64. Unveiling The Secrets to Successful Product Management | Jim Hansen, CPO at Advantive

Karthik Chidambaram: Hello, everyone. Welcome to a new episode of Driven by
DCKAP. I'm your host, Karthik Chidambaram, CEO of DCKAP. We make systems
talk to each other.

We are here in Austin, Texas, with Jim Hansen, Chief Product Officer of
Advantive, makers of distribution and manufacturing software. Jim has a
wealth of experience in product management, product leadership, And really
excited to be talking to you today, Jim, and welcome to Driven by DCKAP.

Jim Hansen: I appreciate it. Yeah, my pleasure to be here with you today.

Karthik Chidambaram: So, Jim before we get started, can you tell us a little
bit about Advantive? What do you guys do? And you make manufacturing and
distribution software. Tell us about Advantive, how Advantive was created.

Jim Hansen: Yeah, sure. So, we started in a little dark room. No, I'm
kidding. It wasn't a dark room, but we, the business itself, came together
right around the July of 2022 time frame. And it was really the creation of
what our owners, TA and Associates think of as, as a platform business. And
so, what they had, this really interesting idea of taking a number of
different businesses that existed out there, very successful great product
types of businesses, bringing them together and forming a larger business.

And that's effectively what we've done. So we have brought six basic
companies together. This was in the 2022 timeframe. And since then we've
actually acquired six additional businesses and brought them all into the
fold as well. And in the end, what we have is a business that delivers high
quality business software for manufacturers and distributors.

And we cater specially to the different kinds of businesses that are, kind
of, specialty in nature. Think of them as like those plumbing markets where
if you needed, for example, an enterprise resource planning type of tool,
you could go off and you could buy one of the big guys. Or you can get
something that's really tailored and suited for what you do as a company.

That's what we do is we provide specialty software for those kinds of
businesses manufacturers and distributors, and it spans four different
functional areas. We have products that fit into our packaging market, where
we think of packaging like boxes, corrugated sheets. Not a sexy market, but
one that is massive and incredibly important to the entire supply chain of
how everybody distributes their goods, right?

And we as a business have software that helps those organizations build
those boxes and build those corrugated sheets that they can then go sell. to
the broader businesses across the world. We have a secondary part of our
business, which is very similar to what I just described, but it's more
focused on manufacturing execution.

So think of all the other kinds of manufacturers that have to go build
things, whether it's the camera or the stand that this, this camera's
sitting on, our jackets, the rings, any other device you can think of.
Everything you look around at is manufactured somewhere. Well, they have to
have tools that allow them to be able to compile the parts to put those
parts together and ultimately produce those goods that then get distributed
across the world.

So we do that too. We have manufacturing execution software that allows
customers to do that. The third part of our portfolio is more focused on
quality. Well those same things that you produce need to have a certain
level of quality. So we can measure everything from temperature to how much
liquid is in a bottle if you're a bottler, to other kinds of quality
factors.

It might just be the size of the thing that you're creating. The weight of
it could be again, something inside of a container, et cetera, et cetera.
And that quality is super important for manufacturers because they have to
produce the best quality goods that they can. And our software helps them
manage the quality side of their business as well.

And then the last part is really kind of the end of the supply chain, which
is how do you then get everything to market? And we do that through
distribution. So we have a sizable component of our business, which is
focused on distribution. And we produce, you know, ERP software, mission
critical types of things that help these businesses manage everything from
their sales to their inventory, to even how they package and place things on
a truck.

Karthik Chidambaram: I love your business model where you acquire a bunch of
companies which are doing really, really well, and you make them a larger
company. We also work with, or we work with a couple of companies right now,
DDI and D1, Distribution One, you know, it's a really, really interesting
business model. You pick the best players in the market, but small, but
looking to get big and you group them together.

Jim Hansen: Yeah. So TA does that well. They do. And I'll tell you, a D1 or
Distribution One and DDI system are the two distribution products, two or
three actually that we have within our portfolio that we acquired, we
brought in, and I'll tell you, they're amazing products. You know, I go out
and I have the privilege as a Chief Product Officer to go spend a lot of
time with customers.

And as part of that, I asked them- why do you buy? Why do you buy this?
Like, you could buy anything. Why don't you buy our software? And what I
continuously hear is we've got the best software in the market. They love
the software. They love what it does.

They love the simplicity. They love the ease of deployment. They love their
ability to be able to just get it into their environments and leverage it
quickly. To deliver the business value that they're expecting. So I am
thrilled to have the distribution piece within our business. You could
think, well, gosh, we could have just focused on manufacturing, but it turns
out manufacturers distribute too.

