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Kamal: [00:00:00] It's all about like democratization of something that like only a certain set of people were doing now getting expanded to a larger thing. Everybody's a content creator of some sort. You're trying to put a blog post, you're trying to put a social media. You're trying more and more to be that designer that used to be a creative department.

So I think that democratization is what is driving a lot of the innovation now, and we are trying to work towards enabling that democratization. Welcome to Launch Pod. The show from Log Rocket, where we sit down with top product and digital leaders. Today we're talking with Kamal Sen, SVP of Product Development at a Ludo.

In this episode, we discuss how Carell Draw was modernized from a legacy desktop app into an AI enabled collaborative SaaS product, including the user research approach that balanced less mature users with the needs of longtime power users. And how they utilized AI to power entire workflows, helping all users behave like pros.

We also discuss Kamal's navigation of a major roadmap dispute with senior leadership, including the real [00:01:00] negotiation tactics he used to diffuse the initial conflict and his squiggly line framework for balancing near term revenue with long-term product vision. So here's our episode with Kamal Nassan.

Jeff: Hey, Kamal. What's up man? It's good to see you again. I know we caught up in person in Seattle when I was there last week, but good to see you digitally now this time.

Kamal: Same here, Jeff. It was a fun dinner and thanks for organizing that. If any of your listeners get an opportunity, definitely don't visit. Set of good, set of folks crossfunctional cross industry folks.

Jeff: Yeah, it was, it had a blast. Uh, Good news is we're gonna do more of 'em too. We're gonna, I think we did like eight over the past. I don't know, six months or so, but we're gonna start doing a lot more. . We're gonna be hitting. All sorts of cities.

So hopefully get to meet some listeners or meet some people who become listeners afterwards or just get to learn about some cool product stuff. But it was cool getting to meet you. But you know, , we've got a cool show here to talk about.

You got a [00:02:00] cool background. You started out PhD in computer engineering moved into product over time. And then you've spent quite a bit of time across multiple companies, you know, Microsoft, Oracle in my backyard, EMC back in Hopkinson where I grew up. And now, now you're at a Ludo. And you know, there's been some really neat work you've done kind of taking some of these products that have been around for quite a while, and , how do you bring 'em into modern age?

How do you ensure that they remain competitive for as long as they've been around? Right? And so that's what we're gonna talk about today. Maybe you can just give us the, the quick and dirty though, you know, how do you go from computer engineering, PhD to leading product at a company like this

Kamal: Yeah, look, I mean like, although like it looks like PhD to a product management,

Jeff: straight line, right?

Kamal: lot of, yeah, it looks like quite a leap and maybe a lot of squiggly lines, but I'll tell you like, what are my biggest learnings? There's an aspect you do in PhD, which is structured curiosity, 

and [00:03:00] you're kind of comfortable with ambiguity.

Guess where that is the case, right? 

Jeff: I, I've heard product can be a little ambiguous, so

Kamal: Like if you think about like PhD, you're trying to define the problem for years. You're trying to figure out, hey, where are the real set of issues and problems to go focus? If you think about like hypothesis testing, that's exactly what you do, right? And if you think about like, failure and quick experiment and just fail.

Fast loop. That's what you do. I can't remember the number of times I've been rejected with papers, ideas. My advisor has not been happy with the experiment we did or like the results, but it was right. So you kind of learn this in the training over many years. Wish.

AI and infrastructure and systems you need to be technical and you need to be able to go deeper [00:04:00] and deeper into data. And you need to be able to understand all these signal to noise ratio, right? And identify the signals. So there's a good set of things. So it's really helped me if.

Jeff: That is the single best explanation I've heard for why a PhD is great hands-on training for being a product manager that I think I've ever heard. I don't know why more PhDs aren't in product with that, right? Because it, it really is, you have to find a novel, you know, discovery or novel problem.

And, and a lot of that is funny, like so much of schooling as much as I loved school, but so much of it is, here's the problem to solve. Go solve it, right? Or here is how you need to learn this process, learn this process. But this is just purely like go discover something that's not been discovered before.

Write it up and then defend it.

