Why great AI products are all about the data | Shaun Clowes (CPO Confluent, ex-Salesforce, Atlassian)
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Why do most product managers struggle and how can they become 10x PMs?
I love that you have very strong opinion about this, which is just the state of the product management career and how it most PMs are not that great.
Why is it that product management is still such a relatively undeveloped discipline? Like we're like 15 to 20 years into this. And so there's something about the current state of product management that isn't getting at the truly important things, the truly value-added things. If we were doctors, you'd be like, that's totally unacceptable. What's the answer, Sean? How do we solve this problem? In everything, always talk from the customer's perspective, from the market's perspective, from the competitor's perspective. A very small number of PMs do that. They get dragged into internal politics. They get dragged into scrum management or scrum execution or product delivery and you just can't win that way.
You kind of have this hot take that the way AI will most impact product management is data management. Well,
you've got this synthesis machine, which is this LLM thing that's gonna help you do synthesis. But if it hasn't got all that data to do synthesis on top of, it's got nothing. And so that means that LMs can only be as good as the data they are given and how
recent that data. is in the future, if you can easily clone a B2B SaaS app like Salesforce or Atlassian, what happens to these businesses long term? Do they just become are they all in trouble?
People really underestimate where the value is created in these applications and they just kind of get it completely wrong.
Today, my guest is Sean Klaus. Sean is Chief Product Officer at Confluent. Previously, he was Chief Product Officer at MuleSoft, which is a billion-dollar business within Salesforce. Before that, he was Chief Product Officer of Metromile, a public auto insurance technology company. And prior to that, he spent six years at Atlassian, where he ran the Jira Agile and also built the first ever B2B growth team. He also created two of the most popular. Reforge courses, one on retention and engagement, and one on data for product managers. Sean is awesome because he is both very tactical and execution-oriented, while also being very philosophical and insightful about the craft of product and growth. In our conversation, Sean shares why most PMs are not good, what it takes to become a good or great product manager, how he thinks about his
Career like a bingo cart and why he indexes towards finding very different roles for every new job that he takes, why good data is the most important ingredient in AI tools and for product managers working with AI, also how to build a great B2B growth team, what he's learned about doing B2B growth, and his really interesting take on how AI will and won't disrupt SaaS tools out in the wild. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget To subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes and helps the podcast tremendously. With that, I bring you Sean Klaus. This episode is brought to you by Interpret. Interpret unifies all your customer interactions, from gong calls to Zendesk tickets to Twitter threads to App Store reviews, and makes it available for analysis.
It's trusted by leading product orgs like Canva, Notion, Loom, Linear, Monday.com, and Strava to bring the voice of the customer into the product development process, helping you build best in class products faster. What makes Interpret special is its ability To build and update customer-specific AI models that provide the most granular and accurate insights into your business, connect customer insights to revenue and operational data in your CRM or data warehouse to map the business impact of each customer need and prioritize confidently, and empower your entire team to easily take action on use cases like win-loss analysis, critical bug detection, and identifying drivers of churn, with interpret's AI assistance.
Wisdom. Looking to automate your feedback loops and prioritize your roadmap with confidence like Notion, Canva, and Linear, visit Enterpr.com/slash Lenny to connect with the team and to get two free months when you sign up for an annual plan.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
Why do most product managers struggle and how can they become 10x PMs?
0:00–12:06
2
How does data‑first thinking unlock great AI products?
12:06–23:17
3
What are “feedback rivers” and why are they essential for product intuition?
23:17–33:29
4
How can LLMs turn raw customer interviews into actionable insights?
33:29–43:16
5
Why is AI’s biggest impact on product management really about data management?
43:16–52:59
6
What makes a high‑performing B2B growth team and what pitfalls to avoid?
52:59–1:02:48
7
How does Shaun choose his next career move and what advice does he have for product leaders?
1:02:48–1:13:22
8
What key lessons did Shaun learn from his biggest product failure?
1:13:22–1:21:30
Speakers
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