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Product Rebels
Product Rebels
[REPLAY] Think Financial, Act Customer
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Hey there Product Rebels! We've had a lot of conversations with product leaders lately, and one thing that keeps coming up is how much financial guesswork is involved in incorporating AI into their product orgs.
From forecasting costs to proving ROI, it's a challenge that really comes down to something more fundamental — do PMs actually understand the economics of the products they're building?
That's exactly what Nat Kunes digs into in this episode. While the conversation isn't specifically about AI, the financial fluency he talks about is the exact muscle product leaders need right now. Enjoy the re-listen.
In this episode, Heather Samarin and Vidya Dinamani sit down with Nat Kunes, Chief Product Officer at Ontra. He shares his insights on redefining pricing strategies, replacing assumptions with validated hypotheses, and the impactful strategy he uses to empower his team to balance goals with true user value.
Nat digs into financial fluency for PMs, market validation practices, and shifting org culture to view product as an asset, not a liability.
Storytelling is a skill in and of itself. And I think this is something that all product managers should be really good at. The most impactful way for folks to learn is getting in there and making pitches for their products and their initiatives and seeing where they could have done better with the right mentorship and coaching from the teams. What could I have done better? What could have been more impactful? Not just from their manager or me, but you know, a broader set of their peers as well.
SPEAKER_01Hey there, listeners and fellow product rebels. We're thrilled to welcome Nat Kunis, Chief Product Officer at Entra, where he's driving product strategy and leading Entra Synapse, the company's private markets, AI technology. Nat's journey through product leadership has spanned SaaS, FinTech, AI, and real estate tech. He spent nearly two decades building and scaling products at the intersection of technology, automation, and financial services. Before Entra, he was an executive at Appfolio, where he led product, RD, and strategy for its real estate and investment management solutions. Prior to that, he held leadership roles at Citrix, guiding SaaS, and enterprise software development. With experience leading teams across product engineering, sales, and customer success, Nat brings a holistic approach to product leadership, blending deep technical expertise with a strong business and customer focus. Join us as we explore Nat's journey and how he approaches leading product with a strong customer first focus. Welcome, Nat.
SPEAKER_02Nat, so good to have you with us. We're going to drop you in the deep end like we do with everybody and say, what does being a product rebel mean to you?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, thanks for having me. I thought a lot about this because there's a part of me that's sort of always considered myself a rebel in the product world, and uh especially when I was coming up through the ranks. But if I had to say it kind of succinctly, I'd say it's really fighting for customer outcomes that are the most ideal for them. And even if that goes against the grain or there's internal pushback, really in some levels sacrificing short-term initiatives for long-term sustainable business that you want to create.
SPEAKER_01We love hearing this. We totally agree. There is a short-term versus long-term often. And so can you take us through a story of where you've actually had to experience this and lead that?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I have a number of different ones that in my career have come up, but I've been fortunate enough in most of the stops in my career where I've had really long-term thinkers as investors in the company. And I think that really made it, I should say, a little bit easier for me to make those difficult trade-off decisions. One of the early ones that I can think of is I spent about 14 years at a company called App Folio, focusing on real estate software. And one of the key decisions and things that we heard pretty early on from our customers was the old softwares that they were using would really nickel and dine them around the pricing of packaging. I remember, for example, one customer in particular that said, I just took over as the new IT manager at this property management software company. And I just called my old vendor to update my billing information. And uh I talked to their support person. They were very nice. And then about a week later, I got a bill for like$200 because that was a quote unquote paid support call. And he's like, All I was doing was updating my billing address as the new contact on this account. And so one of the key decisions that we made after hearing conversations like that over and over was a decision to not charge for support. I remember at that time when I was building out kind of the business case of why we shouldn't do that. A couple key influential figures came to mind. And one of them was at the time the head of customer support at Sonos. And he had shared a story that one of the key decisions they made was the number one support driver for them in terms of the volume of cases was really around router issues. And they said, Well, you know, Sonos, it's not our fault if their router's broken or if their internet's down, right? It's unrelated to the product potentially itself. And that's like one way to think about it. But he said the way he chose to think about it and the way that they organize their business around was you can't have a great Sonos experience if you can't connect to the internet and if your router's down. And so he actually had downloaded a bunch of user manuals and troubleshooting guides for the most common routers to be able to have his customer support team help their customers with those issues, even though you could argue that that's very tangential to their business. And so bringing that into the core focus for them was something that I was able to crib that story too, of course, and apply that in our business to offer free support to our clients. And that was a huge differentiator. There was obviously short-term revenue impacts because many people did charge for support then. And you could obviously, of course, drive revenue that way. But in the long term, it was a big win for us as a business and really helped it kind of set us apart.