Kamal: That's another aspect we didn't speak. Yeah, like getting stakeholder buy-in. You kind of learn in your PhD from day one because hey, first you're convincing your advisor, your like peers and then like some form of committee. There's a [00:05:00] lot of goodness. It's all goodness.

Jeff: I love that. , I always kinda wondered about PhD 'cause it seems like you go so deep, but I guess if you look at it from the broader metaphor of school, right? Law schooling is just teaching you how to think or you know, a lot of. The degree I got. I don't really use it day to day, but I do think I learned the thinking processes and thinking scales and critical thinking and stuff like that.

It's the same thing, just next level up. Go discover something. Defend it. So that's sweet. We've already broke new ground here and we're only a couple minutes in. But no, the thing I really wanna talk about, and I guess. I, I would wager that that training probably played well into this is while you spent time at kind of, you know, a lot of companies that were really innovating, you know, Microsoft with Azure at the time you were there.

And you know that level of kind of newness, you now came in to a Ludo. You guys have a product corral draw and it. Has been around for quite a while. Maybe give a brief overview of, of what it is, but also on that, like what was the challenge was facing and, and you know, what were we kind of walking into here that had to [00:06:00] maybe change face a bit?

Kamal: Definitely. I think like, I'll first.

Jeff: Yeah.

Kamal: Can do vector as an output. So which means that like you can edit like points. Imagine you draw a circle if you can have infinite number of points on it and you can edit each point, which means the shape of that particular circle is not necessarily a circle. So it's very useful for, if you think about graphics design, right?

You try to make a card, you try to make a t-shirt, right? Like you can now edit things on that t-shirt so you don't have to have a static image and just be able to apply artifact removal to it, right? Like remote background or change somebody. But instead you can change every aspect of that pixel, whether that image which is very, very powerful if.

Professional designers. The canonical names you might have heard in this space is Adobe, right? Who's the other competitor of

Jeff: I think I've [00:07:00] heard of them.

Kamal: Yeah, like a small company. So Adobe is another kind of like a vector. Adobe Illustrator specifically provides this kind of capability, right? And it's been there for quite some time because if you think about like, printing.

Right. You go to your favorite store, you wanna do some graphics design, you can do it posters, right? That like you see signboards, which is a very common thing. Even labels, you get printed on your items, right? How do they do it? It's through these kind of vector design software. That's what like car draw is.

And look, became much more powerful. So it is a very innovative thing in eighties, late eighties. And then it slowly went into the nineties with really creating the kind of, with the growth of what personal devices were, the desktop software provided that. So traditionally it's been a very desktop oriented thing, and guess what happened over the.[00:08:00] 

Just on one place, but the workflows are distributed and whatnot. So therein lies the challenge as to how do you take something that is still a very useful product. There are millions of users and millions more that are coming into the trial workflow. Right? As new users, how do you take all this?

Pipeline, all this data, all these users respect where your current set of users are and yet transform for these new set of users who are probably trying to do something else, right? But the output and the creation is at the end of the day, they're trying to get to same kind of t-shirt design and a new workflow or a mug design in a new workflow.

A new Right. So challenge.

Jeff: Mm-hmm. I can identify that pretty well too. 'cause you know, before I had a respectable job in tech I worked in the music industry and, and worked at record labels and, you know, was 

Kamal: Oh. 

Jeff: bands and everything. Yeah. I had a much more rebellious side to me [00:09:00] before I was in the, you know, laced up world of, of startup technology.

Kamal: You still look 

Rebellious, Jeff.

Jeff: thank you. I, I'll take that as a compliment. But I remember sitting there and like, we would design buttons for bands or, you know, there's, there's one band I know that's still very famous in making a comeback right now that I'm very happy to say I think I made the button design and about a hundred thousand buttons for them.

But it was always if we wanted to tweak something or any kind of edit, it was like I had my computer and that I could save the file and. As I progressed in my career, I could email it to them maybe, or I would have to, you know, going back further, take a flash drive and move it over, something like that.

