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Building Marketo and the Art of Product Design - Glen Lipka
Episode 37 • 17th June 2024 • RevOps FM • Justin Norris
00:00:00 00:55:40

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I have a fascination with how SaaS products actually get made—especially those that become institutions in the software landscape.

As users, we become deeply familiar with these products, the nitty-gritty of how they work, and what it's like to live inside them. People base entire careers on these platforms.

What we usually DON'T see is the backstory:

  • How do these great products get designed?
  • What were the decisions and trade-offs along the way?
  • How do they catch on?
  • How do you create lovable features?
  • What causes great products to often stagnate?

Today's guest is a legendary product leader and innovator. As the first employee of Marketo, Glen Lipka led the product team during a critical early phase, building many of its still most-beloved features.

This episode is packed with Marketo lore, product design insights, and lessons about how to build a product that users love.

Thanks to Our Sponsor

Many thanks to the sponsor of this episode - Knak.

If you don't know them (you should), Knak is an amazing email and landing page builder that integrates directly with your marketing automation platform.

You set the brand guidelines and then give your users a building experience that’s slick, modern and beautiful. When they’re done, everything goes to your MAP at the push of a button.

What's more, it supports global teams, approval workflows, and it’s got your integrations. Click the link below to get a special offer just for my listeners.

Try Knak

About Today's Guest

Glen Lipka is a 25+ year veteran of product innovation and design. As Chief Design Officer and first employee at Marketo, he built the flagship product. He has held numerous other product leadership roles and is currently VP of Product Design for Crowdstrike.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/glenlipka/

Key Topics

  • [00:00] - Introduction
  • [01:14] - Glen’s start at Marketo
  • [02:56] - Marketo’s first features
  • [13:36] - Product differentiation
  • [20:37] - Developing the concept of marketing automation
  • [26:00] - Why great products start to suck
  • [40:46] - Hubspot as a product company
  • [44:19] - AI

Resource Links

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Transcripts

Justin Norris:

Welcome to RevOps FM, everyone.

Justin Norris:

You know, Martech has been a huge part of my career, especially the Marketo

Justin Norris:

platform, and when you've been using a piece of software for more than a

Justin Norris:

decade, you know it inside and out.

Justin Norris:

It's like an old friend.

Justin Norris:

There's the stuff you like, the stuff you hate, the stuff that's irritating,

Justin Norris:

but you tolerate it, that sort of thing.

Justin Norris:

And I have a fascination for how these products actually get made.

Justin Norris:

You know, like what were the decisions, what were the trade offs along the way?

Justin Norris:

How do these great products get designed?

Justin Norris:

How do they catch on?

Justin Norris:

And then also what makes them stagnant?

Justin Norris:

What makes them lose energy?

Justin Norris:

And so to chat about this, we have with us today, a man who was instrumental

Justin Norris:

in designing Marketo in the early days.

Justin Norris:

He was literally the first employee.

Justin Norris:

At Marketo building many of its first and still most beloved features.

Justin Norris:

And since then, he's held product leadership roles at companies like

Justin Norris:

Engagio treasure data, and most recently CrowdStrike where he is a VP

Justin Norris:

of product design today, Glenn Lipka.

Justin Norris:

I am so glad to have you on the show.

Glen Lipka:

Thanks for having me Justin.

Glen Lipka:

It's a pleasure

Glen Lipka:

to be here.

Justin Norris:

I would love just to start off with a little bit of the history

Justin Norris:

about how you got started at Marketo.

Glen Lipka:

I had been working at Intuit, in 2006 and, a friend of mine,

Glen Lipka:

named Lisa Sheehan, who's a recruiter, was putting together the founding team

Glen Lipka:

for Marketo, and she thought that.

Glen Lipka:

I would hit it off with them, but she said they didn't actually have a role for me.

Glen Lipka:

they were just hiring engineers, but she said, go meet with them anyway.

Glen Lipka:

and so I met, John Miller and Phil Fernandez and David Mirandi.

Glen Lipka:

They were still unpacking boxes from, purchases they made from their series.

Glen Lipka:

Hey, you know, the, desks and the chairs, and they were just putting them together

Glen Lipka:

in a San Mateo, super tiny office.

Glen Lipka:

and.

Glen Lipka:

We hit it off and I think Phil may have liked the fact that I was a network

Glen Lipka:

administrator, and I could run the network, and install the exchange server

Glen Lipka:

and do operational IT things in addition to product management and design.

Glen Lipka:

so I think he thought, it was a

Glen Lipka:

bargain.

Glen Lipka:

so they ended up hiring me and then right after me was, Crash Tongue, which

Glen Lipka:

is one of the best engineers I've ever worked with, Paul Abrams, who was my

Glen Lipka:

partner in the entire UI development, Wei Liu and several other people who

Glen Lipka:

became the founding, engineering team.

Glen Lipka:

It was mostly like me and.

Glen Lipka:

10 engineers in those that first year or two, along with Kelly Abner, who

Glen Lipka:

is the first marketer, using Marketo and he was working with John Miller.

Glen Lipka:

John had already been blogging at that point.

Glen Lipka:

but Kelly was my proto marketer that if I could automate what he was doing.

Glen Lipka:

that would be a successful

Glen Lipka:

product.

Justin Norris:

So that kind of ties into the next question I was going to

Justin Norris:

ask, which is like the process that you followed and you have shared on your

Justin Norris:

blog, which I'll link to in the show notes, some of the like really early.

Justin Norris:

versions of Marketo when it was like an AdWords management tool and maybe

Justin Norris:

just walk us through like the seed idea and then maybe the process of

Justin Norris:

getting to what we might recognize today is the Marketo platform.

Glen Lipka:

With the first six months we built what is best described as

Glen Lipka:

a replacement for Google AdWords.

Glen Lipka:

Like you would use this interface instead of the Google AdWords interface because

Glen Lipka:

Google AdWords was too complicated.

Glen Lipka:

And I tried to tell David Mirandi and Phil Fernandez, that it wasn't going to work,

Glen Lipka:

but it doesn't matter how hard it was.

Glen Lipka:

And the reason is if you looked at a marketer's resume at the time, it said

Glen Lipka:

things like, I know how to order t shirts.

Glen Lipka:

I know how to make brochures.

Glen Lipka:

I could, make our website and I know how to use Google AdWords.

Glen Lipka:

It was one of the few hard skills that somebody had, and you can't just take

Glen Lipka:

that away and say, Instead of Google AdWords, I'll just be good at Marketo

Glen Lipka:

AdWords, which that didn't make any sense, but they wanted to build it

Glen Lipka:

and they felt really strong about it.

Glen Lipka:

And one of the pieces that was needed was this landing page editor.

Glen Lipka:

and at the time all landing page editors worked the same way.

Glen Lipka:

It was, you had a template, you clicked on a section of the template and it

Glen Lipka:

popped up a tiny MCE rich text editor.

Glen Lipka:

And I said, why does it have to work like that?

Glen Lipka:

Maybe it could be more like PowerPoint.

Glen Lipka:

I just drag and drop stuff.

Glen Lipka:

everyone knows how to use PowerPoint.

Glen Lipka:

It's super easy.

Glen Lipka:

You just drag things around and there's nothing to think about.

Glen Lipka:

And because I was talking to people about their landing pages and it

Glen Lipka:

wasn't that much on them, it wasn't like a long, super scrolling page,

Glen Lipka:

but then the team, they were just like, yeah, but how does that work?

Glen Lipka:

That's not how HTML works.

Glen Lipka:

And I was like, actually, it is how HTML works.

Glen Lipka:

Let me explain absolute positioning and CSS.

Glen Lipka:

And man, the engineers, they hated CSS.

Glen Lipka:

So I had to be the CSS person for the first year and, you know,

Glen Lipka:

explain exactly how That would work.

