Effective Product Management in the Age of AI
Introduction
Michael Daehne: Hey, y’all. Welcome to Inflect. I’m Michael Daehne, and on today’s episode, I’m joined by JJ Rorie, CEO of Shyft PM and an associate professor at Johns Hopkins University. JJ is an expert on all things product management and is the author of Immutable: 5 Truths of Great Product Managers. She’s also currently working on a new book about AI’s impact on the product management space.
In today’s conversation, we dig into the core tenets of great product management that are holding steady even as AI reshapes the field, and we talk about some of the parts that are changing quickly. JJ brings great insight from both the digital and physical product worlds, drawing on her coaching and advisory work across both.
I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did.
Opening
Michael Daehne: Hey, JJ. Good morning. How are you?
JJ Rorie: I’m good, Michael. How are you doing? Good to be here.
MD: Good. I’m so, I’m so glad we’re having this conversation. Thanks for taking the time.
JR: You bet. Good to be here.
MD: Well, I am so excited to dive in. I know we’ve had a lot of fun conversations offline about product management, the evolution of product management, and, like, a thousand related topics. And so we probably could talk for five hours. We’ll to keep it to 20 to 30 minutes because that’s certainly about where my attention span is on a podcast.
But I’m very excited because I’m sure we’ll get into some really fun topics. But maybe to ground the conversation, why don’t you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself and the work you do at Shyft PM?
JR: You bet. Thanks. I think you and I could enjoy a five-hour conversation. I think the audience may get a little bored with us.
JJ’s Background
JJ Rorie: So Shyft PM is my firm that’s been around for six, seven years now, and we do training, we do advisory, we do coaching for product teams. That spans industries, that spans the globe.
One of the things that we love to do is work with teams across the maturity of their product teams, right? So, you’ve got brand-new product managers, you’ve got people that have been in the role for 10, 20 years, and it’s always fun to work with a team like that because they can help each other and it kind of seems like the new ones would need more help, but the old ones, we get into habits, right? And so, it’s always good to help with that.
It’s also fun that I get to see software products and physical products, and that’s a difference, right? A lot of the content, a lot of the training is focused on software products, which is, of course, incredibly important these days, and will continue to be, and almost every product has some sort of technology in it. But there are some nuances to building physical products and especially some highly regulated products that are different. So that’s what we do. We work across the domain of any product, any service that needs to be built.
In addition to Shyft, I also teach part-time at Johns Hopkins University, and so I’m an associate professor of the practice for product management, teach product management to grad students and undergrads, and love that. That’s been amazing to see kind of the new generation of product people coming along.
Michael Daehne: Yeah. That’s really cool that you’re spanning generations or levels of experience in the product management world and how that manifests itself from a change perspective, the students you’re interacting with in the classroom. I’m sure it’s just giving you a very well-rounded, nuanced picture of what’s changing and what’s staying the same. We may maybe get into that conversation in a little bit.
Physical Products and Digital Products
Michael Daehne: But one thing you said that piqued my interest is this idea of physical products, because certainly I spend most of my time thinking in the digital realm. Can you maybe give an example or talk through what that looks like and maybe what’s different or the same between product management for a physical product versus a digital product?
JJ Rorie: Yeah. I mean at the end of the day, the core of product is always finding value, and that sounds so simple and so cliche, but it’s our job in product and our job as an organization, honestly, the entire organization, the responsibility is to find something that needs to be solved in a market and our ability to create something, usually a product or a service, that solves that need, that creates value for our customers and for our business, right?
I mean, that’s at the core of product, that’s all we’re doing is finding problems to solve and then finding unique ways to solve it manifested through products or services. And the way companies do it is a little bit different company to company regardless of what product you’re creating.
But if you think about software products, they’re intangible. It’s not that there’s not physical things behind them, the infrastructure, et cetera, but from a customer perspective, and from a product creation perspective, it’s a code base and it’s a UI and it is quote, unquote, easier to roll back if something happens to pivot, to change. I mean, how many of software products that we use today have literally new releases and new changes, and experiments going on as we’re using them minute to minute, hour to hour, day to day? That doesn’t happen for physical products. You put it out there in the world, and it is what it is. Now, of course, there’s embedded technology that can be changed, but the physical manifestation of the product is what it is. And a lot of those physical products are highly regulated.
Not all of them, a chair or a desk or something. Obviously, there’s, quality and there’s assurances that you need, but, you know, medical devices. One of my big clients is a radiation detection company, so they work in nuclear plants and healthcare environments where, you know, it’s in many cases, life and death. And there are, you know, very important checks and balances that you have to go through and government agencies that regulate that.