SPEAKER_02I love that. And I love the story too about Sonos. And I think that's got a lot of loyal customers because they do go above and beyond. So when you're trying to put this business case together a lot of the time, and actually heat and I have experienced this directly when we're back into it, doing anything like that has when it's a major revenue hit, is there's a ton of tension, right? Because you're putting customer first, but it's also in the balance of like what's the right thing to do for the business. Talk us through those objections and how you set this up to be a successful business case.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I mean, I think this is an area where unfortunately a lot of product folks fall short. And it's really uh being good at talking finance. And I think that great product people are able to talk in the language that helps them be the most persuasive in terms of you know making a business case or an argument, especially to senior leadership. And just like if you're presenting a product roadmap session to the sales team versus to an RD team, you're gonna use a different language. You might be more granular with the RD team and the sales team, you might be more flowery and talk about the big impacts that you're gonna have and get people excited. It's the same thing when you're making these business cases because at the end of the day, you're talking to ideally the CEO, ideally CFO, and you're talking about why we're going to take an actual, legitimate, impactful revenue hit. But in the end, it's gonna be better. And so you have to tell that better story in the language that they understand, which is finance. And so I often would always hire, and I still do to this day, someone on my team that has a more of a finance background that can help me build out some of these more detailed models so that when we're doing business case analysis on any new product or key decisions like that, that we can model out the multi-year impact of it and be able to tell that story. Because at the end of the day, my hypothesis that I had created was don't charge for support, better for the business in the long run, right? And better for the business would mean ideally, you know, more customers, more revenue, better margins, et cetera. So I have to actually like put some actual numbers behind that and say, like, this is my hypothesis, and these are the assumptions that went into it, why I believe this to be true. So for me, the key thing was building out that five-year model and saying, look, over the next five years, this is going to be the impact. Yes, the next two years, it's gonna be more painful, but over the five-year horizon, this is what we think will happen. And then getting people to really get in the boat on that and get on board with that.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I mean, so important, right? You know, my early career, I was in finance and felt like, oh man, I'm using my finance stuff a lot when I moved back into the business. And so totally appreciate the language of finance with leaders. Not a lot of product managers have that kind of experience. Talk to us a little bit about how you help your team with that, right? How do you get them well versed in the language of finance without having a finance degree or talk a little bit about how you do that?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that's a great one because I do think it's really important from investing in the team to give them that background. You know, for me, my undergraduate, I majored in computer science, electrical engineering. And so, you know, I thought I took a lot of math. I did all the advanced calculus and all the things. And then I got into the software world and I was like, I don't even know what a PL is. I don't know how to read, you know, financial statements. And, you know, I felt like a little bit of a fish out of water. I did go back and get my MBA with an emphasis in financial accounting. And the main reason I did that was I had gotten a lot of advice. This is like, don't go back and get an MBA just to think you're scared to advance your career, but to go back if you really want to learn something that you feel like you have a gap in. And for me, that was it. Like I felt like I didn't have that. And so that was a great crash course for me on just finance, how to understand financial statements, how to build out business models and business cases. And, you know, what I found over the course of my career is if you're smart, you don't need to go back and get an MBA to learn that. But there are ways, there are courses and executive coaching courses and different financial accounting courses, even like one-week courses that can give you a really good crash course, I guess, in that type of data and metrics. And so for me, I do typically have a product manager's go through courses like that. In addition, as I mentioned, I do try to have someone on the team who is an expert in that. And so the product managers don't have to be able to create their own models from scratch and do all this kind of financial modeling, but they should at least understand the main inputs, assumptions, and then how that drives the outputs that they're trying to drive towards. And sometimes they're gonna create a hypothesis on what they think is gonna happen and it's gonna be wrong. And that's okay. Like everything that we do is a hypothesis. One of my favorite books that I give every product manager that starts on the team is Thinking and Bets by Annie Duke. I'm sure you guys have probably read that. But the hypothesis in that book is every decision that you make in life, you're making a bet on what you think the outcome is gonna be, all the way down to like, I bet that by eating a turkey sandwich, it will satisfy my hunger at lunch. Like you might be wrong. You might eat that turkey sandwich and be like, oh, that was disgusting and I don't feel great. But the reality is like every decision that you make is in that vein.
