[REPLAY] Tinder, TripAdvisor, and more: Universal Product Lessons

Hey there Product Rebels! If you're a product leader right now, chances are someone in your org has asked you some version of "what's our AI strategy?" in the last month. And chances are, the answer is still murky. We're hearing this from product leaders constantly — there's pressure to ship AI features, but not a lot of clarity on how to move from boardroom excitement to actual product impact.

That's why we're resurfacing this conversation with Ravi Mehta. His Inspire, Validate, Structure, and Ship framework is one of the most practical takes we've heard on turning AI ambition into real outcomes. If anything, it's more relevant now than when we first aired it. Enjoy the re-listen. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

In order to drive change in the organization, you need support from executives. And I think a lot of times product managers and product leaders make the mistake of thinking, you know, if I have a good idea and it's well substantiated and supported by data, then, you know, that's all that I need in order to convince a leader to go with what I think is the right direction moving forward. And I like to encourage people to think about this problem in terms of two dimensions. On one axis, you have alignment. So how aligned are you with the leader's current perspective of the right thing to do? And on the other axis, you have confidence. So, how confident is the leader in your ability to deliver results? And ultimately, convincing leadership is a matter of moving through that map of alignment and confidence. And so, in terms of telling that story and getting that support, you can either do it by making that story more highly aligned with what the executive already believes is the right direction, or by winning their trust and their confidence.

SPEAKER_02 1:07

Hey Product Rebels. Welcome back to another episode of the Product Rebels Podcast, featuring a natural leader in multiple tech industries. We're your host. I'm Heather Samrin. And I'm Didiya Dunamani. Today we are honored to have an exceptional guest joining us, Ravi Meta. Ravi's career began at Microsoft, where he was an early member of the Xbox team with a specific focus on the groundbreaking Xbox Live. This experience fueled his passion for leveraging technology to create immersive experiences and connect communities. Today, Ravi is the co-founder and CEO of Outpace, a groundbreaking company that is revolutionizing the way people learn and grow. Before co-founding Outpace, Ravi held the position of executive in residence at Reforge, where he played a key role in creating the product leadership program and launching the product strategy program. Notable milestones in Robbie's journey include his role as the chief product officer at Tinder, product director at Facebook, and head of consumer product at TripAdvisor. Ravi Meta is a true trailblazer in the industry. His insights, coupled with his strategic mindset and dedication to fostering innovation, have earned him a reputation as thought leader and influencer. Get ready to be inspired as we embark on an engaging conversation with Ravi, delving into the realm of consumer technology, product leadership, and the profound impact of innovation on personal growth. Welcome, Ravi. Ravi, thanks so much for joining us today. We're so excited for this conversation and really excited to hear some of your rebellious activities and behaviors. But thank you for joining.

SPEAKER_00 2:57

Absolutely. Thank you for having me.

SPEAKER_02 2:59

Yeah. The first question we ask everyone that joins us for our podcast sessions is what does product rebel mean to you?

SPEAKER_00 3:08

Yeah, so it's a really interesting question. I had to think about it a little bit. And I think what it means to me is someone who is willing to go against the grain. I think one of the things that I've seen over and over in my career as a product manager and a product leader is that companies can very easily get distracted from serving the customer. I think this is one of the advantages that startups have. It's one of the reasons that consistently big companies get disrupted. Startups start with no data. All they have are a handful of customers. And the thing that they can do to learn is they can talk to the customers, but there's not much else they can do other than that. And so that's the thing that they do. And they often glean really unique insights as a result of that that allow them to solve a customer's needs in a way that a much bigger company, which has the resources to do that, can't always do that. The problem is as companies get bigger and bigger, there starts to be a growing stack of goals that are more about the company than they are about the customer. You know, that could be, you know, what are we trying to achieve for our next fundraising round? Or what numbers have we given to Wall Street? And so what quarterly guidance do we need to hit? And so a lot of, you know, a person's success as a product manager and a product leader gets factored into, you know, are you helping us realize those internal goals that are really important to us? And I think a product rebel is someone who is good at saying, no, no, wait a second. Like let's not focus only on the internal goals. Let's realize that the internal goals will only truly get satisfied in the long run if we serve our customers. So let's go back to the first principles around understanding the customer needs, solving for those needs. And I think a product rebel is someone who has the foresight to do that and the courage to do that and be that advocate for the customer, even when there's a lot happening internally that goes against the grain.

