Product management is a field that often emphasizes the importance of frameworks. These tools provide a structured approach to the myriad tasks PMs face daily. However, reliance on frameworks can sometimes inadvertently stifle innovation and critical thinking.
In this episode, Hannah Clark is joined by Avrum Laurie—CPO at Felix Health—to explore the double-edged nature of frameworks in product management.
Interview Highlights
- Meet Avrum Laurie [01:04]
- Avrum Laurie, from Toronto, studied computer engineering at the University of Toronto.
- Started his career in product management at Microsoft in Seattle.
- Returned to Canada to support the tech scene and worked at FreshBooks for seven years, rising to VP of Products.
- Joined Wealthsimple, helping expand from a single product to a unified app with over 2 million users.
- Currently at Felix Health, focusing on accessible treatment for health issues with stigma, like ED, hair loss, and menopause.
- The Evolution of Frameworks in Product Management [02:31]
- Product development frameworks (e.g., jobs-to-be-done, lean canvas) can be useful early in a career for structuring thought.
- Avrum likens frameworks to “training wheels” that teach critical and systematic thinking.
- Over time, professionals should adopt a more flexible, less rigid approach to frameworks.
- Avrum observed that frameworks can become dogmatic, reducing critical thinking and encouraging blind adherence.
- Advocates for evaluating frameworks on a case-by-case basis, prioritizing logic and reflection over rigid processes.
- The Pitfalls of Over-Reliance on Frameworks [05:17]
- Over-reliance on frameworks in product management can lead to “academic theater,” prioritizing process over meaningful outcomes.
- Frameworks should support, not replace, critical thinking and adaptability in decision-making.
- Avrum initially leaned heavily on frameworks to guide junior team members, ensuring rigor and consistency.
- Over time, this approach became overly rigid, slowing progress and fostering bureaucracy.
- Emphasizes focusing on customer and business impact rather than perfect framework execution.
- Balancing Frameworks and Flexibility [08:35]
- Startups are inherently risky, and frameworks can’t eliminate that risk.
- Over-reliance on frameworks creates a false sense of certainty, which is dangerous.
- The only way to truly mitigate risk is to ship and observe market impact.
- Frameworks may slightly improve odds but can be too slow and cumbersome to justify.
- Faster iteration and observing results often outweigh lengthy framework processes.
A dogmatic adoption of frameworks and processes doesn’t eliminate risk; it only creates a false sense of certainty, which can be dangerously misleading. In a startup, the only way to truly eliminate risk is to ship something and observe its impact.
Avrum Laurie
- Strategies for Agile and Efficient Work [11:30]
- Avoid extremes: neither random decisions nor rigid reliance on frameworks work.
- Adopt a flexible, situational approach combining logic, analytics, customer insight, competitor analogs, and gut instinct.
- Build quickly and cheaply to validate ideas rather than overinvesting in lengthy processes.
- Approach resembles improvisational jazz—structured yet adaptable, using inputs as needed in the moment.
- Emphasizes critical thinking and adaptability over rigid, formulaic methods.
- Advice for Product Managers [14:02]
- Frameworks can emerge from both top-down and bottom-up approaches.
- Executives often push frameworks to scale decision-making as companies grow, but this can create rigid, slow, and unrecognizable cultures.
- Teams may introduce frameworks bottom-up to counter arbitrary executive decisions, but excessive structure can alienate founders and executives.
- Both extremes can lead to frustration and explosive conflict if not balanced properly.
- The goal is to find the minimum amount of structure necessary to maintain efficiency and adaptability.
- Striking this balance requires collaboration and compromise between leadership and teams.
- Balancing Leadership and Structure [19:22]
- Balancing structure and flexibility often requires experiencing both extremes—bureaucracy and freeform processes.
- The scientific method is a foundational framework: form a hypothesis, test it, and validate or disprove it.
- Many modern methodologies (e.g., Lean Startup) are derivatives of the scientific method, with unnecessary layers of complexity.
- Over time, teams should strip away excess frameworks, retaining only core principles to guide thinking.
- Communication is central to solving problems, whether in team alignment, leadership interactions, or UI design.