SPEAKER_02You know, there's so much I love about that. I'm gonna start with the last piece, which is we absolutely believe in everything being a hypothesis too, and framing everything as this is what I believe to be true, and this is the evidence that I have, and this is why I think it. And with maybe not for a sandwich for lunch, but for everything else. Speak for yourself.
SPEAKER_01I just had a hypothesis.
SPEAKER_02Maybe I need to, maybe I need to explain my thinking. But certainly that hypothesis-driven approach is something that we really believe strongly in. I think telling the story is where I'd like to move the question to because here you've got training, your product managers and the language of finance, which is so critical, thinking and hypothesis, so they can go out and test this. How do you link that to that persuasive story? Because that's the last piece, I think, in this narrative that you've shared with us, which is you can have all of the great data, but you still need to be able to convey it. So, what story did you tell to get everybody, even though the numbers were gonna take some pain for the next couple of years, it's gonna be the right thing to do. What did that look like?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so there's a couple things to unpack there. I mean, storytelling is a skill in and of itself. And I think this is something that I, you know, I would say all product managers should be really good at. So I do invest and have invested over the years in that, in teaching, you know, product managers that skill. There's obviously different programs you can do around, you know, how to tell more compelling stories or like coaching and things like that. But honestly, I I found the best way is just giving them a more at bats. The more at bats that they get in terms of creating pitches and seeing what worked, what didn't doing a really good debrief after with the team of like, oh yeah, that didn't land so well, or you know, this could have been a stronger point. I find that that's actually oftentimes the most impactful way for folks to learn is getting in there and making pitches for their products and their initiatives and seeing where they could have done better with the right mentorship and coaching from the team. So that is one where I've always built in a really strong feedback loop where anytime you give a pitch to the executive team or even to a broader audience, even if it's just a general working session with the RD organization and an offsite, there's always this kind of follow-up at the end that says where they're looking for feedback on their presentation. What could I have done better? What could have been more impactful? Not just from their manager or me, but you know, a broader set of their peers as well. And so folks have gone in this rhythm now where they do that. And we use tools to do it to make it easier. At Antro, we use a tool called Lattice. Lattice is great because you can quickly just ask for feedback on a very specific thing. And you could pick list, you know, who in the organization you want and just say, like, hey, I'd love your feedback on my presentation that I gave last week and send it to five people and they can fill it out and it just collates it. And not only can you see it, but then you could show that with your manager if you want and all these different types of things. So tools like that, I think, are really making it easier to ask for feedback. Because at the end of the day, everybody says this, but it's so true is feedback's a gift, and you don't get better if you don't get that feedback.