SPEAKER_01 4:51

That is so interesting. It's just like I kind of got goosebumps because I felt like what you're saying is that we all start off life as a rebel, and then forces take away that rebellionness from us and it makes down. Get beat down. And it's also exactly, and you know, there's other things to focus on. It also is true the more senior you get in an organization, it feels like you're you're starting to get pulled away. And it's a real forcing function to stay focused on that customer. So I want to hear how you manage to do that because you've worked for a number of such interesting companies. I I want to hear about all of them. We're probably going to get a chance to talk about a couple, but how did you maintain going from that smaller company focus where it could be like you are naturally a rebel, to how do you maintain that? How do you get your team to maintain that?

SPEAKER_00 5:43

I think the first thing is that it does require discretion in terms of like when's the right time to be a rebel and when isn't the right time to be a rebel. I think oftentimes um, you know, if you come in and you know there's a there's a current heading in a particular direction, and the person who's always kind of going against the grain but not really paying attention to what the company is solving for, then that person can get unheard because they've always got a message that's sort of misaligned with where the company is going. And so I think to be a really effective product rebel, especially within a large organization, it's important to keep a close eye at where is the organization going, what is leadership concerned about, and how can you use that current rather than fight against it. And so that entails looking for opportunities to say, we can think about this a little bit differently. So, you know, if the company's goal is to increase revenue by 10%, going back and saying, well, let's look at you know, what are the levers of revenue? Let's look at how customer value ultimately gets translated into revenue and go back to these specific needs that we aren't solving for for customers that actually allow us to increase revenue in a way that's deeply rooted in the customer needs and not necessarily only focused on the company's needs to drive revenue. And I think what happens, especially with large companies that have a lot of data, is product teams can get into a very experimental mindset where they just run experiments and certain experiments work, other experiments don't work. And then over time, you know, product teams that don't really understand the customer can generate really interesting returns just by having a really nice pipeline of experiments, running those experiments and driving them. But the problem is that when that happens, the product is not driving towards a North Star. The product is getting built sort of organically and without a clear North Star for where the product needs to go. And that can get very distracting and overwhelming for customers. And that typically doesn't show up in the quarterly earnings or you know, in any sort of near-term metrics. But what it does do is it makes the company vulnerable so that when a better competitor comes along that has a much more streamlined and much more focused customer experience, customers are much more willing to switch in the face of an alternative. And so I think it's really important for people to think about you know, what's my leadership trying to accomplish? What are we trying to do as a company? What are our customers trying to do? And then use that to figure out the right time to introduce the ideas and bring things back to that customer mindset to help you get to those really big leaps in terms of goals and those long-term improvements.

SPEAKER_02 8:14

Yeah, I love that. You know, it's it's connecting the dots, right? Making sure you've got that true north or that rudder of, you know, what's the outcome we're looking for short and long term, and how do we leverage experimentation to get there? So love it. Can you tell us a story about it? You've shared a story around TripAdvisor where this sort of happened for you. And I'd love to share that with our listeners because I think it's a really great lesson for all of us to think about.