And so, you know, there’s this nice synergy between having solutions within
our portfolio that actually satisfies both the manufacturing side of the
business and the distribution side of the business as we can continue to
grow. We look for those opportunities to find things that can help fill in
those gaps of things that our customers need.

Karthik Chidambaram: You have a wealth of experience, Jim, you know, worked
at companies like Riverbed, SolarWinds, did product management. I'm curious
to know about your early career journey, right? So tell us about it. What
got you here?

Jim Hansen: Gosh, I never expected to be in product management, I'll tell
you that. You know, in my early career, I actually went in to be an
electrical engineer. I went to school for electrical engineering, came out
and I was thinking I was going to go build circuit boards. That's what I
thought I was going to do. And I had this distinct privilege getting out to
join a small consulting organization doing, you know, As it turns out, ERP
implementations for Lawson and J.D. Edwards and a little bit of SAP.

And this is back in the 90s, right? A long time ago. And, you know, what was
interesting is that, you know, doing that consulting work really taught me a
lot about really just listening, understanding customers. And so, you know,
after doing that for a little while, working in that consulting firm, I had
this really great idea of moving from Southern California, up to the Bay
Area.

And I was like, I'm going to go into this, the dot com boom. There's all
this great opportunity up there and I wanted to be a part of it. And I got
there just in time for it to all crash. So I joined this little company and
I had a blast while I was there, but the company folded. And so I started
looking around and I found another consulting gig.

So you can think of my really early career as really just consulting, right?
And so, software implementation effectively. And I was working at a small
company, started out. Its name is Automark Technologies. About midway
through my tenure there, we renamed it to SenseAge. And there's a little
security information and event management type of solution, right?

Basically we took log data and made sense of it. That's what we did. And
about halfway through my career, I had three little kids at home and, you
know, my wife looked at me one day and she's like, you know, I didn't want
to be a single mom. I was on the road all the time and she's like, I really
need you to be home.

And so I went and I sat down with our CEO at the time, it was Jim Pflaging.
And so, like, I gotta find a new job. And I gave him my resignation and he
tore it up. And he was like, I've got a different idea for you. It's like,
how about product management? I looked at him blankly. And I was like, I
don't know what that is. What, tell me about it.

And he explained his perspective, and he explained it so simply. It was
really, I- It's always stuck with me over the years. And that is like being
a product manager is about building a business, building the product and
defining what you're going to take to market, how you're going to take the
market and so forth.

He's like, but the real trick with product management is you’ve got a
million things you can do. The trick is to figure out which one's not to do,
because you'll always have a list. There's always a list. There's always a
backlog. There's always a massive number of things that every customer said,
hey, I want this and I want this.

The real trick is figuring out what not to do. And that's stuck with me over
the years because he was right. And at the time I wouldn't have guessed it,
right? I was like, okay, let's do it. I'll become a product manager. So I
became a product manager. And so I did that for a number of years. And I
worked at a number of small startup companies out of the Bay area while I
was doing that.

One of which was a company called Splunk. Who you know, recently got
acquired by Cisco, of course. And as part of that journey, you know, I got
this privilege to come in and build their applications business. And, I
worked with a woman who hired me in multiple different places. Her name's
Christina Noren. A mentor still even to this day for me.

And one of the things that I found just intriguing about the business was
that we were solving big data problems before big data was a term, right?
And, as part of that, I worked in an organization where you'd almost look at
it kind of like Oracle, where Oracle's got this database and like you go
talk to Oracle people like, oh, we got the database, right?

And they don't really talk about their applications, which actually make a
ton of money for them, right? It's all about the database. They are a
database company. Splunk was like that in the early days, too. And it was a
challenge because trying to convince everyone, we've got to build
applications.

Applications are the step function. This is how we go make more money. It
was a really big challenge. It was like antibodies fighting the virus in the
system. And we got through it, and I'll tell you, Splunk was probably one of
the most amazing companies I had ever worked with, but I learned a lot about
becoming a good product manager in the process.

Kind of fast forward over the years, moved into, you know, higher level
roles throughout my career, and eventually here I am as a Chief Product
Officer at Advantive.

Karthik Chidambaram: I love Splunk. I was following Splunk for quite a bit,
you know, in terms of how they were running the company and they went public
and all that. So it's a really, really interesting story. And I also think
that the early consulting experience really helps because, you know, when
you're young, you know, you can travel the world and, you know, it's easier.

So, you know, you just be here, be there, do all kinds of stuff. And then,
you know, you get on to product management and, you know, I mean, it's, it's
really, I would say, you know, it's fascinating, you know, so it's very
interesting. So tell us about some of your early mistakes in product
management?

Jim Hansen: Boy, you know, doing product management in the early 2000s, it
wasn't really a thing. There was no book. You couldn't go find a blog. I
mean, actually, I mean, at that point, we were just kind of getting past
bulletin boards, right? There wasn't a place to go to learn.