But this, this idea of collaboration, which seems central now just didn't exist. And I'm sure that's just one piece of like all these changes that have gone on in the world of, of 'cause kind of vector-based design.

Kamal: , and there is an aspect, an important aspect you just said there, right? Which is the nuance, which is you were the only one designing that button and you were the only one going and printing in a good way. You could [00:10:00] say it, right, like, but like you designed it and you took it to somewhere, you printed it and then like brought it back, right?

The general trend of like what's happening across the, this is not case

Jeff: Right.

Kamal: Democrat. Right. That's another way of seeing whether in what's uh, tip of the tongue for everybody, which is white coding. It's all about like democratization of something that, like only a certain set of people were doing now getting expanded to a larger thing because if you can, in terms of graphics design, right?

Everybody is trying to design something, including kids trying to do posters these days for their school, all the way to marketing teams or content creator. Everybody's a content creator of some. You're trying put a blog post, you're trying, put a social media. You're trying more and more to be that designer.

That used to be a creative department within your like [00:11:00] company or like you relied on somebody, right? So I think that democratization is what is driving a innovation now and trying to work towards enabling that democratization of that vector. 

Jeff: So I guess taking a step back, you're trying to, to democratize it, what did that mean or what does that look like as applied to Carell Draw? 'cause you talked about right. This, you know, it's a bit of collaboration. It's a bit of democratization, but I think there's more to it than just that, right?

It's more than just having a couple people in the file versus having little old me designing a button end to end. There's a world of kind of generative AI that has really popped up. There is a lot of things people think these things should be able to do. Now where do you start with a tool?

I. Like Carre drill, like how do you start that process and how does that kind of output something that, I mean, I saw the launch, I saw the results. It, it seems like it got really good traction and really good feedback. So [00:12:00] it seems like the end result turned out well. So I'd love to kind of hear how did you get there?

How can other people learn to kind of, maybe, maybe not the folks at like Adobe or something, but everyone else. How can they learn to, to follow on like that?

Kamal: No, thank you. Thank you for that acknowledgement there. Great work by the collaborative effort. Lots of.

If we should do it or it's not a question of like, what? Right. Because the, what is a long laundry list of things we already recognized? But it's actually how you go about it. Right. And what are some of the things that, like biggest aspect of a legacy product, like a career draw that like you need to modernize is as I, one of the things I mentioned there was respecting your users.

There's a professional design community that are. Like it's got an established active user base, right? Like they monthly active usage is pretty high and like it's a daily workflow. How [00:13:00] do you respect innovation for them while kind of creating this new user base that has a different kind of a, a workflow and a methodology to it?

Right? And I think like this is where like one of the. Think off like a framework, which is how do you discover, how do. For D. So like some way to simplify and remember, right? So discovery is like all of us try to do different tools, right? Like from surveys to user testing to like how do you look at the data amplitude and understand, hey, where things are, how do you look at like secondary place, right? Like, and look at how the users are.

Understanding that. Right. And we did a lot of things which understood some of the user intent and kind of bifurcated how to look at users who are professional designers and then like, what are these new users? And the new user may not be a [00:14:00] professional designer. Right. That was a biggest learning. Once we understood that, then we could drill into the second and orders of magnitude how.

Product or thesis for those different sets of users, right? These professional designers needed something, right, like, which is like, as an example, like a format of web piece support, which stood out very well and from an ideas portal that we had, and then like we were able to deliver that right in a quick iteration.

Versus these new and beginner users who are coming in was all about this democratization that I talking about they never seen. Right? So to something like a software that is super rich to them would be detrimental. Right. This is where a lot of the user intent we were capturing was seeing where the hotspots were, where the trial drops were.

Sometimes they would not even get into the funnel right of the trial, [00:15:00] and sometimes it would be a churn at the very end of it, but figuring out like, Hey, where those pain points were was. Of the work we were doing once we had like hypothesis on what was not one hypothesis. Initially we turned around and said like, Hey, here a. That we are gonna deliver for these beginner, intermediate users, because think about this collaborative kind of a workflow that they wanna do. How do you get them to a service oriented thing that can work across any device, work at work from their browser, they can close this, open it in their iPad in the evening, and they can still go edit something, right?