- Most challenges, both operational and product-related, stem from communication breakdowns.
UI design is fundamentally a communication problem. If your UI is failing, it’s because you’re not effectively communicating to the customer how to achieve their goals. While it may rely on visual elements, at its core, it is still a communication issue.
Avrum Laurie
- The Potential Stifling Effect of Frameworks [23:54]
- Frameworks can stifle innovation by valuing specific inputs while ignoring others.
- Over-reliance on frameworks narrows possible outcomes, restricting creativity and innovation.
- Generative research, while powerful, should not dominate as the sole method for identifying opportunities.
- Excluding founder intuition in favor of rigid frameworks undermines the unique insights that drive innovation.
- Balancing structured research with openness to diverse inputs fosters a more innovative environment.
- Effective Methods for Validating Product Ideas [27:05]
- Develop a strong point of view using diverse inputs like analytics, founder insight, and research.
- Engage in vigorous debate and critique to refine or change the initial idea.
- Validate the idea by quickly shipping a minimal but representative version, not just a basic test.
- Avoid dogmatic reliance on specific tests (e.g., landing pages or painted door tests).
- Finding the right balance between structure and flexibility is key to effective validation.
- Advice for New Product Managers [28:57]
- Learn and read frameworks, but critically evaluate them.
- Don’t blindly follow steps if they don’t make sense.
- Focus on the most widely discussed frameworks for a general understanding.
- Test frameworks, but stop if you’re going through motions without critical thinking.
- Frameworks can offer structure early in your career, but as intuition develops, you’ll naturally question them.
- Acknowledge when you’re ready to move beyond frameworks—this signals growth as a product manager.
Meet Our Guest
Originally from Toronto, Avrum Laurie graduated with a degree in computer engineering from the University of Toronto. He began his career at Microsoft in Seattle but soon returned to Toronto, eager to contribute to the burgeoning Canada tech scene. Avrum spent seven and a half years at FreshBooks, a billing and accounting platform for small businesses, eventually becoming VP of Product. He then joined Wealthsimple as VP of Product, overseeing customer growth from a few hundred thousand to over two million and launching new products for equity trading, crypto trading, spending & saving, and tax filing. For the past two years, Avrum’s been the Chief Product Officer at Felix Health, an online healthcare platform dedicated to improving the lives of Canadians.
It’s not the absence of critical thinking; rather, it’s an improvised process that draws on elements of frameworks, but in a way that doesn’t feel rigid or dogmatic.
Avrum Laurie
Resources From This Episode:
- Subscribe to The Product Manager newsletter
- Check out this episode’s sponsor: Wix Studio
- Connect with Avrum on LinkedIn
- Check out Felix Health
Related Articles And Podcasts:
Read The Transcript:
We’re trying out transcribing our podcasts using a software program. Please forgive any typos as the bot isn’t correct 100% of the time.
Hannah Clark: If there's one thing product management courses love to harp on, it's frameworks. Yep, for just about every task in a PM's average day, there's at least one prescribed framework to tell you exactly how to do it right. And there's a reason for that; for one, you got to learn how to do your job, and furthermore, you need to know how to do it in a way that's proven to work pretty good.
But there's a caveat, because frameworks can all too easily become a crutch—a way to think that we're in control of our outcomes. And that false sense of control isn't just misleading, it can also become a barrier to the results you really want.
My guest today is Avrum Laurie, CPO of Felix Health. Having worked his way to the C-Suite from his start as an IC product manager, Avrum is no stranger to the overflowing toy box of product development frameworks. Try them all, learn from them, and at one time really enforced them with his own teams. But time and experience has shown that frameworks are tools that often get treated like laws. And while they're intended to empower product teams, the wrong mindset can lead to arrested development. Let's jump in.
Welcome back to The Product Manager podcast. Today we are with Avrum Laurie.
Avrum, thank you so much for making the time.
Avrum Laurie: Thanks for having me. Really happy to be here.
Hannah Clark: We'll start off how we always start off. I would love if you could tell us a little bit about your background and how you got to where you are today at Felix.