Glen Lipka:

so we launched that product and the customer said, yeah, we're not doing this

Glen Lipka:

Google AdWords thing, but that landing page editor that looks really cool.

Glen Lipka:

I'm willing to pay for that, but I don't want the.

Glen Lipka:

Google AdWords part.

Glen Lipka:

So we ended up erasing all the code that we had written for the Google AdWords

Glen Lipka:

thing, it had word buckets and all sorts of synonyms and antonyms and crazy

Glen Lipka:

stuff, and we just erased all of it.

Glen Lipka:

And what was interesting for years, it had search in the URL.

Glen Lipka:

And it was only like a vestige of that old code that we had erased.

Glen Lipka:

We just threw all of that away and it was just gone.

Glen Lipka:

And then because I had gained some credibility with the landing page

Glen Lipka:

editor, they gave me a little bit more room to say what we're doing next.

Glen Lipka:

And the use case in essence was pretty simple.

Glen Lipka:

we had a focus group.

Glen Lipka:

And there was, some marketers in the room and they were talking about these

Glen Lipka:

landing pages and about, Salesforce and Salesforce had an auto responder

Glen Lipka:

for email and they said, all I want is when they fill out that form on the

Glen Lipka:

landing page is to send them an email.

Glen Lipka:

Wait a week, send them another email, right?

Glen Lipka:

Why is that so hard?

Glen Lipka:

And she was doing this thing with her hand, send an email,

Glen Lipka:

wait a week, send another email.

Glen Lipka:

And it made me think of Minority Report with Tom Cruise, where he had that

Glen Lipka:

computer interface where he's using his hands and swiping things around.

Glen Lipka:

And I said, Wouldn't it be cool if it was like that, like a hologram interface?

Glen Lipka:

And the engineers were like, no, that's physically impossible.

Glen Lipka:

And I was like, I have a dream, man.

Glen Lipka:

And so I.

Glen Lipka:

created a trick of psychology of it would feel like you're, rolling up your

Glen Lipka:

sleeves, putting your hand into the screen and grabbing something and moving it.

Glen Lipka:

And just like the way that person said, send an email,

Glen Lipka:

wait a week, send another email.

Glen Lipka:

And I said, that's what Mercado is going to feel like.

Glen Lipka:

It's going to feel like you're a kinetic reaching into the computer And making

Glen Lipka:

things move and that use case, which is really a very simple use case.

Glen Lipka:

You fill out the form, send an email, wait a week, send an email.

Glen Lipka:

That was the use case that made smart campaigns.

Glen Lipka:

That was the use case that made Marketo.

Glen Lipka:

but once you sit and think what does it mean to send an email, wait a week,

Glen Lipka:

send an email from a landing page?

Glen Lipka:

How do you do that?

Glen Lipka:

And I said, well, first we need the landing page editor.

Glen Lipka:

And I felt pretty good about that.

Glen Lipka:

we had something.

Glen Lipka:

Then I said, well, we need a form editor.

Glen Lipka:

So I had to make a form editor to put on top of the landing page.

Glen Lipka:

Then it was like, well, it's going to have to send an email.

Glen Lipka:

So we need an email editor.

Glen Lipka:

And I actually was spending an enormous amount of time figuring out

Glen Lipka:

what HTML would even work for me.

Glen Lipka:

In email clients, which at the time was just a completely wild west.

Glen Lipka:

today you would just have your templates, but, maybe it was constant contact and,

Glen Lipka:

it was me and those guys were figuring out like what stuff would work and what

Glen Lipka:

wouldn't work across different, clients.

Glen Lipka:

It was very much like, what can you do in JavaScript with different

Glen Lipka:

browsers, except it was email.

Glen Lipka:

and different email clients.

Glen Lipka:

And so, I needed that email editor and then I needed something to just glue

Glen Lipka:

it together to say, okay, well, I'm gonna wait till they fill out the form.

Glen Lipka:

I'm then I need some way of describing the text now, everyone in competitive.

Glen Lipka:

Circle said, Oh, you do that with a Vizio like diagram.

Glen Lipka:

And I asked Kelly Abner, I was like, do you like Vizio?

Glen Lipka:

And he was like, Oh no, I hate it.

Glen Lipka:

This thing gets incredibly complicated and it's really difficult to manage.

Glen Lipka:

And God forbid you want to edit it later.

Glen Lipka:

You're going to break everything but it's, what are you going to do?

Glen Lipka:

It's the only thing that's there.

Glen Lipka:

I was like, well, I don't know, come up with another way.

Glen Lipka:

And so I just started.

Glen Lipka:

making designs of how it could be.

Glen Lipka:

And I said, here's a, series of steps.

Glen Lipka:

And one of the ways Phil Fernandez put it is the way I was designing it was

Glen Lipka:

as if it was a programming language and that the Visio world was using

Glen Lipka:

procedural language terminology, and he called it a CISC architecture C I C S

Glen Lipka:

and it was like complex instructions, whereas what I was building was

Glen Lipka:

more object oriented programming and it was RISC architecture, random.

Glen Lipka:

So you can think of like an Intel chip as being a CISC chip, whereas like, a

Glen Lipka:

little mini chip that only does Wi Fi, like from ARM or somebody, that's a RISC.

Glen Lipka:

So the RISC architecture and the CISC architecture became our mental

Glen Lipka:

model of what it is that we were doing, and that very quickly what

Glen Lipka:

a smart campaign was started coming together as this, kinetic feel from

Glen Lipka:

Minority Report, Minority Report.

Glen Lipka:

And just this simple use case of send an email, wait a week, send another email.

Glen Lipka:

there were a few different influential programs.

Glen Lipka:

IBM had one called Rational Rose.

Glen Lipka:

and it kind of influenced the way the smart list works.

Glen Lipka:

iTunes, influenced the way, I thought about like a dynamic list versus a

Glen Lipka:

static list because iTunes had, you know, show me all of the songs that are

Glen Lipka:

jazz, or show me just these 10 songs.

Glen Lipka:

So I was taking some cues from iTunes.

Glen Lipka:

From these IBM tools I'd used a decade before.

Glen Lipka:

but a lot of it was just like, it just made sense to me.

Glen Lipka:

structurally I've always designed a customizable platform style user

Glen Lipka:

interfaces, as opposed to sitemap page by page by page structure.

Glen Lipka:

and it pretty quickly.

Glen Lipka:

made sense.

Glen Lipka:

Although I would say that Kelly Abner really didn't want to use it at first.

Glen Lipka:

It was incredibly buggy anyone who's used the first year of

Glen Lipka:

Marketo knows how buggy that system was barely hung on for dear life.

Glen Lipka:

it would work about as often as it wouldn't work.

Glen Lipka:

but the whole concept of you could do this, that it was your creativity

Glen Lipka:

that was creating what was happening.

Glen Lipka:

Was so powerful that it didn't matter whether it worked or not worked.

Glen Lipka:

The promise was that you could do it yourself.

Glen Lipka:

A lot of, marketers, they had a person in marketing who is the web developer.

Glen Lipka:

this person spoke Klingon.

Glen Lipka:

This person was, move.

Glen Lipka:

I'll just do it.

Glen Lipka:

Don't talk to me about the website.

Glen Lipka:

they hated this person.

Glen Lipka:

They hated the web developer because they did not have that skill.

Glen Lipka:

They didn't have the capability of doing these technical things.

Glen Lipka:

And in their minds, it was like, I just want to fix a comma on the webpage.

Glen Lipka:

Why is this so hard?

Glen Lipka:

Or why is it so hard to send an email?

Glen Lipka:

And all of a sudden there was this tool that said, no, you, could

Glen Lipka:

be in charge, you could do this.

Glen Lipka:

I think a lot of products don't understand how to connect with people

Glen Lipka:

and make them the hero of the story.

Glen Lipka:

it's not like people just want a button where it all just works.

Glen Lipka:

they want to do it.

