What we talked about
Zach Mabe, Senior Product Manager at Amazon, shares insights on creating intuitive products that delight customers. He emphasizes the ‘hammer’ analogy:building simple, self-explanatory tools that solve problems effortlessly. Drawing from his experience, Zach discusses how product managers act as professional decision-makers, constantly grounding decisions in customer needs and expectations.
Show notes
Zach Mabe came to product management from finance, which gives him an unusual frame: he thinks of a PM’s job as professional decision-making, not feature-shipping. His benchmark for whether he’s doing well is how invisible his role appears to the people around him, the more obvious the decisions seem, the better he’s filtering the noise.
What we covered
- The “hammer” is Zach’s core analogy for what great products feel like: a tool so self-explanatory that no one needs to be told how it works, and that always works the same way. He uses it as a constant pressure test, when you’re too embedded in your own product, you stop noticing the workarounds you’ve learned to make instinctively, and those workarounds are where customers are suffering.
- He describes the product manager’s role as a decision funnel: on one side is “just absolute crazy noise” from engineering, stakeholders, customers, and leadership, and on the other side is clarity for the team. When the output looks obvious to observers, that’s when he knows he’s doing it right. The more useless people think his job is, the better.
- Customer expectations are a moving target that only accelerates with AI. Zach uses the example of Amazon’s “add to delivery” button, for years he wondered why, after placing a qualifying $25 same-day order, he couldn’t add a second item to the same delivery window. Once that feature existed, it became a baseline expectation rather than a delight. The pattern repeats: once you make something standard, your only remaining opportunity is to disappoint people when it fails.
- The engineers-versus-product-managers framing is one he actively resists, but he does observe a real cultural divide between organizations where speed-to-ship drives decisions versus those where quality drives them. His preference in the negotiation: he arrives wanting the soapbox derby car, his engineers want to build the Porsche, and the goal is to land on the Toyota Corolla, the version that ships fast enough to matter while being solid enough to sustain.
- His background in finance means his superpower is analytics and data modeling, and he deliberately picks product roles where that skill set is most valuable. He gives aspiring PMs the same advice he follows: know specifically what you bring, find the problems where that strength matters most, and don’t try to be a generalist expert at everything.
- On fearlessness as a requirement: Zach argues that innovation by definition means you don’t know what the outcome will be, and when he hears a team say “we know this is going to do X,” he takes it as a sign they aren’t pushing hard enough. Product management mistakes are visible and expensive, launched features that flopped, three months of engineering work that went nowhere, and the willingness to absorb those publicly is non-negotiable for anyone who wants to do the job well.
About Zach
Zach Mabe is a Senior Product Manager at Amazon, where he focuses on building customer-centric products at scale. He came to product management through a background in finance and data analysis, and specializes in consumer product experiences.
- LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/zach-mabe-0bb293123
- Website: https://www.amazon.com
Episode 84 of the PreVetted Podcast.
Full transcript
Federico Ramallo (00:00) Welcome back to the pre-Vetted podcast, where we spotlight extraordinary people and remarkable talent reshaping our world. Today, we’re joined by Zach Mabe. He’s a senior product manager at Amazon. Zach has built his career around one core idea, helping business delight customers with the right products for the right problems at scale. With strengths spanning from product management, data analysis, strategic planning, and cross-functional collaboration,
He spent his life turning complex challenges into simple, customer-centric solutions that actually ship and make a difference. Zach, welcome to the show.
Zach Mabe (00:38) Thank you. Thank you.
Federico Ramallo (00:40) We were talking before starting recording about this idea of the hammer, right? That the hammer is simple, easy to understand, and we’re thinking about how that connects, how the current products are overcomplicated and we haven’t had time to build an actual hammer, right?
Zach Mabe (01:04) Yeah.
Yeah, I mean 100%, right? And like, I see this, it’s a really big challenge as a product manager, right? Like kind of constantly reminding yourself that you’re trying to build that hammer, right? That very simple tool that everyone’s gonna understand how it works and they’re always gonna work the same, right? All hammers work the same, right? Because you get so embedded in the use of your product that all these little like paper cuts or like small annoyances, right? You know how to work around them, right?
And so it is always challenging to kind of continuously reground yourself in the customer and figure out how do I make this like very simple experience that customers are going to engage with and it will have done the thing they want it to do as quickly as possible and with as little intervention from them as possible, right? And those are like the truly magical experiences.