And, you know, a lot of my software clients think it’s crazy when I tell them my physical products have projects that go on for years before they get a product out the door, and they think, “How is that even possible?” Well, it’s possible because the supply chain, the operations, the materials you need, the regulations you need.
So, as a product manager for that, it’s not easier one way or the other. It’s just, there are nuances, and there are other cross-functional partners that physical goods product managers need to work with, right? They need to understand their manufacturing. They need to understand their supply chain. They need to understand how all that happens.
Versus software, which is not easy per se, but it’s just, you put code out there. You bring it back if you need it. You fix it. You know, things can happen in a quicker way, and that’s where most of the content training focus on how is AI changing product, that’s where we’re focusing on software, which of course we should be, that’s the hotbed for it. But there’s a lot of things that can be done in manufacturing and that can’t be done in manufacturing that we need to also think about.
MD: Yeah. That’s so interesting because I probably don’t spend much time thinking about it from that lens. And so, to your point, not that it’s easier or harder one way or the other, but there may be some levers or some tools or things we have at our disposal in the software development world that we maybe take for granted, like the ability to quickly iterate and roll out a new, version or to roll something back or that kind of thing. So, it’s probably, probably a good empathy exercise too, thinking about physical product development and just different nuances on that side.
JR: Yep. Yeah. And, I mean, the truth is physical companies are always looking for better ways to do it. They’re looking to embed technology so they can roll out changes easier and, you know, they don’t have to have so much of a physical presence. They’re always trying to evolve. But in a world where a physical product is at a client site, the only thing we can do is over-the-air kind of technology improvements.
And even, again, in some of those cases, when you’re talking about government buildings and you’re talking about some cases, they’re not even online. Those devices cannot, from a security perspective, be online, and so then you’re back to the kind of on-premise type of software things that a lot of people think is the old days, but it still exists out there.
MD: Yeah. Very interesting.
Impact of AI on Product Management
Michael Daehne: And, and as you talked through that, you started to talk about the evolution of product management. You mentioned everyone’s favorite two letters these days, AI. And so I think that’s, that’s an interesting topic I want to dive into because your first book, “Immutable,” talked about some of these core capabilities, and things that are so critical to product management, things like relationship building and good judgment, effective communication. I don’t have all five, but some of those core topics. And, and I think, you know, if I read that, I’d kind of say, “Okay, these are the essential truths of product management. These are the things that are not changing,” so to say.
Then, and I think you’re working on a new book about how AI is, is changing things.
Talk about the juxtaposition. What’s true? What’s not true? What’s changing, not changing? I would love to hear some of your observations and expertise on that topic.
JJ Rorie: I love having this conversation. I’ve had it a lot with people over the last year. I’ve had it a really a lot with myself over the last year or two. Because, again, you mentioned my book called Immutable, and at the time I didn’t think it was such a bold title. But, you know, it’s literally saying, “these aren’t going to change ever.”
And then, you know, AI’s not brand new, but in, in our current iteration of AI over the last year or two, I really did some soul searching. I had to say, “okay, did I, did I miss the boat? Was I too bold with that? Are they really immutable? Or is this going to change, in the new evolution of product?” And here’s what I came to. Most of those are absolutely still, and maybe even more important with this new way of doing things.
So, you know, customer intelligence, if you don’t know that, you know, what are we doing? You mentioned communication, relationship building. Those are still going to be core. Judgment is probably the most important thing that we have to do as humans.
What’s happening now is we’re relying on these tools that are not just software products. They’re not just what we had in the past of making ourselves more efficient or connecting ourselves easier. They’re, at least on the surface, thinking for us and doing these human types of things. So, it is different than previous technology revolutions, but there’s also these human moments that we have got to make sure that we insert ourselves in.
And so, what’s changing is the expectations around product management. That’s still very much in flux. What is it? What should it be? What should the role be? Who should be involved? Do we need 10 people or one person? You know, all of that’s still happening. The speed is obvious, in what we expect our teams to do.
What should stay the same, and this is a little bit about what the book’s going to be about, and content pieces. A book is one piece of it, but just like any product, I’ll iterate on it in smaller content pieces. It’s about ensuring that we’re very intentional about avoiding the blind spots that will come from going 1,000 miles an hour trying to implement AI into everything.