So I had to learn it on the job. And, to your point, I made a lot of
mistakes, right? There was a lot of places where- And frankly, the biggest
mistake, and I tell all my product managers that I work with now, you know,
it comes back to that first point that I mentioned a few minutes ago.
There's always a million things you could do. But you gotta figure out which
one's the most important. You gotta figure out which ones are the right
things.

And I'll tell you the one thing that I found over the years is. The most
important trait for a product manager is intellectual honesty. It is so easy
to think that you're the smart guy in the room, you've had all these
conversations, you think you know everything about everything, and you say,
here's what we're gonna go build. And then you go and you find data to
support why you're right. And what I tell people is, you gotta go figure out
why you're wrong.

Because if you don't figure out why you're wrong, you're gonna build things
and you're gonna be wrong a lot of the time. Because you're tailoring the
data. To fit what you think is what your customers need. And that's wrong.
And I tell you, in my early career, I did it all the time. And I learned
over the years after building many things that were not the right thing that
you have to take a step back and you have to stay completely objective about
what it is that you're building.

You can't fall in love with your product. I tell people to, don't fall in
love with your product. You gotta be ready to throw it out with the
bathwater if you need to. But you want to find the things that are most
important, that provide value to customers. Because if you can find those
things, if you can understand their problem, understand what gives them
value, what drives value, what makes them a superhero inside of their
business. If you can figure those things out, you have a much higher
probability of success than not.

And again, early in my career. I didn't know that. You know, so, I'd walk
into a room, I'd see who says, hey, what do you think we're going to build?
And I had to be confident in these things that I thought. But I hadn't
really quite learned that you've got to go spend time with customers. You've
got to get in front of them. You've got to understand them. You've got to
learn what they do. You have to learn how they operate. You've got to learn
how they think. What does their environment look like? How do they have to
do their jobs every day? And when you understand that, now you can start to
take and you put yourself into their shoes.

And it comes down to empathy. You've got to be able to empathize. With the
way that they operate and identify those acute problems that not only are
something that's going to make their lives better or make their companies
better, but are also going to be things that they're willing to pay for. And
that would be my second mistake. I built a lot of things over the years,
right?

Where you build them and you're like, ah, it's great. It's a field of
dreams. You're going to go build this thing and they're going to love this
thing. And then you look back and you're like, oh my god, that didn't do
well. And you, and if you really took a step back with intellectual honesty
and, and you said, all right, why didn't it work? It's most of them because
you chose to focus on the wrong stuff.

Karthik Chidambaram: I love the term intellectual honesty, you know, so
become- you're being very true to what you're building and also don't fall
in love with the product. I thought that's pretty cool, right? Because yeah,
I mean, don't fall in love with the product and, you know, do things that
make money. Whatever great things you build, you know, it's not really going
to go anywhere.

Jim Hansen: That's right. Well, and that objectivity is really important,
right? And I'll tell you, I'll mention one more thing. I tell all my product
managers all the time, if I see you fall in love with your product, I'm
going to put you on a different product because I need you to stay
objective, right?

And the minute you fall in love with it, your perspective changes and you're
no longer able to be purely objective about whether something that you have
is good or bad, something that needs to be improved or something that just
needs to go away. And that's hard, especially in a large portfolio of
technology.

You got a lot of things. I've got 30 products in my portfolio today, and
across those 30 products, I've got some amazing products. I've got other
ones that are okay. Can I make them better? Probably, but where am I going
to best be able to go drive value for the company, but also make sure that I
give the right value to our customers in the process.

Karthik Chidambaram: That's my next question, too. You know, at Advantive,
you have a lot of products, and you're acquiring a lot of companies as well.
You have acquired a lot of companies. So what is- How do you manage this,
right? I mean, as a Chief Product Officer, you know, there are many
products. How do you focus?

Jim Hansen: You know, it's an interesting challenge, and I'll tell you,
every portfolio is a little bit different. You know, I ran a sizable portion
of SolarWinds, and they're a very large portfolio. Riverbed, I had a large
portfolio. Here, I have a large portfolio. And, you know, at the end of the
day, it's really about identifying, and, you know, as a company, we are
beholden to our shareholders, right? I have investment firms that are saying
they want to make money at the end of the day. And we are a company that is
there to help make money.

So, you know, it's funny because I've had some conversations with a couple
of our board members where, you know, like really, what is my real job?
Chief value officer. That's really what I do, right? You know, my job is to
identify value. And then go exploit that value, get it into the hands of
customers so that they'll continue to renew, right? I need those renewal
dollars because it helps me go build more stuff. And then I also want to go
find new business.

