In this episode of Product Momentum, Christian Idiodi shares insights gathered over his 20-year career as a product leader, leaning especially on the significance of human skills and highlighting the importance of product sense in product management.

Christian Idiodi is a partner at Silicon Valley Product Group and co-author of TRANSFORMED, with Marty Cagan and partners at SVPG. He recently joined co-hosts Paul Gebel and ITX Product Manager Dan Sharp for a conversation exploring the two sides of product sense and why its human component is essential to product success in the context of today’s AI-focused world.

Informed Decision-Making + Intuition

Product sense combines informed decision-making with intuition that great product managers develop over time, Christian says. “It’s about having an intuitive feel for what makes a product valuable, which requires a deep understanding of your users and how they experience it.”

Product Sense Is ‘Not Some Magical Gift’

But it’s not some magical gift that we’re born with, he adds. Product sense involves synthesizing data, everything from user feedback to market trends, and making quick, effective decisions that align with both user needs and business goals.“People who have product sense have worked hard to practice and fine-tune it,” Christian explains.

The Essence of Product Management

In this way, product sense lies at the very heart of product management: solving real problems for real users rather than focusing solely on commercial success. Companies lose their way, Christian says, by shifting their focus from helping people to extracting value from them. Product sense helps us maintain a balance between making customers happy and generating revenue for the business.

This episode marks Christian Idiodi’s second visit with Product Momentum. Check out his initial conversation with the team, Product Problems Are People Problems.

Marty Cagan and his partners at Silicon Valley Product Group, wrote INSPIRED, EMPOWERED, and (most recently) TRANSFORMED for product managers and teams; product leaders; and C-suite executives, respectively. Be sure to listen to the entire episode, as Christian explains how each book aligns with purpose to these audience segments.

You can also catch our episode with Christian Idiodi in video on the Product Momentum YouTube Channel!

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Paul Gebel [00:00:19] Hello and welcome to Product Momentum, where we hope to entertain, educate, and celebrate the amazing product people who are helping to shape our communities way ahead. My name is Paul Gebel and I’m the Director of Product Innovation at ITX, along with my co-host Sean Flaherty and our amazing production team and occasional guest host, we record and release a conversation with a product thought leader, writer, speaker, or maker who has something to share with the community every two weeks.

Paul Gebel [00:00:42] Hey Dan, we’re just wrapping up one of my favorite conversations of the year, I think. How are you doing after that conversation?

Daniel Sharp [00:00:49] Oh man, I am so fired up. Such an inspiring conversation.

Paul Gebel [00:00:54] 100 percent. Christian Idiodi just brings his whole self to the table, and I think the way that he thinks is really refreshing, really timely. I’ve got so much that I’m still processing in real time, as we’re kind of recording this after the fact. What did you take away from the conversation? Big picture, top takeaways.

Daniel Sharp [00:01:12] Yeah. You know, for me, I mean, one is a vernacular change. You know, not going to call it soft skills anymore. Yeah, it definitely could be human skills for me from here on out and mostly out of the many views to talk about. Just yeah, how product management is a team sport. Right. And how we need to connect with each other human to human. That was so powerful.

Paul Gebel [00:01:30] I totally agree. And I think, you know, it might be oversimplifying things to say everything we need to know about product management we learned in kindergarten, but that’s kind of the gist of it. It’s about thinking about the human on the other side of the screen and solving a problem and helping them out and not just taking a product which is a good idea, and capitalizing it to extract maximum value and just drain the life out of the product. So many places we went, and I think the central theme is just such a positive message of helping people and being kind. You know, it kind of all boils down to just being a decent person and trying to help out will make better products and better product teams.

Daniel Sharp [00:02:10] Yeah for sure.

Paul Gebel [00:02:12] All right, well, let’s get after it.

Paul Gebel [00:02:15] Well hey folks, and welcome to the pod. Today I am really excited to be joined by one of my favorite product people, Christian Idiodi. Christian has been a product leader for over 20 years. If you haven’t heard of him before or read his work, a brief overview of his career: He’s shaped companies like CareerBuilder, Merril, Microsoft, Starbucks, Squarespace. He’s passionate about helping companies implement the discipline of product management to build world-class products and new technologies. And he is the co-author of a few books: Transformed and also the host of SVPGs podcast Product Therapy. Christian, thanks for taking the time to join us today. I’ve been looking forward to this one.