SPEAKER_00 8:41

Yeah, absolutely. So I was the head of consumer product at TripAdvisor for a number of years, starting in 2012. So right after it had been rolled out from Expedia and then going through until about 2017. TripAdvisor has some things that are part of the culture that are really deeply ingrained. I think one of the reasons has led to the company's success. So it's a company that moves very quickly. Speed wins is one of the mottos of the company. And the other one is, you know, if it's worth doing, it's worth measuring. So it's a very fast, very data-driven, very experimental company. And that has worked really, really well and got TripAdvisor to a point where it was the number one travel destination in terms of total number of travelers visiting the product in a given month. So about 300 million people were visiting the product at the time this particular case took place, and this was in around 2016. But as a result of being so experimental, so focused on conversion, what we were finding was that, you know, as people were coming to the site, either organically through Google, through the search engine optimization that TripAdvisor had done incredibly well, or through paid search, we were developing the product experience so that we could move them as quickly as possible to a booking, so that we could get them to book a hotel or a restaurant or attraction, because that is ultimately how TripAdvisor monetizes. And all of the things that we were using to evaluate successful experiments were focused on that conversion event because that ultimately drove revenue. So, in the goal to drive the highest amount of revenue possible, we were implementing a product experience that worked nicely for the customer in the sense that it got them to where they wanted to go from a conversion standpoint, but made TripAdvisor sort of a step along the way rather than the destination in and of itself. And what that had led to was the company being more and more dependent on Google as a source of traffic. So people were really doing their travel discovery on Google, coming to TripAdvisor to inform their opinions before they booked, and then going on and booking. And so, although TripAdvisor had this very significant role within the travel purchase decision cycle, it wasn't necessarily capturing that value. So we did uh some research that said that something like 70% of all travel bookings at the time were informed by TripAdvisor content, but only a small fraction of those travel bookings were actually happening on the platform. And that was because what was happening was that travelers were going back to Google again and again and again and starting their search there rather than starting their search on TripAdvisor. And so in 2016, we said, you know, we have to solve this problem. We have to create reasons for people to come directly to the site and to engage with TripAdvisor, not just in the moment when they're ready to book, but really throughout the travel planning cycle. And so we decided to implement a travel planning solution, the goal of which was to get people to start their travel planning on TripAdvisor, to save things, to build their itinerary. And so instead of going back to Google, where Google had no prior understanding of their trip plans, they would come back to TripAdvisor to do that. And as a result, we would get more and more direct traffic and become less dependent on those Google-based sources of traffic, organic and paid search. And so we started that with something that was very controversial. Rather than jumping in and running a test and getting something live within a few weeks or a month, we said to the team, actually take a full quarter without shipping any software. Don't worry about launching product. Take a quarter to think about what the TripAdvisor product experience need to look like in the NordStar case where we've achieved this goal of being the hub of a person's travel planning activity. And the deliverable for the team was not working product, but was actually a strategy document. We defined very clearly what that strategy document was. And it was incredibly liberating for the team because the team, the product leaders, engineering leaders, design, user research, data science all got together and said, we've got the time and the space to really think this through. And we've also got permission to not be constrained by past tests and past tribal wisdom of what works and doesn't work. And they spent a significant part of the quarter really thinking deeply about the problem, doing user research. And we came out of that with a very clear North Star of where we wanted to go. And from that, we then broke that down into iterative pieces that we could build quickly and iteratively so that we could move with that TripAdvisor philosophy of moving quickly and doing so in a very data-driven manner, but do it in a way that was guided by a North Star that everyone understood and everyone was aligned with. And what's really excited about that process is that that ability to take some time and space away and create a North Star created a vision for the product, which is largely reflected in the product today. So even years later, the foundational work that that team did has guided how TripAdvisor's product has evolved overall.

SPEAKER_01 13:44

You know, as I listen to this, I expect others are also thinking, what a luxury, right? Just the when the way that you described being able to step back and take the time, truly learn, truly think about this in a way that kind of goes beyond, I've got a few days to make a decision about what we do next. What do you think were the elements of was it leadership? Was it because you're in an interviewer position with revenue? Like what were there other sort of secret source elements that that made this happen? Because clearly you gave the direction, but the organization also went along with it. And I know that that's really hard to do in so many places. So I'm trying to understand what else was in place in order for you to be able to have this beautiful time to truly learn and set that North Star.

SPEAKER_02 14:36

Especially when you're trying to meet short-term revenue goals. I'm sure this was a really big change.

