Transcript: Gilad Livnat | monday | Takhles Episode: How to Keep Focus and Say No

Focus and communication: the two product skills

Eyal David: [00:00] So, takhles: how do you stay focused, and when do you say no? Here's a short clip from the full conversation with Gilad Livnat from monday.

Gilad Livnat: [00:09] It always comes down to two areas. One area is focus, and the second area is communication. I think a good product manager must hold focus. Meaning he needs to understand very well what his company, what his product does and what his product doesn't do. That carries into a lot of areas, strategically, in terms of customer segmentation, in customer interviews.

Eyal David: [00:38] Let's, let's maybe pause for a second and explain. So you mentioned customer segmentation, basically when you're very focused on the specific user and even a segment. Maybe let's give a small example.

Example: segmentation at an edtech startup

Gilad Livnat: [00:48] Say when I had the educational tech startup, everyone really wanted, just briefly what we did: kids have screens and they love tons of games there, and then they spend a lot of time and waste their time and their money, or their parents' money. And we wanted to find some supporting experience for that, an educational experience. The number of kids who play and the ages at which they play is simply astronomical, from age 5 to age 18. And we needed to focus really well and tell ourselves which segment of kids we're looking at, because it affects you: who you interview and what questions you ask, what the interview looks like, which devices they use, when they play. And someone who's in a world where the segment is too broad, because the company wants to take over the whole market, or because he chose too few factors to look at when he looks at an average customer, or it's simply too big a vision and he wants to take over the world here and now and can't step between niches. That just creates a lot, a lot of confusion. You can't tell which signals are really important, which customers you really want to meet and which customers you need to tell, or just do an interview with them for the, for the good feeling. Which questions you ask. These things seep into a lot of places, and later too, I mean, you choose strategically which areas to focus on, and then there's always something that comes, after you've closed the strategy something comes from somewhere else, and it sounds the sexiest and the hottest and the most worth doing. And the result of that isn't even a ripple effect, the immediate result is that your team starts to get confused, and they don't understand why yesterday you said this is the most important thing and suddenly this morning you tell them we're doing something else. And that connects to the second thing, communication. Product people must know how to communicate very well what they do, whether it's in presentations, in one-on-one conversations, or in how they present these things, these worlds of storytelling. It's a skill: you need to know how to talk with the whole spectrum of people, from developers and designers to management and customers. I think people don't understand how critical this is. And if I connect it to focus: when you tell someone in your company we're not doing this, then it's also about how you say it. Without antagonism, but while keeping your team's focus, when you tell her we're not doing this because it's more important to me to do something else.

Telling sales: this isn't in our focus

Eyal David: [03:54] I can tell you, in all the companies I've worked at, the salespeople always come with that refrain that says, I have a customer, let's just do this and that's it, we're on to the next stage. You need to be there and say, this isn't in our focus, we can't do it, it'll clutter our system.

Eyal David: [04:15] That was a Takhles episode from Product Builder. Want to hear the full conversation? Look for it in the feed, and don't forget to follow us.