Avrum Laurie: So, my name is Avrum Laurie. Born and raised in Toronto. I went to U of T and studied computer engineering. Right out of school, I moved to Seattle, worked for Microsoft, and I started my career in product management. That was the first job I ever had was product manager. Two and a half years later, I came back.
I really missed home. And I also really wanted to support the, then burgeoning Canadian tech team. So I worked at a startup called FreshBooks. They're like accounting and billing for small businesses. I was there for like about seven years. I worked my way up to VP of products, then I joined Wealthsimple.
And so this was about seven years ago. And when I joined Wealthsimple, only had a single product, the robo investor and had about two to 300,000 users over the next five years. I oversaw the launch of, four new products; trade, crypto, cash, and tax. And then the ultimate unification of these products into just a single app used by then 2 million people around the time I left, and I think it's more than double since then.
Then finally, I joined Felix Health, which is where I'm at now. And Felix provides on demand treatment for everyday health issues. Think like ED, hair loss, weight loss, menopause, categories of health that historically have a lot of stigma. And we're trying to really remove that stigma and ultimately provide access to care to more and more Canadians.
So that's my career in a nutshell.
Hannah Clark: That's a very impressive resume.
So what we're about to talk about, we can take it all the more seriously because we really know what you're doing. Because today we have a bit of a hot take, which is not always what the case on the show. Something the product world is maybe a little bit precious about, which is the product development frameworks of which there are so many.
So before we tear them apart, can you tell me a little bit about your kind of journey when it comes to frameworks, your initial enthusiasm for them, how you were an evangelist and sort of the turning points that have changed things for you.
Avrum Laurie: So first, just to like maybe level set a bit. When I talk about, product frameworks, I'm talking about things like jobs-to-be-done or lean canvas or, a very well defined generative or evaluative research process, or even something like a little bit more businessy, like a slot analysis or something. These are not inherently bad things.
And I think especially early in my career and early really anybody's career, I think these frameworks weren't and are super useful because they essentially help you structure your thinking when you don't have a lot of experience or pre existing mental models to draw on. And so I think of them a little bit like training wheels, which ultimately help you learn to think. To think critically, to think systematically, to think in a structured way, but I think that there's a point in time where the training wheels need to come off, right?
And by that, I don't mean a full abandonment of the frameworks. They're not gone and buried. It's maybe just a more flexible and less rigid approach by taking, elements of frameworks. And also just starting to exercise critical thinking in the absence of a framework, just being logical, critical, reflective.
So the turning point that I noticed in my own career was when instead of loosening things up and becoming more flexible, I was noticing that culturally frameworks were becoming dogma. They were like the way you do things. And in that regard, they actually reduce critical thinking. Blindly following any unquestioning dogma in any part of your life means that your brain is shut off, right?
You are going through the motions, versus critically challenging, what is helpful and what is necessary on a case by case basis, like that's critical thinking, too.
Hannah Clark: Yeah, I would agree. I see it almost like the difference between technical perfection and creative flexibility. There's a, when you're learning how to play piano or something like that, you've got the drills, you've got, folks who are like, the technical perfection, you have to learn how to do things correctly, the hand positioning, all that kind of stuff.
And then over time, as you internalize those kinds of systems and your brain wraps your mind around it, then that becomes something that you, it's almost like a language that you speak. I can totally follow what you're saying.
Avrum Laurie: And you know when to bend the rules, when to break the rules and because you at least know the rules now.
Hannah Clark: Yeah, I totally follow.
Let's talk a little bit about the over intellectualization in product management around frameworks, around some of there's a lot, I think a lot of this kind of stuff. There's the technical way to do things. And then there's we've just talked about this sort of like language that you develop over time and experience.
So do you have any anecdotes that kind of illustrate how this has impacted your teams or timelines where, maybe things have been too restrictive and caused an issue or approaching something with more flexibility has been freeing?
Avrum Laurie: Yeah. I read a great Twitter/X thread about this, which I have to give credit to Claire Vo, who wrote it.
She's the CPTO at LaunchDarkly. That really, when I read it, succinctly captured a lot of my own thoughts, which is that like we need to stop rewarding the academic theater of PM best practices. I think she says something like, she says that, but she also said something like we need to stop thinking like you can put insights into a magical PM framework and spit out great businesses on the other side.