Federico Ramallo (02:01) Yes, because if we can build a product that is self-explanatory and easy to use and can apply to as many possible use cases then you build this… What I’m trying to say in too many words is there is something magic about the simplicity of the hammer, right?
Zach Mabe (02:24) Yeah. ⁓
100%. And, you know, anytime customers have an expectation of what a product should be doing for them, right, which is every product, everything customers use, they have an expectation of what it’s going to do. Right. And so understanding those expectations is like so critical in the difference between a magical experience and just an average one. Right. Because people will figure it out. Right. Like if they have an indestination in mind when they engage with a product and that indestination is worth it enough.
they’ll suffer through friction and through problems to get to that end point. ⁓ But that doesn’t make it like in a great experience, right? The great experience comes from all of my expectations were met, or maybe even expectations I didn’t know I had, right? But that subconsciously I was hoping would be true just happened.
Federico Ramallo (03:14) Right, right. And I think that’s the great impact that the product managers can bring to a team, where you can help the company build simpler products that has a much more significant impact on the users, right?
Zach Mabe (03:32) Yeah, I agree, right? I mean, it’s our job. people, I always enjoy trying to explain to like friends, like what do I do? Right? Like they always ask, like, what does a product manager actually do?
And I always look at them and I’m like, you know, it’s a great question, right? Like, of course I produce products, right? I produce BRDs and whatnot, right? Like, write documents, spend a lot of time writing, but like, at its core, I feel like being a product manager is being a professional decision maker, right? Like, you are engaged for your ability to know the space, critically think, and make the right decision, right? Into the day, your job is to make the right decision for the customer.
⁓ And so in these moments, like this is why, you know, the dog food thing, right, which like, man, I how we came up with that term, dog food, this is a horrendous term, but like, it’s critical, right? I mean, every single product that I join or like work on, I begin using it religiously, right? Every opportunity I can, right? Like honestly,
Federico Ramallo (04:25) You
Zach Mabe (04:37) Amazon has probably made more money from me since I joined Amazon just because of like my engagement with the products I’ve worked on right where I feel this need to go use it because if I’m not using it right like I am also a customer the expectations I have as I use that product are going to be shared by thousands of people right
⁓ And that doesn’t say anything about UX research and user studies right and like these engaging with the customer where they’re at right that’s also super critical and and and everything but like You know if you don’t understand the product if you don’t understand the pain of your own product You’re never gonna get the magical experiences right because you won’t You won’t have wanted them right you won’t have had missed expectations where you go
man, this really should have done X thing here, and it didn’t. And now I have to go work around getting that outcome I wanted, right?
Federico Ramallo (05:34) It’s interesting because it’s a moving target, right? Because these expectations change over time, right? and if you do a good job as a product manager to finding what are these ⁓ expectations of the users, then your job become invisible because people don’t see it because they don’t complain, right? It meets the expectations, right? Which means you’re doing a great job, right?
Zach Mabe (05:57) Yeah. Yeah.
I actually love that you said that like your job becomes invisible thing because I actually think it’s a hugely underrated aspect of product management, right? The more useless people think I am, I almost feel like I’m doing a better job, right? Because if people don’t see the just absolute mess.
that is all of these inputs coming in through me and filtering out the other side, right, to the engineering team, right? If I am able to take the just absolute crazy noise that is like this side of the decision funnel and drive clarity on the right side of it to the point that people aren’t even sure why I’m there because the decisions seem all so obvious, then I’m like, man, I’m killing it.
Right? Like, it is a funny thing. The more invisible your job is, almost the better you’re doing, right? And like, you’re totally spot on on these changing expectations. I think, you know, like, we’re seeing it so rapidly right now with AI, right? Every single time we bring an AI product or tool to bear, it is the like…
Single biggest challenge meeting customer expectations, right? Because when AI works, right the way we hope it does The reason that everyone feels so great about it is because it is the most magical thing, right? That is the single most magical experience for sure when AI works the way we hope but getting it there is really hard, right and so that’s That is I think ⁓
very spot on, right, this moving expectation. like, I think almost the worst part is everyone kind of knows where the challenges are with AI today, right? And so like, when chat GPT gives me a really bad response back, I’m like, okay, I could probably ask the wrong question, right, engage with it slightly the wrong way. And like we were talking about this before we started recording too, right? if customers have an outcome in mind, they’ll kind of work around those frictions, but that doesn’t make it a good experience. But like someday,
Chat GPT is gonna find a way to work inside those expectations and even with bad prompts, come out with the thing you wanted. But then customers will just move on to expecting something else out of that product, right? So you’re never done, right? No product is ever done being built. You just decide to move on from it, right? It’s kind of like writing or any other form of art, right? It’s never actually done. You just have deadlines or you have the next thing that needs doing, right?