SPEAKER_00 14:40

It was a very significant change from how the team typically worked. So we did a couple of things. One, there was a growing realization that this was a problem that we needed to solve. And so before getting to that point where we said, let's put aside this time, we were very clear about framing this problem and why this different approach was very important to making sure that we made progress and why, if we sort of did what we normally did in terms of product development, it was liable to result in something where we got some incremental gains, but we weren't really solving the root of the issue. So the first thing was being very clear about the problem, framing that problem, and articulating why an alternative approach is really important in this case, relative to the way that we had typically built software. The second thing was to say, look, we're not gonna take an entire engineering team offline for a quarter. But we all know, and as product managers were familiar with this, there's lots of technical debt. And you know, every single quarter we're striving to figure out like what is the technical debt that we actually have time to address versus the feature work that we want to get done. Here we were able to say, we're gonna spend a lot of time this quarter thinking about what needs to get built, what the North Star is, and that's actually gonna free up the engineering team to evaluate what is the technical debt that we need to work on during this quarter. And we focused on the technical debt that we would need in order to implement the travel planning functionality. And that largely revolved around the saving system. So the save system at TripAdvisor was something that TripAdvisor had implemented years earlier, but the code hadn't been touched in years, and there were some concerns about scalability and whether or not it would actually work with this travel planning use case. And so we said, all right, you know, those concerns are totally fair. Let's spend time this quarter working on technical debt and then building our North Star strategy so that we're making progress, but we're making progress in a different way than before. And so that really aligned a lot of different perspectives together and gave folks what they wanted. The third thing was to be very clear about what the deliverable is going to be. And so rather than saying, hey, we're gonna implement a strategy or we're gonna define a strategy during this quarter, and people weren't really clear what that meant. We actually said, you know, page by page, here's what the strategy document is going to be. It's going to include, you know, what is the goal that we're solving for? What are the key use cases that we're solving for? What are the use cases that we're not solving for? And then very critically, one thing that I've come to believe very strongly is that vision is visual. And so it's very hard to create a vision for a product without some sort of wireframes or design. And so we said part of the strategy document is going to be 20 or 30 wireframes that clearly articulate what the North Star is so that we're all on the same page about what we're going to build. And that was a key unlock because that made it very clear what we were striving for and what the end deliverable would be and why that would be important for the company to get everyone aligned.

SPEAKER_01 17:34

So cool. I just think there's a couple of things that that really just sort of like uh leapt out at me, which is often we talk about strategy and it's this amorphous thing, and we're trying to buy time to work on something. I love the fact that you said, I am going to tell you exactly what this is going to look like once we've done the work. I that is such a great lesson.

SPEAKER_00 17:56

And the um the wireframing thing is important. It's it's counterintuitive for for product teams. But the analogy I like to use is if you go to an architect and you say, I want to build a house, and they say, Well, I'm not going to give you blueprints, I'm just going to give you a document that describes the house I'm going to build for you. There is no way you would sign up to actually pay for that build because you wouldn't really understand what the end product was going to look like. And so blueprints serve a very valuable purpose of they help you to visualize what the end product is going to be. Wireframes serve that same purpose. And I don't think any vision or strategy document is complete without a blueprint of the product. And so it's not complete without wireframes.

SPEAKER_02 18:34

Yeah, totally agree. I want to dig into your first sort of element of success, which is just what I translated as sort of creating this platform. You know, one of the things that's really challenging, especially for folks that may be a little less experienced than you, right, that are trying to lead big change in organizations. It's figuring out the best way to establish that platform that gets people okay or accepting of sort of change and risk, right? Getting people feeling comfortable with that. Talk to us a little bit about, you know, if we have a product leader listening today or a product manager listening today that sees a change is needed. What are some of the tips and tricks that you have in helping them define a platform for change, but also getting it, getting commitment on that change, uh that prospect of change?

