Earn the Right to Decide: Reference Customers, Coaching and the Craft of Product Management

Lenny asks why founders delay hiring a first PM and some teams wish they had none. Idiodi answers that most people have simply not experienced a good product manager. Product management is competency-based: the PM should be the person who knows the customers, the data, the industry and the product best, which is why others can trust them to decide.

Where that competence is missing, he says, others displace influence because they feel they know the business or customer better. He tells CEOs to think about the senior person they trust to decide which markets to enter, someone like a long-tenured VP everyone respects. Imagine having that person on every team, he says. In his view the dislike is really aimed at the results people have seen, and the discipline must elevate itself until it earns the right to decide.

His advice for PMs is a period of humility. Find the loudest, most influential person in the organization, the one who is in every meeting, and ask them to teach you or offer to help them, even intern for them with your manager's permission. That extends their trust to you and shows what drives their influence. Then keep doing discovery, so people see you learning every day and eventually recognize that you have the most insight.

Lenny summarizes the advice as becoming more full-stack in the company, always learning visibly, and knowing more than anyone else so that people want you on the team.

Idiodi describes the product manager's job as a team sport in which the team uncovers a solution. Every solution carries four risks: value (will people buy, choose or use it), usability, feasibility, and viability (does it work for our business). He says the PM's competency is mainly to drive value and viability, answering whether a solution is worth building at all.

He frames the essence of the job as waking up on behalf of someone else to solve a problem, and doing it well enough that they give something back. He calls that return a certificate of appreciation, which may be revenue, engagement, loyalty or a reference. If the work is not fun, he says, you are probably not doing it right, and if it is not hard you are probably also not doing it right.

Asked which risk new PMs neglect, he names value without hesitation. When teams are handed roadmaps of features to build, value is simply assumed and a PM is barely needed. He warns against tests in which 300 users score a design at 84% or 90%, because being able to use something does not mean people will buy, choose or actually use it, and what people say often differs from what they do.

Lenny notes that Idiodi once argued that if you could pick one discovery approach among many frameworks, it would be working with reference customers. Idiodi calls it the holy grail of product work. His definition of customer love is someone willing to put their reputation on the line by telling others about the product, and he compares it to choosing a steakhouse online: one review is not enough, but many from people like you convinces you.

He argues that most companies start product-led, and the product team creates the first customers before sales and operations capture the value. Product teams lose influence when salespeople have to push an unproven product, whereas showing a buyer 20 people like them makes selling easy. The technique means discovering who has the problem and a solution at the same time, getting out of the building and sticking with people who have the problem until it is solved.

He says he has never had a product failure with this method, and that he has worked on or helped create about 205 products and tries to build a new one from scratch every year. His rule of thumb is six to eight references for B2B and 15 to 25 for B2C as an indication of product-market fit. For every app he launches, he wants 25 five-star reviews on day one, and he explains that references also protect against building for one or two people with an unusual problem.

To find the right early customers he looks for technologists and evangelists, people who believe they have the problem and love to try new things. He asks them whether they would tell others if he built what they want, and keeps iterating until they will. He says asking for a five-star review reveals hesitations that a polite answer would hide, and that recruiting itself is a signal: if he cannot find enough people who care, it may not be a problem worth solving.

The references also tell him how to market the product. He puts on the box exactly what customers say, so expectations match reality, and he involves marketing, sales, legal and finance early. All the reference customers must want the same thing; if one person wants something different, he does not build it. He also notes that people reading reviews take comfort when satisfied reviewers do without a missing feature.

Idiodi tells the story of his time at a staffing company, Snagajob. The head of global staffing at Starbucks called with a problem: after buying a San Francisco Bay Area bakery, the company realized close to 800 employees might lack documents and would likely quit. Idiodi asked whether Starbucks would pay for a solution, then took a designer and an engineer, defined the problem, and drove around talking to people to see who else had it.

At a McDonald's construction site, an operations director told them a new store needs about 120 people on opening day and that most people in the industry do not show up for work. A Macy's manager said the store hires 20,000 people each holiday season. The team offered to send McDonald's candidates to interview, paid per hire. The first Monday was a flop, since fewer than 20 of about 40 showed up, so they scaled outreach, called back everyone, and sent reminders.

The second attempt produced 45 to 50 interviewees and a happy manager, so they pitched Starbucks. They proposed sending around 3,000 people to hire the 800 needed, because most candidates do not show up. Working manually with spreadsheets, phones and email, they got Starbucks to hire 784 people in a week, and the contact copied then-CEO Howard Schultz on an email saying the team had saved them.

Not every customer fit. A Los Angeles airport terminal needed 200 hires, but airport jobs were so unattractive that it took about three months and a union negotiation to raise pay to $15 an hour, so they decided never to do airports again. Because the engineer and designer were involved from the beginning, they built the recruiter experience, a scheduling tool and notifications without writing a requirements document. The product took about nine months and booked $32 million in sales in its first 90 days.

Lenny calls it the epitome of doing things that don't scale. Idiodi agrees, saying you do the unscalable work first and the scalable work after, and that solving the problem is the best way to learn how to solve it, with no fake-door tests, opportunity trees or interviews required.