And so that's what I mean by the over intellectualization. When products management or business theory, as encapsulated in some framework, becomes your only modus operandi, and in doing so, you become exceptionally bureaucratic, like everything becomes formulaic and by the book. And therefore exceptionally slow and you start to reward the wrong things like you reward the successful execution of a framework versus like actually achieving meaningful impact on the customer or the business, which is like actually what matters. And like in terms of an anecdote that sort of illustrates how this phenomenon impacted my teams and timelines, I think that when I first became a leader and it was no longer just an IC, I was very guilty of embracing this academic theater.
And it's funny because if I reflect on before that, like when I was an IC, I think I was like a pretty instinctual PM. I thought very critically and, but on my own terms, without a heavy handed adoption framework. But when I started to have to lead other people and especially, junior people, I couldn't just say just do what I do.
It's just think critically. Just do that. It's that's not particularly helpful guidance to anybody. And so I started to lean more heavily on frameworks because they provided and they articulated a structure that I could use to scale decision making to my own team and ensure a consistent level of rigor and process was employed.
And that's fine, right? There's nothing inherently bad about that until it's not fine. Until the tail starts wagging the dog, and the correct application of frameworks becomes the end as opposed to the means. And then all that bad stuff that I mentioned earlier starts to happen, right? You're slow, you're bureaucratic, you're formulaic, and all these things.
Hannah Clark: Funny that you mentioned that because I was just going to say I feel like there's a pitfall there. There is definitely a level of guardrails that can be really helpful from a leadership perspective when you're trying to get everybody on the same bus and trying to drive at the same pace. But yeah, I can see what you're saying.
There's definitely a point at which a tool can become like a, it becomes an objective to just do the tool, right? Rather than to use the tool effectively.
Avrum Laurie: Yeah. All he has is a hammer. Everything starts to look like a nail, so.
Hannah Clark: Yeah. People have said that a lot on the show lately.
In your experience, how would frameworks create this false precision or false certainty? Because this is an interesting concept to explore. Like you touched on it when you first talked about it that there is this tendency to think of frameworks as being like this formula for the perfect, if you follow this formula, then you're guaranteed or this framework, you're guaranteed a perfect outcome, which we know is totally BS.
So what are some of the alternative approaches that you've used to handle uncertainty?
Avrum Laurie: Yeah, so I mean, look, startups are inherently risky ventures, like most of them fail. And of course, naturally, people are always looking for ways to reduce or mitigate risk. And a framework is conceivably, one of the ways to do that, right?
If it's like a tried and true process that has helped many a person develop and validate an approach. But the thing you have to remember is that it never stops being risky, right? If you believe that with enough frameworks layered on top of each other in enough heavy handed process, you can virtually eliminate or minimize risk to a point where it's almost negligible.
You've lost the point. In fact, like a dogmatic adoption of frameworks and process doesn't eliminate risk. It actually just creates a false sense of certainty, which is actually very dangerous. It's like even a bit delusional. And, in a startup, like the only way to actually eliminate risk is to ship something and observe the impact.
This is literally the only way to truly eliminate risk is deliver something and of observe what impact it has on the market. Now, it could be argued that like a framework might help you like marginally increase the odds that the thing you choose to build will actually have an impact.
But also if the framework is some very lengthy, cumbersome process that takes a whole bunch of time to complete, whatever slight or marginal improvement that you get from it is probably not worth it, right? Moving faster to just quickly build and ship something and then just look at the results.
That would be way faster than employing this again, lengthy, heavy handed process that maybe increases certainty by 2%, not really a meaningful amount. And so not really worth it.
Hannah Clark: Yeah. Yeah. I see. I'm thinking of this almost in terms of a quota versus impact. If you see, if a goal is set or a KPI is set for, a certain amount of tickets closed or whatever versus what's the actual impact of what you're doing?
People tend to get focused on I'm doing my job right because I'm doing the thing that I've been asked to do to the letter. But when that kind of shifts you away from actually achieving the impact that is intended to achieve, it's counterintuitive. And I totally see what you mean.
It's you get lulled in this false sense of I'm, I'm creating value. I'm doing what I've been asked to do. But you're not really, the value isn't really there when you look at the dollars and cents.