Federico Ramallo (08:25) Yeah, mean, it’s ⁓ a piece of art that’s never done. There’s actually a deadline that, when you have to publish it, yeah. And I feel the same thing with the products, The level of coordination that needs to happen for a product to be successful is very, very complex, right? ⁓ And the…
So one of the things that I’ve been doing on my engineering team is kind of trying to ⁓ give them this ⁓ awareness of what we’re building has a value to the user, right? trying to, it’s not facilitate, but aligned with the product owners vision and building more empathy with them, right? Because then that way,
instead of ⁓ providing objections of, ⁓ there’s a better way to implement this or whatever, then we can become a ⁓ collaborator to build the vision of the product owner. ⁓ And it’s because of this complexity, because you have so many layers, that idea kind of get lost in translation.
And that has been really interesting for me, right? Because ⁓ I ⁓ think I mentioned before, but I earn more and more appreciation towards your role because I’ve seen the impact that it on people,
Zach Mabe (09:55) Yeah, yeah, I appreciate that. I mean, yeah, know, and engineering is hard, right? That is an incredibly hard job. You are expected to have the skill set that is incredibly technical, right? And incredibly deep in a subject matter, right?
but then also always be able to bring it back to the customer, right? And like the user that we’re trying to delight. And so it’s a really tough thing, right? But I think this is what kind of separates exceptional engineers from the rest, right? Which is if you understand the business enough or the end vision or the customer enough to actually push back and help shape the end product, right? Beyond like the actual…
kind of pure technical, right? Like that’s obviously a thing that we rely on for engineering, right? Like when I have a thing I want done, I rely on engineering to help me understand how to get it done, right? Like that’s, that’s obvious.
But I feel like the next step is understanding, well, why do you want this done? What is the underlying user problem to your point that you’re trying to solve? ⁓ And then pushing back there too. I mean, that’s exceptional. I love when my engineers ask me questions that I’m like, you get it. You get the problem. You get the user, the customer’s problem. It’s not just.
I’ve told you I want the button to open up Y page when you click it, right? You understand why I’m picking that spot for the button, right? Or you have questions about it, right? You understand why the button should look like that or you have questions about it, right? You push back on like, it be this page or this page, right? ⁓ Because you actually understand the customer journey, right? But that’s tough, right? That’s a big ask, especially given, you know.
Just the, you know, that, job produces, right? The point of being an engineer is to build a product, right? End of the day. And so that’s still your first responsibility. So it’s kind of like everything, right? We’re like, we all wear multiple hats, right? You know, every once in a while I’ll have to pick up an Excel spreadsheet and just do a bunch of finance analysis, right? Cause the finance team doesn’t have time for it, right? Or, you know, in the world of AI, I’ll pop into an AI tool and draft up some UX mocks that are code ready, right? Like.
Federico Ramallo (11:52) Right.
you
Zach Mabe (12:15) without necessarily going through my UX team, right? And that’s just kind of the multiple hats that we all have to wear, but yeah, it’s hard, but it is critical. It is a big difference between, like, I think, a really high-functioning team ⁓ and just kind of average ones.
Federico Ramallo (12:32) Right, right. Probably this is an oversimplification, but the best way of being able to explain this is product owners have the what needs to be built and the software engineers know how to build it. ⁓ And sometimes there’s a back and forth on that because ⁓ it’s easy on a non-technical product owner to say, let’s build this, but it’s technically, you
Zach Mabe (12:47) Mm-hmm.
Federico Ramallo (13:00) challenging or impossible, right? And if we took it a little bit, then there’s a better way to do it, right? So having that negotiation, right, ⁓ is a great service ⁓ for the product and for the users, right?
Zach Mabe (13:02) Yeah.