And finish the workflow. So that is the kind of thing that like we ended up delivering. At of the day, and that's what credit goal was, which was a lightweight vector graphics design. Which was fundamentally seeing that like this beginner, intermediate users that are coming outta the funnel [00:16:00] can get to productivity in minutes, not days or weeks.

That it typically takes somebody with a professional graphics design. So, which means they're able to get tens.

Jeff: So I, I think you briefly touched on this idea of the ideas portal. Is that kinda what it sounds like it, I assume it's kind of a place where user can come in, interact. I. Give you suggestions, give you ideas if you will. Was there any worry within that, that kind of like what you would get there would be heavily weighted towards your kinda longtime power users?

Or were you able to kind of discern who was, you know, kind of those new users who were non-design background that you talked about versus the heavier, maybe longtime power users? Like how'd you kinda split those personas to ensure

Kamal: That's a, that's a very good question. Right? Look, cannot be absolutely. At the end of the day, these different [00:17:00] mechanisms uh, different ways, data can be skewed in how you view right at the lens. IDs portal is definitely skewed towards our existing professional designers who knew about this product and who are already users of the product, and they're coming in and giving you feedback.

I cannot take that feedback and apply it to what I wanna beginner

users.

Right. So you intent the.

Feedback from that spectrum because we didn't use ideas portal for that big intermediate audience, just put it [00:18:00] plainly, right? We used more like, hey, where are the hotspots in there? uh, Workflow where they dropped off, right? Because we had some activation metrics. Did they reach that activation point and how long it them reach that activation point?

That we.

Or rejecting. Right? And then we refined from there, right? I wouldn't say we have cracked cracking. This means that like we're wildly, wildly successful from revenue at the end of the day. There's one metric that like matters as company, right?

Jeff: it's the one metric to rule them all right.

Kamal: rule them all. So look, so process to get there and like we're trying get there.

As soon.

Jeff: Yeah. And I really appreciate how you're kinda looking at it in, you have [00:19:00] this kind of deep community driven approach to how do you serve your power users in the long-term ones, but still at the same time, how do you approach this new cohort of users almost from a more zero to one fashion? Where are they getting stuck in onboarding?

Where are they just having trouble with key workflows? It's not about how do we take this product from, you know, 90 to a hundred. It's how do we get them in? How do we get them using it? How do we let them do the, the core things they're trying to do? Because that is going to be more basic.

I. They're not professional designers who are in this thing 8, 8, 10 hours a day. This is something, like you said, they're trying to get like 10 iterations out real quickly. Maybe they're trying to collaborate with a designer. It's a different workflow. So I appreciate the kinda way you're looking at that.

And I'll be honest now, I would be remiss if in any major launch that went on in the past any bit of time I didn't talk about. Ai. And, and just, I mean, that was

Kamal: I kind of knew

Jeff: I think we 

Kamal: where. 

Jeff: 45 per, you know, we spent like 45 minutes out of like an hour and a half chat at least, at dinner about [00:20:00] AI as a, as a whole group.

But not like the high-minded, yeah, it's gonna change the world, blah, blah, blah. We know that. so, you Know, to leverage. A concept that Ji brought up our, our speaker up at Seattle. When, when we met, you know, kind of these ideas of AI at the edge versus AI in the core, how did you look to bring in like functional aspects where, where, you know, artificial intelligence was really going to help the both cohorts and users do better?

Kamal: Look \ again, just like. It's not what we need to do. It's not like if we need to do right, like that's your point, which is like, Hey, how you go about it and how do you really influence real productivity? Because at the end of the day, when you think about AI and a Vector graphics design software it's a productivity software.

So if the productivity as a singular metric is not changing. Drastically. Then this AI is a novelty, not necessarily something that is gonna add value for the user, right? At some point then they'll attrition order that feature or the product or like that [00:21:00] entire pricing capability, right? So that's how I think about it.

So when we think about AI, like, within.