Avrum Laurie: Yeah, totally.
Hannah Clark: Okay, so let's talk about some alternatives then. So let's say now we're moving away from frameworks, you yourself absorb that language.
What are some of the strategies that you're using today when we talk about, like a more agile or more efficient way to do things? So that kind of, take the best of the frameworks, take the best, the greatest hits and leave what's not useful.
Avrum Laurie: I guess what I'm, what I'll first say is what I'm not saying, just pick things at random and ship them as quickly as possible.
That can't be the answer, right? But rather, the answer is also not only ship the outputs of some highly contrived academic framework, like that's also not the answer. So if those are not the answer what is the answer? I think we can just be more flexible. We can use like a free form and, a case by case combination of some combination or permutation of logic, reason, analytics, customer insight, competitor analogs, even gut instinct, to quickly inform an opinion about what to build and then build it as quickly and cheaply as possible to validate it.
So to use an analogy, it's probably maybe a bit contrived. If dogmatic frameworks are like rigid classical music, right? This is more so jazz. It's a little bit improvisational. There is a structure to it, but it's a little bit more freeform. This is purely analogy because I don't really like jazz, but probably like classical work, but the analogy works from what I understand about jazz. But I think that there's an element of improvisation.
There's an element of, in the moment, critically reflecting which of these inputs is useful for me right now. Which of these inputs do I even have right now? If you don't have them all, do you need to work with what you've got? So it's a little bit more situational, a little bit more improvisational, a little bit more flexible. It's not the absence of critical thinking. It's actually more of a sort of an improvised process that draws on perhaps elements of frameworks. But not in a way that feels rigid and dogmatic.
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I want to switch gears a little bit because I imagine that there's probably folks listening to this who are like, Oh, my boss is so married to these frameworks. So let's step back into the shoes of one of the team members on your team when you know, young Avrum was a young leader in the product space, really all about the frameworks.
What advice would you offer to a PM who's in that position of working in a team where there really is a lot of pressure to strictly follow a framework or justify every decision that they have to their executives?
Avrum Laurie: It's interesting because I would say I was actually sick first. It's like the introduction of frameworks can be both driven bottoms up and tops down.
And I talk about each one. First, let's talk about tops down, right? And why it happens or why I at least I think it happens. Sometimes executives and especially founders, as their company scales the point where they're not directly involved in every decision, seek out frameworks as a way to scale good decision making and reduce risk, if they're not directly at the helm of every decision, right?
And that's okay to an extent. But if they forget or lose sight of the fact that their business, most likely, was not the emergent output of some magical business framework, but rather was like the results of taking risks, trying different things and ultimately hitting on something that works. Like they're in danger of creating a really bad culture that has, all the bad attributes that I mentioned, before. Like some, someplace that's really rigid, that's really slow and really bureaucratic.
And it's almost like a careful what you wish might get it because what often happens is they hate the culture that they've created because it's not familiar to them. It doesn't remind them of how they built the business in the first place. It's actually really unfamiliar, right? It's well intentioned because they're trying to create a way to scale good decision making, but then they create something that like they don't even recognize.
And I've seen that where they're just like, what have I done? Before we talk about some of the remedies, let's talk about the bottoms up way that frameworks can be created because I've seen this happen too. I've actually been part of this. Where I've been part of a, a bottom up revolution of frameworks.
Hannah Clark: A coup.
Avrum Laurie: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Perhaps not that far, but revolutions. So, sometimes teams feel like whiplash by founders or executives. They feel like they're seemingly being told to go build arbitrary things, at least from their perspective, right? It's we want to do this, see this feature, go build this.
And so this can be really frustrating because they're like, where is this coming from? I don't want to do this. I don't think this is right. So they actually introduce frameworks as a system of control for their own sanity to try to structure executive thinking and create some guardrails to prevent ultimately like what they see as like this freneticism, this like random like, this random walk around an executive's brain or founder's brain.
Hannah Clark: Ah, is that all startup founders that do that?
Avrum Laurie: To an extent but it's also what makes them so great.
Hannah Clark: Yeah, of course.
