Shaun Clowes
Chief Product Officer at Confluent
Shaun Clowes is CPO at Confluent, previously CPO at MuleSoft (billion-dollar Salesforce business) and Metromile, with six years at Atlassian where he ran Jira Agile and built the first B2B growth team. He created popular Reforge courses on retention and data.
Dimension Profile
Key Themes
Episode Summary
Shaun Clowes argues that most PMs are not good because the discipline is still underdeveloped, and the fix is simple: always talk from the customer's, market's, and competitor's perspective instead of getting dragged into internal politics. He shares his Bingo card approach to career development, lessons from building the first B2B growth team at Atlassian, and why AI's biggest PM impact will be data management.
Leadership Principles
- → Product management is still underdeveloped — if PMs were doctors, the state would be unacceptable
- → Always talk from the customer's, market's, and competitor's perspective — the very small number of PMs do this
- → Most PMs get dragged into internal politics and scrum management — you can't win that way
Notable Quotes
"Product management is still such a relatively undeveloped discipline. We're 15 to 20 years into this. If we were doctors, you'd be like, 'That's totally unacceptable.'"
— On why the state of PM craft is still immature
"Always talk from the customer's perspective, the market's perspective, the competitor's perspective. The very small number of PMs do that. Most get dragged into internal politics."
— On what separates great PMs from the rest
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