SPEAKER_01We're huge believers in getting what we call kind of a 360-degree view from your stakeholders, right? How well are we doing, right? Are we fulfilling expectations? Do we have missed expectations or expectations that we weren't even aware of, right? So that feedback gathering is hugely valuable to a product team and individual product managers. I want to expand on a little bit of what Vidya asked, which is oftentimes like even going up to bat and getting that practice, I think is hugely valuable and sort of critical in the career of a product manager. I kind of want to go back to that support decision that you made and talk more about how the hypotheses were communicated and how that decision was made. Because oftentimes we are faced with these big tough decisions. And sometimes those hypotheses can be little sticky wicket, right? Where the leader is like, well, I don't agree with that hypothesis, or I have other data that sort of refutes what you're saying. And there's sort of this tension that you talked about earlier, right? Talk to us a little bit about how you get through that and what it looked like in this particular decision.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that's a great way to think about it. So ultimately, in this particular situation, we presented a business model case that said, look, you know, we're not going to make any revenue off of support from this day on, you know, if we make this decision. But over time, we believe that's going to increase our win rates within a certain segment uh of our customer population. We believe that that win rate increase drives this much additional revenue.
SPEAKER_01And win rate is what? Like your net promoter score, something, the referral rate, or how talk to us a little bit about that.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, well, in this case, it was actually winning new clients, new logos onto our product suite. So we believe that that was gonna be a draw onto the platform that would allow us to actually, you know, significantly move our win rates up and essentially acquire more customers. And so, you know, for us, of course, you could sit there and debate that. And if you know, in this case, we said, oh, we think we're gonna see a 20% increase in win rates, and therefore we're gonna make X dollars more revenue. And so what I've often found helpful in that kind of situation is you pressure test your own assumptions ahead of that meeting. And so working with that person, as I mentioned, that's doing that kind of modeling, you can create a best case, mid-likely case, worst case model. And you already have kind of the data so that when somebody goes in and you kind of already have a sense for what they're gonna poke at, right? And so they're gonna say, well, really 20%, that seems a little aggressive, or maybe that's rose-colored glasses. And so you said, okay, great. We also ran the model at 10%. And you can go back and immediately point to that and say, you know, even if we were off by double, it's still a great deal. You know, you can actually, you know, pre-pressure test some of those assumptions and it just kind of steals the sword and makes it a lot easier to win over potential skeptics or folks that don't believe in some of the assumptions going there. I would say too, like one of the most paramount things that I'm a big believer in is when you are building models and you do have assumptions in there, being a hundred percent transparent on what those assumptions are listed up front because you don't have to like poking in. Yeah, yeah. Exactly, and the ranges as well. Because you don't want people poking at one thing and then realizing that you had made assumptions somewhere else. And then one, it can either undermine your credibility if they think that you're being dishonest about it, even if you weren't. But two, it just kind of opens up a whole other can of worms. So it's just kind of listing out all the things that you believe to be true, and then you know, let the debate happen. And I think that debate also is really healthy because we can say, like, you know, yeah, we did a down case at 10%. Maybe you believe it's 0%. And let's talk about what that would mean. And are we willing to make that trade-off and that bet in the event that that's the case?
SPEAKER_02Seminic best practices here. We love everything that you're sharing. Sounds like it went well. You clearly did a ton of work to get ready for this, prepared for it. Looking back, would you have done anything differently, knowing what you know now?
SPEAKER_00In this particular case, no. I mean, I think it really went well and our hypothesis played out and was successful. And in fact, so much so that it taught me some good lessons of really looking for those types of opportunities in any business that you're in. So, like even at my current company at Entra, we recently went through a very similar process where we had been charging for onboarding. And with some advances in AI technology that had recently come out that we had been able to flow into our products, we were able to significantly cut down the amount of human capital that was required to onboard new customers. We could have just sat there and said, well, you know, we're charging for onboarding today and our costs have gone down. So great, extra money. But doing the same kind of analysis and looking at, you know, what if we just said onboarding is free? Would we reduce that barrier to entry, reduce the friction that comes, you know, up front with getting customers onboarded? And we did the model, came out with you know also really strong numbers, even in the bear and bull case, right? For that, and decided to make that change, drop some revenue, of course, off the PL. But in exchange, we've seen a flood of new customers come on board. And then they there's no barrier entry. So their the conversion rates have been really good. I mean, this is exactly kind of the same playbook again, just by looking and identifying opportunities in our business where we can look at pricing and packaging a little bit differently.