Yeah, I honestly, I always love those conversations are some of my favorites because I’ll come in and like, I just know the engineers going to start it like I’m building the Porsche, right? Like whatever your ask is, I’m going to build the Porsche version. And I feel like I’m always coming in and I’m like, whatever the ask is, I want the soapbox Derby car. Whatever gets it done fastest and down the hill.
Federico Ramallo (13:25) Yeah
Hahaha
Zach Mabe (13:39) That’s it, it’s all I need. And then hopefully, right, in these conversations, you understand a little bit kind of why I feel the urgency, right, or like why we need to do this quicker, why it doesn’t need to be perfect. And I understand why it can’t just be held together with like duct tape and dreams and we land on the Toyota Corolla, right? That’s always my hope, right, that like through this discussion we can figure out the Toyota Corolla version of the product, right?
And that’s like nothing to say, obviously there’s the other super overused analogy of the skateboard, like the MVP concept of like, yeah, you build the skateboard and then you add handlebars and turn it into a scooter type crap as you build into the car. I that is always true. We always need to be iteratively developing where we come up with ways to deliver as we build the end product. But.
The end of product vision, hopefully, is more of the Toyota Corolla and not always the Porsche or not always the Soapbalk Derby car. Having said that, I think that’s a lot of culture, right? I’ve seen that, like, I think which one you end up with always ends up a lot of the culture and the direction of, leadership, right? How quickly they need to see product come out, how much do they understand that?
Federico Ramallo (14:36) ⁓ Right.
Zach Mabe (14:56) if you want product built the right way, it takes a little bit longer, right? And I think that often ends up like, I mean, I hate when people talk about it this way, but maybe it’s the easiest way, right? Is it a more product-driven organization or an engineering-driven organization, right? Which, you I don’t like it because it makes it seem like we’re on opposite sides when we’re not, right? But like, that I do feel like ends up kind of the culture.
Federico Ramallo (15:20) Right, right. Yeah, I’ve been there when I was technically, know, obsessed on the technical quality, trying to make, build something that is super perfect and optimize it on the technical side. Yeah, but what’s the point if nobody’s going to use it, right? Or it’s not going to provide value to the user, right? Yeah, but look at my code, it’s so beautiful. Yes, yes, but…
does that have an impact to the user, right?
Zach Mabe (15:49) Or you just
don’t put a big enough dent in the problem fast enough, right? I mean, I think that ends up the biggest trade-off always right is Any like, you know, I’ll give an example right like when I’m when I pitch a product vision to leadership, right and I go to them and I say look Here’s this problem. It’s X size
Like this opportunity is huge. We can do a lot here, right? We have the skill sets and the expertise to do a lot in this space. And then they say, yep, great, we love it. We’re gonna give you five people, go solve the problem. Like how many years of appetite, right, do you think that they have before I wanna, they want me to come back and say, you know that X I told you? Yeah, we got 80 % of it, right? Like.
People want to see you eating into the entitlements that you call out, right? Like if you say, I can do X, they want to see the roadmap of where you’re slowly but surely eating into that entitlement, right? And delivering into that space. And any time…
And this is why we make these trade-offs, right? Because if you build the Porsche, you’re just not delivering fast enough, right? You’re not going to be getting the entitlement quick enough to satisfy the pace of customer expectations, right? To make it more about the customer, right? Customers want to see advancements, they want to see new CXs, they want to see new things to do. That’s how they stay engaged. And from a business perspective, right?
We’re not running charities, right? End of the day, the point is to claim those entitlements, right? To do the things we said we’re gonna do and to do them in a way that is aggressive and with urgency, right?
Federico Ramallo (17:34) Right, right, because timing becomes a significant factor on, know, especially when you’re building a new product, ⁓ the first to launch it, you know, is going to have a much bigger impact on the market, right? ⁓ Right, right, it’s…
Zach Mabe (17:47) as long as you get it right. Because we see lots of times where you don’t get it right and then the second
person is like, I could do that better.
Federico Ramallo (17:56) Right, right. I still remember when Elon Musk crashed the ball to the Tesla Cybertruck and crashed the glass, right? And he was surprised about it, right? ⁓ So, you know.
Zach Mabe (18:06) Yeah.
