Philosophy Meets Product: Pragmatism, Internal Politics, and Product Ops

In this episode of UX Leadership by Design, Mark Baldino sits down with Mike Nowak, Principal Product Manager at Deloitte Digital, to explore the philosophy and pragmatism behind product management. Mike shares his unconventional journey from theology and philosophy to product leadership, emphasizing the importance of humility, adaptability, and cross-functional collaboration in the product space. The conversation dives into the interplay between UX, engineering, and product management, the challenge of defining “what to build and why”, and how organizations can create a culture where mistakes lead to learning, not failure. The discussion also covers why product decisions are often political, the evolving role of product ops, and how businesses can better align incentives to build truly user-centered products.

Resources & Links

• Connect with Mike Nowak on LinkedIn
• Book: Getting Naked by Patrick
• Book: Product Operations: How successful companies build better products at scale

• Connect with Mark on LinkedIn
• Fuzzy Math - B2B & Enterprise UX Design Consultancy

Transcript

Mark Baldino (00:01.518)
Hello and welcome to UX Leadership by Design. Mark Baldino, your host. I'm also a co-founder of Fuzzy Math. Fuzzy Math is the user experience design consultancy that brings consumer-grade UX to business applications for B2B and enterprise tools. Today, I speak with Mike Nowak, who is a principal product manager at Deloitte Digital. Mike calls himself an accidental technologist and that he is a quote, out of work philosopher, theologian who found his way into a career that he loves, which is product management.

Mike and I share bit of background and we both have undergrads in theology slash philosophy. And we do get a little bit into the philosophy of product management. What is the role, certainly, and really what makes it most impactful? What are some pitfalls you can run into? But we also have this conversation around the pragmatic approach and how to be practical and pragmatic in the delivery of our work, which I think is something that Mike and I feel strongly about. And we land on this sort of core tenet of Mike's, which is that this realization that humans are fallible, that

humans make mistakes and that humans don't have all the answers. And I think in this day and age, people feel like they do have to have all the answers. So it's really about how do we create a culture of product delivery and a process that allows people to make mistakes and then more importantly, allows people to learn from those mistakes. So I think it's a really wonderful conversation and I very much expect you all will enjoy it as well. And as always, thank you very much for listening.

Mark Baldino (00:01.698)
Mike, welcome to the podcast.

Mike Nowak (00:04.389)
Yeah, thanks for having me. It's good to be here.

Mark Baldino (00:06.508)
Yeah, it's great to connect with you. I always want to say standard sort of intro. You have, I think, a pretty interesting background. You actually refer to yourself as an out-of-work philosopher and theologian. So as somebody who studied theology in undergrad, I get the question of how I got into technology or design. Super curious if you could take folks through your background and how you landed.

Mike Nowak (00:32.763)
Sure. Yeah, like to sometimes I like to say I'm kind of like a punchline to that joke. That's like, hey, what's the difference between like a philosophy major and a pepperoni pizza? You know, it's like, well, pepperoni pizza can feed a family of four.

Mark Baldino (00:37.358)
like a philosopher. I thought you could say what happens when a theologian, a philosopher, and somebody else walks into a bar. thought that's where it

Mike Nowak (00:50.469)
Yeah, you could go there too. I'll come up with one of those. yeah, I I guess my background, I also kind of consider myself like an accidental technologist. When I studied in college, I like to tell people I took this, my dad was like, you don't know what you want to study, take a business course. And I took like a marketing course for like a half a day. And I was like, I hate this. I hate everything.

Mark Baldino (01:16.088)
There you go. Learned you needed in a half a day.

Mike Nowak (01:18.833)
Yeah, yeah, it was some like case study on Frito-Lays and I was like, I'm just not interested in a case study on Frito-Lays. so, you know, I just kind of took the approach back in college of like study what I'm interested in and we'll see what happens. And, know, at one point I had, so basically I ended up landing on philosophy because it was kind of like, there's not that many, there's really not that many degrees that are really for a specific job. I don't know what I want to do anyway. It seems like learning how to think,

write, argue, what have you, would be valuable and I enjoy it, so why not? So I had intended to do something like become a theologian and try to get a PhD, teach at the academic level and know, like life just kinda happens and I think I was reading Writing on the Wall career-wise, like, you know, there's probably not a lot of reliable jobs in the humanities to get that PhD and get that professorship going.