SPEAKER_01Wow, this is great. I have like so many questions to keep going on this conversation. I'd like to take one path, which is those types of decisions, once made, require some early indication on whether or not you're on the right track, right? Did we make the right decision? Was our hypothesis? Are we proving that out? Because often waiting until the big revenue nut goes up might be too late, right? So talk to us a little bit about what you do for more early indications so that you can pivot if you need to faster than you know, just waiting for the revenue line to go up.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, you hit it on the head. Revenue is a lagging indicator, right? Like it's too late if you're waiting for that as your indication of success or not. And so, yeah, so really important to create sort of interim checkpoints of am I on the right track? And you can do that up front as you know, and typically where I would use that is here's the hypothesis, here's what we want to do. If we're fine to move forward, then here's the things that we believe we want to have checkpoints at, you know, six months in, we want to see this, three months in, we want to see that. And we'll identify some key metrics in the business that we believe are driving towards the hypothesis that we built out. So, an example in this particular case would be, you know, we believe there's a gonna increase win rates. Well, luckily, win rates is something you can track pretty easily on a monthly basis across your sales team. And so we announce this change, and then we look one month later and we can see did win rates move at all. Two months later, did win rates move at all? And so typically you want to have at least a little bit of a sample size window. So there's an element to that. Some maybe one month might be too tight, depending on some decisions you've made. You might want to give it a quarter or six months, but definitely a shorter time period than the ultimate kind of revenue outcome that you're driving towards.
SPEAKER_02You know, there's been so many things you've talked about, which are incredible practices. When I think about you bringing on someone on your team, and this actually could be great advice to other product leaders out there. You talk about hypothesis, you've talked about setting up good feedback loops about storytelling, the business cases, setting up the right metrics. Where's your head start at? Like when you've got someone, you know, where would you begin? Like, what's the foundation that you set that then all of this builds on?
SPEAKER_00You know, the first thing that I make sure that every PM and organization, and honestly, I should say this like in my career, I've done everything from managed directly just product managers to UX to all of RD to actually I was a CEO of a division within a company. So managing sales and marketing and client services as well. And in all my leadership across all those functions, and especially within the product management discipline, really understanding the business drivers of the company is something that I really focus on instilling into every person as part of their onboarding process. How do we make money, right? What are the big levers within our business that drive the outcomes we want to see? When we look at next year's budget and the PL, what are the assumptions that went into that? Are we expecting that we're gonna double sales? Are we expecting that customers just adopt more of our services? These are all the key drivers that we want to make sure that everybody in that group understands going into it so that they can make smarter decisions.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I want to kind of dig into this a little bit. And because I feel like it's super important, you know, you've got some really good foundations here. And what we haven't talked about, which I think is just inherent in what you're doing, and the reason why you've been successful is that these trade offs that you've talked about and that you're cultivating in your team and the way to think about them, isn't just about the metrics or the financials. It's Really, about what value you're bringing to customers and what you're doing to hurt the relationship with your customers and where the trade-offs you're making. So there's some inherent customer centricity in here that I want to kind of dig into. Talk to us about how you learn either how you're hurting the relationship that makes you want to make these trade-offs or how you're going to increase take rate or win rates because you're learning about the customer themselves to help you make these decisions. Because I think it's all inherent here. We haven't really talked about it, and that's super important. So talk to us a little bit about your sort of this customer centricity and how you cultivate it in your team.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and I think that's an extremely good point. You know, we're nothing happens without the customer getting value out of our product. And so day in and day out, that's what we're working towards. All those metrics, revenue, KPIs, whatever, literally is all driven off of the value that we're creating for customers. And so we do look at how some value point that we've created for customers ties back to that ultimate outcome that we want to see as a business as well. I think that's obviously a key element. The other thing we do is an example that we do often for every single new product launch is we'll go through a process called market validation. In the market validation process, we'll talk to dozens, if it's kind of, you know, enterprise customers, if it's, you know, more SMB or consumer, it might be thousands, you know, of firms. But we'll talk to them to see what are their key pain points that they're having today. We'll pressure test our assumptions around what we're building or proposing to build, I should say. And then propensity to buy, willingness to pay, all those kind of different metrics where we can kind of come out and at the end have a very clear picture of what's the real value prop, what's the real value we're going to provide with a product to them and the problems we're trying to solve. And then we can kind of use that as our north star within our development teams to build towards that. And all those other kind of KPIs kind of key off of that. And so that's really the north star that we use is that constant kind of feedback and communication with our customer. And it doesn't stop once we build it. Of course, you know, we're constantly talking to customers and iterating on our products, and then obviously continue to add more and more value over time. And so that ultimately what drives all those business outcomes we want to see.