So, what I mean by that is, customer intelligence is an immutable, quote unquote immutable truth. The way I think about it now is knowing your customer. I mean, let’s even simplify it more. Like, we have to know who we’re serving in order to build solutions for them. Well, the blind spot there with using all of these AI tools to build our customer intelligence, to synthesize all of our feedback, our interview transcripts, our product analytics… And by the way, we should be using AI for that. We should be using these tools to synthesize this huge amount of data that we have that we haven’t, as humans, really been able to do as well.
But what happens is we get this, what I call secondhand understanding. We think we know them really well because we have this tool that spit out all these great summaries. Do we? Do we really know what’s in their mind? Do we know what’s driving their behavior? Do we have true understanding or secondhand understanding? So, those blind spots that are just natural as we’re using AI more and more, that’s what we have to avoid.
I think product is going to, at its core, still be the same, like finding problems to solve in the markets that we choose to do business in and then doing it in unique ways through valuable products. But what that looks like, how we do that internally may change, and it may change for some organizations more than others.
MD: Yeah. You used the term blind spot, which I love. I feel like that really gets at the core or the essence of the cautions maybe or the challenges specifically in a very human-centric discipline like product management. Of course, we want to leverage AI to go faster, be better, right? Synthesize all this information.
But there are some things that are fundamentally very human in nature, and like empathy, judgment, those are key aspects, I think, of the product management discipline that AI might be able to help with, but I would argue cannot replace. And I think the challenge with, certainly with generative AI, this is true with a lot of the modern technology, but I think one of the challenges with generative AI is that the output, no matter how right or wrong it is, it always looks really nice.
JR: Exactly.
MD: And so that tricks you. That just tricks your brain into the being like, “well, it’s right. Whatever it says the customers want is what they want.” And it might be spot on one day, it might be totally off another day based on the inputs and the prompting and all that stuff. And so, I love that idea of, yeah, it can be an accelerator, it can be helpful. But we still need these, you know, immutable capabilities, right?
JR: Yeah, absolutely. And I think one of the ways that companies are falling a little short, which by the way is natural, like if you’re a company trying to use AI to be better, which anyone listening probably is doing that, right? I don’t know any company that’s not doing that in some way. It’s okay that you’re not succeeding to the degree that you would want to. Nobody is, right? Nobody knows exactly what to do yet. They are doing the best they can. They’ve got leadership that’s doing the best they can. Maybe they’ve got consultants that are helping them do the best they can, but they’re still evolving, right?
And this is just a space where things aren’t perfect. But the companies that are doing the best that I’ve seen are the ones who know that, who are like, “okay, it’s an ambiguous space we’re working in right now, and we’re okay with that.” And we’re not necessarily only focused on accelerating our production and our processes, but we’re trying to accelerate our learning first and foremost, right?
And that comes from that empathy, that comes from that really knowing the customers and knowing the markets and, where I think the human moments are most important, like only humans can bring this kind of judgment. That surface fluency that comes from AI reports and summaries, man, we think we know it all, right?
It’s so easy to think, “oh my gosh, I’m an expert now.” No, we’re not, and it’s okay to not be, but we need to infuse those human moments in it. And that can be as simple as going back to, just some frameworks of having hypotheses and trying to disprove them, right? I mean, assumption biases and all the things that have always been around, now they’re highlighted even more. Like, can we go and can we say, “these are our hypotheses. Our AI tools have helped us with this. This is what we think, and we think we’re validating here. Let’s go try to prove ourselves wrong by actually talking to customers. And can we, can we validate, you know, one more level on a human side?”
That’s what some companies I’ve, work with are starting to say, “okay, let’s, let’s take ourselves out of the tool and do something very manual, which is human, and, and see if we can still get the same answer.”
MD: Yeah. Part of the reason I’m so glad we’re having this conversation, I think we’ve talked about this offline, every project FlexPoint does has some tech component. Like, it’s almost always about a new ERP implementation or new modern analytics capability or, you know, custom development, whatever.
But we’re never doing the hands-on keyboard development work. We’re not doing the tech work. And people kind of go like, “wait, what do you do again? You’re a tech consulting firm?” And it’s like, well, it’s all about tech, but the things that really often are challenging and can dictate the success or failure of these projects are fundamentally people and process things.
And I think that’s a lot of what is coming through in your expertise on the evolution of product management is, whether it’s the physical products or the digital products, really focusing in on what our customers want and need and are asking for, how that shapes the product vision and priorities and all that stuff is not about the tool. And it’s not about what AI tool are we using, it’s more about what, what are we actually trying to solve for? AI can be certainly helpful in that, but it’s not the silver bullet or core to the story, I guess.
