other groups as well, has really matured over the past, I'd say 10 years, and the companies that I've worked with. started as a roadmap company, right?

Started as a product management roadmap tool are still probably the best tools to use for product management roadmapping. There was an inflection point, and I'll say this was about three years ago though, where everyone basically had the same capabilities, the same features, some were better built out than others.

But since that inflection point, we've actually seen those companies target much more niche markets,. So you've got Aha!, which is very much committed to from strategy to planning, to execution. You've got ProductBoard, which is very focused on insights-driven product management.

You highlight some text in Zendesk and then you right click send to ProductBoard and that gets you captures that insight. Those are the things that we're seeing those companies go at, and it's becoming less easy to talk about it as a holistic market because it's more just are you great at strategy to execution?

Then Aha is probably the better tool for you. Do you want to do insight driven product management? Then ProductBoard is going to be the one tool to rule them all for you

[00:29:42] Nils: And there aren't too many other choices in any of those categories. 

[00:29:45] Cliff: No, there's, I'd say there's probably four prominent players in the product roadmapping market.

And then there's a bunch of others that are purpose built product roadmap tools. And then there's that gigantic bucket of, smartsheet is is a spreadsheet I can, yes, I can use Excel. I can use PowerPoint. I can use Visio. But are those the optimal tools for that? And. For some people it is, and I won't say that it's not globally.

But there's many efficiencies we can drive by adopting those tools that are specific to product managers.

[00:30:18] Nils: That's my feeling as well with that that there's not that many tools. There are diverging in terms of where they focus and depending on what you want, there's not a lot of choices. 

[00:30:30] Cliff: And in some ways, I think that's almost easier in a way than having a ton of, a plethora of tools that do roughly the same thing. Because then it's almost just a price play, right? And if you choose the cheaper one, that doesn't necessarily mean you're getting the better one. I think it's much better, and it makes people think about what they're doing.

their approaches. And I, to me, that's a value right there is do you want to be an insights driven product team? And what does that mean for you? If you do and that works for you, then, hey, here's a tool that does that.

[00:31:00] Nils: makes a lot of sense. Very good. This has been a fascinating and awesome conversation, Cliff, and I'm sure we could talk for another hour, and maybe we will do that in the future. But for now, I always try to end the show with some things that people can start taking action on right away, and we talked about this.

So do you have three things that people can start doing right now to start to put some of these ideas into action?

[00:31:23] Cliff: I think the number one is talk to customers and this sounds, it sounds so silly, right? Talk to customer blah, blah, blah. But I really mean that. And I've been thinking about this, like in, in other companies, if it's difficult. This was actually my response to what would you tell the old you on LinkedIn, right?

I would tell myself, get out there and talk to customers. If my organization isn't built to do that, find a way. Because there is absolutely no substitute for what your customers are experiencing on a day to day basis. And you're not going to find the answer to everything in the four walls of your company.

And you're never going to break through and become customer driven if you just give up and say marketing does their research, so I'll just use that. That's not what a product manager does. That's what a product owner does. Someone else made the decision and we're going to execute on that.

So that that's number one. 

Get out there, talk to customers have open ended conversations with them. Don't go with a big list of questions that are specific. Ask them what they do. Ask them what challenges them. Ask them what roadblocks they hit. And it may be, may have seemed like it has absolutely nothing to do with your product, but that's where you double down.

It's those hidden things that, that impact someone's everyday life. That's where people find value. 

And I think the last thing is look for those opportunities to make something lovable, even if it's small. People talk about the minimum lovable product.

I'm not yet on that bandwagon, but the thought that B2B software is always functional and always does exactly what you want it to do in the way that you expect it to do it. Let's throw some fun in there. Let's throw some, success screens. Let's add maybe a little bit of gamification, right?

"This is the fourth thing you've done in the past month." 

Those things seem like they're unnecessary. They seem like they're in the way and I really feel like as we're seeing changes in the user base of things as we're seeing people age into jobs where they're using B2B software. The more we can give them that kind of positive feedback, the more we can make it, I won't say fun, but rewarding.