Capability, right? When I say capability, for example, coral Draw, we've done some AI capabilities like power trace. Oh, you're tracing something, you know, there's an image you market, and it can automatically translate that into a outline. So now you've got an outline onto your image, and now you can edit it, right?

So you didn't have to trace it, so it automatically trace that outline, whatever complex the outline is, right? So that's superpowerful capability. Right. You see that in any of the photo apps, right? So artifact is a big thing. We enable artifact, we enable like sketch, right? So let's say you draw an outline, we can turn it into a a bit vector kind of outline to a important thing that you're drawing.

So capturing that intent

Jeff: Mm-hmm.[00:22:00] 

Kamal: are one thing. But really where we see is that like capability had to manifest in a UI design that the user can really use in their workflow. Right. Which kind of leads to my second part, which is like, if you think about ai, it's not just a singular thing, right? If you think about productivity, there's a workflow.

I start my day as a graphics designer and I end my day between that I'm doing a bunch of things right to get to my output. How do I get into that workflow and seamlessly integrate AI so that like I'm getting from that. That they're able to do faster than what they were able to do before, which means I'm spitting out, let's say hundreds or tens of output versus maybe single digit number as before.

Right? A simple example is imagine like I'm a person in a marketing team. I'm responsible for designing. There's a conference, [00:23:00] I'm responsible for designing some gear and other stuff, right? If I can enable that person to not think about this as an AI or a thing, but instead say that like, Hey, I need to do this.

I'm capturing that intent and giving them an output, which they're able to automatically integrate and say that like, Hey, print this. Put it on a card, ship these things, right? All this stuff. Now that workflow is what we are trying to get towards. Where we are is more on the capabilities side. So we've fundamentally built a bunch of capabilities and now we are trying to understand how do I influence the workflows so that like I'm capturing the intent there.

Jeff: Yeah, that makes sense. Right? Like, let's first, you know, I think we talked about again at dinner, step one is just start. Doing things with it, and it doesn't have to be perfect, but figure out, and I I mean more on the user end than on, you know, your the, the production level [00:24:00] feature end. But just start seeing what resonates, what works, and then move on to maybe, you know, like you said, kind of capabilities.

Let's start making li people's lives a little bit easier. Let's start, you know, helping the tools be a little bit more efficient. And then the next step is. Let's really start to blur the line between AI and solution and you know, I think we have an idea here to parallel it, to Log Rocket. 'cause that's just the one I know better.

We do session replay. But where we started was building ML models and then AI models that will proactively tell you important moments or important issues within user sessions. So you don't have to wait for. You know, conversion rate to drop, or you don't have to wait till start losing money on, on your, you know, checkout pathway.

Let's say if you're an e-comm tool, we can just proactively see it happening and raise the flag for you. That was step one, but step two is starting to really monitor for. What are the questions we know they're gonna get asked if we just get ahead of that, right? So as you maybe start to release new features or as you do a [00:25:00] release, we can, you know, watch that more closely.

We can integrate with your intercom or with your JIRA or with your GitHub to start to pick up these pieces. And, you know, so you come in tomorrow after you launch and we can tell you, Hey, we detected this launch based on the ticket that we saw. You know, you're trying to affect these metrics.

Good news, conversion is up, this is up. But we noticed this issue in a key pathway further down the funnel. And here are three intercom tickets that, you know, kind of validate that this is a real user facing problem. So. It's starting to be, how do you do those things before someone asks to do it or you know, maybe to parallel it to corral draw.

It's like, we made the design and we know we need to do these four or five assets. I, I don't know, can it like auto scale it to the different things or how do you do the magic things just to make the, the, the work that just seems like plotting go away.

Kamal: I think the the way to think is the capabilities, as you said, [00:26:00] right.

Was almost like step one of functional te we were all functional testers or using chats of the AI model. Right. we, trying to understand, hey, where are the edges are as generally eval getting for what are the things, I mean. Because we are in the graphics design area, in this product evals are much, much further behind, right?

Like it's not yet there. I need a way for me to give a very safe environment in production that I don't generate the wrong image. Uh, Wrong.

Jeff: that could go sideways real fast.