And at the time I was really involved in a local, like a local church plant for those outside the church world. called these, these are like church startups, basically. And that church startup world was emphasizing something called bivocationalism and bivocationalism was, this notion that you kind of get a kind of get a day job. And then you also like work at the church, you know, on the side, which is, you know, cynically, it's kind of a like, how do you pay pastors less?

Mark Baldino (02:35.982)
This is the system that you want to get paid to do.

Mark Baldino (02:47.118)
So, so.

Mike Nowak (02:47.875)
is like have them support themselves. So that was kind of the thinking at the time. And that's where I ended up getting into like what I would say is technology is ended up getting a job at Apple in the retail environment. And actually Apple has proved to be like when we'll get into product management stuff later, I feel like working at Apple was a pretty formative experience for me in terms of like my journey to product because working for a company that is so product centric and has such a strong philosophy around like.

Mark Baldino (03:08.12)
Yes.

Mike Nowak (03:16.657)
You know, they taught us things like, don't you're not selling, you don't sell features. Don't list off a bunch of features to people. Like get to know the person and then you pitch benefits to them, which is, you know, this notion of like understanding how the product actually does something in their life. Um, and that, that was, yeah. So I did that for a few years and then long story short, you know, after not making enough money, I was kind of like, and having a kid on the way, I was like, I think I need to do something more lucrative and,

Mark Baldino (03:22.702)
So, I you enjoyed this video.

Mark Baldino (03:44.238)
.

Mike Nowak (03:45.987)
And I ended up through personal connections getting involved with a consulting firm in Chicago. So that's where I really got into, you know, I'd say like business level technology, you know, kind of suffered as an account manager salesperson maybe for probably about five years before I just got so burned out. I'm like my work product being like,

Mark Baldino (03:56.054)
level.

Mike Nowak (04:10.939)
politics or assigned contract or something like that. And I saw our custom side of the house, just really just like doing something creative and generative, which is I think what drew me to it. And just kind of had the opportunity at a small agency because there's a lot of flexibility there to get mentored and move into a role where I was starting to lead projects. And that's kind of the like, I guess, pretty quick.

overview of like a 10 year journey to become a product manager. But definitely like got into product and I'd say I haven't really looked back since then because it's like I just really enjoy the, at the end of the week, we built a tangible thing. Software does something it didn't do yesterday. Really like working with designers and engineers and just that cross-functional people who know stuff I don't kind of thing.

Yeah, and maybe I guess to bring us up to date, spent a few years working in small consulting firms and now I'm at Deloitte, been here about a year and came into Deloitte. They actually acquired one of the firms I worked for in the past and have been there about a year.

Mark Baldino (05:27.884)
Awesome. You mentioned liking your job at the end of the day, end of the week, which is fantastic. Congratulations on that. It's not easy, right? You also talked about liking working with designers. Appreciate that as a designer background in engineering. What do you see as the role of product management in that space vis-a-vis UX design, vis-a-vis engineering, maybe even focusing QA and some...

Mike Nowak (05:37.572)
No.

Mark Baldino (05:57.39)
and stuff like that. What do think is the core role of product?

Mike Nowak (06:00.517)
Yeah, I like to say I have, think what is a simple definition of product, which is the like, what should we build and why? Which I think a lot of organizations, it's like that feels like a simple question or simple set of questions, but they're anything but simple to answer. So I view products largely as, I picked this term up recently, it's like a little fancy, but it's like an interstitial role. I think it's borrowed from,

Mark Baldino (06:06.19)
Thank

Mark Baldino (06:11.182)
Thanks.

Mark Baldino (06:25.454)
control.

Mike Nowak (06:29.305)
like anatomy and physiology, there's like your lymphic system is known as like an interstitial organ of like, it doesn't do anything itself except connect other systems that need to be working together. And I picked that up and I think that's, this is definitely where like the humanities background comes in where it's like, you just, you're just so trained in making connections between disparate things.

Mark Baldino (06:52.547)
Thank

things.