Christian Idiodi [00:02:55] Paul, thank you for having me. Always a pleasure to spend time with you.

Paul Gebel [00:02:59] Absolutely. So I’m going to jump in. You know, when we were chatting before the show, your journey, the way that you’ve helped people globally, you’ve really spent a career making product management practical for people, and you’ve clearly got a heart for helping others and leading people into this career we call product management. So I want to kind of start kind of frontways back and talk about the practical ways that you’ve been helping people. And then in sort of the second half, I want to explore some of those soft skills, kind of why you do what you do. So I kind of want to work backwards from the way that we usually talk and start with some of the practical things that you’ve been up to you, because it’s been a really interesting journey just to pick a point, to start a conversation from. Can you tell us about what you’ve been up to, especially your journeys throughout product leaders in Africa, from from different experiences in the market there? What have you learned about what product management means outside of this kind of context that we’re hearing most loudly in conferences and podcasts?

Christian Idiodi [00:04:03] Yeah,  thanks and in some ways the latter journey of my career now, I’m hoping to demystify a lot of what product management is, especially for a nonacademic discipline. But, you know, there’s not some degree that was historically people were learning product management. I still see a Bachelors, Masters program.  I don’t know of any Doctor of Product Management out there into a PhD, I doubt it, but it’s existed in the world forever, right? I’ve always said the idea of creators, inventors, innovators, and entrepreneurs. Yeah, all these fuzzy words of people that have woken up to solve problems, that management has really institutionalized in some way, a discipline that has existed forever. Right. And what it has done, it has talked about doing it commercially repeatable manner.

So within a company, we can innovate. We can be entrepreneurs. All this is fancy words for solving problems. And people give you something. Because you’ve done it well enough. And so in some ways, the unfortunate aspect, when you have a discipline that is forever evolving and trying to define itself, because many people get caught up on all of the frameworks, all of the rhetoric, all of the academic aspects of what the job is, that they lose the sense of how great work is done and how great problems are solved. You know, I see that in many mature companies because I go back to the history of their genesis and they all say that companies, oh, a bunch of founders got together to solve this problem. They all collaborated, with all the principles of a mature company, probably existed at the very beginning. And they lose sight because they focus on the educational academic aspect of how do we grow? How do we scale? What’s your raison d’être, and they lose sight of what got them started. And so in my journey now, I have focused heavily on trying to demystify the discipline, look for ways to explain it to people in a clear, compelling way that they can understand the nature of the work as collaborative problem solving focused on solving problems in a meaningful way that customers will love, and also work for your business. And I’ve been trying to coach people on that.

Christian Idiodi [00:06:24] Now, most of my work has been in North America and in Europe, and I do some work in Asia and even South America to this day. I am from Africa. And, I realized a couple of years ago that all of my assumptions about what was true and great about work in other parts of the world may not be true in Africa. You know, I went to Africa a couple of years ago, and a friend of mine told me he found a job in a newspaper. And I wrote code,  I participated in solving that problem almost 20 years ago. Like building the stock to move job to a digital format. You know, people going from, you know, see that adding newspaper to print a code from a newspaper to eventually move into the internet. And I had this false assumption that because it was solved 20 years ago, it’s one technology job board. Well, everybody should be doing it.

And so I started to notice, two trends. One, this false assumption that what is technologically now possible in other parts of the world is not just technologically possible in Africa, but also prevalent and adopted by Africans in such a meaningful way. And two, this inherent lack of permission where people kind of felt like, do I have permission to actually do it, to try to solve this problem? And so there was an ecosystem that people spent a lot of time making money on a problem than from solving the problem, people making money from, addressing a symptom, than from providing a cure. You know, people making money from going around a problem. So it’s like, hey, we don’t have power, and let’s focus on generators and stop that solving power here. We don’t have good roads. Let’s build a bigger truck to drive over the bad road. You know, hey, we don’t have to go to healthcare. Let’s travel away to where there’s good healthcare. And so this couple of very interesting trends that I discovered. And at the root of it, I saw two big opportunities. One, I have to accelerate the use of technology to solve problems, and I have to accelerate the evolution of the discipline of product management, which is how we made decisions or the problems we solve and how to do it. And that’s become my passion there.

