The new manifesto for product builders - Faith Forster (Chief Product Officer)

Faith Forster has spent 15 years in product leadership. She was VP of product at Dex, acquired for approximately $600 million, and went on to serve as CPO at Legal, a payments and compliance platform. She now runs discovery.com, an AI-native platform that helps product leaders and teams make faster, better product decisions by connecting to their tools and synthesising competitor, customer and growth intelligence. She is also the driving force behind the Makers Manifesto — a cross-disciplinary set of values and principles for building great products in the age of AI, developed with 45 contributors from across product, engineering, design, and business leadership.

We discuss:

1. The manifesto emerged from 96 conversations with product leaders whose grasp of AI ranged from fully automated pipelines to treating it as a faster way to write PRDs — a gap that revealed an industry in urgent need of a shared reference point.
2. Four values anchor the manifesto: purpose over possibility, value created over effort spent, learning loops over launch plans, and human accountability over full automation.
3. "Maker" was chosen over "builder" to signal that designers, engineers, salespeople, customer support staff, and founders all share equal ownership of the creation process — regardless of job title.
4. Feature parity is no longer a defensible moat: when any competitor can replicate a capability within days, durable advantage must come from data, relationships, distribution, and business model.
5. Product market fit can no longer be treated as a static milestone — in a market where products, competitors, and customer expectations shift simultaneously, fit must become a continuous, living part of decision-making.
6. "Done" now means adopted, not shipped. AI removes every excuse for clunky, one-size-fits-all experiences, and teams that still equate production deployment with completion are measuring the wrong thing.
7. Making context explicit — codifying strategy in a form that agents and humans can both act on daily — is the principle teams consistently identify as their most urgent, immediate priority.

Chapters

• 00:00 Introduction 
• 01:12 Faith's background 
• 02:28 Origins of the Makers Manifesto 
• 06:18 Makers Manifesto vs the Agile Manifesto 
• 07:23 Why "maker" not "builder" 
• 11:42 Four values and 16 principles 
• 15:01 Purpose over possibility 
• 19:10 Learning loops over launch plans 
• 22:36 Who gets to be a maker 
• 28:55 Durable advantage in the AI era 
• 33:22 Staying close to customers 
• 36:04 What's next for the manifesto 
• 43:59 Wrap-up

Referenced

• Makers Manifesto — https://makersmanifesto.org
• discovery.com — Faith's AI-native product decision platform

We're refreshing The Product Experience and want your input. Take our two-minute survey and help shape where the show goes next! 

Our Hosts
Lily Smith enjoys working as a consultant product manager with early-stage and growing startups and as a mentor to other product managers. She’s currently Chief Product Officer at BBC Maestro, and has spent 13 years in the tech industry working with startups in the SaaS and mobile space. 

Randy Silver is a Leadership & Product Coach and Consultant. He gets teams unstuck, helping you to supercharge your results. Randy's held interim CPO and Leadership roles at scale-ups and SMEs, advised start-ups, and been Head of Product at HSBC and Sainsbury’s. He participated in Silicon Valley Product Group’s Coaching the Coaches forum, and speaks frequently at conferences and events. You can join one of communities he runs for CPOs (CPO Circles), Product Managers (Product In the {A}ether) and Product Coaches. He’s the author of What Do We Do Now? A Product Manager’s Guide to Strategy in the Time of COVID-19. A recovering music journalist and editor, Randy also launched Amazon’s music stores in the US & UK.

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

SPEAKER_02 0:00

This is a market shift. It can't just be about one person's opinion or one organization's experience. Yeah, Dow Manifesto was built for a very different time. It was when the world was transitioning from selling software in boxes on shelves to it being available through the internet. How do you really dig out that durable advantage? It needs to become a living, breathing part of your decision making. You really do need to have a product that people love in that context because if they they can't have bank do, then they'll find something else. Understand your purpose, understand why you exist and focus on solving that. Like you still need a reason to exist.

SPEAKER_01 0:41

Hi, Faith. Welcome to the product experience. How are you doing? I'm good. Thanks, Silly. Glad to see you again. Uh yeah, I was gonna say I should should really say welcome back to the product experience, because this is your third time here. So um third time's a charm. Before we get stuck into our topic for today, it'd be great if you could give our listeners, in case they didn't hear the other two interviews with you, a quick intro into um who you are and what you have done in products and what you're up to today. Yeah, sure.