Mike Nowak (06:56.899)
It turns out that's a really helpful skill to have in product management, which I think of course, engineers do as well and so do designers, right? And so it's not like any, I don't view product management as anything magical necessarily. It's more like we just primarily sit in this place of going like, okay, let's, I mean, I guess I sort of subscribe to the classic. I think this is classic. Like it's like desirability, feasibility, viability.

Mark Baldino (07:03.274)
as we all know, started with the first rate. And since then, I don't know if is anything better.

Mark Baldino (07:15.47)
I don't really sit in the place of God. okay, let's... mean, I guess they sort of sit in the place. So, it's kinda sick.

Mike Nowak (07:26.973)
And the viability piece is like the business piece. there an overlap between it meets customer goals and it serves internal goals or whatever the company's goals are, whether they're revenue or efficiency? Obviously, desirability is, I think, the realm of designer specialty, you know, is like, do we really understand the people and what they want and what would be easy for them to use? And then that feasibility piece being like, how could

Mark Baldino (07:29.612)
is there. Over.

Mike Nowak (07:56.315)
build it. And I view those things as all like dependent on each other. You tug on one and it has implications for the other. So I definitely view building good product as the like is greater than the sum of its parts. You have to put three groups together who co-own that outcome. Like I don't view it as like, a product tells everyone what to do. I view it as like,

Mark Baldino (08:01.262)
that has everything that's written there. if you want do a presentation like this, you have to put this in the right place.

Mike Nowak (08:23.205)
kind of facilitating that interplay between those separate concerns, which can sometimes be in tension with each other or not. And I think this is a little bit where I guess I feel like maybe my background in sales and account management and stuff like that is probably where I came into being a product manager already having a pretty good sense of the like, I understand what businesses care about. I understand what these different departments in a business setting, how they think.

Mark Baldino (08:27.086)
us.

For sure.

Mike Nowak (08:52.485)
which is maybe the gap sometimes that I feel like I'm filling in sometimes for like designers and engineers who are like, it doesn't make sense to me why we would do X, Y and Z. And it's like, well, let me tell you about sales and marketing and how they do or don't work together. So yeah, I guess I view it as really just facilitating a lot of that process, the product trio, I guess that's Teresa Torres or Melissa Perry would be, I guess, kind

big names that are proponents of that approach. And I generally think that works pretty well.

Mark Baldino (09:30.094)
That's great. No, thank you. It is a simple question. You get a lot of different answers. think product has to wear a lot of hats and kind of wear them well. I think that what we're going to do is much easier than the why we're going to do it. And communicating that why, as you said, I think is a challenge. think for designers, I think sometimes worrying about the business feels like an afterthought. So I think part of

Mike Nowak (09:58.267)
Mm-hmm.

Mark Baldino (09:59.566)
product's role is helping design understand the business why and what's business value versus user value. Perfect World, we're all aligned here, right? But we all designed a lot of complex tools where sometimes business value is more important. A feature being added has more impact on dollars and cents than it might on sort of like efficiency effectiveness or happiness of the users.

I really do, I see product in between all of those groups as well and a helpful advocate, right? Like they're an advocate for a lot of different roles and responsibilities and viewpoints. And I feel like when product does that well, makes designs work easier because we can kind of, we can focus more on user satisfaction and value. And as you said, sometimes they're mentioned with one another, but it's like, if everybody's...

Mike Nowak (10:50.577)
Mm-hmm.

Mark Baldino (10:54.666)
is worried about the same things at the same level, it sometimes feels like you can't advocate enough maybe for your viewpoint or what you think is important. So I feel like product fills a negotiator role. They are kind of a counselor. They go out and gather information and bring it back to the group in, I think, interesting ways. sometimes in its place, designers fill that role. But I think I say all the time, our best projects at Fuzzy Math, my consultancy, are when we have a

strong client product team in place and we're sort of stepping in to fill design's role and we can just fill that role, which is really, really important as opposed to kind of spreading ourselves too thin.