And so my job running a large portfolio like this is to figure out where are
those things that I can maximize the value that I can drive for the company.
And again, in the context of the value that I can drive for customers as
well. Because customers at the end of the day are paying the bills. Right?

They're paying my salary and I have to make sure that we're building the
right things for them and that we're delivering to them the value that not
only is going to get them to continue to be my customer, but also at the
same time deliver value to us as well. Because we have to continue to grow
as a company because, you know, we are owned by people that want money.

Karthik Chidambaram: So it makes sense. Yeah. But then let's say, you know,
you have four or five products, right? So, and then, you know, you're
managing all these products and one product is obviously doing really well
paying the bills. But then there's another product where, which is not doing
so well, and maybe the team's not great and there are some challenges there
and all that, but, you know, that is a problem, right?

Because let's say you're serving an industry, and that industry needs the
solution, and you have a product for that, but just that product is not
great and maybe you don't have the right team to support it. How do you deal
with that situation? Because I've run into that problem, or we have run into
that problem, right?

So let's say you don't have the right people, then would you continue
investing in the product, find somebody else or would you just say, you know
what? Let's just pause right now because they say no, focus is very
important. Yeah, so let me just work on this, and then let me get to that
later.

Jim Hansen: Yeah, you know, gosh. It's that's such a tough question because
every situation is a little bit different and as you look at any portfolio,
whether it's any of the ones that I've managed you go to like a company like
HP or IBM or anybody that has a large number of products and you're always
making decisions about what to invest in, what to maybe invest a little bit
less in, and things maybe that, you know, does it really make sense to have
it in the portfolio long term?

The way that we think about it at Advantive, I don't sunset products. You
know, we have customers that are running products from, you know, gosh,
years and years ago. And they get value out of it. So, I continue to make
sure that we're supporting those customers appropriately, that we're
providing them the right value.

Now, am I building new things? Maybe not. In some cases, I also see a
product that I might say, hey, like this thing here, man, this thing is a
growth opportunity. We can go find new customers. We can get our customers
to expand. I can get them to use more of it, which again, helps me, helps
them too. But at the same time, you know, and so those decisions are very
specific to the environment that you're in.

And I'll tell you, between my experience here at Advantive, Riverbed,
SolarWinds, and the companies even before that, every situation was a little
bit different, right? What the advice that I would give anybody with a
larger portfolio is, think about what you have and find the places where you
can deliver the most value at the lowest cost.

Because at the end of the day, the lower, the less you spend getting the
value in front of the customers, the more I can spend elsewhere. Right? And
I don't have unlimited funding. I can't do all the things that everybody
wants to do. And it kind of comes back to what I said right at the
beginning, right?

I've always got a list. I have a list of thousands of things that I could go
build. Which ones are the ones that are most important? How do I help the
most customers get the most value with the least amount of money that I
spend on it, so that I can make sure that I can do more things that give
them more value beyond that?

Yeah, I keep saying no too right, because there's obviously a lot of things
you can take on, but then don't take on everything that comes your way and
that becomes a hundred percent. Yeah. And it's a, you know, sometimes it's
hard. It's hard to tell a customer now, right? When a customer is saying, I
really need this thing, my general approach is, and again, this is kind of
how I tell my team to operate is you’ve got to go understand it. So go spend
time.

A customer says, hey, I need this thing. It's not, we're not doing that.
Tell me about it. What problem are you trying to solve? Why do you need this
thing? How is this going to help you do your job better and show me what
your experience is. And sometimes there have been situations in my career
where I've seen a customer, they tell me they want something, like, that's
silly. I don't think you need that. Let's talk about it.

We talked about it and then they're like, no, no, you’ve just gotta see it.
You’ve got to understand. I go to visit with them and I watch them do their
job, and like, oh my god, I totally get it. I absolutely understand. This is
creating a huge amount of anxiety for you as a customer every day. And I've
actually changed product decisions in order to be able to make sure, again,
that we're providing them the right value.

It's just such a- It's a challenge to figure out the right things to do and
the right things not to do. But at the end of the day, if you spend time
with customers, if you know them and you understand them, and again, you
kind of proverbially put yourself into their shoes, you will make the right
decisions more times than not.

And it doesn't mean that everybody's always going to be happy. And that's
always the challenge. You're going to lose customers every now and again,
right? It's what they call churn, right? Even the best of businesses might
be at 93-94 percent retention. You're still losing a couple. And that's
okay. Because it might mean that you just weren't the right fit for them. Or
that they're not the right fit for you.

And sometimes those decisions are tough. But you have to be okay with it. As
long as you have clarity on what it is that they need, you can continue to
grow and drive customers and grow the business.

Karthik Chidambaram: Yeah, don't sweat over it if you lose customers. It's
okay, right? It's okay.