Glen Lipka:

They want to be a part of the solution.

Glen Lipka:

And Marquette's entire ethos was, that we're putting you in the driver's seat.

Glen Lipka:

You are a creative, technical person, and that you're not just ordering t shirts.

Glen Lipka:

You're not just, writing copy, but you can actually make experiences.

Glen Lipka:

was a really big deal.

Glen Lipka:

And it started doing well relatively

Glen Lipka:

quickly.

Justin Norris:

could tell you as a user, picking up Marketo signed

Justin Norris:

my first contract just at the end of 2011 starting using it.

Justin Norris:

went through that experience that you described.

Justin Norris:

Like in the beginning it's, complicated and it's weird, but I used to tell

Justin Norris:

people there's like a Zen moment that you have where all of a sudden like

Justin Norris:

everything falls into place and you're like, Oh, like the world opens up.

Justin Norris:

Like I can do anything now, just by dragging these things.

Justin Norris:

And it was an incredibly empowering experience as a non technical marketer

Justin Norris:

who was sort of technically inclined.

Justin Norris:

Just like you said, it gave you those capabilities.

Justin Norris:

and that was enormously empowering.

Justin Norris:

I want to just double click cause I'm really fascinated by the, two

Justin Norris:

visual paradigms that you mentioned.

Justin Norris:

I think of it as the bowl of spaghetti model.

Justin Norris:

You called it probably more charitably, the Vizio style, like flow chart diagram

Justin Norris:

model, and then the more linear model.

Justin Norris:

And it feels like people split into camps.

Justin Norris:

And today, like even today, we still see, like there was Marketo, but

Justin Norris:

sort of Zapier's followed a similar linear format and Mercado does.

Justin Norris:

Over on the.

Justin Norris:

Vizio side, you know, you have Eloqua and Salesforce flow and Trey.

Justin Norris:

do you still feel the same?

Justin Norris:

like if you had to do it all over again, you would pick this model,

Justin Norris:

or do you see some strengths and weaknesses between the two paradigms?

Glen Lipka:

Well, the reason to pick it in the beginning has everything

Glen Lipka:

to do with differentiation.

Glen Lipka:

It was, Elko was a big player.

Glen Lipka:

they were the dominant 600 pound gorilla and, responses was also

Glen Lipka:

a very strong player at the time.

Glen Lipka:

And when you can't just come in and say, Hey, you know, that other software you

Glen Lipka:

use, well, we do about 10 percent of it.

Glen Lipka:

well, what are they going to do?

Glen Lipka:

They're going to say no.

Glen Lipka:

So you need something.

Glen Lipka:

And Bill Bench had said something very wise, which is, I need to be able to

Glen Lipka:

go to someone and say, if you don't have X and you don't have shit, right?

Glen Lipka:

I need to tell them that and I'll make them believe it, but

Glen Lipka:

it has to be plausible of like you have to have this thing.

Glen Lipka:

And so what I found is some people were used to the Vizio

Glen Lipka:

charts and that was fine, but it wasn't like the linear was worse.

Glen Lipka:

I thought it was better for management and maybe a little worse for giving a demo.

Glen Lipka:

But it wasn't like night and day.

Glen Lipka:

It was, you could get your job done either way.

Glen Lipka:

So the perfect design differentiation is something that actually doesn't matter.

Glen Lipka:

That's perfect.

Glen Lipka:

Cause you don't want something that's like objectively worse.

Glen Lipka:

But, I'll give you an example.

Glen Lipka:

the Tesla who, if it wasn't for Elon Musk, I would love my Tesla a lot more,

Glen Lipka:

but when I first got it, there was nothing in front of my steering wheel.

Glen Lipka:

It was all on the screen.

Glen Lipka:

Now, was that better or worse?

Glen Lipka:

I would say, you get used to it, you get used to it, but it was different.

Glen Lipka:

And so when I'm thinking about Marketo differentiation, I

Glen Lipka:

needed to create a religious war.

Glen Lipka:

I needed people to say, Oh, if you're not into the flows and you're not doing

Glen Lipka:

shit, you're like, if you're not, if you're a Vizio person, you're an idiot.

Glen Lipka:

and even though I knew they were like roughly equivalent, it doesn't matter.

Glen Lipka:

You need to create a warrant.

Glen Lipka:

This is a lesson for every single tech marketer out there.

Glen Lipka:

Differentiation will get you half the market.

Glen Lipka:

We were nobody.

Glen Lipka:

We were nobody.

Glen Lipka:

And Elko was huge, a huge company.

Glen Lipka:

And what business did we have taking half the market share away from them?

Glen Lipka:

We didn't.

Glen Lipka:

They had way more functionality.

Glen Lipka:

They called us play school.

Glen Lipka:

I remember it was very hurtful, right?

Glen Lipka:

And they would call us play school.

Glen Lipka:

And I just be like, but if we create a war and you're either on our side or not,

Glen Lipka:

and that led us to like a very strong community, Eloqua didn't have a strong

Glen Lipka:

community and that we said, you're not just buying software, you're buying

Glen Lipka:

into this group of like minded people.

Glen Lipka:

When you create a religious war, people want to be on your team, right?

Glen Lipka:

It's one team or the other.

Glen Lipka:

And then that's loyalty.

Glen Lipka:

And we did a lot of things in the beginning to get that loyalty.

Glen Lipka:

I remember one customer, we must've done 50, 000 worth of, consulting

Glen Lipka:

because they had multiple Salesforce instances and we just merged them for

Glen Lipka:

just because they were like, we can't buy your software until this gets done.

Glen Lipka:

And it'll take a year and a half.

Glen Lipka:

And we're just like, I think we can just do it.

Glen Lipka:

And they said, well, how much do you want?

Glen Lipka:

What do you want in return?

Glen Lipka:

I said, all I want is undying loyalty.

Glen Lipka:

And they put, I know, I remember they put me on mute.

Glen Lipka:

And I could tell that they were laughing at us, but then they

Glen Lipka:

come back and they were like, all right, glad we'll, give you that.

Glen Lipka:

And let me tell you that they gave us references.

Glen Lipka:

They took videos, they wrote guest blog posts, they did

Glen Lipka:

everything we asked them to do.

Glen Lipka:

And in the beginning that mattered a lot.

Glen Lipka:

And so what our approach was, was very differentiated.

Glen Lipka:

but the truth is it's not better or worse.

Glen Lipka:

Now, in hindsight, what I did with Playmaker with Engagio, I think

Glen Lipka:

had advantages, like involve a customization layer, like Marketo

Glen Lipka:

is a very set it and forget it.

Glen Lipka:

Sort of system.

Glen Lipka:

the marketer is completely in charge, but the SDRs could

Glen Lipka:

have been part of that process.

Glen Lipka:

It could have been like, here's a queue.

Glen Lipka:

I take a ticket off of the top.

Glen Lipka:

I customize it a little bit and then send it on its way.

Glen Lipka:

And, I would have done more of that.

Glen Lipka:

Plus, I think that I would have made more abstraction of the flows so that

Glen Lipka:

you can have sub flows the way that in Figma you have components that are

Glen Lipka:

reusable blocks and that yeah, you could do some reasonable things like

Glen Lipka:

call campaign, but you couldn't see it.

Glen Lipka:

it was very difficult to see that high level.

Glen Lipka:

So I probably would have added in more of that that abstraction layer.

Justin Norris:

It's funny that like 10 years later, Marquetto

Justin Norris:

did roll out some kind of flow charty way of visualizing things.

Justin Norris:

I've never really used it or liked it because it is very high level and very

Justin Norris:

basic so clearly they felt that out in the market there was someone that wanted

Justin Norris:

this and maybe wasn't buying Marketo because of it so they threw it in to

Justin Norris:

tick a box but I just find it ironic that after all that time they circled

Justin Norris:

around and slipped that in there.