Paul Gebel [00:08:42] Yeah. So if I could summarize, I heard so much in there, we could unpack what you’ve just said for an hour. But just to condense it down, it sounds like you’re kind of diving into a polemic that’s not really talked about where founders solve a problem and they solve it well. It creates an organization around a product. And then the shift goes from helping people to extracting value from people, and that puts the product at odds with the consumers, with the users, with the clients, with the customers. And I think that you’re really trying to bring the storytelling, the value, the problem solving back to product as opposed to how do we capitalize this, how do we get it to market? How do we make the most money possible to shifting it to how do we help the most people possible? Is that is that too small to put all of that into? It feels like there’s a lot.

Christian Idiodi [00:09:37] Absolutely right. You know, and don’t get it wrong. I tell people this all the time, we do want to make our businesses happy, and we do want to make them revenue and profit and grow. But the logic of the discipline comes in striking the balance that they focus on the customer, the people we’re solving a problem for. Our buyer is to make them happy while making our business money or profit or stuff. And because I tell people, doing one or the other is actually relatively very lazy and actually easy by itself. You know, I tell people, if you want to make your customers happy, you know, buy them a boat or something like that, like they’ll all be like, hey, yo, that’s why it’s a free boat. Or a free airplane, whatever it is, nobody’s gonna buy it. They got me a private jet, they’ll be happy. But we can’t do that because we don’t make money. On the other hand, like just making money while not caring about a customer, you lose sight of the original reason you started the business. So management is the core discipline, that hold the contract of value creation for a company. It reinforces that and leads that every day. The original promise. That if I do something for you well, you will give me something back in return. And that’s what this discipline is.

Daniel Sharp [00:10:56] That’s amazing. Thank you. Yeah. You mentioned before in the frameworks and all the methodologies that we sometimes lose sight of products. And I’d love to hear how you’re defining products. And then you know, as product people how we can grow it.

Christian Idiodi [00:11:12] Yeah. You know the product sense it’s one of those words that I didn’t know when I was put on. And it was what in the world is product sense? You know, I thought it was an excuse for people to have sense and not have sense that way. And I, you know, I’m like, is it like common sense, which is absolutely not common, you know, or is there some magical dynamic in product sense that so many people tout how they get product sense and how they evolve it. We’ve always talked about what makes good product managers, you know, our sense of the cost of skills, emotional intelligence, problem-solving, relationship, and stuff. What would they bring? Would they contribute to a company this deep knowledge of their customer, the deep knowledge of their business, a deep knowledge of the industry, a deep knowledge of data, a deep knowledge of the products that they are working in. And because of that deep knowledge, we tend to trust them with the decisions of what we do. You know, I often break down to see if it was the first of a product team. And I’m like, okay, you’re spending $2 million. Like they say, they work in two weeks, sprint like an average sprint, it’s like $65,000. Are you going to trust somebody to just make a decision on what we blow 65,000 on average? Just imagine that in your household you’re like honey, you know, what are we spending? Why in the world would I trust that decision without some oversight? So, like, don’t me explain justify it. But the best companies trust that person because they know more in the company about the people we’re serving, about how it’s going to work for the business. They have these insights, all of these things.

Now, people look at product sense as that fine line that, you know, okay, I’ve taken all the data, all of the input. I’ve now intuitively been able to make a decision that tends to be sound, and that people tend to trust. You know, and you see the many companies. Yeah, people that you kind of everybody kind of agrees. You know, you always want the opinion before we make decisions. They always want to check it. Well, you know, you check in with Daniel. You know, I was thinking he’s doubled his department. What they might have business sense, institutional knowledge, industry sense in some ways. And what we’re seeing, they may not even have data. It’s not like you’re going to them. And I go to Daniel for the data. You’re saying what does Daniel think? Now the reality of this is people think like, you know, they are born with this magical gift, you know, stuff like that. When you find the people that have this sense, they actually have practiced this for a very long time! You know, it’s kind of like in any sport. Like, when in doubt, they give it to their superstar, you know? Just what do we do with the ball? Why? Because this is a realm of decision-making, they have a higher chance of succeeding than other ways. What do they have? What were they born with? Are gifted with it in some ways?  They have cultivated that skill. So in some ways, product sense can be learned, can be matured, can be grown, can be evolved by insights, by time with customers than with data by time with industry over time this starts to be this balance between what you think is intuition or gut, versus what is a decision informed by a historical pattern of either massive failure or massive success.  Yeah.