And as a Chief Product Officer, how do you spend your time? Like, for
example, one third of your time is spent on customers, or one third on
people. Do you have anything around that?

Jim Hansen: Oh boy, yeah, that's an interesting one. You know, I have a
pretty firm belief, and I've done this most of my career. You've got to
spend time with customers, certainly, right? And as a, more so as a product
manager than as a Chief Product Officer. I spend time with some of our
larger customers. Gosh, in the last, you know, three months, I've traveled
to three or four different locations that I've met with a number of them.

The thing that I think is most important is you got to spend time with your
own people. I have to teach my team how to go ask the right questions, how
to have the right conversations. Think of me as more of a personal trainer
than go into a spa. I'm not a spa. Like, if you want to come work for me,
you're, I'm not a spa.

I'm not the guy that's gonna, you know, put the towel over your face and rub
your shoulders. I am the guy that's gonna teach you how to be the best
freaking product manager alive. And that's something that, you know, as I've
watched people that I've mentored over the years progress. I have wonderful
people.

Actually I'll tell you a funny story. There's a young lady that used to work
for me years ago. I won't mention her name since we're on a podcast. But
yeah, so she'll know who she is when she listens. And she was one of my
employees. She was actually a Product Marketing Manager and she came to me
and she's like, you know, Jim, I'd really love to try my hat at being a
product manager.

I was like, okay, let's give it a shot. And so, she went and we made her a
Product Manager. A couple of weeks later, she comes into my office. She's
like, Jim, what chance, what percentage chance do you think I'm going to be
successful? And I was like, you know, probably about 10%. And she didn't
take offense to it. But she definitely took it to heart.

And what I loved about her is that she took that and turned it into her
personal mission to be awesome. Fast forward. She's a Vice President of
Product Management now for a software company out of the Bay area. And she's
amazing. She's one of the best Product Managers I ever had working for me in
my career.

And it's wonderful for me to watch people go through and do this job. If I
could think back to when I was an early Product Manager, no one taught me. I
had to kind of just figure it out. And so, I kind of look at it as my
personal mission to make sure that everybody who does this job does the job
well, but they’ve got to do it right.

And again, it comes back to a lot of those same traits that I had
highlighted just a little bit ago. You know, radical candor and
transparency, right? Yeah. How am I doing? I'm not doing well. You're not
doing well. It's okay, right? And I really take that feedback in a positive
way and that's what she did.

Karthik Chidambaram: It's really good. Yeah. But one challenge we do have, I
mean, you talked about travel. There's something, you know, I mean, you
know, obviously I like to travel too and I meet with customers and all that.
Yeah. But then, you know, I mean, setting up these meetings, you know, let's
say, you know, you're the Chief Product Officer. You're trying to set up
meetings with customers. Tell us about that process. Is it easy or, I mean,
are customers always welcoming because that's something, you know, getting
the schedules on and all is something, yeah, sometimes it's a challenge,
right? You know, depending on the type of individuals within the customers
that you're trying to spend some time with.

Jim Hansen: Sometimes it's easy, sometimes it's harder. The way that that
one thing that I found is that when, when I call up somebody or I send a
note, I'm like, hey, I'm Jim Hansen. I'm the Chief Product Officer for this
company that you use to help run your business. I'd love to just talk with
you. I generally find customers are pretty receptive.

And depending, like, you know, but I've also had conversations with
customers that are really mad at us. You know, whether it's here at
Advantive or other places, right? They're upset for some reason. And so, you
know, I actually relish those conversations too, because it's an opportunity
to learn. It's an opportunity to understand, again, them. Why are they
upset? What is it that either we have done or what we have not done that's
making it a challenge for them to do their business?

And what you always uncover is that it's such simple things. It might be
that we had a support ticket that we didn't respond to. It might be that we
have a bunch of support tickets that we didn't respond to. It could be that
they needed something which was going to really help them accelerate the
growth of their business. And we just didn't deliver it for them, or we
didn't, but we never told them that we were going to deliver it.

Who knows, right? And so, when you sit down with them, you learn about them,
you learn about their business, you learn about who they are and what they
need, and what they care about. And again, once you understand that, then
you can start to think about how you start to adjust your own product
strategy to be able to make sure that you're either catering to them- and I
might go to be like, actually, you're not the right customer for me. But,
that’s usually not the case, right?

There are a breadth of customers that are usually the right customers. And
so then you just gotta figure out how to make it all fit. And it's like a
big game of Tetris that you gotta figure out as part of the resourcing that
you have, the things that your customers really care about.

And again, I'll bring it back to, you gotta find the things that are most
important. Right? It's easy to go build a one off little thing for one
customer, but it doesn't help anybody else. So how do you deliver the most
value for all the customers that are using your products? It's an incredibly
challenging thing to go do.