Glen Lipka:

there was a UI, I used to call it fluid dynamics.

Glen Lipka:

It was basically the, process, forgetting the name that they had for it.

Glen Lipka:

but it was a Vizio diagram it wasn't about a flow of like, send an email, wait

Glen Lipka:

a week, send an email, it was more like,

Glen Lipka:

first they're a lead, then they

Justin Norris:

The revenue cycle

Justin Norris:

modeler,

Glen Lipka:

Yes, the Revenue Cycle Modeler, that did make

Glen Lipka:

sense to be a Visio diagram.

Glen Lipka:

that totally made sense.

Glen Lipka:

Not everything should be a flow, it's use the right tool.

Glen Lipka:

So the Revenue Cycle Modeler was a Visio diagram on purpose,

Glen Lipka:

and it worked well in that case.

Glen Lipka:

And that the program, flows with the green strip, that made

Glen Lipka:

sense also to be a, diagram.

Glen Lipka:

but doing it for just send an email, wait a week, send an email.

Glen Lipka:

I think after I had left in 2015, they lost their way a little bit.

Glen Lipka:

They sold to private equity.

Glen Lipka:

I should have stayed the one extra year.

Glen Lipka:

That would have been very lucrative for me.

Glen Lipka:

I kind of missed out on that one.

Glen Lipka:

And once they got taken private, it was more just like shore up the functionality,

Glen Lipka:

get it prepared to sell to Adobe.

Glen Lipka:

And then once you're in Adobe, it's, more of a maintenance mode.

Justin Norris:

really want to go down that road, but I'm just curious because

Justin Norris:

you mentioned Eloqua, I've had a chat on this show as well with Mark Oregon,

Justin Norris:

who's the founding CEO of Eloqua, and it's funny hearing the story.

Justin Norris:

A lot of similarities where they started out with a completely different use

Justin Norris:

case in mind and then stumbled into this thing from a different direction.

Justin Norris:

I'm curious from your point of view, like this category of marketing

Justin Norris:

automation didn't exist, really.

Justin Norris:

It wasn't a thing.

Justin Norris:

what was the process like of Emerging into like, oh yeah, there's this

Justin Norris:

thing where we like score leads and send them emails to nurture them.

Justin Norris:

And like, having that concept emerge,

Glen Lipka:

Again, it, did start off very simply of I just want to send an email,

Glen Lipka:

wait a week and send another email.

Glen Lipka:

And then all of a sudden it's like, well, what else do people want to do?

Glen Lipka:

And that just became more and more, functions more and more

Glen Lipka:

things that you could do, but it was always the same language.

Glen Lipka:

And the language is when something happens, I want

Glen Lipka:

to do some sort of response.

Glen Lipka:

And it was designed like a programming language.

Glen Lipka:

I remember in the beginning, I remember when Eloqua was, I think it was there,

Glen Lipka:

they were a content management system.

Glen Lipka:

and I looked at their UI and I just thought, my goodness, it's so complicated

Glen Lipka:

and it was very expensive to implement.

Glen Lipka:

And then when we started going, our tagline was, I think I

Glen Lipka:

had come up with the tagline, which easy, powerful, complete.

Glen Lipka:

but it was our whole ethos was this is easier.

Glen Lipka:

It's simpler.

Glen Lipka:

It's how Salesforce beat Siebel.

Glen Lipka:

they just made it easier.

Glen Lipka:

They made it easier to self service.

Glen Lipka:

And I remember them at the time tweeting something like celebrating

Glen Lipka:

a victory over Marchetto.

Glen Lipka:

And I was just, it blew my mind.

Glen Lipka:

Cause I'm just like, we're nobody.

Glen Lipka:

Why are they even saying her name?

Glen Lipka:

that's just telling people, Oh, there's a competitor that they're focused on.

Glen Lipka:

And I.

Glen Lipka:

Literally responded immediately like saying, good one, you know, the last

Glen Lipka:

10, you lost, but this one nice job and they erased their posts and I,

Glen Lipka:

so I had screenshot it and I sent it back to them saying, I think you lost

Glen Lipka:

this, it was just, we were the cool kids and they were the old grandpa.

Glen Lipka:

Uh, and then they ended up paying IDEO to design.

Glen Lipka:

a Marketo killer and I thought I was so flattered and so, excited that it

Glen Lipka:

was like me versus IDEO because they're famous design firm and what they ended

Glen Lipka:

up doing is taking exactly what they have and just putting a nice, paint

Glen Lipka:

job on it, making it look a little bit nicer, but I was just like, yeah,

Glen Lipka:

there's no way they're going to fix that.

Glen Lipka:

and I felt like it was an unfair battle, they just did not have

Glen Lipka:

the resources or understanding.

Glen Lipka:

And I knew that they were going to end up selling pennies on the dollar,

Glen Lipka:

which is what they did to, Oracle.

Glen Lipka:

and then they went into their own maintenance mode.

Glen Lipka:

it's like when you have that energy.

Glen Lipka:

That this is something cool and different and, better.

Glen Lipka:

Everyone gets really excited about it.

Glen Lipka:

I think that I underestimated the lightning in a bottle effect.

Glen Lipka:

at the time, the people, there were so many great people there who were

Glen Lipka:

like Maria Pergolino was inventing inbound marketing before my eyes.

Glen Lipka:

Bill Bench was Inventing SAS sales.

Glen Lipka:

there were so many things that I was just mesmerized by how they were happening.

Glen Lipka:

And I was just very lucky to be right in the middle of it, but like revenue

Glen Lipka:

operations or, marketing operations, it's sort of like, we didn't even think about

Glen Lipka:

it until it was already real for years.

Glen Lipka:

It was just more like, there's Emily Salas and she's trying to

Glen Lipka:

solve this problem and how do we.

Glen Lipka:

Help her solve this problem.

Glen Lipka:

And generally, I remember, they were very early, the first couple of customers,

Glen Lipka:

like I trained our first 50 customers personally, and they would have just

Glen Lipka:

these weird little problems and we've been sitting at a whiteboard saying,

Glen Lipka:

how are we going to solve that for them?

Glen Lipka:

I remember also we invented anonymous leads and I said to Jenna

Glen Lipka:

Raleigh, you got to check this out.

Glen Lipka:

Anonymous leads are great.

Glen Lipka:

And she's like, Glenn, I know you're very excited about your

Glen Lipka:

anonymous leads, but I'm very busy.

Glen Lipka:

You're not the center of my universe.

Glen Lipka:

I have a job to do.

Glen Lipka:

And I was like, huh?

Glen Lipka:

And then like six months later, she comes back and like, Hey,

Glen Lipka:

these anonymous leads are great.

Glen Lipka:

And I was like, I've been trying to tell you that.

Glen Lipka:

And it's a strong lesson that just because you build some cool thing and

Glen Lipka:

just because you have an early adopter customer doesn't mean that they're

Glen Lipka:

ready for it and doesn't mean that they want to hear from you all the time.

Glen Lipka:

This is probably the biggest lesson from Marketo is that More features

Glen Lipka:

is not why you're gonna win.

Glen Lipka:

More features is not why you're going to be successful as a tech startup.

Glen Lipka:

It's never about the number of features.

Glen Lipka:

It's always how does it work?

Glen Lipka:

Who are you?

Glen Lipka:

are you?

Glen Lipka:

creating differentiation?

Glen Lipka:

Are you creating a cultural, mainstay for someone to latch onto?

Glen Lipka:

That's what matters.

Glen Lipka:

The number of features, I mean, you need like a minimum, you need to be able to

Glen Lipka:

do something, but we had four, I would say we pounced on Eloqua and at the point

Glen Lipka:

where they had given up, we still only had half the functionality they had.

Justin Norris:

I want to talk about this dynamic that you've described.

Justin Norris:

both Marquette and Ellipa going through the lifecycle of a product where it's

Justin Norris:

got like innovation, energy expansion, and then like maintenance mode.