The more we can make it a little quirky even but still do the job, I think we build much more connection with the user. And this is, this is common practice for B2C. It's been that way for 20 years, but B2B still lags way behind on the usability, the lovability, the direct engagement with users. We're still way about the practical implications of getting the work done.

[00:33:55] Nils: I'm looking forward to seeing data around that

[00:33:58] Cliff: Yes. Yes.

[00:33:59] Nils: Because I feel like I completely agree with your idea that if you can make the customer feel like you care about them in some way, whether that's being amusing them or taking care of them or making sure they understand that they're safe or whatever, that's going to go a long way to keeping them happier and increasing their, their NPS, for example.

[00:34:20] Cliff: and we do have some data around that, right? We know for a fact that business users are looking for more consumer ish engagement models, more consumer ish user interfaces. I don't have the numbers right in front of me, but we do know this and it's still taking way too long for B2B companies to really get that into practice. To get those user experience folks, right? I'll give my, I'll give my shout out to the UX community, right? I want more designers. I want more UX researchers. I want more of that availability so that I can convince people that these are the right things to do. That having an engineer design something might not be optimal, right?

It might get the job done, but that just because it's getting the job done doesn't mean it's useful or usable 

[00:35:04] Nils: you're leaving money on the table potentially

[00:35:07] Cliff: absolutely.

[00:35:07] Nils: using design. Yeah. It seems like that would be motivating.

[00:35:12] Cliff: I would hope so.

[00:35:13] Nils: That's awesome. It's great list of things for people to do. 

Cliff, really appreciate it. Great having you on. If people wanted to follow up with you or learn more about you and or the Gartner product program, what should they do?

[00:35:25] Cliff: You can reach out to me on LinkedIn linkedin. com slash ctgilly. And for Gartner, go to the gartner. com website. We've got a lot of different offerings for different size organizations. When we launched this Gartner for product teams, it wasn't the only role based solution. There's one for product marketers.

There's one for general managers. We've got one for analyst relations. We've got one for tech and startup CEOs. There's a lot of opportunities out there to engage with us, in different ways for different teams within your organization. Don't just say or think that we're Market Research or the Magic Quadrant Company, because there's so much more out there for you.

[00:35:59] Nils: Fantastic to know that. Definitely I'll put all that information as well in the show notes. So if people want to go to the show notes, they can find all of that info on how to connect with Cliff and how to connect with Gartner. . 

Thanks again for joining me and looking forward to seeing how things go and all the new data that you're going to be providing us with over time and insights.

Can't wait to see more of that and maybe have you on the show again when you get some new, interesting stuff that you can share.

[00:36:25] Cliff: Sounds great. Thanks for having me, Nils. This was great.

[00:36:27] Nils: Thanks again to Cliff Gilley for joining me on this episode of the Secrets of Product Management podcast. Lots of great insights from Cliff, as well as some great action steps to start doing today. 

Start talking to customers, as Mike Smart reiterated in last week's episode. 

And as apparently Marty Cagan is beating the drum about in his new book, we have to talk to customers and the market, even if we don't have permission. 

And try to make your product more lovable, even if it's an enterprise product. The users are expecting it more and more anyway, and there's obvious value in making your product more engaging to users. 

Put those ideas into practice and you'll start seeing the impact very soon. 

As I mentioned, I'll put links to Cliff's information, his website, his LinkedIn. Gartner, and all that stuff into the show notes secretsofpm.com/161. 

If you liked this episode and want to share the ideas in it, please feel free to tell your friends about it. 

It's a great way for the show to grow. And please let me know your thoughts on this episode. 

If you want to reach out to me about this episode or any other topic that I cover on the podcast, I'd love to hear from you, or you can leave a comment on the show notes. 

You can always find me easily on LinkedIn or my direct email nils@millsdavis.com. I'd love to hear from you. 

Until next time, this is Nils Davis. 

Bye-bye.