Kamal: Part of it until that step one is super important for you to understand what this environment is, what is the capability? That's what we're collectively doing between the customer and us, right? And then step two is this workflow. Because when the workflow gets [00:27:00] enabled, that's the real power of.

Jeff: No.

Kamal: There a session replay, there's some conversion rate drop off, but like so.

Jeff: Yeah, exactly. All right, so let's, let's move on a little bit because there's one other thing I wanted to talk to you about that we, we touched on briefly, you and I before we jumped on this. But it's a topic I've always found really, really interesting. And we had a guy named Steve Nash from GumGum on here.

A couple months back now who, who had a really good story about this. But you know, Carell draw is one thing, right? I think it was pretty obvious to all involve, like you said, there was no question of if we're doing it, it's just what we have to do. But you also oversee another product called Parallels and the update story along that was maybe not as clear cut.

And I'm always kinda curious how these conversations go. Like how did you go and especially approach someone you know, who was your [00:28:00] direct. Supervise your direct manager or your, you know, and make the case that, Hey, I think maybe you're looking at this wrong and, and here's the evidence, or how do you have that discussion.

So maybe give us the background on parallels and then let's dive into like how you can navigate these kind of tricky situations.

Kamal: So let me first tell what is panels for the users and then like, I'll give a little bit of background on exactly what we're talking about on this. How do you influence like the product production? So panels is a virtualization product. Think of what is happening like 10, 15 years ago, right?

Like, virtual desktop kind of a delivery of mechanism. Applications were centralized. Your users were working out of an office or a building. The users were largely centralized, right? So applications were centralized, managed by IT. Users were centralized. You could deploy a virtual desktop. As an IT and have access from this user to this virtual desktop and provide this application access in a [00:29:00] secure manner.

It's important because of the fact that like, if you can lock down this application and the access to the application and what you could do is a privilege within this application, then my data is within my environment and it's not leaking. Even if you're right.

Like there's a lot of such risks that companies are worried about and even now But what has changed, right? I don't have to tell you users. That's not the case anymore, right? It was already shifting. With cloud, it's shifted dramatically in a hockey stick manner, which is users are distributed, right?

The users can be anywhere. Applications also happen, be distributed. How do you secure your application delivery as an IT from a distributed environment to a distributed set of users? That is fundamentally what panelist does, right? So when we started, it was again, meant for this kind of centralized user, centralized kind of a thing.

So we [00:30:00] have a virtual desktop mechanism called remote application server, which allows you to run a server or of course, a cloud environment and provide virtual desktops as a service or desktop that it can provide. And then there is of course the edge related, so everybody's laptops are getting how do.

How do you run on a Mac super important scenario. How do you run even Mac on a Mac? Because if I'm an IT and I'm shipping applications for a Mac, I need to develop and test it. How do you run Mac On a Mac, right? Or even if I'm rolling out right, how do you do such kind of variations on my machine and be able to test it out?

That's what, so again, like you get. It was two product. We had an Edge product, desktop. And we knew where we wanted to [00:31:00] go, was the species that like, Hey, the users are distributed, applications are distributed. What we are doing right now seems very discreet. Products going after justice. Problem here. Justice problem here. Right? But actually what it is looking at is not that. It is transforming the set of it.

Folks who are within this environment were also changing, right? Like it not when right. Term in this for virtual desktops. So that was not the case. And like when it is looking at this environment they wanna secure with hey, how do I secure my Salesforce? In the same vein, I secure some legacy app that got distributed from Central way, say a ERP app.

And then how do you secure some, like the use case I said of Windows Delaware to a Mac or a A Mac on Mac or UX on Mac, right? Because at the end of the day, it cares about secure. Access to [00:32:00] some application. That's what their metrics are. So that's what panels provided. And like our challenge here was transforming and bringing this kind of like, hey, for the next generation, it, we give this platform which can provide this secure app delivery?

Irrespective of whether they were on edge server, a cloud, irrespective of whether they were running a SaaS application or a legacy application or a local application on their edge. Right? And how do you get the policies right, which is like, to be uniform. Doesn't matter where this application is running from whether it's on the cloud or edge or what type of application.