Mike Nowak (11:31.621)
Yeah, maybe related to that, noticed like, honestly, like, so I've worked with designers that I think have really strong business jobs. And I've worked with same, same goes for, for like tech leads and stuff like that. And to the extent that I am working with, with people who like kind of play in another area, I noticed as a product manager, it's like, my job's way easier in this particular scenario, because I don't maybe have to carry all that weight of, you know,

advocating or explaining to the client or the end customer, like exactly why we're doing one thing versus another. And I think that gets at the, like, I don't think these are necessarily like hard to find roles. You know, at the end of the day, it's like, maybe they're most clearly divided when it comes to like your actual work product. It's like, well, I write JIRA tickets. I make Figma designs. I produce code, you know, but, well, I guess I don't produce much code as a product manager, but, but sometimes there's a

you know, there's a little bit of crossover. I try to pull my tech leads into fake gems as often as possible.

Mark Baldino (12:36.962)
Right on. Well, I think a lot of times that there's a lot of ink spilled on what product role is. And I think design, maybe too often we're sort of like, hey, we have this process we have to follow from start to finish. it feels, but that gives us comfort in our design decisions. And it gives us comfort in our role that like we do research with users, we do synthesis of that. We tell stories, we lie, right? And sometimes it feels like organizations don't...

Mike Nowak (12:50.033)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Nowak (13:02.021)
Yeah.

Mark Baldino (13:05.806)
totally have a clear understanding of like products role because maybe they get too much into the function of I write tickets, I write requirements, I put BRDs together if people still would do business. I haven't seen them in a long time. Everyone's around and would be like, do you have a sample of a BRD? And I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You don't want to. You don't need to do that anymore. We're not going back. But I think it can be hard because the role you're describing your product is pretty hard.

Mike Nowak (13:19.002)
man, I try not to.

Mike Nowak (13:26.651)
Haha.

Mark Baldino (13:35.554)
to do and it's hard to do well. if there's not like, there's not a set product management process, although a lot of people try to define it, but I think it vacillates sorts different in different situations. It's different within different within the same organization. I think it's a real challenge for product. think sometimes designers have the opposite problem, which is they're too rigid in their process and can't be adaptive to the needs of the situation or something like that.

Mike Nowak (13:45.999)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Mike Nowak (13:57.275)
Sure. Yeah, I actually, so I think this has become kind of a fascinating question to me over the years. I think like five years ago or something like that, I read Melissa Perry's like escaping the build trap and I was like, this is it. This is the right way to do product, you know? And I feel like I certainly, this is just kind of in the water, is I feel like there's been a really big shift recently towards people who are pointing out.

Mark Baldino (14:12.76)
Thank you.

Mike Nowak (14:24.731)
the nuances, at least a product development. I won't even just call it product management, like as a craft, but product development in general. It's like, do you guys follow the Spotify model? Do you do the Amazon thing? Do you do, you know, something that's like they do at Google? And it's like, I think there's, there's been a real growth in understanding in the industry of like, a lot of those things that people espouse as like best practices and ways to do things are highly context specific. Like it's like, well,

you you might not be able to operate the way Amazon does, because do you have the DevOps chops underneath to like automate and orchestrate all those different environments that allow them to work in the way they work? You may not, right? So it's like, so taking like best practices and things that you read in the books and stuff like that, and just trying to like lift them as if they're like the right way to do things, I think is, I think runs into a lot of challenges and there seems to be a growing

number of voices saying like, can't just lift and do these things as if they weren't specific to their original contexts. Yeah. I think maybe this is why I feel it's so pronounced in the product management role is like getting back to that, like what my definition is, is like what to build and why. Like I've never worked on a team where we had a shortage of things to build. It was like, there's always too much to do.

Mark Baldino (15:32.375)
Right, now 100%.

Mark Baldino (15:45.998)
That's even more interesting.

Mike Nowak (15:51.811)
And to me, the real name of the game is just like, we have to make smart decisions about what we do focus on. And so I think that question of why should we do this and not this in most contexts is actually a political question. It's competing priorities, competing opinions about the future of what we're doing. And that's why it's like products job. Maybe it's our main job is to adjudicate all that and to say.

Can we come up with a coherent way of thinking about this product and why we would say to ourselves, yes, let's do this and not that. It may not be right, but can we at least start to put some discipline around it? I guess I would say maybe that's the place where I feel like there's need for discipline in product is, I mean, there's a lot of places, I guess, but I would really zero in on that is like, do we have a consistent way of saying yes and no to ourselves? Because otherwise we're probably just getting into

Mark Baldino (16:37.358)
is alive.