Paul Gebel [00:14:36] Everyone just want to take a quick break in today’s conversation to share some exciting news about it. Upcoming product and design conference taking place Thursday and Friday, June 27th and 28th right here in Rochester, New York. It’s going to be held at the Memorial Art Gallery, and it’s going to be spread over two days. Day one, featuring a half-day design and product workshop series with Briana Singh, John Hagerty, Ryan Rumsey, and Patricia Reiners. Day two is going to be a fantastic day of keynotes headed up by John Meada, VP of design and AI at Microsoft. Denise Tillis, coauthor of the new book Product Operations. And Ryan Rumsey, CEO of Second Wave Dive and author of Business Thinking for Designers. Sprinkled in throughout the day of keynotes will have the option to choose your own adventure. You can sit in on some live recordings of podcasts. You can network with some fantastic product and design professionals throughout the day, or catch one of our three fireside chats discussing some of the important themes and topics in our space that we’ll be touching on throughout the day. To reserve a seat for you and a friend, or maybe treat your whole team to two amazing days of learning and networking. You can head on over to it.com/conference 2024. That’s it. Dot com slash conference 2024. Looking forward to seeing you there. And let’s get back to the show.

Paul Gebel [00:15:56] Yeah that’s so cool. I think the way that I’m hearing this is it’s actually part of a few conversations that I’ve heard recently around sort of product community conversations, blogs, conferences where intuition, product sense, whatever adjective you want to use to describe this thing. You know, often in the boardroom it’s looked down upon as unscientific or not data-driven. But really what we’re what you’re talking about trusting that product leader to make those decisions. It comes from an immersion. You use the word cultivate. And I love that. It’s not nature or nurture. Some people have it  – but it’s not any of that. It’s taking all of this subconscious body language, user feedback, little key words that might not be, you know, it might be qualitative and not exactly, you know, a data point that we could put a flag in. But it’s taking all of these, you know, micro pieces of data. The team gives us feedback. Users give us feedback, product behavior interactions and obviously revenue gives us feedback. But we have to have somebody at that center of all these decisions that can not just put it into a spreadsheet and spit out the mathematically correct answer. It’s got to be a human response to all of these inputs. And I think product Sense is really kind of wrapping all those intuitive pieces up into a collective whole.

Christian Idiodi [00:17:21] Yeah. Somebody joked with me, just actually I was at a conference in Paris. We’re actually talking about product sense and, you know, a kind of mini argument. Well, I mean, if it’s only about the data and the inputs and stuff, then ChatGPT should have the best product sense. You know, we should just check with it for all of the decisions we make. You know, and I said, no matter how much we evolved, we generated AI, all of that work. The idea of what is right or wrong for us at this time, within this situation, in this context, can only be left to a human set and a human interpretation, because it is designed to solve the problem for humans. Again we call them customers or fancy names. We call them for humans, you know? And so at any point in time, the data, the insights, all of those things do not automatically translate. Into what is best for a human at this time, in this manner, in this environment, within this context. And that is where I was sent. But it was kind of that sixth sense of the human construct was coming.

Daniel Sharp [00:18:26] And it’s so amazing. And its just so apt for where we are right now, you know, you’re talking about, you know, early on about how, you know, it’s so easy to focus on the symptoms. Right. And when in doubt, quote the show Home Improvement. “We just need more power.”  Right.

Daniel Sharp [00:18:41] But I’m keen to talk a little bit about the soft skills of product management help empower us to get after you know, the underlying you know kind of underlying problems and finding here.