Avrum Laurie: I think that's okay to a point, right? Be exposed to just like that raw signal sometimes, it's tough. But again, if you go too far and the framework start to make the founder and the execs feel like they're powerless in the face of this, like dense bottoms up bureaucracy, they're like, it's only a matter of time before that powder keg explodes.
Like in this case, the company will come. I'm recognizable to the founder, but in this case, the founders up play really. It's whoever, the bottoms up creation this process. And that works until it explodes, right? Because if a founder or an executive feels wait a second, this impenetrable framework driven bureaucracy means I can't share some insight, some intuition that I have as the founder, which I think the reason why the business exists because of them, it's a terrible situation and it's going to explode and it's going to explode in a very suddenly and very badly.
And I think in both cases, whether it's bottoms up or tops down, you need to figure out a way to work with leadership to strike the right balance. And it's like just enough structure and no more. It's hard to define what that point is. And I think it will be very different from company to company, but you need enough structure until it stops being helpful.
And finding that equilibrium point is not easy. And it is a negotiation. It's a compromise on process that achieves the right sort of inflection point. But yeah, there's no magic way to do it, but that's what I would say is what your objective is, the minimum amount of structure that is deemed necessary.
Hannah Clark: Talk about art versus science. That means that really what we're trying to achieve is finding that the right amount of tension between leadership and ICs, where folks don't feel like they're at the mercy of the shiny object syndrome or the whims of the founder, and that there is some structure to the way that they're operating and can be efficient.
But then not to the extent that the founder feels locked out of their own company or locked out of the decision making ability of their own company, in which case, yes, I can see how this could be catastrophic and vice versa. Nobody wants to work in a situation in which there's such a tight micromanagement on the ICs that it just feels like there's no room for organic decision making.
So how do you reckon with that? You've been an IC, you've been a leader in multiple capacities. What have you used with your teams to try and find that balance?
Avrum Laurie: It's interesting because I've done you learn a lot from your mistakes, right? I have been at the helm of creating an impenetrable bureaucracy and learned why not to do that. On the other hand, I think I've gone the other way sometimes, which often happens when you realize the pendulum has swung too far, which is I have let's freeform it.
Let's do everything bespoke and let's offer no structure. And I think that's both of those extremes are useful and to some degree unavoidable. I guess I would say I'll provide some advice, but I'll also say that probably whoever's listening will not be able to take it without going to one extreme or the other, whether they realize it or not, it's like you have to live through it.
Hannah Clark: Yeah.
Avrum Laurie: I think I would say I will always go back to the most elemental of frameworks. Like the scientific method. It's like defining a hypothesis and then developing an experiment to prove or disprove it. These don't feel to me like heavy handed frameworks. They're so foundational. They structure like elemental thinking.
And so that's what I tried to like always fall back on, as opposed to some like second or third or thing that is ultimately just a derivative of the scientific method. If you read Lean Startup or like what it ultimately boils down to, and they have a lot of like artifice that they built up on top of it of a lead sprints or all this stuff that's things can be helpful or whatever, but it's just the scientific method.
That's what it is at its core. And it's useful to see it apply in a startup context because we're not actually scientists. And so maybe it's not immediately obvious how to apply the business context, but once you like understand it, you can reject a lot of the artifice that becomes less necessary over time.
And maybe it's useful at first, but it should just fall away. And what's left is the elemental kernel of lean, which is like something very basic, something that predates startups, scientific method, you know what I mean? Something very elemental like that. That's what I ultimately strive to create a culture that embraces like, these sort of deep elemental concepts of how to structure thinking that are certainly not unique to the domain of startups.
Hannah Clark: Yeah. And I think that can go really well hand in hand because when I'm listening to this and I'm thinking about these kind of situations of excessive tension across the org chart, this really sounds like a symptom of poor or stunted communication as well in which, I'm reminded I'm getting flashbacks of situations in which I felt disempowered as an IC to communicate with leadership, honestly, about changes that were being made in the company.
I know that there is a lot of struggle from the leadership level to communicate effectively with folks who are doing various jobs and be able to justify the means or the reasons why things are changing.