And it's not- You can't do it by going and talking to one customer. You
gotta talk to a whole bunch of them. Because then you start to see the
trends, and you start to see what it is that they all care about. So for me
as a Chief Product Officer, I do that way less today than roles that I have
had in the past.

It is my passion. I love spending time with customers and I love getting to
know them because it helps me think about, how do I evolve my business? How
do I continue to chart the path of where we need to go as a company to make
sure that we're not just following behind where our customers are? I want to
get in front of them.

And if I can understand them well enough, I can do that and I can build the
best possible products that are going to solve the problems that they don't
even know that they have yet. Yeah, look for patterns, right? So when you
work with a lot of customers, you really find the pattern and say, you know,
this is the problem you're solving.

Karthik Chidambaram: It's very interesting. So let's switch gears a little
bit. You know, you produce both distribution and manufacturing software. So
like you said, you know, at the start of this conversation, some
distributors are becoming manufacturers now and some manufacturers also want
to distribute so then they can work directly with the customer. Where do you
think this is heading as a technology provider?

Jim Hansen: Yeah, you know, it's interesting. It's amazing to me how many
manufacturers there are out there and distributors that still use pen and
paper in Excel. It's shocking to me that there is-

It is and it isn't, right? It's one of those areas where if I put myself
again into the shoes of, let's say, a small distributor, they have money
coming in, they have money going out, they have employees to pay, they have
all the expenses that they have as a small business, and they've got to
figure out where to spend their money.

So where, technology wise, do they do that? And I believe, firmly, that
technology is an enabler. Technology is how you grow. Technology is how you
get rid of the mundane, and you let your teams focus on the things that
provide value to your customers. And if you can't figure out the right ways
to automate and make it easier for them to do your jobs, growth gets stunted
to a large degree.

And if you look at the growth of companies in general, right? Like how hard
is it as a business to get to be a 1 million business, right? Less than 5
percent of companies get there. How hard is it to get to a 10 million
business? Way harder. It's really hard to do that. And so you put- you kind
of put that into the lens of the distributors or the manufacturers
themselves.

And you realize they've got a big challenge on their hands to figure out the
right way to do it, but also to do it so they can still create the margins
that they need as a business, right? And that's a challenge. But I do
believe firmly that technology is an enabler. Something simple like an
enterprise resource planning solution or a manufacturing execution system, a
PLM, a PDM.

These are the kind of things that make it easier for customers to be able to
do their jobs. You think about a distributor, or maybe a manufacturer that
is trying to do some distribution on their own. Well, maybe they have a
sales guy that has to go to a retail shop and figure out, where am I going
to put my products on your shelf?

But if you could enable that salesperson to have at their fingertips on an
iPad or something, let me just access the inventory and see what I’ve got
available that I can help you to go accelerate your business. You're now
providing me as a provider. I'm providing value so they can provide value to
their customers, right?

So I think technology is critical. For growth, right? And you could even
start to think about, like, generative AI and some of these things. I
actually think those are more solutions to a problem that is yet to be
defined. And so in a lot of cases, when you look at some of what these folks
are doing, like I can see, I can think of a million different ways that
somebody would potentially be able to leverage a generative AI solution or a
machine learning kind of solution to be able to go deliver faster
information, or value to their customers, or just getting their users, their
people, inside their business to have information at their fingertips.

But the question is, do they need it? Right. And so, you know, I always look
at that. I've had multiple people that are Jim, we got to do some AM. Like,
okay, cool. Why, why do we need to do it? What problem are we trying to
solve? And if we can figure out the right problem and apply that as the
solution, absolutely all in.

Karthik Chidambaram: It's awesome. I mean, you talked about generative AI
and all that, right? So, I mean, as the Chief Product Officer, like you
said, you know, it's about the practical use of the solution, right?

So, where are you really using it? I mean, there's a lot of technology which
is coming out there. How do you design? You know, hey, you know what? This
is the technology I'm going to experiment on. You always keep experimenting.
Yeah. But how do you know what I'm going to put on the product, or is it
just based on customer feedback or the practical use, or how do you do that?

Jim Hansen: I think this is where strategy has to become a core component to
how you decide what to do. And strategy is informed. You don't just come up
with it out of nowhere. And trust me, like, you look at a Bezos or a, you
know, Elon Musk, and some of these guys out there, like, they're just
incredibly smart people who came up with some cool ideas and they're
awesome, like, they just keep coming up with great ideas.

That's not how the rest of the world works, right? And so for the average
Joe who has to sit down and build a product, I think strategy and
understanding what your strategy is is really important. And so, for
example, you think about something like AI and so forth. I look at that
technology wise, even within Advantive, in a couple different ways.