JR: 100% correct. And one of the things that I’m starting to see, and I think we’ll see more is, focusing a little bit more on software at this point, is that it’s so, so easy to go from an idea to a prototype in a day or even less in some cases, right? Or even if you’re talking a week, it’s still, historically that’s still very, very fast.
And then of course these feedback loops, which have always been important, is this feature or this module or this thing that we built actually solving the problem that the customers have or think they have? And that’s always been part of product management, but now we can do it in different ways. We can do it much, much quicker.
I think there’s going to be and continue to be customer fatigue on this, right? Because product teams are going to go and try to get from customers feedback, through real prototypes, not just talking to them, which that’s a good step. But, you know, you put more and more features, you put more and more experiments. We’re going to have to continue to find ways to do it without burdening the customer, right? Without burdening and say, “hey, I’ve got this new prototype. You want to try it?” You know? Nobody has time for that. And we’ll get there, but for the next year or so, I think we’re going have a lot of fatigue with customers saying, “I don’t care. Just do it. Just solve it.” Right? And we’ve got to figure out a good way to hasten those feedback loops but also still make them valuable.
MD: That’s a really interesting nugget. I’m so glad you brought that up because I think this idea of like, we have more ways to ask the customer more questions sounds great, but it might manifest itself as a bug, not a feature, maybe is a good way to put it.
JR: Yeah, exactly. Customers have never cared how we build things for them. They just want us to solve their problems and do it right and do it well. And we’re, now asking them to be more a part of the process. They don’t want to be, you know?
Advice to Product Managers in Today AI’s Evolution
Michael Daehne: Yeah. You gave some really good insights at the organization or leadership level, ways to look at the evolution of product management and what AI means. What about if we’re talking to like an individual product manager? So, someone who’s boots on the ground in role right now, they’re probably getting some of these questions and pressure from their organization leadership about can you go faster? Can you do the work of 10 as one using AI?
Do you have any, any coaching thoughts, pearls of wisdom for that person that’s heads down in that role as they’re navigating all the changes in the product management world right now?
JJ Rorie: Yeah, I actually feel really bad for product managers right now because I think it’s... Look, I’ve been a leader in organizations for many years and I work with leaders as much as I work with product managers, and so I totally understand the reasoning behind it, but leaders are pushing down a lot of new expectations without the reality of being on the ground.
And so product managers are now waking up to this new world of I got to do design, I got to build a prototype, I’ve got to be the engineer, and maybe there’s a set of eyes at the end to make sure I didn’t screw anything up. But you know, I’m being asked to do all of this stuff and, and it’s not ever what I signed up for.
Even if I have a CS degree, even if I can do it, or at some point did something similar in my past, it’s not what they signed up for. It’s not what they were expected to do, you know, six months ago or what have you. And that’s hard, right?
One of the difficult things about product management has always been a lack of clarity of responsibilities and expectations because it’s so cross-functional. It’s not like an accounting role where you’ve got to follow these FASB rules and that you do exactly this every single time, right? It’s never been one of those roles. And so, it’s always had kind of blurred lines around things, and now those are just even brighter and deeper.
So, the advice I give is, push back in a natural way to say, “What are we actually trying to accomplish?” Right? Like at the end of the day, we’ve been trying to solve this problem for our customers and do it in this way. We’re changing the way we’re doing it, or are we changing the problem we’re trying to solve? Like, literally ask leadership that. The answer’s most of the time going to be the way we do it. We still want to focus on these markets and these problems, and this is our core business. This is what we bring to the table. Okay, so how we do it is changing.
And then, you know, ask as a product manager, say, you know, “I’m here. I’m on the ground. I’ve got a designer, I’ve got an engineer. We’re all being asked to do things differently. Can we bring you some proposals on what looks like it’s going to work?” As opposed to just being dictated to. Um, look, some leaders will take that and say, “yes, go.” Some leaders are like, “nope, it’s my way or the highway.” And you know what your leadership is, so take that with your context in mind. But say, “we’re on the ground. We understand your edict, but can we do it in this way?”
And that’s what I’ve seen some product managers do really well. It’s not necessarily to even pump the brakes on it or buy themselves time.
It’s to do it right. And, as you said, it’s people and process are the things that get in the way 99% of the time, and so that’s what we’re really asking to change, people and process. Throwing a new tool in it is one thing, but it’s really people and process.