SPEAKER_00 19:30

Yeah, it's a really good question. I think there's a few elements to that. The top level, I think, first principle is that in order to drive change in the organization, you need support from executives. You ideally need support from your boss, you need support from other executives within the business. And I think a lot of times product managers and product leaders make the mistake of thinking, you know, if I have a good idea and it's well substantiated and it's supported by data, then you know, that's all that I need in order to convince a leader to go with what I think is the right direction moving forward. And I like to encourage people to think about this problem in terms of two dimensions. On one axis, you have alignment. So, how aligned are you with the leader's current perspective of the right thing to do? And on the other axis, you have confidence. So, how confident is the leader in your ability to deliver results? And ultimately, convincing leadership is a matter of moving through that map of alignment and confidence. And so if you're highly out of line, so you're highly misaligned with what a leader currently thinks is the right direction, it's nearly impossible to convince them to do something if they don't already have confidence in you and they aren't willing to go out on a limb with you. And so that's really important is to think about that. So, in terms of telling that story and getting that support, you can either do it by making that story more highly aligned with what the executive already believes is the right direction, or by winning their trust and their confidence. So they'll support you so that even if they don't currently agree with your perspective, they're willing to say, I'm I'm willing to go out on a limb for you because you've proven to me time and time again, you have the track record of saying, of coming to me with surprising and controversial ideas and showing the impact that they can have. So I think that that is that first thing is to understand and assess where are you on that spectrum with the leader that you're trying to convince. And then based on that, you can figure out what are the techniques and the strategies in order to either get more aligned or to gain that confidence. And once you can get that equation right, all of the other things are important, but they get much easier because you've got the right context to be able to get that support that you need.

SPEAKER_01 21:43

You know, I think it's a really good tool as well for like maybe looking back at some decisions that didn't go as well and kind of trying to map into that alignment and confidence axes like what was missing, where was I? And it's such a great tool for all the way from leadership to junior. PMs when a meeting didn't go well, what was the gap there? So I love it from a retrospective perspective as well. And I'm gonna go use it myself.

SPEAKER_00 22:09

So absolutely, it's a great way to think about it. And then, you know, that can help you understand very specifically where I should focus on next time, especially if you're engaging with that same person.

SPEAKER_01 22:19

Absolutely, absolutely. So I want to ask you, you you moved from TripAdvisor to Tinder. And such a, you know, I'm so I'm like, okay, that's very different. That's a little different. I guess you're still helping people achieve some goals. But tell us, tell us a little bit about um what that transition was like, very fast growing. What did you take from TripAdvisor? What really stuck when you went from this very specific industry to a very different one? And what did you find yourself having to do completely differently? Um with this type of, you know, still consumer, but with a very different um set of outcomes that you're trying to achieve.

SPEAKER_00 23:01

So what's interesting is that there's a a lot more similarities than you would expect. So a key part of TripAdvisor is recommendations. When someone comes to the product, how do you recommend the right places for them to travel to, the right places to book? Tinder, the core thing is how do you recommend the right person, people for that particular person to see so that they can decide whether to swipe right or swipe left. Another thing is user-generated content is the heart of both experiences. And Tinder, it's the profile, and in TripAdvisor, it's the reviews. And I think that that is that's one of the things that gets me very excited about different products that are all around consumer, because I think that they often share more than people recognize. Because as people, you know, we're all similar, right? There's an underlying psychology, there's underlying behavior, underlying utility and value that we're driving for within our lives. And as product experts, I think we can learn a lot by not just looking at what are the products in our domain that are doing really well, but going outside our domain and getting inspired by that. And so that was a one I was just really excited and interested in you know, how do you think about what the next generation of social discovery and dating looks like? A lot of you know how younger people interact and how they meet each other is changing due to social media. Tinder was one step in that direction. I think there's going to continue to be different changes. So big important problem. And then consumer products at scale often share some really important elements where you know, if you can map kind of one domain to another, you can get to some interesting ways of thinking about things. So those are a couple of things that excited me about the opportunity at Tinder. I think in terms of you know things that were that were really different, is you know, ultimately the goal at TripAdvisor is for someone to plan a trip and book their travel. And so it's not a social, social goal. It's actually a transactional commerce goal where ultimately the important thing at Tinder is people matching with each other, getting into interesting conversations and eventually meeting and dating. And so it's important to think about those value functions differently. And the process of helping a person make a travel decision are really different than the process of helping a person get into an interesting conversation. And so, you know, those are a couple of things that were similar, but a couple of things that were also different. Happy to dive into more details about that.