Number one, how can I use Generative AI and those kinds of mechanisms to
just make my team more efficient? Think of something like, I've got all this
data sitting inside my CRM. How do I make sense of it? I could sit down and
read it all. Well, can I come up with a better way to synthesize the data
that's all sitting right in front of me and make it easily accessible so
that I can find the information that I really care about, which is the
trends?

And the answer is, yes, you can totally use Generative AI types of
mechanisms to be able to do that. Microsoft has Copilot, and there's a bunch
of other ones out there in the world that allow you to do that. Can you get
more efficient at developing code? Yes, we're actually testing, our teams
are, you know, playing around with, how can we leverage these tools to just
make the development work go faster so that I can get things into the hands
of customers faster too. That's the inside side of it, right?

And there's, I could probably wax poetic on this for a long time, but the
other side of it is then how does a customer take advantage of it? And that
is in my mind, a decision point of, again, what problem are we trying to
solve? You know, we are exploring different mechanisms as an example today
on how can I leverage AI to get information faster into a salesperson's hand
who is out there trying to sell to their customers?

You know, data coming in through your e-commerce platform. How do you look
at it in the right way to know, what are you selling? Where are you selling?
How are you selling? Because if you can understand that better, then you can
start to make better decisions. And again, drive your business. And again, I
believe firmly control what you can control.

And I think those are great examples, right? Like there's a lot of things in
the world, whether you're a product company, a software company or
otherwise, where you don't really have a control over things outside of your
business to some degree, but I have complete control over the things that we
do. I can make those choices.

We can decide what we're going to do, but you’ve got to decide based off of
data. If you start going off gut, you might make some good decisions, but
you might not. So, you know, that's, I mean, again, another lesson that I've
learned, right? You, and by the way, you might have an opportunity to look
at a bunch of data and you might think, gosh, I need more to go make a
decision.

Sometimes you just gotta make a decision. Gotta make the decision off of
what you got in front of you, knowing that down the road you may have to
make a slightly different decision because the data that you have may be
wrong or the data that you have may be skewed in some kind of way that has
led you down a path that is not the right path.

Karthik Chidambaram: Yeah, decision making is critical, right? You make a
decision and then move ahead, rather than not doing anything, you know,
that's another problem.

Jim, what do you do outside of work?

Jim Hansen: Oh, what do I do outside of work? Boy, I work a lot. I'm
kidding, I'm kidding. You know, gosh, you know, a couple things. One, you
know, my family is a big volleyball family. I'm a sports enthusiast. I'm not
that tall, I'm only 5'6” but I played volleyball in college. My- all three
of my kids play volleyball. We have a court in our back. We play volleyball
at home. My daughter actually plays division one over at Stephen F. Austin
here in Texas. And I'll tell you, you know, the competition is super
important.

Like, I love it. Like, everything in our family turns into a competition no
matter what happens, right? We're like, playing a game of cards, turns into
a competition. We're like, hey, who can swim faster across the pool? Okay,
turns into a competition, right? But, what I love about that is that life is
a competition, right?

You know, you compete for jobs, you compete for airspace, you compete for
time, you compete for everything. Competition is super important, right? And
so, you know, my whole life kind of revolves around my kids, my wife, my
family, and, you know, we are a really competitive family, right? You know,
we get into the you know, you get together with groups, you know, that
family night, and I'm like, oh boy, the Hansons are here, you gotta watch
out for those guys, right?

That's it. But it's a lot of fun though. You know, we do. So I do a lot of
that. I love doing outdoor sports, except in the summer in Austin because it
gets pretty hot here. But you know, that's kind of what we do. You know,
we're a pretty tight knit family. We spend a lot of time together.

When my daughter's in season, I'm usually traveling around the country
watching her play. My middle son plays up at Michigan State. My oldest is in
the Navy. And he's actually about to get out, but actually tried out for the
Navy team, he made it, but then he was always deployed when they were
playing, so he never got a chance to play. But he's, he's actually a really
good player too.

Karthik Chidambaram: Tight knit family, very cool actually. So you guys
have, like, weekend nights and all that, or is it like planned weekend
nights, or how do you do that?

Jim Hansen: Yeah, yeah, so I mean, we you know, we will, the kids are all
out of the house right now, right? So, you know, when it's just my wife and
I, we will, we're pretty low key. We'll hang out at the house. I live, you
know, right here in the Austin area, and, you know, we'll go swimming and
we'll kind of just hang out, we'll go for walks. I got two little beagles
that, yeah, if you ever had a beagle. They eat everything and they enjoy
barking at everything too.