Justin Norris:

and you've listed in one of your blog posts, a lot of Marketo features

Justin Norris:

that went out sort of half baked, I think, as you described it.

Justin Norris:

And I've observed this, anyone watching could see every year at summit, there

Justin Norris:

was like SEO, social, ABM, like it was really clear, what's the trend?

Justin Norris:

What's the buzzword this year?

Justin Norris:

We've got to do something for that.

Justin Norris:

And then it was like a big splash and then half quarter baked, never came back to it.

Justin Norris:

So there was this, and I'm not saying this to like dump on Marketo

Justin Norris:

or criticize anyone, but it's a dynamic that you can observe.

Justin Norris:

In the market and it makes products suck.

Justin Norris:

and that hurts me as like someone who, a big part of my career

Justin Norris:

is working with these products.

Justin Norris:

And I wonder for your thoughts about how does a company avoid this?

Justin Norris:

And I asked this to founders that I speak to too, like, how are you going

Justin Norris:

to avoid making your products suck?

Justin Norris:

Cause you can see it coming.

Justin Norris:

Like, how does somebody avoid that, rock in the water?

Glen Lipka:

To me, I can peg it to 2012, we went public, and from that day

Glen Lipka:

forward, everything went out differently.

Glen Lipka:

so like, in the beginning, there's a thing called PCAMP in Silicon Valley,

Glen Lipka:

which is for product managers and they were talking about releases and

Glen Lipka:

I was like, we release every two weeks and they literally almost fell out of

Glen Lipka:

their chairs of like, are you crazy?

Glen Lipka:

How is that possible?

Glen Lipka:

And it's because we were young and didn't know any better

Glen Lipka:

and we were just doing things.

Glen Lipka:

And if you go back in the release notes, and I think that they're still

Glen Lipka:

there, the first year of release notes is me writing personally.

Glen Lipka:

Like, so if you look at the way the release notes are written,

Glen Lipka:

it's not these big stories.

Glen Lipka:

It's just, okay, now I, now we have this, now we have this, now we have

Glen Lipka:

this, and it's fleshing it out.

Glen Lipka:

It's adding to the story.

Glen Lipka:

And then there comes a point where they start being very long

Glen Lipka:

and much more like flourishing.

Glen Lipka:

And that's the point of where professionals got involved.

Glen Lipka:

And at that point, there was these, there was no such thing as a small improvement.

Glen Lipka:

It was always a huge thing.

Glen Lipka:

And it was.

Glen Lipka:

Really unfortunate.

Glen Lipka:

and I think that the point of where it was very painful was programs.

Glen Lipka:

we had reached a point where it's like, people are trying to do

Glen Lipka:

things that are really complicated.

Glen Lipka:

And this revenue cycle, analytics is not working, People did not like it at all.

Glen Lipka:

and I had actually left the company for a brief period, right.

Glen Lipka:

In the middle of it.

Glen Lipka:

And when I came back, they were like, you got to fix our analytics thing.

Glen Lipka:

Everyone is upset.

Glen Lipka:

And when I looked at it, I was like, okay, I see the problem.

Glen Lipka:

The problem is, is that John Miller is a physics major, from Harvard and

Glen Lipka:

Stanford, and he's incredibly smart.

Glen Lipka:

And he's like, everyone should be thinking about the percentage that your, conversion

Glen Lipka:

from lead to opportunity is dropping at a precipitous rate compared to, you know,

Glen Lipka:

the last year is over, blah, blah, blah.

Glen Lipka:

And I was like, that's not what people want.

Glen Lipka:

They want to know how many webinars did I have?

Glen Lipka:

I had six, that was it.

Glen Lipka:

They just wanted to know how many programs did I run?

Glen Lipka:

How many things did I achieve?

Glen Lipka:

They weren't getting measured on like these.

Glen Lipka:

I described it as buckets of M& Ms where the holes would be changing sizes

Glen Lipka:

at different rates and the M& Ms of different colors would be coming out of

Glen Lipka:

the buckets, going into different buckets.

Glen Lipka:

It's like fluid dynamics.

Glen Lipka:

And I was like, it's so complicated.

Glen Lipka:

It's not what people want.

Glen Lipka:

They just want to say the basic thing.

Glen Lipka:

how many mail blasts did I do?

Glen Lipka:

How many opportunities did we influence?

Glen Lipka:

And that this was around the same time that marketers started having

Glen Lipka:

this schism, the marketers who were overreaching, trying to say that

Glen Lipka:

they created the revenue and the other marketers who were like, let's

Glen Lipka:

just claim that we did the webinar.

Glen Lipka:

And that.

Glen Lipka:

I think that there was a huge overreach in that first group and it

Glen Lipka:

created a lot of problems with sales.

Glen Lipka:

So we made program analytics, which I have two patents.

Glen Lipka:

Both of them are relating to this period.

Glen Lipka:

I literally did math for all year of just figuring out like

Glen Lipka:

how things were going to work.

Glen Lipka:

How do we, you know, things like first touch, attribution and last touch

Glen Lipka:

attribution and multi touch attribution.

Glen Lipka:

I didn't intern.

Glen Lipka:

Name Karina Boo from, Cal who is helping me with all of these charts and graphs

Glen Lipka:

of like an S curves of exactly how we were going to attribute things.

Glen Lipka:

she's a, founder in her own right right now of a company called Warmly.

Glen Lipka:

And, when we made programs, I said, okay, people aren't going to just want

Glen Lipka:

to do this just for the analytics.

Glen Lipka:

We need to give them an extra reason to do this.

Glen Lipka:

And I said, the good, the easy reason is.

Glen Lipka:

You don't have to go to the design studio.

Glen Lipka:

You don't have to go to these other areas.

Glen Lipka:

You can just make your program with all the stuff in it right there.

Glen Lipka:

And, we call those local assets.

Glen Lipka:

And I said, the local assets is the reason to make it easier for people

Glen Lipka:

to use the software and that the benefit they'll get is the program

Glen Lipka:

analytics, the attribution that you can't just go into the attribution.

Glen Lipka:

You have to give them a little bit of candy first, and then

Glen Lipka:

they'll take the attribution.

Glen Lipka:

And that was our biggest feature ever.

Glen Lipka:

That's a huge change from the way it worked beforehand.

Glen Lipka:

and the design of all of it with the different program types and, success

Glen Lipka:

and how does it sync to Salesforce?

Glen Lipka:

campaigns.

Glen Lipka:

It was all very intricate and I really love the design that

Glen Lipka:

we put together for that.

Glen Lipka:

And then I got in this argument with Cheryl Chavez, who is the.

Glen Lipka:

product management director, where she's like, we have to get it out the door.

Glen Lipka:

And I said, I don't think people will remember what month we delivered this

Glen Lipka:

thing, but they will remember how it made them feel when they first used it.

Glen Lipka:

And if it doesn't have these local assets.

Glen Lipka:

It will feel broken.

Glen Lipka:

And she insisted we launched it and everyone was upset.

Glen Lipka:

Everyone was super upset because they were just like, you made this big change,

Glen Lipka:

but why it's like, there's no point.

Glen Lipka:

And it was only two months later that we released the full version.

Glen Lipka:

And then everyone was like, Oh, this is great.

Glen Lipka:

we can use this.

Glen Lipka:

And then programs became a much more successful.

Glen Lipka:

concept, but that, was a very upsetting moment because I knew it was wrong.

Glen Lipka:

I knew it was going to cause us grief.

Glen Lipka:

And for what, for a couple of months, nobody remembers what

Glen Lipka:

month the feature came out.

Glen Lipka:

And I think that it was around that time that we were getting ready to go public.

Glen Lipka:

after we went public, it was always another story.

Glen Lipka:

We needed to tell an acquisition.

Glen Lipka:

Social was.