SPEAKER_02 25:27

Yes, I think that would be great. One thing, though, that I am observing that I really appreciate is that the way you transitioned was more so about how to think about consumer behavior overall and some of the things you learned about sort of psychology and sitting in the customer shoes, as opposed to what I think Vinnie and I see a lot of is trying to translate process from an old company to a new company and really be thinking about how do I make a difference in this company by implementing a process that I've done in the past, right? That has been successful, as opposed to let's think about the the customer segment and sitting in the customer shoes as my first way to think about value and generating value in this role that I'm in, my new role that I'm in, right? It's you're first going to the customer as opposed to process, which I think is refreshing in a lot of ways. So I really appreciate that. One thing we always like to ask of product leaders that come on the show is to talk a little bit about maybe one lesson learned, right? Something that you, you know, man, if I were to change that or do that again, I'd probably do it differently. I'd love to just hear of a lesson learned that maybe others can learn from you.

SPEAKER_00 26:46

So one of the things I did before I started at Tinder was I talked to a relationship therapist who worked with a lot of people who were in their late 20s to early 30s. And a lot of what they wanted counseling on and guidance on was how to meet the right person. And so what was interesting about that set of conversations with that relationship therapist was I got to hear sort of what are the symptoms of dating and dating apps when they don't work. And one of the things that he talked a lot about was burnout. And so he said, look, a lot of people go in, they want to meet someone, they go in with a head full of steam, they get you know profile set up on all the dating apps, and then they spend hours a day swiping. And two weeks later, after a couple of dates and a lot of conversations, they're exhausted because they feel like they didn't necessarily get the value out of that time spent. And so I went into the Tinder uh role.

SPEAKER_02 27:40

I'm one of those, by the way.

SPEAKER_00 27:42

It's an incredibly challenging.

SPEAKER_02 27:44

I did meet my husband online, so that's pretty I'm pretty shocked that I did that. But yes, I I'm I'm listening and I'm nodding with everything you're saying right now.

SPEAKER_00 27:52

And so what's interesting about that is people take breaks, they get burnt out and they have to come back to it. And a lot of times it works for folks, but it works for folks after a couple of bat bats. Like you've got to like kind of go back and forth. And what's interesting is like going into the role, I had that perspective. You know, it was a very incomplete perspective. It was just based on a couple of conversations, and the team there had done a lot more detailed analysis. And I looked for like, you know, are there signs of this in the data? And there are, you know, dating apps have very high churn rates for social products, you know, relative to you know Facebook and Snap and others, the churn rates are you know incredibly low. Naturally, the churn rates are going to be higher for dating products because once a person finds someone, they don't need to use the product anymore. But what's interesting is once you start to zoom into those churn rates, you see that actually the majority of churn is not people that have been successful in finding someone and don't need the product anymore. It's more people that are burning out and need to need to take a break. And so one of the key things that I focused on when I got to Tinder is how do we create a more retentive experience? What are the things that we can do in order to help with that burnout and give people reasons to stay in the product when they weren't necessarily making the progress that they wanted to on that use case around dating? Because it does take time to find the right person. And we did some really interesting strategy work, made some, I think, significant progress in terms of defining what the North Star was. And I think the thing to answer the question that I would have done differently is it was actually hard to get the organization aligned around that because there was such a specific way that Tinder worked that any changes to that was naturally going to lead to some decrease in key metrics. Anything that you did to get into the get in the way of the core flywheel around swiping, matching, talking was necessarily going to reflect itself in key product metrics, but was something that I felt like was important to think about, you know, what is the long term? So it goes back to the start of the conversation around, you know, are we solving internally for the metrics that our business cares about, which might be things around revenue or things about engagement that we know drives revenue, versus are we focusing on the fundamentals of the customer? And the customers are constantly evolving, in part, especially for successful products, in part because they're using our product and they've been so successful with it. And so I think, you know, looking back, you know, I probably could have done a better job of understanding how to build more alignment around that idea that it's important to think about the value that we're creating differently and that, you know, the shortest possible engagement from a person arriving, swiping, matching, and chatting is not necessarily the thing that creates long-term retention and creates a sort of experience that people don't get burnt out from. And so that was something that got me to reflect on this idea of alignment and confidence and how to really think about navigating that map when you're trying to advocate for change within the organization. And so, you know, reflecting on my time at Tinder, I think that that's something that I could have done better.

