Transcript: Why "I Didn't Hear Anything New" Is the Product Leader's Real Win

Host: Eyal David · Guest: Noa Ganot · Back to episode

Noa Ganot breaks down why product managers fail to move the executive team: it's not a shortage of slide decks, it's the lack of a story that explains the why. Through an anecdote about a VP Product who presented at a management meeting and heard the CEO say "I didn't hear anything new here" — which was actually the win — she shows how to build the logic of a story that leads the company in the right direction, and why that is the essential job of the product leader, not just running day-to-day operations.

In this episode

Tell yourself the story of why you're doing something before you ask others to execute it — it's a hard exercise that people avoid, but it's the foundation of any convincing strategy.
A good story is built through patient draft work, sentence by sentence ("ping pong"), until you yourself read it and believe it — and you eliminate the holes in the plot.
When a CEO says "I didn't hear anything new here," it may be a sign of success: you hit exactly on his real intent and organized it so that management finally understands it too.
A product leader is responsible for leading the company in the right direction, not just running the product department — it's far too easy to sink into day-to-day management and miss this.
Product in a product company is the central business instrument; if the product can't be sold and can't deliver results, you're building pretty things in the sand.

Noa Ganot: [00:00] That's the story — the CEO's story — and this is an exercise I really recommend to everyone listening to us who gets instructions on what to do: tell yourself the story. The story of why they want you to do this. And it took a long time until we managed to arrive at a story that we read and believe ourselves that it's a logical story. It requires deep thinking, not just strategy — it's one of the things that people. avoid the most; it's really, really hard. So essentially he came back to you with something organized — you drafted it, you drafted it together — and it came back, and we work on the draft literally sentence by sentence. Okay, hold on, so you wrote this sentence, what do I understand from it, did I understand you correctly or is there something else hidden here — and we really put in order the. the logic of the story. There are lectures I give where there's this kind of picture of a terribly complicated maze, and someone stands there trying to find the way through the maze. That's essentially what we're trying to show: why these steps and those steps will bring us in the end to the point where we want to be — and it's really, really not easy. Giving that answer is not — it's usually not something that's self-evident; there are a million holes in the plot. And if. So essentially. After this back-and-forth, and after we managed to reach a state where we read the story and believe ourselves, the VP Product went and presented it at the management meeting. The meeting ended, the CEO summed it up: well, I didn't hear anything new here. And he left the room. Now, the very fact that he said he didn't hear anything new — as far as I'm concerned that's excellent, because it means we hit on something he really meant. So that's already good, but the VP Product was terribly frustrated at this stage — like, what, I worked so hard and in the end he says there's nothing new here. But then, an hour after the CEO left, the members of management came to him and said: listen, thank you very much. Finally, after months of this CEO talking about a platform, a platform, we understand what he's trying to do and why — why we even need to go in this direction. And thank you very much for helping us understand. Now, that understanding is terribly important. It's not by chance, in my view, that the VP Product is the one who told the story — it's not just because he works with me; I think it's a fundamental part of the product role. which is important to understand, because as a product leader, you're not responsible only for the product department. It's terribly easy to slip into that place of day-to-day management. You're responsible for being the one who leads the company in the right direction. Why the VP Product specifically? And not someone else? For two reasons. One, because product is much more than what comes out at the end of the sprint. Product in a product company is the central business instrument the company decided to take to the world and achieve its goals with. And as VP Product, you're responsible for that. True, you don't manage the salespeople, and true, you're not responsible for their incentives, but in the end, if you're a product leader. who doesn't know how to be sold and doesn't know how to bring the company to results, it's a bit like you're playing in the sand and building pretty things. Absolutely — by the way, there are companies I've seen where even sales does this; if there's a vacuum then sometimes they'll take it here too, right.

Eyal David: [03:28] I want — just a second before we move on to that — I'm terribly curious. So as a product person, what do I need to understand about the CEO's state of mind? I understand his time is very expensive. I understand that maybe he also doesn't — he doesn't have the patience for this fuss of now starting to understand the why, or even, in the case of the story you told, to reflect it. He also didn't reflect it to his team, which is also very strange, but what do I need to understand about the state of mind the CEO is in. This was a Tachles ('bottom line') episode from Product Builder. Want to hear the full conversation? Search for the pod, and don't forget to follow us.