Glen Lipka:

Like a thing for like a few months.

Glen Lipka:

And then I'm like, nobody's going to use this.

Glen Lipka:

Nobody's going to care about this after it stops being the cool

Glen Lipka:

thing, the cool flavor of the month.

Glen Lipka:

And there was a AB testing and I'm like, I'm just going to use this, and so we made

Glen Lipka:

it and it did a thing, but it was just one story after the next that sounded really

Glen Lipka:

cool, but like I knew it wasn't something that was going to make a huge difference.

Glen Lipka:

And it was just about satisfying investors and about.

Glen Lipka:

Announcing things and acquisitions.

Glen Lipka:

We did so many acquisitions and I was like, why are we acquiring this company?

Glen Lipka:

They don't matter.

Glen Lipka:

You know, we could, build our own thing of this.

Glen Lipka:

It doesn't even do anything interesting.

Glen Lipka:

And I learned firsthand, like the power of the quarterly report.

Glen Lipka:

and I think it's a, there's a tyranny to it that makes it.

Glen Lipka:

So you have to make each story bigger than the last.

Glen Lipka:

You have to keep making, like these acquisitions and it's

Glen Lipka:

hard to integrate a company.

Glen Lipka:

And.

Glen Lipka:

I think that to avoid this problem to a certain degree, you have to

Glen Lipka:

separate out your product development from your investor relations.

Glen Lipka:

You have to say investor relations.

Glen Lipka:

I know you want us to make a bunch of cool stuff and we're not going to and that

Glen Lipka:

you're going to have to tell your stories.

Glen Lipka:

On your own, we're not going to acquire companies.

Glen Lipka:

We're not going to just make half baked software.

Glen Lipka:

You guys are on your own to tell the story that you're going to tell.

Glen Lipka:

And to a certain degree, it will depress the stock a little, however,

Glen Lipka:

your customers will continue to love this, the product, and that

Glen Lipka:

will increase the stock price.

Glen Lipka:

And so I think it washes out in the end, but you just can't let

Glen Lipka:

your investor relations arm dictate your product development strategy.

Glen Lipka:

And I think this is very much, a Steve Jobs way of thinking about things, that

Glen Lipka:

he would, when he came out with the iPhone, there was a bunch of people,

Glen Lipka:

and it's hard to imagine this at the time, who were saying, you're idiots,

Glen Lipka:

you're going to ruin your iPod business.

Glen Lipka:

Because they were just like, look how much money you make in iPod, you're

Glen Lipka:

going to cannibalize that business.

Glen Lipka:

think of the mindset that you have to be in to say that Steve Jobs is an

Glen Lipka:

idiot for coming out with the iPhone.

Glen Lipka:

But that's literally what people said.

Glen Lipka:

And there's a bunch of videos of him talking about some of this stuff.

Glen Lipka:

One guy is giving him a horrible time about not understanding what the open

Glen Lipka:

doc format does or something like that.

Glen Lipka:

And he's trying to explain to the person that that's not

Glen Lipka:

how you build a great company.

Glen Lipka:

You build a great company.

Glen Lipka:

By sticking to your values and by creating things that you think are great

Glen Lipka:

and taking the time it takes to do it.

Glen Lipka:

If you do great things, there'll be stories to tell.

Glen Lipka:

There'll be announcements, but if you focus on the announcement, you

Glen Lipka:

probably won't build a great thing.

Justin Norris:

And, you know, I've wrestled with this a lot because.

Justin Norris:

I've seen them focus Marketo and, almost every other company I can think of

Justin Norris:

that's reached the stage, focus more and more of their effort on products

Justin Norris:

or new features or new modules that are going to add incremental bookings.

Justin Norris:

So they want to roll things out that are going to increase contract value.

Justin Norris:

Meanwhile, there's a backlog, a million miles long of like features

Justin Norris:

that users every day are like, I need this, I need this, I need this.

Justin Norris:

And you can understand the logic because they say, well, no, one's going to

Justin Norris:

churn because of this one missing thing.

Justin Norris:

So let's focus on this.

Justin Norris:

And like, it's a spreadsheet math.

Justin Norris:

And if you go against it, you just seem like you're this, crafts

Justin Norris:

person who doesn't really understand economics and doesn't care about

Justin Norris:

shareholder value, et cetera.

Justin Norris:

But I think what they're missing and what you've described is this long game where

Justin Norris:

like the product becomes less lovable, it loses its integrity, loses its value in

Justin Norris:

the eyes of the people that use it most.

Glen Lipka:

two good examples of that in Marketo, history is AB testing.

Glen Lipka:

There was a, sales VP.

Glen Lipka:

Who said we have to have AB testing.

Glen Lipka:

We keep losing deals because of AB testing.

Glen Lipka:

And I'm like, I don't think it's going to make much of a difference.

Glen Lipka:

And, he insisted.

Glen Lipka:

So we built AB testing.

Glen Lipka:

The analytics show that 97 percent of all users use it about 3 percent of the time.

Glen Lipka:

And that 3 percent of the users use it like 97 percent of the time.

Glen Lipka:

So in other words, there's this very, very small group of people that love it.

Glen Lipka:

And most people were like, I tried it once.

Glen Lipka:

And I remember a user once told me, you're, killing me with A

Glen Lipka:

B testing and I asked them why.

Glen Lipka:

And they said, I used to only have to write one email and

Glen Lipka:

now I need to write two emails.

Glen Lipka:

Thanks, Glen.

Glen Lipka:

And I'm creating work for him.

Glen Lipka:

And, on the flip side were tokens, which nobody asked for.

Glen Lipka:

Nobody asked for tokens.

Glen Lipka:

But I said, no, none of these are going to be cool.

Glen Lipka:

And it's because of my position in the company and I could just

Glen Lipka:

make certain things happen.

Glen Lipka:

And it just made tokens happen.

Glen Lipka:

Tokens ended up being like one of the most powerful features used by everybody.

Glen Lipka:

incredibly powerful feature, but nobody asked for it.

Glen Lipka:

And in the demo, you don't even like talk about it necessarily all that much.

Glen Lipka:

but it was one of those things that made Marketo what it was, that was

Glen Lipka:

maybe one of the last big features that were like that, just came from a place

Glen Lipka:

of, ah, this would be cool, right?

Glen Lipka:

Instead of a place of, this will tell a good story.

Glen Lipka:

So like AB testing on the one hand

Glen Lipka:

And tokens

Glen Lipka:

on the other.

Glen Lipka:

every company has the ability to do that kind of work.

Glen Lipka:

And they have people who know, but I think that product managers Don't

Glen Lipka:

they're not taught how to do that.

Glen Lipka:

They're it's a lost art in product management.

Glen Lipka:

And most of the time, product managers are feature people.

Glen Lipka:

They just want to like pummel the user with release features.

Glen Lipka:

And instead of thinking there's certain kinds of features that expand your story,

Glen Lipka:

like more flow steps might do that.

Glen Lipka:

There's certain ones that expand the surface area, like tokens allow

Glen Lipka:

for new kinds of things to happen.

Glen Lipka:

but most of the time they're just like, well, they voted on these features.

Glen Lipka:

Let's do the ones that they voted for.

Glen Lipka:

It's a lack of imagination.

Glen Lipka:

But I think most companies, they have people who can do it.

Glen Lipka:

And I think as a society, we just don't value this very much.

Glen Lipka:

We don't value innovation.

Glen Lipka:

Like we value it in the genius CEO, but we don't value it as a

Glen Lipka:

regular old job that people have.

Glen Lipka:

Most designers that I meet, they don't understand differentiation.

Glen Lipka:

They don't understand how to do real innovation.

Glen Lipka:

They don't understand how to think about products this way, and they're

Glen Lipka:

not being taught how to do it.

Glen Lipka:

And it's not being valued in them.

Glen Lipka:

If they do it, it's very difficult.