SPEAKER_01 30:51

I think that's so interesting. I love that that that's how you evolved that axes because I think it's so true. Like, what can I have done differently, even if you're successful? Which one of these axes do I lean on to go faster or be more effective? And there's something else that you've talked about before that I also think is is so important, and you've talked about customer all the way through this, and that is in terms of persuasion and in terms of getting people on the same page. And, you know, one of the things that Heather and I often talk about is make customer the center. And I love the way that you've talked about that. I would love for you to share sort of how you bring and make customer the the center of those conversations and those decisions.

SPEAKER_00 31:35

Yeah, so one hack that I found that works really well is product teams will do user research and then they share that user research typically in like a hundred slide deck, right? They want to capture every single element of that user research. There was, we asked 30 questions, here's all the things that we got. Here's all that we have and you know, 50 comments we got. And so you have a hundred, you know, you have a hundred slides, and then you've got like all of these comments, you've got all of these different cuts and segmentation of the data. And then, you know, the team might do a big readout of that data, and then everyone forgets. It kind of fades into the the background. And the thing that I found that's a really good hack for that is to record the customer sessions and put together a really quick highlight reel. So one to two minutes long of the best quotes from customers and start with that and share that and get everyone in the company to watch that. Show that at your company meetings or in your product product meetings. It doesn't take a lot of time. And seeing the faces of customers, talking in their own words about how they're experiencing the product is often like a complete unlock for people, especially within large organizations where you haven't had the chance to be face to face with a customer in a long time. And in that way, the nice thing there is when you're debating a topic, it's less about my opinion versus your opinion. It's more about what is the customer's opinion? What is the customer's perspective? And it's much harder for executives to argue with customers than it is for executives to argue with the product managers on their team.

SPEAKER_02 33:11

Absolutely. We love that. Well, there you have it. There's the best rebel hack you could possibly imagine is bringing the customer into the room, some way, shape, or form. And how easy is that, right? And oftentimes I think we overlook how easy that is. And so wonderful advice. Robbie, thank you so much. I uh what can we promote for you these days? We know you've gotten a new, you've started this new endeavor, which I think is really interesting. I went out there today just to take a look. Talk a little bit about it.

SPEAKER_00 33:42

Yeah, definitely. So we recently launched the new version of Outpace. So a couple of years ago, I started a company called Outpace focused on helping to democratize access to one-on-one coaching. One of the things that we found as we were building Outpace was that we were working with generative AI to help make coaches more efficient. And we found that that technology had gotten to a point where you could actually create a completely AI-based coaching experience and have that, you know, not be as good as a live coach. Like there's certain things that live coaches can do that AI can't, but for orders of magnitude less in terms of cost, you can get an experience that starts to approach that. And so we launched about six weeks ago our Outpace AI product, which is an AI coaching experience specifically for product managers and product leaders. Our first program is called Leveling Up as a Product Leader. It consists of 25 different AI guided sessions. Each session has 10 or 15 minutes of audio on key topics like prioritization, road mapping, strategic thinking. You go through those sessions, you answer some hands-on exercises, and then you can work with an AI coach to really refine, refine things and get some hands-on feedback. And it's pretty remarkable what's possible with generative AI today. So we'd love people to check that out. And if you have any questions about it, you know, feel free to reach out to me. I'm pretty accessible on LinkedIn. I also, um you can reach me on my site at uh ravi-meta.com.

SPEAKER_01 35:02

That's so fabulous. Unless you put us out of a job, in which case, you know, we're gonna be with those actors on strike right now. It's okay. We're we're good. Um Ravi, we just the time's flown by. Um, this has been such a fantastic conversation. We so appreciate this. We could speak for hours with you. Um, this is wonderful. Thank you so much for being with us today. Thanks, Ravi.

SPEAKER_00 35:26

Thank you so much for having me. I really enjoyed the conversation.

SPEAKER_01 35:36

Thanks for listening to this episode of the Product Rebels Podcast.

SPEAKER_02 35:39

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