Mike Nowak (16:48.937)
social, emotional kinds of bartering, which is fine, but I don't know, I think it wears people down quite a bit and leads to worse decisions.

Mark Baldino (17:01.454)
Yeah, for sure. Is there anything in your Apple experience in or product market fit stuff that you lean on or you think offers consistency? I always feel like I'm not always, but there's a lot of folks who kind of push back against that. The strongest voice in the room will feel like this the idea. They think this is the future of product A or B or the future set.

Mike Nowak (17:23.632)
Yeah.

Mike Nowak (17:27.505)
Mm-hmm.

Mark Baldino (17:28.302)
And I'm always, I mean, obviously user research is one thing, but market research, not like advertising market, market research, but actually like getting product, you know, product market fit type research. does that have a role in your process? Do you think that that offers any space in consistency or repeatability of process? And then I'm just kind of curious, because you mentioned the Apple experience, like they handle things in a very, very specific way. If there's any nuggets from there.

Mike Nowak (17:32.047)
Yeah.

Mike Nowak (17:58.213)
Honestly, I don't think so because I feel like my experience at Apple was so far down the pipeline from product development. don't know how Apple develops all their products.

I guess other, I mean, maybe the strongest overlap is to do with like, do think Apple is of course very user centric. And I think if they.

Mike Nowak (18:27.089)
if you're gonna err on one side, it's like, well, let's make sure the users are happy, right? It's like using that as something that, but again, obviously these things are often intention, especially like a lot of B2B apps and stuff, like it's just a much more complicated, you know, kind of landscape. So, I mean, I would say, and I'm no expert on this at this point in my career, I'm pretty interested in the realm of what is,

Mark Baldino (18:45.902)
for

Mike Nowak (18:56.773)
has been called like product ops, product operations recently. I feel like product operations is a group of folks. Like again, Melissa Perry, I think she came out of writing Escaping the Build Trap and then said like, well wait, why is it so hard for organizations to kind of operationalize and work this way? So I don't know, I guess maybe that's the place I'm kind of like bullish on at the moment is like, what does it look like for us to create? I guess maybe to your point earlier, like a little more.

Mark Baldino (18:59.512)
Yep.

Mike Nowak (19:26.577)
discipline and rigidity around the product process, which I think is more of an emphasis on saying, we're gonna make data-driven decisions. And maybe where the art comes in is like the debate around which data do we care about and why. It's turtles all the way down, you know, where it's like, it's just, there's still some sort of subjective debate underneath every level.

Mark Baldino (19:52.567)
Yeah. I think, you know, her most recent book is around product operations. And I had her co-author on, gosh, probably last year this time. And I think they make a really strong case for data-driven decisions. And even like dashboarding, even down to the point of like, this is what a dashboard can look like. These are the boxes. And it's like, it sounds so simple, but...

Mike Nowak (19:59.621)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Nowak (20:03.892)
yeah.

Mike Nowak (20:16.047)
Yeah.

Mark Baldino (20:19.224)
People aren't doing it. And I think it does get to the heart of why aren't these things repeatable? Why does the strongest voice win? Why are things very, very political? Always going to be political, but why are they so political? And I do think that there's a lot, there's a lot of great nuggets in that resource of like, okay, now we have a process, but actually we need to get this ingrained into an organization. And how do we do that consistently in one of the roadblocks? So I'd encourage.

Mike Nowak (20:27.505)
Yeah.

Mark Baldino (20:46.872)
Yeah, you to take a look at it and then obviously anybody listening to spin through the books. I think it's super helpful and also does a great job of breaking that down. I wanna talk about a topic you and I chatted about pre-call, which I don't know if it comes from, we're both roughly Chicago based Midwestern roots, which is like pragmatism and practicality in design. And I've always described

Mike Nowak (21:09.339)
Mm-hmm.

Mark Baldino (21:14.286)
Fuzzy math is like a very practical, pragmatic group of people who, you we don't do, I say this all the time, we don't do decks for deck's sake, we don't leave you with some sort of strategy, we always pair product strategy and research with the actual like nuts and bolts of UI design. So pragmatism is really important to me, it just makes sense to me as a human being, I would feel weird doing strategy and then actually doing the execution on it, but like...

Mike Nowak (21:30.661)
Yeah.