SPEAKER_02 1:13

Um I'm I've been a product leader for about 15 years now. Last times I was talking to you, I was VP of product at Dext, which we sold to RS Software for about 600 million. And then I think I also spoke to you as I was starting at Legal, which is a payments and compliance um platform for Dolphins, um, where I was CPO. More recently, I have gone deep on the whole AI thing, as we were about to talk about. So I've been building my own platform called discovery.com, which is an AI native product to help product leaders and teams uh make better product decisions faster. So it acts as sort of the context layer and connects into all your various tools to share insights on your competitors and customers and growth strategy and goals and helps focus all the product work we do towards customer and commercial goals. And I've also been organizing the Makers Manifesto, which is what we're here to talk about today.

SPEAKER_01 2:12

So take us back to the beginning of the story of the Makers Manifesto. Like what is it? Why did it happen? Um, how did it get created? That kind of thing.

SPEAKER_02 2:23

So where it kind of came from, uh, in the process of doing our from beta for discovery, I spoke to 96 different product leaders and managers, mainly leaders. And one of the things that struck me from those conversations was how wildly different people's understanding of AI was, but also the implications it would have on their organization. We had everything from, you know, I spoke to AI native businesses who had completely automated the flow of not necessarily roadmap items, but um paper cuts or bugs or quick wins, like a human who wasn't just not involved. Through to people who just wanted a way to sort of make PIDs quicker, which in my mind was literally the definition of a faster horse. And so, but there's there was also a lot of fear and tension about AI and sort of in that lack of understanding as well. And I I'd been to some like lots of events and conferences and and heard a lot of chat on different groups, and it it just sort of felt to me like you know, this is a market shift, it can't just be about one person's opinion or one organization's experience. Uh and so there's a lot of you know chat on LinkedIn at the moment, but there's also a lot coming out from the foundational model companies themselves, which have an agenda. And so I thought there was there really needed to be an independent voice where people came together and said, This is what you now need to think about. This is this is the foundation that you need to think about what this means for your organization. And I was chatting to Adrienne in particular from Leading the Product in Australia, uh, because I put together my pitch on, you know, this is how product management is going to be different, and then kind of undermined my own pitch, saying, like, you know, this really needs to come from a group of people rather than an individual. Um, and I said, it's almost like we need the next Agile Manifesto. And she was like, I love it. So next thing you know, I was messaging a few of the guys I know here in London saying, I've got this crazy idea, what do you think? And they were like, Absolutely, we need this. I'm in. Uh and then it was really sort of Adrienne from the product and Andre from Productized, who really helped me reach out to people globally. Uh, so we had quite quickly actually a lot of really uh well-known names in the industry um come together and say, Yeah, I agree, like I'm seeing the same things, we definitely need this. And overwhelmingly, the response was they're honoured to be asked to be involved. Um, but it really happened quite organically from there. So we had such a strong group to start with that the approach I kind of took is like if if you respect someone and think they should be involved, then they're very welcome. And so it kind of created this network effect where we, yeah, it just sort of took on a bit of a life of its own. It got far bigger than I expected initially. We ended up with 45 contributors uh across the different regions. Uh, we did actively try and seek out more people in Asia and Africa. Unfortunately, we couldn't um get anyone from those regions, which was a bit unfortunate. Um, and we were really actively trying to recruit people that weren't product management people. So the group is a little bit skewed in that way. It's purposely both people from AI native businesses for product study as well as those that are larger and trying to transform. Um, but we were really actively trying to get leaders of tech businesses and um engineering and design and marketing representatives as well, so that it would become a cross-disciplinary and global effort. It need really needed to be representative, I thought, for it to have the value of potential that it could have.

SPEAKER_01 6:12

And so do you see the manifesto that you have created with this um working group? Do you see that as replacing the Agile manifesto, or is it just a different like set of principles and values?

SPEAKER_02 6:27

I think it's different. So the Agile Manifesto was built for a very different time. It was when the world was transitioning from selling software in boxes on shelves to it being available through the internet. And so it really was bringing to life the idea that we need to be a little bit more iterative, we need to understand our customers and work with our customers. Um, but it is only about the software development process. And what we've created with the Makers Manifesto is purposely border, it's about how you create value for customers through products, and so it does incorporate a lot more than just the build. And it's actually why we we quite consciously chose the word maker instead of builder to indicate that this is a much more of a holistic kind of the process of creation, I guess. Um part of that is about realizing value and adoption and that's part of it that comes with creating something of value.