Christian Idiodi [00:18:53] Yeah. Yeah. You know I yeah things I hire for and things I want to cultivate. And then there are things that I define what competencies in the work. I mean it’s like, I’m probably watching too much NBA sports these days, but like, you know, you kind of expect athletes, a NBA player to be able to shoot the ball and pass the ball and dribble the ball. I mean, you know, you’re not going to be like “So we know you are professionals, can you dribble the ball?” But when you’re trying to discern between two skilled players, you’re looking for some other competencies or some other act. You know people call it soft skills. I kind of like the name human skills in some ways, you know, can you communicate that you are a good team player. You know, can you do you have leadership. You know we you know work in product, those human skills that I care about. Self-awareness. Probably a big one. Emotional intelligence. Significant one too, as well. I care about relationship building and influence. I do care about some things around time management, which is also a factor for me of self-awareness in some ways. And there’s this inherent idea of leadership. And we can talk about that because that’s kind of you have to do a lot to influence authority in this aspect. And, you know, self-awareness for me is kind of how your actions, that sense of how your actions can affect, people or decisions. You kind of have this inherent sense of like the levers of dynamics, of decision making that says, I am present in a world with others and my actions, my thoughts, my words got to have an impact, positive, negatively, otherwise. How I listen, how I discern, how I communicate. That’s such an important part because when I talk about collaborative problem solving, I always or more specific, I just don’t like problem solvers for product work.

You know, we could you know, everybody has that uncle, you know, father-in-law, somebody having a toolbox and shed in the back of their house, that is very good at fixing things and doing things on their own, but probabaly terrible at working with other people to do it.  You know, this is not that sport. This is not golf, It’s more like a team sport – , basketball, all of soccer and stuff. Like, you can no matter how skilled you as an individual, we do not win the game against another team, playing by ourselves. I mean you could be Rockstar and get lucky once in a while, but very difficult to do so. So I care about collaborative problem-solving. People that can work with others to solve a problem or can get out the best in others. To solve the problem or admire, respect the contributions of others to do that. Competency for me is not just being able to do something, but knowing when to ask for help. See, I need that, you know, person. It’s very, very hard for me to start to coach that kind of staff, you know. Those ” I do it all by myself? I’m a rockstar, hero complex, superhero. I don’t even need a sidekick. I got this.” Not the spot for you. Right.

So  I’m kind of pulling out this human skill that people are important. Anyway, if you’re not good at communicating with others, you would in a team sport. You know, I get it. Some spots are like I thought to myself, I go to sleep on. It’s great. This is not one of those, you know.  You know, a whole generation of people. I’ve got teenagers in my household, and I often have to get them off the Tikky Tokky and, Snapsshop on the Bookface, Instagram gram and stuff. And I see, you know, what’s on the other side of that. And I need you to balance out your time. Talking to humans in the human condition like “Paul? How about you?” You. You know, when im person, you know, in three, it could end up WYD IDK. All of this kind of shit. I like that. Oh, you mean, don’t you? Not at all like you. I get it as a language digitally, but I need your human skills because people do problems in the world outside of the digital ecosystem, and you need to understand them. You need to communicate to them. I need to communicate those to a group of other people who are solving for that. So communication is not I know how to shut off Snack or I know how to send that email. Well, I know. I mean, these are all excuses now in the modern world. I am an excellent communicator. I can type an email in ChatGPT and I can send it, you know, is being able to listen, actively discern a problem, and communicate the point. So simply my brevity, intelligent, and articulate. I don’t know if they teach these things in school anymore, but this is,  these are human skills.

Paul Gebel [00:23:46] Yeah, I think the context of human skills against AI or digital or social or whatever, you know, the platform is that you’re talking about, that I want to turn the whole conversation into AI. Once you bring that in, it’s easy for it to just become an AI conversation. But you brought up an idea a moment ago that I want to circle back to you about. ChatGPT should be the best product coach if these things are true. But these things aren’t all there is to life. There’s not. There’s more to there’s the conversation than just being mathematically correct or having the most insightful extraction of the conversation summary. So I think that that’s really timely, and it’s actually taught me a lot recently since ChatGPT went mainstream, I’ve been playing around with it along with everyone else in the world, and it’s really shown me the value of handwriting a note or taking the most important things from a meeting or a conversation, as opposed to taking everything and documenting it all. I think that skill of being able to position an idea in the context of a problem is, is a uniquely human skill. Because the large language models, ChatGPT and everything else, they are designed to give you an answer no matter what, it’s irrespective of the quality of the answer. We can prompt engineer some really great insights, and it’s a helpful tool for getting those conversations started. But it has to be finished with how does it impact humans? Otherwise, we’re just building machines to talk to machines through machines. And it’s it just becomes a robot echo chamber.