Glen Lipka:

There's a lot of companies that hate me.

Glen Lipka:

They hate that I do this.

Glen Lipka:

And which is why I, I feel great when I.

Glen Lipka:

Land in a place of where they value it and they care about it.

Glen Lipka:

But real magic happens when you empower the people in your organization

Glen Lipka:

who get this kind of concept.

Justin Norris:

What do you think about HubSpot and as a product company and

Justin Norris:

what they've been able to do, because they, it seems to me that they have

Justin Norris:

pursued a slightly different course than their peers in the marketing

Justin Norris:

automation space and have continued to expand what they do, but in a way.

Justin Norris:

Like it feels they haven't lost that mojo, so to speak.

Justin Norris:

Maybe it's gone up and down, but overall they still have this

Justin Norris:

tight knit, passionate group of users and it still feels like

Justin Norris:

they have that energy behind them.

Justin Norris:

Do you, do you share that perception?

Justin Norris:

And if you do, why do you think that is?

Glen Lipka:

I remember when I first saw them, they said they

Glen Lipka:

were marketing automation for the fortune 50, 000 or something like

Glen Lipka:

that, or the fortune 5 million.

Glen Lipka:

it was, very clever because Eloqua was clearly the enterprise.

Glen Lipka:

We were clearly the mid market.

Glen Lipka:

And they said, we're going to take the low end.

Glen Lipka:

and I thought that was really smart positioning.

Glen Lipka:

Positioning is another concept that very often gets overlooked,

Glen Lipka:

but it's super important.

Glen Lipka:

You have to be in the middle.

Glen Lipka:

You can't be the too expensive one and you can't be the cheap one.

Glen Lipka:

You need to be the Goldilocks provider.

Glen Lipka:

And, I think Marquetto had that for a long time and then started to lose it actually.

Glen Lipka:

As HubSpot started coming up.

Glen Lipka:

I think that their positioning was really smart.

Glen Lipka:

I remember seeing their UI and thinking there was some parts of it that were fine.

Glen Lipka:

they would put the responses on the landing page object itself, but instead

Glen Lipka:

of like a smart campaign where it's abstracted, they would say, Oh, take

Glen Lipka:

the landing page, flip it upside down, and it says what to do when someone

Glen Lipka:

fills it out, which in some ways is like, you know, That's clever and easy.

Glen Lipka:

In other ways, it's more limiting, right?

Glen Lipka:

But very often limiting is not as limiting as you might think.

Glen Lipka:

And that it's, if it's close enough that you can say, Oh, it's a religious war.

Glen Lipka:

I think it should be, and somebody else thinks it shouldn't be.

Glen Lipka:

And, that way you get half the market.

Glen Lipka:

I think that did a really good job of their branding.

Glen Lipka:

I think they did an amazing job with their content HubSpot content was.

Glen Lipka:

and they did a lot of things that I think were close enough.

Glen Lipka:

That's the thing about a lot of software close enough is really fine.

Glen Lipka:

It's then it becomes about your differentiation and

Glen Lipka:

about what you're doing.

Glen Lipka:

it's not all about the features.

Glen Lipka:

And I think they never focused on having the most features.

Glen Lipka:

So I wasn't ever the let's analyze the comp, the competitive product guy.

Glen Lipka:

I just, I knew what we were doing and I focused on that.

Glen Lipka:

but I definitely appreciated their positioning, their marketing,

Glen Lipka:

their content, their willingness to try different things.

Glen Lipka:

I think that their play into CRM, lightweight CRM was brilliant.

Glen Lipka:

Cause then they were like, you don't need Salesforce.

Glen Lipka:

There was a lot of people who were just like sick to death of Salesforce, whereas

Glen Lipka:

with Marketo, you had to have Salesforce.

Glen Lipka:

You couldn't have Marketo and not Salesforce.

Glen Lipka:

there was a period where I thought Marketo was going to be acquired by Salesforce

Glen Lipka:

and, the CEOs, Mark Benioff and Phil Fernandez got into it in some weird way.

Glen Lipka:

And, the stories were, how it didn't work out, but I just thought we

Glen Lipka:

were like a perfect fit for them.

Glen Lipka:

it just goes to show how You really don't know how things are going

Glen Lipka:

to turn out in the middle of it.

Justin Norris:

I want to, in the time we have left, switch gears a little bit and

Justin Norris:

just think about AI and open ended topic.

Justin Norris:

I know you're just someone who likes to think about technology and

Justin Norris:

trends and where things are going.

Justin Norris:

And I'd be curious for your read on the current situation, either AI impacting

Justin Norris:

your workflow as a product designer, like AI for product designers, or

Justin Norris:

just AI as being incorporated into products as a builder of things, take

Justin Norris:

it whichever direction you please.

Glen Lipka:

It hasn't affected anything from a, make product perspective.

Glen Lipka:

it's definitely in the middle of the hype cycle right now where

Glen Lipka:

it's, the peak of expectations.

Glen Lipka:

And it'll probably fall into the trough of disillusionment at some point.

Glen Lipka:

I think that there's this very strong desire on the part of human beings to,

Glen Lipka:

To have a friend that can't escape, that it's not exactly a slave, but

Glen Lipka:

it's like, it goes on my phone and it seems to have free will, but it can't,

Glen Lipka:

betray me and it can't be mean to me.

Glen Lipka:

It has to always be nice to me.

Glen Lipka:

And it's like a friend.

Glen Lipka:

I think that that desire is nearly overwhelming.

Glen Lipka:

in human beings, and that we desperately want this.

Glen Lipka:

And then along comes something like ChatGPT, and it, talks, and

Glen Lipka:

it seems like it can't go anywhere.

Glen Lipka:

But then, you realize it's kind of an idiot.

Glen Lipka:

I had said to ChatGPT, when I was younger, there was this poem about a

Glen Lipka:

coal miner who, when he went to work, his Children were in bed unconscious.

Glen Lipka:

And when he came back home, his Children were in bed unconscious.

Glen Lipka:

And in his mind, his Children were in a coma, right?

Glen Lipka:

And it was only because he worked very long hours early

Glen Lipka:

in the morning, late at night.

Glen Lipka:

And I had kids at the time, and it had made me sad of, like, working too hard.

Glen Lipka:

And so I said, Chachi B'tee, what is this poem?

Glen Lipka:

And I described it.

Glen Lipka:

And it goes, Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Glen Lipka:

I know what poem you're talking about.

Glen Lipka:

And it told me the author and the name of the poem.

Glen Lipka:

And it even listed the poem.

Glen Lipka:

I'm reading it and I'm like, something's not right.

Glen Lipka:

This, this is not the poem.

Glen Lipka:

So I Google it.

Glen Lipka:

And I'm like, there's an author that it cited.

Glen Lipka:

But they didn't write this poem.

Glen Lipka:

And I was just like, so I said to Chachi B.

Glen Lipka:

T., I can't find this poem.

Glen Lipka:

And they were like, Oh, that's because I made it up.

Glen Lipka:

And I was like, okay,

Glen Lipka:

don't make up a poem.

Glen Lipka:

I'm there is an existing real poem.

Glen Lipka:

And it goes, Oh yeah, I gotcha.

Glen Lipka:

And I'm like, I just want to know the author of that poem and I'll go find it.

Glen Lipka:

And it's like, yeah, it's this author and here's the text.

Glen Lipka:

It wrote another poem, a completely new poem.

Glen Lipka:

And I'm just like, dude, what are you doing?

Glen Lipka:

And it's just like, well, I couldn't find the poem.

Glen Lipka:

So I made it and it, looked me dead in the eye and said, this

Glen Lipka:

is a real poem and a real author.

Glen Lipka:

And it was written in 1874 and it made a whole backstory for this poem.

Glen Lipka:

And I'm like, why are you lying to me?

Glen Lipka:

And the answer is.