But you know, we, we will go for walks and, and just kind of just explore
and experience the world, you know. Don't do a lot of traveling. You know,
we're a little bit more the stay at home kind of people. And I love doing
research. I read books all the time. You know, I'm sure we'll talk about
that.

I'm not really a very exciting person. I love building products, so I spend
a lot of time reading product books. Just trying to figure out how to do it
better. I love the product excitement actually.

Karthik Chidambaram: Yeah, that's exciting. Yeah. What question would you
like the next guest Jim what question would you like to ask the next man?

Jim Hansen: Yeah, you know so you know the one thing that I find interesting
is is when you look at a business, right? Businesses come in all shapes and
sizes whether you're a small distributor or a big distributor a manufacturer
You have to figure out how do you take things to market you have to bring
them to market and and that's a tough Struggle, right?

You know, sometimes you, you build what you think is the best go to market
strategy, and then you look back and you're like, that didn't work that
great, but why didn't it work that great? And you've got to figure out,
you've got to dig into it and understand. And this is going to data becomes
so important, right?

Being able to look at what you've sold, where you're selling, what are
customers saying? Like, why didn't they buy this thing that I made or that I
produced, whether it's software or, you know a consumer product or something
like that. And, and when you, when you start to figure that out like what I
would love to know is you, when, how do you define and how do you change
your go to market strategy when it makes sense to do that?

And when you need to pivot, how do you do it? Right. And, and you know, for,
I'll tell you for, for, for me I'll pivot on a dime. If, if we, if, if I
look at our go to, and I, I'm evaluating our go to market strategy every
day, every day, we look at it, we're like, Hey, is this working and keep in
mind, we've got a large portfolio, so we look at it in, in.

Kind of in buckets. Yeah, and then we look at it at the macro too, right?
But but if if something's not working man We got to make a change and we
don't want to sit around and wait Because if you wait you lose time and time
kills So I would love to get I would love to understand from the next person
or whomever you talk to I would love to know How do you do that?

How do you do that effectively? And how do you make those changes in the
least disruptive way? Yeah, I love the question. And yeah, I mean, it's all
about change all the time, right? I mean, I love thinking about this too,
right? So let's say if something's not working, hey, what do you do next?
And just pivot and then try something else. And you keep experimenting and
try something new.

Karthik Chidambaram: Yeah, it's a great question.

Karthik Chidambaram: So Jim, I would like to end with this question. What
book are you reading right now?

Jim Hansen: Yeah, so there's a wonderful book by Clayton Christensen called
“Competing Against Luck”. And it's an interesting one because you think
about all of the products out in the world. Again, I mentioned Jeff Bezos. I
mentioned Steve Jobs, right? Like you go tell Steve Jobs, hey, is it lucky?
He's like, no, man, I knew exactly what I was doing. Right. And I would say
a majority of good businesses, they don't get built because of luck. They
get built because you control what you can control.

This book goes into, you know, it's competing against luck. Like, how do you
build the best product and how do you understand and build the right thing
to make sure that you have the maximum chance of being successful in the
market? And it doesn't happen, as we talked about earlier, right? 5 percent
of companies make it to a million dollars.

You're like a million bucks. I feel like I can go make a million dollars
pretty easily. But how do you do that? And companies struggle, like, every
day, and it's a people challenge, it's a product challenge, it's a market
challenge, it's a customer challenge, and all of those things have to come
together. It's a great book. It talks a lot about strategies that you can
employ to be able to do that effectively.

It's one of my most favorite books that I've read more recently.

Karthik Chidambaram: It's very interesting. I think I read something similar
in another book “So Good They Can't Ignore You”, I think, where they talk
about, hey, it's not about luck, you know, you keep trying different things
and you don't know what's gonna work. What's not gonna work. Just keep
trying and then, like you rightly said, deploy different strategies and see
if it works.

I'm actually rereading a book right now. It's called “Range” by David
Epstein. It's a pretty good book, too. So, where it talks about, you know,
having a diverse set of skill sets. It's not just one, right? Let's say, you
know, if I want to play tennis, you know, it's not about just playing
tennis, you know, you play 10 games and decide which game is good for you at
a later point in time.

Jim Hansen: Yeah, sure. So, yeah, I mean, you think kids do that, right? Put
them in soccer, go put them in baseball and figure out which one is the one
they like the most and they grab. Yeah. I think that's, I'll have to read
that one as well.

Karthik Chidambaram: I think that's a good book for anybody to read. Yeah.
Especially for kids, I think.

Jim Hansen: Yeah, for sure.

Karthik Chidambaram: Jim, I want to thank you. Thank you for joining the
Driven show. It was great chatting with you. There was a lot of learning on
product management. Thank you for joining the Driven show.

Jim Hansen: Yeah, you're very welcome. I appreciate you having me here.