I do not want to be on the receiving end of whatever
email came out of that. I’m, man, that must have, yeah, that must have been wild.
Federico Ramallo (18:19) Yes, yes. the reason I mentioned that is because you can see it on physical objects, physical products, right? But it’s hard to see on software products, right? ⁓ You build a house, now move it five inches to the left because we miss something, Well, it’s a whole ordeal, right? ⁓ Or move a wall, right? You can see it ⁓ physically, you can see the debris, you can see you need more wood, whatever.
⁓ But with software you don’t see that, right? Because we just rebuilt something and there is no debris, right? It’s just ⁓ wasted time, if you like, right? Yeah.
Zach Mabe (19:00) Yeah.
And I think you’re right, it’s
easier to see those advancements and how critical those timings are in physical product than it is in digital, right? Phones are a great example. iPhone is constantly trying to, I don’t wanna say guess, right? That makes it seem like they’re just throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks. they are innovating on features of a phone, right? The new Air is a good example, right? They’re testing this new form factor,
of our customer is going to be to things like a camera if they can get a phone that’s half the thickness and like half the weight, right? Like these are like very obvious physical product developments that change how people engage with the device.
But online, it can be harder to see, but it’s just as critical, and people just maybe don’t see it, right? I’ll give you an example of a recent feature that I kind of saw pop up on Amazon. I wasn’t involved in building this, but I saw it, and I was like, this is a thing, talking about expectations, that as a customer, I have had the expectation of ever since we launched SubSameDay delivery, right? So know, on Amazon, in Seattle.
I think it’s mostly like urban areas, right? You can get delivery next day now, right? If you hit certain cart limits, blah, blah, blah, right? So you can put $25 worth of stuff in your cart, get it in the next morning by 8 a.m. or whatever, right? Like the delivery timelines. This is just a thing that’s out there.
Always I sat there and I was like why if I’ve already placed an order for $25 Can I not add to it if I find something else that I want that is qualifies for same day? But I can’t hit $25. I should be able to add it to that delivery, right? that was a friction point right
But now there’s an add to delivery button. And that is so amazing to make that improvement to the customer experience. And that’s the innovations we’re talking about. That’s the timing.
But Amazon has competitors, And like, you know, there’s other e-commerce platforms out there that are hot on our heels with, you know, being just as innovative and pushing just as hard to delight the customer. And it’s the same thing, right? Like, if Amazon can’t keep up with…
What are customers’ expectations in search? What are customers’ expectations in adding to cart, to checking out, to delivery speed, to all of these things, and somebody else comes out with the same thing, a sub-same-day delivery feature, and they had that add to next delivery button, they beat us, they beat us on the CX. They got there first, and customers are gonna pick up on that.
So it’s there for sure. Those innovations happen. They’re constantly changing how we present information, where one can add to the cart. These things are always evolving. ⁓
Federico Ramallo (21:50) Right, right. I remember when Amazon added the, that you could ⁓ group your products together so you will get less cheap, less boxes, right? ⁓ And when I saw that, it was something that I was not expecting, right? This, I don’t know, this was many years ago, right? It’s something that I didn’t know that I wanted, but once I saw it, I was…
I thought that’s brilliant, because now you can have one package, you can wait a little bit longer, but it’s less shipping, it saves resources, right? And I’ve seen other ⁓ competitors lagging on some of these features. ⁓ The delivery time was longer, right? So there was a longer friction.
on competitors and it was easier to do ⁓ business with Amazon. ⁓ So I found that very interesting. ⁓ Then I’ve seen the other competitors kind of catch up on those type of features. So it’s always a competition on adding these new features. ⁓ And I think that that becomes an issue when you are trying to ⁓ build those features.
and you add more complexity to the workflow. So it’s a challenge to do that, right? Because ⁓ if you’re used to buy with one click and now you have to click three times to do the same purchase, right? Or five or whatever, then that becomes an issue just for that, right?
Zach Mabe (23:36) Yeah.
Well, in one click, see, man, I love, I love talking about one click CX is right because one click experiences are so delightful when you get them right. But like the.
Federico Ramallo (23:41) You
Zach Mabe (23:51) things the customer’s expecting happens when they click that button to buy, right? Like what address am I picking? What payment method? What delivery speed, right? There’s a lot of choices that were going into that checkout flow that you’re now putting into one button, right? And we were talking about this and like the Apple devices thing, right? Like when I joined to this call, I had four possible microphones that Apple could have picked to record my voice right now, right? It picked the wrong one, ironically, but you know.