Policy of securing it remains. So then the IT.

Jeff: So with that kind of comes in mind, what parallels does it sounds like. Maybe this is [00:33:00] oversimplifying, but kind of two paths. One was maybe more incremental change and one was we kind of need to rethink a broader scope of, of how we're doing this. And those are two fundamentally incompatible ideas, right?

So, I guess what do those look like? And, you know, how, how do you go about reconciling when you know, it's not like you're not debating which shade of orange here you are debating, you know. Are you going north or south? Almost.

Kamal: So like, here's a way to think about it, right? Like, I know, like we've spoken about like this it fundamentally stems from getting, like, not just now the vision is understood. Like what we want to go after, which is the product strategy. Now you want to get like the company to rally behind this, right?

In some sense, which is like, hey, how, which direction to go. When I say the company you're trying to convince, like of course your ELT team, but like also you're trying to convince the board on like the direction and.[00:34:00] 

Right. So to do that, right, to first not look at this as, Hey, this is not, and this south, but to actually be able to bring this as, maybe there's a squiggly line here I need to take in order for me to reach where I want go with my product strategy. Right. That's kind of the first thing I would say. And we did exactly what you're pointing out.

Like you referred to as north and south, like I completely understand that, but, but what it is, is really like, we had this thing incrementally, we had to do certain things right? Because like end of the day. Like revenue trumps everything else. So in order to unlock revenue, you need to do something that, like you're able to get some alignment, get some capabilities delivered.

Yet you are marching towards that product strategy that you've set, which is that how do you bring [00:35:00] this platform capability? So. What our platform capabilities were by like a quarter or two in order to deliver some of these near term roadmaps and then be able to continue on, right? We did not completely put it in the back burner, but we had to slow all some of these aspects so that we could deliver these near term impact.

Then be able to do some of these product strategy in an accelerated manner. Right? So in some sense, that's why I said it's a squiggly line than anything else. And we talk a lot about this influencing without authority, right? This is a classic example of like one of those things where like if somebody says no, deconstructing that, no understanding why they're saying no and being to chip away at their in this manner so that you can still. Progress towards where the vision is because ultimately if you've set a product strategy, hopefully you've done all [00:36:00] your homework, you've done, like, this is not a question of like, Hey, how to do the homework.

It's a question of, okay, let's assume you're convinced and it's the right strategy and like you're hyper convinced this is it, that you're ready to put your badge down for this. Right. What to do, right? \ I'm not giving background on the right. So once you've got into that stage, then deconstructing the know is super important because. Kind of making these squiggly lines happen and you creatively figure out how to enable those squiggly lines? Hopefully not the north and south. Right. If it was completely diametrically opposite, I think like 

Jeff: it it could be tough if you're totally north and south

Kamal: Correct, correct. If it was a completely different product, I don't think we've been.

Jeff: that might be when it's time to just rethink generally. But like, it sounds like here, the, the, the worry was there was some short-term revenue tied to some short-term kind of [00:37:00] like roadmap goals to be hit. But long term, you know, I think it seems like everyone was agreed upon the, where the market was going.

So it come down to, all right, how do you, but Right. You said it's not a conflict. We're not, I. Trying to have a huge conflict here. We're not trying to fight about north and south. It's let's deconstruct where does no come from and how do you use that to advocate for the right position that, that you firmly believe, like you said, with all the evidence and homework behind you.

I mean, we have a, we did not make this up to be clear, but we have a term we like to use a lot here. Disagree and commit, where sometimes you know you're not going to be a hundred percent behind. The final answer, but you're still gonna get there. But it is also recognized as all of our jobs as leaders to push strongly for what we do believe.

I mean, we are all hired for expertise. What we do believe is going to move the company forward in the best way. But once that decision's made, we, we all are gonna rally behind it. And [00:38:00] part of that is how do you get the right data for people to really rally behind it? And. To make sure you're right. But like you said, I, I love the kind of decouple conflict from the discussion.

Break apart the No. And understand where it's coming from so you can kind of start to bring up, well, maybe, maybe the answer is, you know, towards your vision and then like you said, squiggly line the other way.