Christian Idiodi [00:25:23] Yes, yes, there will always be. Well, so better prompting and better interpretation of what has come out of those. Yeah. Good.

Paul Gebel [00:25:33] So I want to shift gears a little bit and bring up the idea of, well, it’s not exactly shifting gears. It’s really building on where we’re going. We obviously have more data available to us than we’ve ever had before, but we also have people who are feeling emotionally disconnected more than ever before. I also am a parent of teenagers and have all of these conversations all the time about being digitally savvy, being safe on the internet, being connected to humans, and not just in group text forever. How do we help communicate these ideas and the importance of keeping them central while keeping that product sense, that business sense, the craft of product management has to be data-driven, has to be scientific, but it also needs to retain that humanity. What hope do you have? Why do you keep writing books? What motivates you to keep this conversation alive?

Christian Idiodi [00:26:29] Oh, boy, we’ve seen a lot of good work. From great products companies with great product teams and regular individuals. You know, Steve said, it’s not the people. It’s mostly the environment in which you have given. And yes, great products come from great product teams, but they’re just made up of regular people in that way. And because we’ve seen it so intently and clearly, that is really a difference between how the best companies work and how the rest. It’s very hard for you not to challenge any company not to work as the best company, because you know, when people ask me, why do companies try to transform themselves or work in this? It’s mostly that because of fear, like, oh my goodness, you know, Amazon just came into our industry. We got to do something like a Stripe or something, you know, or frustration like, oh my goodness, we’re spending so much money. We’re not innovating. We’re not growing as fast. They’re just frustrated that things are not the way they used to be or like excitement, which often comes like financial. Like if we work like Google, we will make money like Google and everybody will be rich, like Google in kind of that narrative in their head? But for me, the reality is that you can take care of your customer. You can truly. It is good. It is truly good for your customers and your business and your employees to work in an important environment and empowered environment for them to solve problems in a meaningful way. Like what? I mean? Like I want to hear more companies say, I just want to do better for the people that I serve and the people that work for me. And if you really want to do that, you will walk in telling me like it is better for you that there is a bug in my platform for six months. How is that good for your customer? I release twice a year because this helps me for my business to manage the change so that that problem will stay for six months. And you see what I mean? Like, people tend to misunderstand what it means to care for your customer. You know, that way you’re letting them suffer a pain that you can solve because you don’t have the infrastructure to deliver it better, or you think it’s better for your employees. That didn’t work in a command and control environment like a factory. Then your knowledge worker, your smart person I should give you had problems and trust that you come up with a good situation to work to solve it. So you know the passion for like probably why we write books, why we care about this, why we’re stubborn about this on one end. Because we recognize you will do better serving your customer and your business working in this way.

On the other hand, we are we’re talking about the product model. Because if you think about some of the most iconic products we use a lot today that solve problems at a large macro scale, they come from companies that work this way. You know, we are we may be talking on Zoom. We may be chatting in Google. I mean, oh, OpenAI – they didn’t come from some legacy company that worked in a product model in that kind of way. So it is always, we know its the best way to do good work. And so you hear is about so we’re improving healthcare, security, unemployment, whatever the issue is, why would we want you to work in another way and another model. So you know, so we I coach people, I advise people, I challenge people on this because of what we’ve seen it to do for countries and society yet. And, you know, Marty has been, Marty Kagan has been directly participated, see, you know, 20 years ago, seen working in Asia. And we’ve seen people that attended training with him doing like Tencent or Alibaba or and you’re like, you know you can see what that does to creating a whole generation of talented people solving problems. That and boy, that inspires me, inspires me. That to me, is a kid in a class today that I’m training, he may be the next creator of something bigger. That Apple inventor of something meaningful. Yeah.