Federico Ramallo (24:18) You
Zach Mabe (24:20) It’s the same thing, right? Like it’s the same thing of like you’ve simplified a process from five or six steps down to one, but then that puts a lot of onus on you as the business, as the CX driver, to make the right decisions that the customer is gonna want. Because otherwise everyone’s gonna stop using it, right? If I clicked buy now with that one click and it picked, I don’t know, my mom’s address, which I use maybe twice a year, right? Like I would be like.
Why? Why did you do this? Like, I’m never gonna use this CX again, right? So it’s important. It matters a lot.
Federico Ramallo (24:50) you
Right, right, we were kind of talking about this before I started recording. You mentioned the microphone. One story that I have about that that I found frustrating. So you used to connect an external screen on the MacBook and then it would show a new screen, right? You have a default decision. Now it shows a…
a pop-up saying what do want to do? Do you want to extend your desktop or do you want to screen mirror or extend your desktop? Something like that. But my question is why? Because now you have an expectation of zero clicks, it works. Now you have a click, right? And we had that issue and that pop-up didn’t show up on the screen for some reason.
So we were frustrated. This was at the beginning of a talk. So we were frustrated of work, damn it, right? And in that conversation, ⁓ one thing I don’t remember if you or I bring it up, whatever, ⁓ we’re talking about this idea of wouldn’t it be great if we can ⁓ define the policies that we want, right? ⁓ These type of decisions that are not
Zach Mabe (25:56) Yeah.
Federico Ramallo (26:20) ⁓ interface based, ⁓ But it’s this smart quote unquote, you know, defaults. ⁓ Wouldn’t be great if we can just, you know, tweak it and improve it on the user side.
Zach Mabe (26:35) Yeah, 100%. And like, I think you’ve brought up another really good point about when technology removes our need to do something and then fails, right? And those are almost some of the worst CX misses. This automatic input switching is like the best example. Man, I was talking to ⁓ one of my younger siblings, right? Like, guess like sibling-in-law. ⁓
Federico Ramallo (27:04) Yeah
Zach Mabe (27:04) And like they’re kind of in that Gen Z generation, right? And they plugged in the HDMI cable to the TV for like their video game or whatever, right? And the input didn’t automatically switch. And they just unplugged it and plugged it back in like 20 times. And I’m like, what are you doing? Just go into the menu and like change the input. And they’re like, I don’t know how. And like that was such a mind blowing experience for me, right? Because like I have…
come up with this technology and understood how to do those things because it was required, right? Like when I started plugging my freaking little three, you know, three colors into the holes, the right colors might match up right into the TV. I knew I had to. Yeah, the RCA. Thank you. couldn’t quite remember what it was. Yeah. Like when I had to plug my RCA cables into the back of the TV, like.
Federico Ramallo (27:46) Yeah, the… the RCA.
Zach Mabe (27:55) I knew I had to go switch the input. I had to do that myself. But the minute technology kind of improved and got to the point where it was like, no, I can detect there’s an input coming in through this channel. I’m going to switch to it. That just becomes the default. Everyone expects it to work that way and they expect it to work flawlessly. And so all you get to do post that point is not delight customers, but disappoint them. Right? Like that’s kind of the double edged sword of building better CXs.
Federico Ramallo (28:20) You
Zach Mabe (28:25) once you make it the standard, your only opportunity is to disappoint people. Like, it becomes their expectation, and if it fails, it’s a huge problem, and if it works, well, that’s just what it should do. That’s what everyone does, right? But, you know, it’s on to the next one, right? I mean, I think this is another thing we talked about, right? This is why working in tech is so much fun, because it’s never done, right? As soon as we build something like that,
right, that just changes how people use a product, it’s onto the next thing, right? There’s always another customer problem to solve and there’s always more opportunity to build a CX that delights customers that, you know, maybe they didn’t even know they wanted, right? There’s that other ⁓ Ford question, right, if I would have built a faster carriage, right? I mean, it’s the perfect example of why tech is fun.
Federico Ramallo (29:17) Right, right. I found interesting the adventure of the unknown, right? Because, you know, it’s so wild some of the things that, you know, some stick, some don’t. And I found that fascinating.