SPEAKER_02Can we just take one click down from that? Because I think this does bring this full circle to what you said right in the beginning, which is you're pushing for customer outcomes. That's and you've talked so much about the balance with solving for the business. And you said you're learning from customers, and you said, of course, we're doing this all the time. Just what does a typical week look like in terms of learning for you?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I mean, for me, even in my role, it's trying to talk to uh as many customers as I can in a week. I think that's the pulse, right? That's the pulse of the business is, you know, how are they feeling? What's going on in their minds? And I love talking to customers actually about things even outside the product that we're building too. Because for me, understanding what's keeping them up at night, just in their business in general, even if it's unrelated to our software, what's changes are happening in the organization, what are they worried about with new administration coming in or not worried about? Like all that stuff kind of feeds into having empathy and kind of getting into their heads around how they're operating their business, which helps us make smarter, better business decisions for our clients. And so I really encourage, you know, everybody on our team, especially the product team, of course, to have those conversations as often as possible. It's like, you know, it definitely is a gift. It's like one of my favorite times of the day. I actually like much prefer talking to a customer than talking to folks inside my own company because it's like you're learning something new. Like personally, I'm a lifelong learner. That's something that I wake up every morning, and if I feel like I'm not learning something new, I'm a little bummed. Like, you know, I want to learn. And that's one of the best ways to learn because I feel like our customers are always teaching us something that's new in their business. And so, so yeah, and I try to instill that in the entire organization. You know, that is a question I'll ask a lot of the team. How many customers you talked to last week? Even in sometimes when presenting data, how many customers you talked to? You know, what was the sample size that led you to this conclusion or assumption? I think that's a key driver of a lot of important decisions of the company.
SPEAKER_01For sure. I mean, amen. That was like we love leaders that lead by example here, right? Because I have to say it's a 50-50 chance that a PM is really eager to talk to customers or have access to customers. So they have to go to sort of sales and get a proxy. And we often find teams that are really disconnected from kind of the day-to-day of their customers, right? And the challenges they're facing. And so it starts with the leader for sure. I often see product managers that just don't feel comfortable with it, right? They've been brought up in their career as maybe a technical product manager, maybe came through a PO or an engineering route, and it just was never espoused in their previous roles. Talk to us a little bit about how you help product managers get over maybe some of those hurdles and sort of build the foundation in the company to allow them to have access for one, but then also getting them feeling comfortable and experienced at talking to customers that then leads to good decision making.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I'll kind of fork it into two paths. One is for someone that can get there, and another, I'll give an example of where it didn't work out so well. So to hit on the first point, you have to create the environment where they can talk to customers. And oftentimes when you peel back the onion on why organizations are like that, is they don't trust the product person to come in and help them, right? So what you need to do is turn the view of a product person being a liability in the conversation to being an asset. Like, you know, right. And I would say, like, even when I started at Entra, that was the case as well, where we had to kind of flip that around and get the sales team to a point where they're like, Can I get two product people on this call? How many product people will be like, because they know that they're gonna win the deal because the product person's on there? Like the product person is there to help them, right? And so we had to shift kind of that mindset organizationally. And part of that was obviously teaching the product managers to be more effective on those types of calls, right? You know, you gotta understand the salesperson is trying to close a deal, they're not sitting there wanting to do discovery all day long, you know. And a product person, of course, has some self-serving interest there of like they want to learn more, they want to do discovery, they want to learn. And