Daniel Sharp [00:30:41] That’s incredible. So for those of you who are listening on your favorite pod app, you don’t get to see Christian’s awesome shirt that says ‘Transform’. So Christian, before we go, yeahTransformed is Silicon Valley Product Group’s latest book. Your names on there. What do you want to tell us about? I know that many of us in the product community were anxiously waiting for it to hit the streets.

Christian Idiodi [00:31:01] Yeah, It’s a lot about a compilation of our work over time  in one book. And particularly what’s really different is the audience for it, if you can imagine. We wrote Inspired for product managers and for product teams to learn how to do good work. We realized that that was not enough because you could want to do good work, but the environment is not right for you to do good work. And that was the responsibility of leadership. So we wrote Empowered to help leaders understand how to create that environment where product teams succeed and to thrive, and how to coach them and lead them with content. And you want to recognize that even when you have put up leadership with context, the environment and stuff, Transformation introduced, we have work this organization update. And so this an audience which is the most senior people also clearly the CEO. If you want to be pointed about if there’s a message to somebody in a company directly appointed and we wanted to have a book that speaks to them. Tells them, like, you know, you’re building a case for: Why the way you’re working probably doesn’t yield the results you want.  We’re building a case for why transform where? Build a case for what? It means to transform how? Well, hopefully sharing some convincing stories of what you can do when you transform. And, you know, the book goes through real case studies of companies transforming. We share companies that are working in this way. And, you know, and it’s important because I want people to recognize not just that they can do it, but that it’s going to be hard, but it’s worth doing, and why it is good for your customers and your business when you do. And so the book is really we want to talk about the principles that the best companies use, how to move to outcomes. And then we want to share a tremendous amount of stories that are compelling for you to say, okay, I understand why I should do this. I understand what I would need to do this and what it to look like when I have done it. And this is transforming into the product operating model.

Paul Gebel [00:33:09] Well, Christian, I wish we could go another half hour. I’ve in been just like immersed in this mindset that you bring the positivity, the care and compassion for humans instead of ones and zeros is somehow always a fresh topic to talk about. We get so in our heads as product people. It’s hard to get out of the vanity metrics and the requirements gathering. And remember, like you said, there’s a human on the other side of that black mirror that’s doing something to try to help you. And having these human conversations, I think is really powerful. Before we let you go, besides your book and the SVPG blog, where else can people find you and what you’re up to? Where can we follow the latest adventures of Christian Idiodi?

Christian Idiodi [00:33:56] Yeah. You can follow me on LinkedIn. It’s probably the best platform to do so. I am doing a lot of work in Africa through my foundation, the Innovate Africa Foundation. We have an Inspire Africa conference that we put on every year, we bring people every year to do that to launch a fund for Africa, kind of a pre-early stage catalytic fund to help people get product market fit and to coach early entrepreneurs and product work in a meaningful way. So we’re doing a lot of work around computer literacy, around education in Africa, and building a good product leadership discipline on the continent. So you can follow my work through my foundation, on LinkedIn on SVPG.com. And we will love, love, love to help in any way we can on your journey.

Paul Gebel [00:34:39] Amazing. And we’ll link to all those organizations in the show. Notes of people can find you and track this and follow the adventures. It’s been a blast talking to you and unpacking these ideas. Christian. Thanks so much for taking the time and joining us today.

Christian Idiodi [00:34:52] Always a pleasure. Glad to be back and to share with you. We could do this again soon.

Paul Gebel [00:34:58] We’ll hold you to that. We’ll talk again soon.

Christian Idiodi [00:35:00] All right. Thank you.

Paul Gebel [00:35:02] All right. Cheers. Well, that’s it for today. In line with our goals of transparency and listening, we really want to hear from you. Sean and I are committed to reading every piece of feedback that we get. So please leave a comment or a rating wherever you’re listening to this podcast. Not only does it help us continue to improve, but it also helps the show climb up the rankings so that we can help other listeners move, touch, and inspire the world just like you’re doing. Thanks everyone. We’ll see you next episode.