And so, product people, your value to the organization is to find problems to solve and then uniquely find ways to solve it. Think of this as a product. Think of this as that same kind of thing, and put your product hat on and say, “okay, what needs to be changed? What doesn’t need to be changed, and how can we go about it?”
MD: Yeah. I love that, and particularly the piece that product management has always been a role that is hard to draw a box around. There’s always been blurred lines and some ambiguity of scope and responsibility, and so this is one more thing in that mix that it doesn’t make the lines any more clear. It probably muddies it a little bit.
But to your point that all of those skillsets that product people have built up in their careers, I think can be part of the solution in helping navigate what this should look like.
JR: Yeah, absolutely.
Avoiding the Illusion of Progress
Michael Daehne: We just have a few more minutes. I want to ask you one more question, then we’ll do lightning round.
We’ve talked about, I think, some of the things in your book, through the course of the conversation, but are there any other kind of key themes or things as you’re spending time writing about the evolution of product management right now? Other topics that are key or might be, I don’t know, surprising or a hot take or something like that you want share?
JJ Rorie: One of the things that I see the most and that I’m digging into more to try to understand what’s really happening out there and are there ways that we can avoid it as a blind spot or, you know, be intentional about it is something I’m loosely calling the illusion of progress, right?
So, everything we’re doing, as product teams, as companies in this whole, you know, AI evolution is conceivably to try to drive execution better, to do better things faster. But are we actually doing that? And I think the output of a faster release or, you know, a faster requirements document or whatever it is that we’re building, we can do all of that faster, which gives us the illusion of we’re progressing and we’ve made progress, but are we? Have we?
And I think we’ll continue to fall, everyone, it will continue to fall into that trap for a while until we become, as an organization, become very, very intentional about it and check ourselves, and that’s that human side of things, right? We come back as a human team, a team of humans, and we say, “where have we gotten it wrong? Let’s prove ourselves wrong.” That’s a good exercise, right? And, if you, if you have a hard time proving yourself wrong or invalidating your assumptions, then okay, good. You’re okay. You’ve actually done the work to get where you want to go.
But if you can start to poke holes too easily, then it’s an illusion. It’s not real progress. So, I think that’s kind of a core of what one of the things I’m working on and talking to companies about and thinking about how do we as product teams avoid that. I don’t know that we can completely avoid it because, again, everything looks shiny and new and pretty and great, but how can we make sure that we’re being intentional about really making progress and really executing on the right things as opposed to just putting a bunch of stuff out there?
MD: Yeah, absolutely.
Well, what a great conversation. Thank you for sharing so much of your expertise.
Lightning Round
Michael Daehne: We’ll do a couple lightning round questions, and I’m going to start with one that I didn’t prep you on, but I see your cat behind you. What’s your cat’s name? I love animals, so I always love to ask.
JJ Rorie: Sorry for those of you who won’t get to see the video. You’ll just get to hear. My cat behind me, his name is Knox, and he is a nice, sweet, quiet boy. I have another cat who’s locked outside of the room because she is not a quiet girl, and her name’s Quinn. She would definitely be right here in the microphone if she were in the room.
MD: Awesome. Yes, I feel like, all cats have a personality. Sounds like you have both types.
JR: Exactly.
MD: Well, my dog was reasonably well-behaved this morning. She sometimes shows up audio-only on the podcast with her barking at the UPS guy.
JR: And what’s your dog’s name?
MD: Her name is Georgia. My wife and I met in Atlanta, and so hence the name Georgia. But we have also talked offline about our college football allegiances, and now that my Longhorns are in the SEC and are 0 and 3 against the Georgia Bulldogs in the last two years, I have some mixed feelings about having a dog named Georgia, but that’s another conversation.
JR: You’re mad at Georgia every Saturday afternoon.
MD: Exactly, yeah.
Well, we’ve talked some about, I’ll say, the downsides or the cautions maybe, or risks of AI in the product management space. What about maybe like a good thing, an underrated thing AI can help a product manager with right now?
JR: Yeah, I think it’s the learning. I think it’s the compression of learning. There’s something I talked about in Immutable, about customer intelligence , and how do you build that and continue to know a lot about your customers who use your products. And I call it the study, discuss, observe, which is so simple. I’m a simple person, and I believe that we can do things very simply. And we overcomplicate a lot of things.
Study the world around ourselves and our customers. Discuss those things with our customers and our teammates, our partners. And observe what’s happening, right? Like, literally just watch the problems that are occurring for our customers.
