Picking sharp problems, increasing virality, and unique product frameworks | Oji Udezue (Typeform, Twitter, Calendly, Atlassian)

**Oji Udezue** (0:00)
Products who try to be viral, just for what I call synthetic virality that fail. Because in the end, if you're synthetically viral and people get to the product and it sucks, that's it. You know, Slack wasn't even viral, right? There was no synthetic virality. Slack couldn't even connect to organizations for the longest time. You could be working on the third floor and someone using Slack on the fourth floor and you would have no clue. There's no way to share it with them. But what happens when you went to lunch, people are like, we got Slack and this is amazing. And people on the third floor are like, holy shit, when can we get it? Boom, boom, boom. This is the bedrock of virality. Build a great product that solves a sharp problem.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:37)
Welcome to Lenny's Podcast, where I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experiences building and growing today's most successful products. Today, my guest is Oji Udezue. Oji has helped build and grow products at Microsoft. We worked on Windows, Outlook, Hotmail and Inner Explorer. At Atlassian, where he was head of product for all their communication tools. At Calendly, where he was chief product officer. At Twitter, where he was head of product for creation and conversation. He's currently chief product officer at Typeform, which I am a happy customer of. Oji has one of the broadest and most interesting careers in product, and he's also one of the most thoughtful humans I've met. In our conversation, Oji shares some of his favorite product frameworks and also why you should be really careful applying frameworks at your company. We dig into what he's learned from Calendly and Atlassian at Typeform on how to do product-led growth successfully and also how to get really sharp with your ICP, or Ideal Customer Profile, also how to increase your product's virality and a concept called Forest Time, which I love, and even his favorite Nigerian food, which I am currently on the hunt for. With that, I bring you Oji Udezue after a short word from our sponsors.
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Oji, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.

**Oji Udezue** (3:11)
Thank you, Lenny. It's a pleasure to be here.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (3:14)
It's my pleasure.
You've been a PM and a product leader. It's so many amazing and also just very different companies all with very different approaches to product and growth. And I think you have this really rare, broad perspective on what works in product and growth across a lot of different ways of doing it. And so I have a bunch of questions for you. I hope you came ready for that.

**Oji Udezue** (3:34)
I am ready.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (3:36)
Sure.
I love it.
So I want to start with frameworks.
You've written and shared a bunch of really interesting frameworks for how to think about product and growth. And so I just want to dig into a couple of them. And one of them is around how to find big B2B SaaS ideas. And it's around finding the right workflow. Could you share this framework and also just like how founders and also investors can use this idea to find big ideas?

**Oji Udezue** (4:01)
Thank you. So I think you're referring to where do you fish to find a unicorn? And the thing behind that is that people can find that on Substack and on Medium with my writings. But the premise is that there's a lot of risk in building startups, right? And the last decade of product management and startups has really focused on the method of building software and companies.