Lenny reports Marty Cagan's praise for Idiodi's ability to build trust with executives and coach people. Idiodi says coaching is the day job of managers, because doing product management is the PM's job but getting better at it is the manager's job. Using a sports analogy, he says the coach stands on the sideline looking for ways to make you better. Most people coach poorly because they have never been well coached.

He illustrates this with a CEO who screamed at his team because his own boss had screamed at him. Idiodi offered to restate the message and asked the team which version worked better, and they said his version made them see four other things to do. The CEO had simply never seen an alternative. Idiodi adds that he coached his sons' soccer teams for eight years and treated four-year-olds as adults, with plays and strategy.

On trust, he says people do not know what you know until they test you, and trust is built on competence and character. His technique for a new hire is to bring them to the loudest, most influential person and ask that person to teach them, for instance by letting the newcomer sit in their meetings for a week. This extends the leader's trust to the newcomer, makes the leader accountable for the newcomer's growth, and leads to introductions. He calls it an emotional-intelligence black belt move.

Lenny calls these Jedi ninja tricks and asks what to do without a good coach. Idiodi says mastery does not come from avoidance, and companies fail to create space for practice. Product management is a game-time role, so people need practice arenas such as volunteering at a nonprofit or community event, where people solve problems collaboratively, and they should observe good product work to learn from it.

Lenny sums up the advice as getting reps in, with collaborative problem solving as the key thing to look for, and says the same applies to breaking into product management. Idiodi separates people who solve problems alone from those who work with others to solve them. Even when you do not know an answer, he says, knowing who to go to is a gift.

Lenny asks about leaders promoted too early who then blame others. Idiodi tells a story of an award-winning engineer who feels stuck on the ladder, so the company promotes him to engineering manager. He has never interviewed, fired or coached anyone, and soon notices that nobody applauds him. When a big problem arrives, he jumps in and solves it himself, not recognizing that his job is now getting a team good at solving problems.

Idiodi calls this the most common origin story of micromanagement. He adds that new leaders feel they cannot say they do not know, so they search the web for frameworks and repeat whatever seems to work, and their reports copy it. He says dysfunction cycles through the culture because the new manager was never coached to manage.

His alternative is to promote people to do the job, not to learn the job. If someone wants to be a director, he tells them to start doing director work with him over a few months. The best time to practice being a VP is before being one, when mistakes are protected and coaching is easy. He criticizes giving someone four direct reports with no evidence they can manage one, and says companies should build succession and coaching programs so leaders learn before they hold the title.

Lenny likes the idea of doing VP things before the title. Idiodi adds that when you are not yet in the role, nobody blames you for a try, but once you are a VP, mistakes affect everyone.

For companies and leaders, he says that classes and mentors are often an outsourcing of coaching. He jokes that a communication class does not make someone better at communication; practice with feedback does, so he suggests attending the class with the employee and practicing together. He says he teaches many leaders to coach and that he has not seen a problem that coaching could not address, because all problems are people problems.

To pick a coach, he says to look for someone who has generated good outcomes and has learned from good coaches. Some football coaches never played, but their pedigree shows who they learned from. He suggests asking candidates who coached them and what patterns that coach taught.

Idiodi says he has family in Africa and once wrongly assumed that problems solved in North America or Europe were already solved everywhere. A man who found his job in a newspaper made him realize he had worked on that exact problem in 1998. He saw two patterns: technology is poorly used, and solving problems in emerging markets is hard, since before you can code you may first need to solve power and access to a computer.

He describes a society that makes money working around problems, such as buying generators for electricity and bigger cars for bad roads, citing a Tesla with a portable generator on its back. He insists the continent has abundant creative talent and a very young population, and notes that less than 30% of Africa has discovered the internet and that many unicorns have already emerged. In his view there is no talent or resource problem, and the biggest opportunity is to empower people with enabling technology and the right mindset.

That led him to found the Innovate Africa Foundation, whose first Inspire Africa Conference drew a thousand people from 31 African countries. He was moved to meet an 11-year-old robotics engineer and a 13-year-old CEO of a health-records startup. He coaches and teaches teams across the continent how to do product work, and plans to launch an angel fund funded by the product community in January, because many startups are pushed into institutional capital before they are ready and give up too much equity.

Idiodi closes his main remarks by urging product people to see their work as solving a problem on someone's behalf so well that it gives something back, bringing passion, empathy and customer focus. Lenny connects this back to reference customers: telling others is one of the things a satisfied customer gives back.

In the lightning round, Idiodi recommends SVPG's own books, *Inspired* and *Empowered*, and previews *Transformed*, due in March, which covers moving to the product operating model with stories of companies that were not born digital. He also likes Ben Horowitz's *The Hard Thing About Hard Things*, and enjoys *Succession* and *Billions*. His favorite sports app is Real, which shows scores through the shared reactions of people around you.

His favorite interview exercise is to give candidates a live problem, such as helping a hearing-impaired friend wake up for a new early job. He is not looking for a right answer but for collaborative problem solving, curiosity, humility and knowing what you cannot know. He notes that people who jump straight to a framework or plan to solve everything alone are warning signs for team culture.

His life motto comes from his father: show up, and you are ahead of most people; show up on time, ahead of more; show up on time with a plan, further still, and execute it with a smile. He also says he left home for boarding school at 12, in a remote place without electricity or potable water, and lived on his own from 12 to 16.