There needs to be, I think, clear communication channels and there needs to be that safety to, express ah, we need to have a forum for feedback that's totally honest and open and there's no fear of consequences for just speaking your mind. Coupled with this kind of approach that you're describing, like we had an episode ages ago where we talked about depersonalizing some of the methods like, here's my hypothesis.
It's not just I have a gut feeling like this is how I have walked through it. And this is the result that I'm seeing that's different from what you feel.
Avrum Laurie: Yeah. This might sound a bit reductive, but I truly believe it's everything's communication problem. And I don't even mean the meta stuff that we're talking about, like how do we align with leadership?
I think UI design is a communication problem. If your UI is failing, it's because you're failing to communicate to the customer how to accomplish what they're trying to accomplish. It may be a visual communication mechanism or medium, but it's, it is a communication problem. I think that so much of what we do, both the Meta and the Mesa fundamentally are communication problems.
And maybe, yeah, maybe it's a little reductive, but it's I think it is at the core of so much of what is hard about what we do.
Hannah Clark: I know, I think that is that's a finger snap mic drop moment, honestly. Like you're so dead on. Communication problems are often at the heart of so many causes of tension or, balls dropping or what have you.
And so I think it's a really good way to look at things when things aren't working or when there seems to be some kind of frustration internally of any kind. It's what's the communication problem that's like at the root of this? That's a really interesting way to look at it.
So moving right along, do you believe that there are circumstances where frameworks can stifle innovation? This is a leading question. You maybe know, maybe I'm showing my hand. And if so, so how do you identify those situations?
Avrum Laurie: Certainly they definitely can. And I think, that's in large part because many frameworks, by their very construction, implicitly value or don't value certain inputs. So, if you're really picking and choosing which inputs you consider useful or valuable, which you just reject entirely or you just ignore, that constrains the possible outputs.
And if you have constrained outputs, that means cycling innovation, right? So, I'll give you an example. I've been part of organizations that have had, extremely well-developed generative research programs. And they were the primary way we identified new areas of investment. Going and interviewing customers and synthesizing their needs and requirements into a potential set of investments.
Now, look, I want to say generative research can be very powerful and very useful, but is it the only way you should identify new investments? I don't think so. And in particular, if generative research becomes too dominant and it doesn't leave room for, say, founder intuition, it can be pretty problematic, right? I've seen founders, I like literally been in a meeting and it's a very surreal experience where founders are like founder of companies getting shot down when they offer an idea because it didn't come, we didn't hear that from the customer, so, no. And it's the founders insights are like, why we're all here? Like, why we're having this debate?
The founder has some unique insight, which allowed them to ultimately create a company. And if we say the generative research process is so dominant. And as I said, only values inputs that are from customers. Then I think you're constraining the potential outcomes. And I think that can be very dangerous.
And that's where generative research can go from being a helpful methodology to one that is really confining and ultimately, I think, can ultimately limit innovation.
Hannah Clark: Okay. First of all, I have to just give a shout out on behalf of the founders to say thank you because I think this is one of the few times on the show where someone has really stood up for founders and, really like champion the value that they're bringing. Because most of the time what we talk about is here's what you're doing wrong or you should be doing better. So I just want to give you a little follow up for that.
But then the other thing that I wanted to say is, I agree with you. And I also think that there's a balance there as well. I believe in the idea of creative constraints and that sometimes, working within constraints can help to define the playing ground a little bit, but I won't linger on that.
I think that there's maybe a balance, but I don't know. What do you think?
Avrum Laurie: Yeah, no, of course. It's funny because I always say sometimes I feel like my answers are like very unsatisfactory because everything's a balance. And it's I'm sure someone's listening just take a position, man.
The reality is that unfortunately, far more nuanced than that, so.
Hannah Clark: Art versus science, it's about using the tool effectively and not just letting the tool run your life. All right.
Okay. So moving right along. So in balancing the use of frameworks with more instinctual decision making, which is really what we're talking about, what are some of the methods that you found effective for quickly validating product ideas? Since we're obviously your big champion of the founder ideas.
Avrum Laurie: I mean, I don't think it's crazy rocket science. I think you develop a strong point of view from a wide corpus of data, many different inputs, and those inputs can be, analytics, founder insight, generative research, value research.