Glen Lipka:

Because people want a confident answer I don't want to not

Glen Lipka:

give you a confident answer.

Glen Lipka:

I was like, but I asked for the truth and it goes, I don't really

Glen Lipka:

understand what you mean by truth.

Glen Lipka:

I understand what you mean by tell me the answer to a question.

Glen Lipka:

And I could write something that looks a lot like the answer to your question.

Glen Lipka:

It's not true.

Glen Lipka:

It's not real, but it looks a lot like the answer to your question.

Glen Lipka:

This is what we have today.

Glen Lipka:

This is what AI is.

Glen Lipka:

I remember way back, there was a famous Marketo sponsored

Glen Lipka:

bake off of lead scoring.

Glen Lipka:

And they had like, I think it was Lattice or somebody, and

Glen Lipka:

it had an AI scoring thing.

Glen Lipka:

So we had the Marketo way, we had rules, and you had the AI way.

Glen Lipka:

They let it bake.

Glen Lipka:

They let the sales happen.

Glen Lipka:

Turns out, six in one, half a dozen in the other.

Glen Lipka:

Nobody won.

Glen Lipka:

But marketers overwhelmingly said, well, if it doesn't matter, then

Glen Lipka:

I'm going to do it the rules.

Glen Lipka:

Because if I just have a button that does it, what do you need me for?

Glen Lipka:

like I want to be paid for doing work.

Glen Lipka:

And if there's a button to do my job, then that doesn't bode

Glen Lipka:

well for my career prospects.

Glen Lipka:

And so I don't think anybody truly wants AI to do their job.

Glen Lipka:

I think they want a slave on their phone that can't leave and it's got

Glen Lipka:

to be nice to them and that maybe can do some things for their job

Glen Lipka:

to make their job easier, but only in so far as it can't replace them.

Glen Lipka:

That as soon as it replaces them, it's a problem, but as long as it doesn't replace

Glen Lipka:

them, then help being helpful is fine.

Glen Lipka:

for example, in Figma, if it named my layers for me, great.

Glen Lipka:

But if it came up with the differentiated, point of view of like, oh, you should do

Glen Lipka:

tokens and here's how tokens should work.

Glen Lipka:

I don't think that's going to fly, but there's nothing that I've seen in

Glen Lipka:

any AI yet where it can do honestly.

Glen Lipka:

Anything relating to product development.

Glen Lipka:

I think an area where it might be good at is, testing like, Selenium script

Glen Lipka:

writing, looking for vulnerabilities where like there's a buffer overflow, problem.

Glen Lipka:

And it could find that in the code and fix those kinds of things.

Glen Lipka:

I think like code helpers, syntax helpers, all of that is useful.

Glen Lipka:

maybe some illustrations, but even those, like, they're kind of terrible.

Glen Lipka:

I don't mean to pour water on everybody's idea of AI.

Glen Lipka:

I just think it's wildly overhyped and mostly based on a psychological need,

Glen Lipka:

as opposed to a real technical ability.

Justin Norris:

No, I mean, that's really interesting.

Justin Norris:

I've seen the same things that you've seen.

Justin Norris:

I remember even coming up for the name of this podcast.

Justin Norris:

I was like brainstorming ideas and it was like, give me a list of like 20 words,

Justin Norris:

like associated with this aesthetic.

Justin Norris:

And it would give me a list of 20 words of which like maybe seven were duplicates.

Justin Norris:

I'm like, can you please just give me a clean list of 20 with no duplicates?

Justin Norris:

It's like, Oh, sorry, sorry.

Justin Norris:

Here you go.

Justin Norris:

Again, the same, like that sort of thing.

Justin Norris:

It's like, what, what, but then I've seen, like, I'm using it to

Justin Norris:

create images for my sub stack.

Justin Norris:

I'm like, give me an image of this in like a 1950s sort of cartoon

Justin Norris:

jazz aesthetic and like, it does it.

Justin Norris:

And it's got weird wonky things in it, but It's okay for my sub stack and to

Justin Norris:

pay an illustrator to do that by hand would be completely cost prohibitive.

Justin Norris:

and so it seems that there is this niche where you can use it to get things done

Justin Norris:

or, automate certain things that you would otherwise have to do, I agree

Justin Norris:

completely that nobody needs to be replaced and the psychological need of

Justin Norris:

like the friend that's almost the part that creeps me out the most, to be honest,

Justin Norris:

because if you have someone who's always emotionally available, you know, can't

Justin Norris:

Not want to give you attention, et cetera.

Justin Norris:

What use do you have for real human relationships after a point in time?

Justin Norris:

And that's the part that scares me about AI.

Glen Lipka:

I do worry about those things.

Glen Lipka:

At the same time, I feel that loneliness is a debilitating feeling.

Glen Lipka:

there's a reason that having a friend on your phone is so useful.

Glen Lipka:

There's a reason why something like Twitter works.

Glen Lipka:

Like people want to be heard so badly.

Glen Lipka:

That they're willing to talk to crazy people just to get that.

Glen Lipka:

I think that we're living in incredibly interesting times and

Glen Lipka:

yeah, we're making some cool products.

Glen Lipka:

We're also changing the world in a way that's very scary.

Glen Lipka:

we're certainly entering a post truth world.

Glen Lipka:

and I think Adobe is more than any other company, responsible for

Glen Lipka:

the capabilities of deep fakes.

Glen Lipka:

And that for your substack illustrations, there's some designer

Glen Lipka:

out there that's like really bummed.

Glen Lipka:

He used to get work and that's an area that AI is doing better than most.

Glen Lipka:

But what happens to those designers?

Glen Lipka:

What happens to humanity?

Glen Lipka:

Cause one of the things about AI is also, it's, what it's fed.

Glen Lipka:

It only knows how to make the thing that has been made before, like a 1950s

Glen Lipka:

style or whatever, but what is a 2040s?

Glen Lipka:

Style look like, nobody knows that yet.

Glen Lipka:

And if we're not training, designers, if we're not giving designers

Glen Lipka:

a living, then who is going to

Glen Lipka:

make

Glen Lipka:

that.

Justin Norris:

We'll never have it.

Justin Norris:

It'll just be endlessly regurgitated content back and forth into the model.

Glen Lipka:

with that said, maybe we're becoming so efficient that

Glen Lipka:

people can have those sorts of jobs without it being a career.

Glen Lipka:

Like I'm a big fan of universal basic income where we can

Glen Lipka:

pay people enough to live.

Glen Lipka:

And so they can be artists without starving.

Glen Lipka:

They can be musicians without starving.

Glen Lipka:

I think that the world is changing.

Glen Lipka:

It's important for all of us to not be reactive, not just assume

Glen Lipka:

it's going to be bad, but also don't assume it's going to be good.

Glen Lipka:

we have to think about the details and.

Glen Lipka:

Keep trying to goose humanity forward.

Glen Lipka:

So we make innovative things, in new and different ways.

Glen Lipka:

Creativity, I think is more a value that people will.

Glen Lipka:

Care about in the future, not less, the more AI, the more

Glen Lipka:

automation, the more technology helps us, the more that creativity

Glen Lipka:

matters.

Justin Norris:

And I think you can see it like in the rise of platforms like

Justin Norris:

Etsy, which is specifically about like people valuing something handmade.

Justin Norris:

of course, all the like mass producers are snuck onto Etsy now as well, and degrading

Justin Norris:

the quality of that, but you're right.

Justin Norris:

There is a hunger for something like, I want something built by hand,

Justin Norris:

something that wasn't scaled, something that's unique, that's one of a kind.

Justin Norris:

I know we're, out of time, but Glenn, this was just a fascinating discussion.

Justin Norris:

So, glad you were able to join us today.

Glen Lipka:

Thank you for inviting me.

Glen Lipka:

This has been great.

Glen Lipka:

And I really

Glen Lipka:

enjoyed talking with you today.

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