Mark Baldino (21:41.41)
What's your take? How do you find a balance in pragmatism? How do you feel like, you know, when I describe pragmatism, I think to some people it can sound really boring and like it's stagnant in some way, shape or form, but like what's your approach there? What's your take on pragmatism in designing?

Mike Nowak (21:57.465)
Yeah,

Gosh, there's a lot of ways I could go with that. I think...

Mark Baldino (22:02.446)
Thank

Mike Nowak (22:07.761)
it's, there's probably some sort of like innate thing in me that just gravitates towards pragmatism in the sense of like, so I'm tempted to say like, well, I'm just drawn to it. So maybe getting back to the philosophical thing is, I think for me, it might be sort of rooted in kind of like, in kind of like a, like,

Mark Baldino (22:12.782)
Thank you.

Mark Baldino (22:18.638)
Thank

Thank

Mike Nowak (22:34.949)
like an epistemological humility kind of thing. I think humans can spin some fantastical stuff on paper that really sounds good, but it's like until we get it in the real world, we're kind of just making stuff up. So I think that's probably where it comes from for me is like, it's like there've been so many times where like we sat in a room and we thought a bunch and we created something and then when it met the real world, it was like,

Mark Baldino (22:41.774)
day.

Mark Baldino (22:52.172)
and I'm really looking forward

Mike Nowak (23:05.083)
we were really wrong about this. And maybe coming up in consulting, it's like when you spend a lot of money of your clients and it's wrong, they're usually pretty mad about that. Even if maybe you as the consultant, it's not totally your fault that it was wrong. So I think it comes from kind of just this, I feel like my commitments to like agile approaches and like all of these things are really rooted in a very like, I don't know, I just don't.

Mark Baldino (23:20.59)
and so forth.

Mark Baldino (23:27.724)
Yes.

Mike Nowak (23:35.129)
No, there's a lot I don't know. We could sit in this room and wax philosophical and think about this, that, or the other, but we just don't know. And I'm really committed to like, how can we, how can we as soon as possible get to something that's real, which is like real contact with the real world where we can kind of like take our lumps and how can we design that contact with the real world in ways that are like smart.

Mark Baldino (23:41.096)
I think that's a point.

Mark Baldino (23:52.942)
this thing.

in people.

Mike Nowak (24:04.131)
and low risk and like quick and iterative.

So I think those are kind of where it comes from for me is like, and I think what's interesting is like, it's funny, like I'm very like pragmatic, let's do something, but I'm also like really firmly committed to this theory of like, we just don't know. So in one sense, there is, you could say, I think there's like an underlying theory to my pragmatism, which is like very philosophically rooted in terms of like, you know, there's theory behind why we should work this way.

Mark Baldino (24:33.526)
you.

Mike Nowak (24:40.143)
So I think that's how I would answer that question.

Mark Baldino (24:42.872)
It's a good answer. I appreciate it. And I think you're touching on something a few times here, which is humans generally aren't good at acknowledging that they don't know something, right? I'll say it. I'm a consultant. I step into a room. My job is to have the answer for the client. And again, I haven't designed in a long time. been in sales and account leadership.

Mike Nowak (24:54.629)
Yeah.

Mike Nowak (25:02.374)
Yeah.

Mark Baldino (25:09.422)
for 10 years, right? So I'm kind of always selling and always feel like I have to have the answer. But it's a tough lesson to kind of teach younger designers, younger consultants. You don't always have to have the answer. And actually, sometimes asking good questions is your job in the moment and listening and stepping back and then absorbing and being like my business partner, Ben says this all the time. It's okay to tell the client that you can have an answer for them tomorrow.

Mike Nowak (25:29.04)
Yeah.

Mike Nowak (25:39.077)
Yeah. Yeah.

Mark Baldino (25:39.82)
that block, and it's a hard lesson. you know, that your pragmatism being rooted in, let's get this into the hands of human beings. I think you answered it in a sort of iterative, rapid fashion, low, not low cost, but low sort of like barrier to entry and get some feedback as a way to backfill our gaps in human knowledge. It's a nice way to say it without actually acknowledging that there are gaps that people have and we're not really good at

Mike Nowak (26:02.171)
Yeah.

Mike Nowak (26:07.983)
Yeah.