Zach Mabe (29:31) Yeah, I agree.
Federico Ramallo (29:33) What are your thoughts on ⁓ AI tools being able to help on predicting the customer experience or being able to fulfill a great customer experience?
Zach Mabe (29:48) Yeah, I mean, so AI is like…
undoubtedly going to change how people interact with technology, right? I mean, probably 10 times this concept we were just talking about, right? Of like when I plug in the HDMI cable and it just switches, right? And how default that is, like this, this times 10 is how AI is going to change how we interact with technology, right? It’s just going to happen. I think the question is like timing and what exactly that looks like and all the different modeling and knowledge bases we’re going to have to bring to bear to make that reality come true.
⁓ But I think it’s another area where customers have a lot of expectations.
And when AI works, it’s like one of the most magical experiences, right? Like when AI connects dots that I didn’t even necessarily anticipate it to, and it gives me output that is exactly what I wanted with very minimal prompting, right? I ask basic questions and it gives me exactly the information I want. Amazing, right? I think good examples are chat assistance for customer service.
If I can just have, fairly instantaneous, faster than you get from a person responses to my customer problems, and then get a solid resolution where that agent clearly understood me, magical experience. But every time there’s misses there, you’re interjecting friction that can get very frustrating. And so…
It’s a challenging one. mean, it’s definitely going to change the way we interact with technology, but I feel like anything, right, we’re at kind of the beginning of it, right? The product is probably here and it needs to be here. And…
we’re gonna keep tackling it, right? Like it’s all these different companies are gonna keep coming out with new product and new ways to solve problems. ⁓ you know, for me personally, right? Like I’m not a technical AI PM, right? Like I don’t, I wouldn’t know how to go build these models, right? But I am gonna be a consumer of them, right? And so for me, a big way I think about this is like, how am I setting my products and my asks to engineering up in a way that is going to enable me to best use AI to
Federico Ramallo (31:43) you
Right.
Zach Mabe (32:11) Right and so then I have to be very much constantly aware of the iteration of those tools Right. So give you a good example. We now have like ways to build code ready mocks, right using AI tooling
But the best way to do that is not to ask it to constantly reimagine the UX, like the user experience and the UI, every time I want to mock something up. I need to give it standards. I need to give it expectations of what I want to see come out the back end. And so already thinking about when you’re writing a BRD, ⁓
what are your requirements to engineering going to be to make sure that the UI elements they’re building are being exposed to a knowledge base that I’m then gonna use in the future to build these UX mocks so that I can move quicker. We already do this for things like metrics. It’s my job as the PM to tell engineering.
you know, this is gonna be the ref tagging standards, right? Like the ref tagging, you know, ⁓ nomenclature and how we’re gonna track these things. Here’s the kinds of metrics I wanna track, like let’s figure out how to get that done, right? That is already part of my process, right? Now I’m just adding to that.
Instead of metrics, right? Like the AI ready data that I’m expecting them to be exposing so that I can leverage these tools. Right? And that doesn’t require knowing how AI works. That requires understanding how AI tools work. Right? Like as a PM, I know how to use Figma. To me, it’s the same thing. Right? Now, instead of Figma, I need to learn how do these agents work? What kind of data are they going to expect? You know, we build internal AI tooling too, right? Like I need to become knowledgeable about
and the kinds of things it’s going to need, right? So this is kind of how I think about AI both from the product development side and the customer side, right? Like it’s gonna change both and we have to be honest about kind of the work it takes to get there and how we’re going to enable it.
Federico Ramallo (34:19) Right, right. Yeah, I think that you don’t need to know mechanics to drive a car. You don’t need to be an expert on AI to be able to build an AI product, right? Or AI enabled product, yes.
Zach Mabe (34:32) Yeah, 100%. I
couldn’t rebuild my car, but I can change the oil. I can put gas in it. I know enough about owning my car and working with my car that I can keep the car running. It’s the same thing. I would say it’s every person’s responsibility right now.
Federico Ramallo (34:39) Right.
Zach Mabe (34:54) to become AI tooling literate, right? Like, that is just the way it’s going to be and there’s no stopping that. It’s going to happen because it’s too good for it to not.