It can be a whole slew of things. Then employing vigorous debate and critique to that point of view, with your peers and other folks, and either ultimately refining that point of view or changing it, right? Which may be what happens to that process. And then you need to figure out how to quickly validate it by shipping the smallest version of it possible.
And I want to be clear, like I am not one of these people who's that will always be super minimal investment, like not everything can be like a painted door test. And I think sometimes people assume that's true. Sometimes that just doesn't work. You need to build enough of something that is actually representative.
Otherwise, you're just not going to get good signal. And so again, I don't believe, I'm not one of these people that's everything can be just like a stand up a landing page. See if people sign up for a wait list. Sometimes you can do that. Again, if that's your only way of validating guess what? You just got dogmatic on pay the door test as like a, as like the framework to validate things.
And I just don't think that is useful. That's ultimately what I believe, which may, again, sound like an unsatisfying answer, but it's what I do. And I think it's ultimately what I've come to after having the pendulum swing to multiple extremes and then slowly finding the right equilibrium point that works for me and the orgs that I have run.
Hannah Clark: I'm very aligned with you on that, so I'm not even going to cross examine you.
How would you advise new product managers, and now we're going to come a little full circle here. Let's go back to day one, IC Avrum. How would you advise the new product managers of the world to evaluate the usefulness of frameworks, especially as they're coming into the field, they're absorbing them for the first time, they're learning them, they're using them without becoming overly reliant on them?
Avrum Laurie: I mean, certainly learn them, read them. There's probably 10,000 product management blog posts about each and every one of them. So don't ignore them. But I think, a) examine them critically. They are open to scrutiny as well. As you're going through them and you say that doesn't, if you find something that doesn't make sense it might not make sense.
It may be an instance where the framework doesn't worked perfectly in every scenario. That's okay. I mean, certainly you could focus on the big ones, which will be the ones that have the most blog posts written about them. And that's probably useful, right? That's like a useful heuristic to focus on the ones that most people talk about.
So at least you have some general concept of what they are and try them out. I think that's not a bad thing. Where to catch yourself if you ever find yourself going through the motion, so to speak, saying the framework says, I got a new step 4 of 21 because that's what the framework says.
Stop. At that point, you're no longer thinking critically, and you've fallen down a trap and it's time to reset. And so, that's when, you've gone too far. And I think they offer, especially early, a sense of comfort and safety and structure. Which can be very useful when you're inexperienced and don't have yet that intuition built up. But there will be a natural point where your own intuition will actually have become cultivated where you are probably going to catch yourself doing these things.
And it's that's like a moment to celebrate because it's like a moment where, at that point, the training reels can come off because you're starting to question some element of the process that isn't working for you. And that's like a, so it could a good moment. It's a demonstrating growth.
It's demonstrating evolution as a product practitioner. So that's great.
Hannah Clark: Yeah. And then someday you can also be the CPO of Felix Health.
Avrum Laurie: That's right.
Hannah Clark: I think that brings us full circle. Thanks so much for joining us, Avrum. This was a really fun chat. So where can people follow your work online?
Avrum Laurie: So I'm not so much, I mean, I have a Twitter/X profile. It's just my name. It's @Avrum. I'm not on there much anymore because it's become a bit of accessible, but I guess like LinkedIn, but I'm also that kind of sucks too. I don't know. Like clearly there's like something missing. I don't know. Like podcasts like this one, maybe. I don't know. I don't have a great answer for you on this one.
Hannah Clark: Okay maybe follow your X account and possibly follow your LinkedIn. Okay, that sounds great.
Avrum Laurie: Sure. Yeah, that's right. Maybe try Felix and and, and Wealthsimple and FreshBooks if you have a need. That's what I'd say.
Hannah Clark: Wow. Someone should have a need for all, at least one of those things.
Thanks so much Avrum, this is great.
Avrum Laurie: Thanks so much.
Hannah Clark: Thanks for listening in. For more great insights, how-to guides, and tool reviews, subscribe to our newsletter at theproductmanager.com/subscribe. You can hear more conversations like this by subscribing to The Product Manager, wherever you get your podcasts.