Mark Baldino (26:09.646)
admitting that instead they put blinders on and move forward with decisions. So I don't know if that's what's resonating in your approach to me. I don't know if that's if I'm saying the same thing as you.

Mike Nowak (26:20.165)
Yeah, I think so. That sounds largely overlap to me for sure. Yeah, and I remember my very first day on the job in consulting where I actually didn't know even what our company did. I barely understood what consulting was. It was required reading to read, I think his name is, is it Patrick Linceoni? Yeah, Getting Naked. And that was like the first thing I read in the consulting world. And it's like,

Mark Baldino (26:39.628)
Yeah, yeah, naked, getting naked.

Mark Baldino (26:44.662)
Yeah, I was gonna name drop it, but I'm not a big name drop, but it's a great book, right?

Mike Nowak (26:49.177)
Yeah, yeah, it is a great book and I think it stuck with me and I think just time and time again, I've just been wrong about stuff, you know? It's like, I don't know, we thought this would work this way, it doesn't. So let's fix it, you know?

Mark Baldino (27:05.548)
Yeah.

Are we getting worse at that as a group of technologists? I if you spend any time on LinkedIn, I post a lot on LinkedIn. It's not a lot of... I mean, there are people who post about mistakes, greatest mistake I ever made, or I learned the most from this mistake. It is a lot of people with answers. And I don't know if that's for the better. Maybe this is too philosophical a topic, but...

Mike Nowak (27:20.678)
Yeah.

Mike Nowak (27:30.437)
Yeah, I don't know. I don't know if we're getting worse at it.

Mike Nowak (27:36.771)
It does seem like there's been a bit of a shift towards like, we just need to execute, you know? I feel like we might be living in a time and space where people are feeling a little more scarce and are like, just do the thing and get it done, you know? But I don't know. Obviously this also depends on your context, right? I think another subject I've been pretty interested in is the notion of like psychological safety and what makes for organizations where...

Mark Baldino (27:37.55)
Thanks watching.

Mark Baldino (27:46.67)
Yeah.

Mike Nowak (28:04.003)
And teams where people can feel free to admit either they don't know something or they're struggling or they need help. What was it? I forget the name of it. It was, was the study Harvard did with Google about effective teams, you know, I feel like that's another one of those nuggets I picked up along the way that it's like psychological safety was the number one indicator of, of a highly effective team, you know? So, I think largely what we're doing in tech is working on like wicked.

problems, you know, they're, they're gnarly, they're solving problems that haven't been solved before in settings they haven't been solved before. So I actually feel like it's sort of a superpower of a team to be able to say, yeah, we're not, we're not sure we should take a few different angles on that and get back to you, you know.

Mark Baldino (28:44.376)
feel like it's early.

Mark Baldino (28:58.126)
I was at a conference years ago and one of the speakers was talking about the design, the design process. And they said, design is about failure and it should be about failing it over and over again. And then learning from that failure. it really struck me as, we're not trying to design the best thing and then validate that what we had in our minds was right. We're actually kind of placing a few bets and it's risky and it kind of should be risky. And we should go into it thinking, hey, we're 70 % of this

Mike Nowak (29:18.287)
Yeah.

Mark Baldino (29:27.886)
could be wrong, but if we utilize just a simple research process effectively, we can actually learn from that. as you mentioned, quickly iterate on that and get to something that we feel a little bit more confident in. I do think there's a lot less space for mistakes these days. mean, everyone seems to be gripping things pretty tightly across the board in businesses, in design teams, in product orgs.

Mike Nowak (29:37.03)
Yeah.

Mike Nowak (29:50.715)
Yeah.

Mike Nowak (29:54.15)
Yeah.

Mark Baldino (29:56.586)
CTO on down. it is maybe tougher these days to find that room to acknowledge like, okay, it's all right for us to be wrong. It's all right for us to make a few mistakes and then kind of learn from those.

Mike Nowak (30:09.841)
Yeah, years ago at Chicago Agilte, I heard a speaker, and this is another one of those things that just stuck with me, and he said, he's like, you know, when we learn fast, we call it learning. When we learn really slow, we call it failure. Right? So he's like, if you spend a lot of money to learn something, that's when it's called failure. But if you can learn something with not that much money, then people will say, that was learning.