Federico Ramallo (35:10) Right, right. Yeah, I think that ⁓ being able to ⁓ set ⁓ expected behavior, what do you expect the application to do and respond for a specific user case, that gives you the ⁓ good enough setup to ⁓ pass down the requirements, right. ⁓ So I think that’s a great way to put it. And then on the assisting side, building…
when you’re building a product, you can consume a lot of tools that are AI enabled that will allow you to build better products, right? ⁓ Or assist you on ⁓ some of the tasks that will consume a lot of time. Now you can delegate it to agents or tools that are AI enabled, right? ⁓ That are becoming better and better every day, right?
Zach Mabe (36:04) And we have to be very aware of that change in engagement pattern, right? Like I don’t know many people today who are going and talking to chat GPT and then like ordering product through chat GPT, right? But if that was to like, but the more common that gets, right? Just talking to an agent through voice or through text ⁓ or even just search, right? If my expectation is, ⁓
If my, if as a customer, right, I start looking more and more at searches, like I’m not gonna search for, you know, I don’t know, t-shirts, right? I wanna give it a description of the t-shirt. I wanna describe how I want it to fit. I wanna describe the color, right? Like I give my thoughts on my search experience to this search agent and it spits out the right product for me. That is a seismic shift.
in customer behavior, right? But those engagement patterns and possible ways of engaging are things that we need to be aware of that AI is going to change, right? Because today, there was no predictive modeling that was good enough to do that, right? But that’s going to change.
Federico Ramallo (37:19) Right. So I’ll ask you one last question. What advice would you give to somebody who wants to get into product management, you know, based on your extensive career? What advice would you give them ⁓ on how to become a great product manager?
Zach Mabe (37:35) I love this question and like maybe a good opportunity to share a little bit of my background, right? Like I didn’t start in product management, right? I started in finance, right? So I think the thing, the number one piece of advice I give people when they ask me this question is like two things. One.
Know your strengths, right? Product management is about wearing a lot of hats, and it’s about solving a lot of different problems. And no single person is an expert at everything, right? But know the kinds of things you bring to the table, right, where your superpowers and your strengths are, and how you’re going to best help the customer. And then find opportunities where that skill set,
is going to be best utilized, right? Coming from finance, for me, that’s analytics, right? I do data, I do modeling. I understand these things very deeply. And so I tend to pick products where that modeling and data-focused decision-making is going to be best utilized, right?
But I’m not technical, so I would maybe shy away from roles where as a product person I’m expected to code, for example. You know what I mean? Because these kinds of roles exist or that are really, really deeply technical. I tend to be more on the consumer product side, less on like, I probably would never go become an AWS PM. So I think understanding your strengths is a huge one. The second one is…
Federico Ramallo (39:00) Right.
Zach Mabe (39:06) Don’t get into product management unless you’re willing to be fearless. Like, you will make mistakes and as a product manager, those mistakes are huge.
You don’t get to just be like, I sent an email and it didn’t go over well type of mistakes. No, this is like, I broke customer facing features. Or I launched a product that just totally flopped and we spent three months of dev work on it. They’re big mistakes, but this is what innovation looks like.
If when you’re innovating, you’re only doing things that you know what the outcome is going to be, you’re not actually innovating, right? Innovation comes from doing things where you have no clue what the outcome is going to be, right? And I constantly challenge people when I sit in meetings and I hear us talking about, we know this is gonna do this. And I’m like, well then, I don’t know that we’re pushing ourselves enough, right? So you have to be willing to be fearless and to go after product vision.
with like dogmatic belief, right? And not be easily dissuaded from the vision you set for yourself. ⁓ Otherwise, failures are just gonna set you back too much, right? And there’s gonna be a lot of failure, probably as much failure as success.
Federico Ramallo (40:14) you
Yes, I agree. mean, ⁓ being able to take risks for the sake of launching a more innovative product. I think that’s a great advice. So, Zach, thank you very much for joining us today. think we learned a lot about products. I truly appreciate it. ⁓ Any final remarks before we wrap it up?
Zach Mabe (40:49) Yeah, no, thank you for having me. I always love getting to share my experience and my views on these things. I’m just one guy who has opinions, and they’re only my opinions. I’ll continue to fearlessly share them. Follow my own advice.
Federico Ramallo (41:06) Great, great. Thank you.
Zach Mabe (41:08) Thank you.