Kamal: And, and two more things I wanna add, right. To finish off that thing, which is over communicate, right? One of the things I find is that like sometimes when I started off as a product manager to today my communication is one of the big things.

If. Changed because overcommunicating is super important. What I mean by that is not about like Yeah, of course. Everybody writes six pages, everybody writes aq. I saw the point that I'm making, I'm making the point that like, how do you communicate often? How do you go by chip away at the stakeholder buy-in, right?

Which is you need to [00:39:00] start etching. What does it look like to buy into different quarters of the company? Right. Whether it is the different aspects of the ELT team or the board, right? How do you start doing that? So once they, so say no, doesn't mean like, Hey, you retract and change code and like they do that, but instead like deconstructing that, no, but communicate and keep communicating.

That's the first part. The other big lesson is, look, I was in Microsoft.

I've lived through some of the decisions and I saw some of the leaders there go through this, right? Like it was not a slam dunk for Microsoft to go invest on Xbox. It was not a slam dunk for investment and Azure, right? I heard even from some of the interviews that open, I was not a slam dunk investment.

All these look like, oh, duh.

Jeff: Right. Wind always [00:40:00] look super clear in retrospect, right?

Kamal: Right. In retrospect. But I, I lived through the Azure kind of a journey in a much more intimate way, and I know the kind of struggles that like internally happened to get to where it was, right. Even the shape of what Azure is today, so it's not a once and done kind of a thing, so is really. Use these tools you created, which is these six assets, and keep using it, communicate a larger and larger set of audience that this is what after.

Jeff: I think to that point, everyone, because you know, if it's your thing, you've thought about it a lot. It's very easy to underestimate or overestimate, rather just how much is on everyone else's mind and the fact that maybe they hear you every

Kamal: the bridge for.

Jeff: yeah. I heard it put really well, [00:41:00] basically like once you, especially in any kind of senior leadership role, you know, you gotta take your kind of big concepts, really distill 'em down to pretty, you know, concise wordings and then just say them over and over and over again.

And as you start to get, just like I wanna throw up every time I say these words. It is probably just starting to really sink in even, you know, not even just employees, but people outside the company. Like, as you get further and further away, people have less and less buy-in to really, really focus on every little detail you say.

So just keep saying it, keep saying it. Like you said, you know, there's places for the six page docs, places for the, you know, witty, three syllable. What's the thing, what's the hook? But you just keep on those things and it's remarkable how much that will move. You know, move the, the huge super tanker over time.

Well, you know, Kamal, I would love to talk just endlessly. Honestly, I had a blast in Seattle. I was sad to leave [00:42:00] there. Having fun today, but

Kamal: I think everyone in that room had a blast.

Jeff: That was a fun time. That was, that was a good dinner. I, I do, I do hope if anyone's here in this keep an eye out. We are hitting a lot more cities. I think we've got, you know, LA coming up.

We're gonna be Salt Lake City probably at some point, but we're also gonna hit, you know, old favorites. New York, Austin. We'll be back to Seattle. I think we actually, we've never done San Francisco. I think we have to do San Francisco soon. But I'm definitely gonna come back to Seattle and we'll have to hang out again, but it was a blast and, but I can't keep you all day as much as I'd like to.

. But thank you so much for jumping on. I felt like I learned a lot both about kind of how to look at. Products at Carell Draw and how do you continue to innovate on them, even on something that's been successful for just so long.

But then also how do you have these kind of conversations behind the scenes that allow that kind of innovation to happen publicly. So thank you so much for jumping on. This is a blast. I appreciate it.

Kamal: Thank Jeff. Thanks having me. And like it was definitely a fun conversation. 

Jeff: Yeah, definitely. And if people, if people want to reach out, I assume LinkedIn is, is a good channel for you.

Kamal: Yep.

[00:43:00] Absolutely. 

Jeff: Yeah, well check 'em out on LinkedIn. Lots of smart stuff there. But yeah, thanks so much Kamal. It was great to have you talk soon.

Kamal: Thank.