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

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:00)
I love that you have very strong opinion about this, which is just the state of the product management career and how most PMs are not that great.

**Shaun Clowes** (0:08)
Why is it that product management is still such a relatively undeveloped discipline? We're like 15 to 20 years into this. 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 unacceptable.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:23)
What's the answer, Shaun? How do we solve this problem?

**Shaun Clowes** (0:27)
Always talk from the customer's perspective, from the market's perspective, from the competitor'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.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:40)
You kind of have this hot take that the way AI will most impact product management is data management.

**Shaun Clowes** (0:45)
Well, you've got this synthesis machine, which is this LLM thing, that's going to 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 LLMs can only be as good as the data they are given and how recent that data is.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:58)
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?

**Shaun Clowes** (1:06)
People really underestimate where the value is created in these applications, and they just kind of get it completely wrong.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:17)
Today, my guest is Shaun Clowes. Shaun 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 Metromile, 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. Shaun 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. In our conversation, Shaun shares why most PMs are not good, what it takes to become a good or great product manager, how he thinks about his career like a bingo card, and why he indexes towards finding very different roles for every new job that he takes, why good data is the most important ingredient in AI tools and for product managers working with AI, also how to build a great B2B growth team, what he's learned about doing B2B growth, and his really interesting take on how AI will and won't disrupt SaaS tools out in the wild. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes, and helps the podcast tremendously. With that, I bring you Shaun Clowes. This episode is brought to you by Interpret. Interpret unifies all your customer interactions, from gong calls, to Zendesk tickets, to Twitter threads, to App Store reviews, and makes it available for analysis. It's trusted by leading product orgs like Canva, Notion, Loom, Linear, monday.com, and Strava to bring the voice of the customer into the product development process, helping you build best-in-class products faster. What makes Interpret special is its ability to build and update customer-specific AI models that provide the most granular and accurate insights into your business, connect customer insights to revenue and operational data in your CRM or data warehouse to map the business impact of each customer need and prioritize confidently, and empower your entire team to easily take action on use cases like win-loss analysis, critical bug detection, and identifying drivers of churn with Interpret's AI assistant, Wisdom. Looking to automate your feedback loops and prioritize your roadmap with confidence like Notion, Canva, and Linear? Visit enter.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.
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