so they could easily go down a script of a bunch of questions that just derails the sales conversation, right? And so that's not great either. And so what you need to do is really kind of teach that audience piece that I was saying earlier, which is like know your audience, speak to the audience. And while it doesn't mean going out and lying and be like, oh, our roadmap's gonna do all these things for you, don't worry. Like, you know, it's not going to that level, of course. We don't want to be dishonest, but it there is a little bit of salesmanship when you're on a sales call, right? Just like there is with the CS, if you're on the phone with a client services rep of really understanding what's their pain point, they have some urgent need that's going on right now. They don't want to talk about some other feature that they're not using right now, right? So there's an element of being in that moment. And then once you've kind of turned that around where they've seen this, you know, and it's not like an overnight change, like they have to see this kind of play out where you start to see some of the top sales reps who are like, oh yeah, they're bringing the product person in all the time. What's that about? And then all of a sudden the other sales reps are like, I better do that too. They're winning and they're bringing product people in all the time. So you kind of can change the culture that way, of course. That's one big one. I'd also say there's situations where I think you gave a great example of someone who came up maybe through the technical path, maybe was a product owner, not really a product manager per se. And I've inherited folks like that in organizations. And, you know, I come in and I'm like, hey, you got to get great at talking to customers. That is absolutely 100% a requirement of this job as a product manager. And I've had folks say, Well, I don't like talking to customers. That's not my jam, you know, like I like doing this and doing the technical requirements. And so that's a situation where, you know, I've had to have those real conversations that, hey, look, this is part of the being a product manager. So if that's something that's not interesting to you, that's okay. What is interesting to you, and maybe there's a better fit. And I've had a few folks kind of move back into kind of engineering type roles, you know, out of conversations like that, because they just said, I'm just not interested in talking to customers as well. So I firmly believe that's a key part of the job. So I do push on that and try to get people into the right role for what they're passionate about.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, it's kind of hard to imagine being a successful product manager without talking to your customers. So yeah, totally there with you. This is fantastic conversation, that I love that just the breadth of what we've explored here and you know, having all of those examples. I think such great learnings. As we close, what can we brag about you? What's happening? What are you doing now?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, well, now I'm at a company called Entra. We do a legal AI software. One of the biggest things that we've done in the last couple of years that I'm super excited about is we've expanded out of just kind of pure play legal tech software into really building out a platform strategy, a full technology stack, what we call it for the private markets, which in our world corresponds to private equity firms, investment banks, some of the big law firms. So we've kind of expanded out into this broader ecosystem. But now we have, you know, a multitude of solutions when, you know, for many years there was kind of just one kind of core solution that the company had. So taking the company on a multi-product journey, expanding the scope of people that we reach within our customer base. And it's been really exciting. Uh, and today now we actually have over, you know, we're pushing almost a thousand of the largest, you know, private equity clients out there in the market. And so we're knocking on the door of a lot of different companies and winning business. And that's always a fun place to be. It's been exciting to be able to join the company here.
SPEAKER_01Awesome. Well, thank you, Nat, for all of your great advice and like Videa said, stories and all the best to you at Entra. It sounds exciting and it sounds like you're on the right path. So thank you for your time. Thank you so much.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, happy to. Thank you.
SPEAKER_01Thanks for listening to this episode of the Product Rebels Podcast. If you enjoyed this conversation and want to learn more from Product Rebels from companies like Netflix, Amplitude, and beyond, please follow us wherever you listen to podcasts and join us for another impactful interview in about two weeks.