And most of that, as I wrote Immutable, five years ago, was, you know, fairly manual human work. And it still is in many ways, but that’s a good example of compressing that learning. Like go, set up an agent to, you know... It used to be called a Google Alert, which sounds like the horse and buggy of the world right, right? But it’s like every time this company was mentioned, I got an alert.
But I mean, just set up agents to like scrub everything around us. And again, you’ve got to put your human hat on to understand what matters and what doesn’t. But that compression of learning what’s happening in the world and all those little signals and triggers, why are we not using that for that? And I am not even good enough at it yet, but, you know, tell me what’s happening right now that could be important. Now don’t overwhelm ourselves with, “oh my God, every day I should be changing my product because of this new information.” Nope. That’s not what I mean. Just compress your learning and do it very intentionally over time, and that’s going to help us be better at knowing the markets and customers.
MD: Yeah. What a great suggestion. How about a book or podcast that you think would be a great – other than Immutable, of course – but a book or podcast you might recommend for someone in the product management space?
JR: The ones everybody knows about, Lenny’s and Melissa Perri’s. I love those. They’re mostly focused on technology. Melissa Perri’s a little bit broader.
I actually think there’s a few books that are not product specific. Thinking in Bets, Annie Duke, I believe is the author. Really, really interesting about hypotheses and the human brain.
There’s Matt Wallaert, a behavioral scientist, brilliant author. Follow him on LinkedIn. I don’t know if he has a podcast of his own, but he’s out there. And just product but behavior, which I think is almost becoming more and more important, right? Like anthropology, psychology, behavior science, I think those are going to end up being so much more important as we evolve.
Technology, CS, all of that stuff’s important, but it’s almost becoming commoditized, right? And so, I think that some of those human sides of things is what I pay attention to a lot these days
MD: For sure. Okay, last question. Best advice you’ve ever received?
JR: Ooh, I love this one. You know, it’s interesting because it still goes back way, way, way back in, in the beginning of my career. I was, like customer service or something at – and then I ended up in marketing for – a golf company. I’m a big golfer and played golf in college, so it was awesome that I actually started my career in a golf company.
And the VP of R&D gave me this advice one time when I was leaving the company, or just before I was leaving the company, and he said, “Surround yourself with great people. Surround yourself with great people in your career, either formally, like find people to work for, or just, you know, make sure that you’re hanging out with, you’re getting to know people around the organization and outside the organization that are really good for you and your career.”
And that has still been the best advice I’ve ever gotten. It’s evolved over time. The people I wanted to surround myself with or the roles and the maturity they had, the skills they had evolved as I was evolving, right? It went from mentorship to, you know, more kind of peer, “This is happening. Oh yeah, that happens for me.”
And now it’s actually I’m trying to tap into more of the younger generation to make sure that I’m not missing something, that I’m not, you know, being too biased because of, you know, my years of experience and, why am I thinking about it this way? Is it just because I’ve always have, or can, you know, younger, you know, newer people with fresher ideas give me some perspective?
So, surround yourself with people, ask questions, talk, have conversations, mentor, be mentored. I think that’s really important.
MD: Yeah. Oh, great advice, and what a great note to end the conversation on.
Closing
Michael Daehne: We covered so much ground and a lot of fun topics. I know it’ll be super useful to our, to our listeners. So, thank you so much. I’m so glad that Pedro, our resident product guy, and a big, big fan of yours made the connection.
JJ Rorie: Yes, shout out to Pedro.
MD: Yeah, thanks Pedro for connecting us. I, I really enjoyed the conversation.
JR: Thank you, Michael. It was so great to be with you. Enjoyed it. Thanks for having me.
MD: Awesome. Have a great rest of your day. Thanks, JJ.
Mentioned
Shyft PM: https://www.shyftpm.com/
Immutable: 5 Truths of Great Product Managers by JJ Rorie https://bookshop.org/p/books/immutable-5-truths-of-great-product-managers-jj-rorie/5192bd0c41d33617?ean=9781955985529
Lenny Rachitsky’s book recommendations: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/essential-books-for-product-builderspart
Melissa Perri has two books about product, both available at https://melissaperri.com/book:
Product Operations: How Successful Companies Build Products at Scale
Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value
Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have all the Facts by Annie Duke https://bookshop.org/p/books/thinking-in-bets-making-smarter-decisions-when-you-don-t-have-all-the-facts-annie-duke/31466984521c3d8a?ean=9780735216372&bkshp-astro=t
Matt Wallaert: https://mattwallaert.com/