Mark Baldino (30:39.534)
Yeah, right on. Well, I have one final question for you. We might have touched on it before, which is like, take it two ways. Where are you putting time and energy from a product perspective? What do you think are some challenges that we're facing? You mentioned product ops, so maybe that's where you're placing some bets. Is that an area that think like solve some of the problems that are facing the product management, maybe digital design space these days?

Mike Nowak (31:03.857)
I think it's related to product ops, I think I'll answer this in terms of like there's a question that I can't stop paying attention to, which is like.

Mark Baldino (31:10.766)
Thank

Mike Nowak (31:18.639)
I think it has to do with like organizational culture dynamics. There's something along those lines that I think is like really fertile.

Why can't we build better product? It doesn't feel, maybe it's getting back to what I was saying earlier about political kind of realities of product. I think what I'm seeing, and this is a conclusion I've kind of come to recently, that it feels to me like the product management world needs almost no additional help on what is a good product management process. There's a hundred to choose from that are all great.

but the barriers and roadblocks that people run into, and maybe this would be like the touchstone to product ops is like, what is it that keeps organizations from operating in ways that are more product centric? In all of my years in consulting, I've of course worked at a lot of different types of organizations. And you can tell some organizations have...

Mark Baldino (32:05.028)
Thank you.

Mike Nowak (32:26.001)
well-developed muscles that got them to where they are today and now they're playing in digital spaces and this is a new paradigm for them and they have cultural and organizational structural barriers to operating in ways that I think are more product-centric, which is like how do we organize around this digital product and make it successful? Instead, we find ourselves taking product and fighting in like traditional sales marketing

operations kind of ways, which which those sales and marketing and operations organizations were built. I don't know, probably from like an industrial age kind of mindset. And I think I think digital product is is actually like a psychological thing. It's like when you put a piece of software out into the world, it's being used by thousands, millions of people that you don't control, you know, and

And it creates kind of just really wide open questions for like, do we do this better? And it's not an assembly line. It's not, it's not a industrial, you know, mechanical process, but we kind of use, we have a lot of metaphors that, that lead us down that way as if it were that. So, so I'm deeply fascinated with questions of like org design, incentive alignment. Cause I feel like a lot of product managers have probably done things in recent years like

read Melissa Perry's books and said, this is great. Why don't we do this at my organization? And there's complex structural, cultural incentive based reasons why people don't work in certain ways. Cause I think at the end of the day, people all work in ways that make sense to them. And it's like, I'm sitting in ops in a traditional kind of organization. I care about a certain set of things. I'm incentivized to care about a certain set of things.

Mark Baldino (34:02.232)
really.

Mark Baldino (34:11.416)
Yeah.

Mark Baldino (34:17.358)
about a certain set of things. did see people just looking at certain set of things. I'm just having to go out.

Mike Nowak (34:21.241)
And it impacts how I show up. It impacts how I collaborate. I love people in ops, by the way, I'm not trying to single them out. You know, and it's like, I think that's it. So I think it's that kind of human organizational psychology side. Like I love following Adam Grant stuff, you know, and I don't, I don't know enough about all that stuff, but I'm like deeply curious about it. So I feel like that's the next, it's like organizational change feels like the next frontier for product, because I think the barriers in front of.

Mark Baldino (34:26.414)
Thanks.

Mike Nowak (34:50.705)
And I say product there, I don't just mean product management. mean the end-to-end multi-discipline practice of building products.

Mark Baldino (34:52.558)
Yeah, right on. Well, I follow you on LinkedIn. I suspect you'll have something to say about this. I hope you have something to say about kind of the future of it. I appreciate during the conversation today, you've continually brought it back to the humans that are at the center of these processes and the center of these tools.

and I have very much enjoyed the conversation, which didn't get too philosophical for me. It's like just philosophical, like philosophy light, which is great. I really enjoyed some of the more heady topics that we got into, but just want to say thank you very much for your time and energy today that you put into the podcast.

Mike Nowak (35:31.781)
Good.

Mike Nowak (35:43.611)
Yeah, sure, thanks for having me. It's been great to be on, I enjoyed the conversation.

Mark Baldino (35:48.071)
All right. Thanks, Mike.