SPEAKER_00 7:22

I'll I'll add to that one, Faith, because you know, the the intern, we had a lot of debate on the inside in the in the working group about the word builder versus maker. And what we realize is, you know, when you look at this, um, when you're building a house, some people are the bricklayers, other people are designers, they're architects and other things like that. And they say, no, I'm not a builder, I do another part, I'll do a more of a white-collar job rather than a blue collar job. And the reality is we are all makers, we're all part of making things, regardless of how you see each other now, uh see yourself now. And I think the word maker was a lot more meant to be a lot more inclusive about that and rat and be very specific about that. And uh the other side of this is uh building up from the Agile Manifesto. There was, you know, for my entire career for 20 years or so, it's been about how can we build a better process? How can we create a better process so that we're not wasting time and effort, so that we're not just doing waterfall and waiting six months to two years to see if something's actually going to work or not. And the reality is now we can do that way faster, whether it's a prototype or whether it's a real thing. Uh, so everything that's in this, the the maker's manifesto, which is more about alignment and purpose and ethics and things like that, it's not that this wasn't important before. It's just that we had to actually have a better process so we could get stuff done and learn about whether it was worth doing. Now we can do that fairly fast, incredibly fast in some cases. So this stuff that was always important is just way more important and more paramount. So we wanted to uh raise this into the forefront.

SPEAKER_01 9:08

We'll go through some of the specifics of the manifesto in a minute, because it's it's basically quite a short document, similar to the Agile Manifesto, which is a guide. But as Randy was saying as well, and and Faith, as you kind of mentioned too, it very much leans into from what I can see as an outsider coming in and consuming it, that it is a lot of the principles and ways of working that are core to sort of modern product management practices, with a bit of consideration for what AI changes for you, rather than here's a load of like principles of how to work with AI. Like it's it's not that sort of narrow and specific. It's like you say, is a a broader kind of makers manifesto rather than an AI manifesto, if that's fair to say.

SPEAKER_02 10:03

Yeah, and that was quite conscious. We we again we had that debate within the group whether this should cover what stays the same as well as what changes, or whether it should just lean into what changes. And um, we were very conscious that yeah, this concept of makers, it it's not just people who have been product managers or designers or engineers or founders to date. It it opens up the possibility of so many more people being involved in creating products that haven't done that historically before. And so it's also an opportunity to kind of give those people a sort of foundation to say these are the things that are important if you want to make something that's really great. Um, and so it is consciously takes out the jargon and and sort of really talks to kind of of all the things that you could think about or do, these are the things that you need to make sure are taken care of. These are the most important foundations for you to create something that's really effective.

SPEAKER_00 10:59

And in a world where, you know, I can do, as the product person, I can do 80% of an engineer's job, 80% of a designer's job, and they can do 80% of my job, and the CEO can do 80% of all of our jobs. Um, and you know, anyone can build something over a weekend with some prompts. This was incredibly important. We were in very intentional about saying this isn't about a product manager only following it. This is anyone who is involved in the making process or wants to be involved in the making process. These are just some good sound management principles for how to do it responsibly, do it well, and do it effectively.

SPEAKER_01 11:37

So take us through how the manifesto is structured.

SPEAKER_02 11:42

Uh so there's four values and 16 principles, and quite similar to the Agile Manifesto. Um, in the four values, so we've got purpose over possibility, uh, value created over effort spent, learning loops over launch plans, and few minutes for full automation. Yes. Um, for each of those, we've got a quick description underneath, but we've also talked about what it's not. Uh, and I think that's probably almost more important in a situation where we've got this sort of experimental transitionary phase of people trying to understand AI and what it means and how you can use it, where you know there's been some really poor examples of like leaderboards of tokens spent and that being seen as an important part of your job or a basis of performance reviews, or potentially even worse, pushing people out of the organization. That's really missing the point. And so we we kind of wanted to call out some of those things as well to say that actually it it has to be about creating value for your customers. It can't just be chewing up tokens. Like that's not creating value for anyone. And so there's a few things we've called out in that respect.

SPEAKER_00 12:52

Oh, it's absolutely creating value for the uh for the AI firms, but yeah.

SPEAKER_02 12:58

Yes, not so much for customers. Um and actually that even that in itself is something that we debated because some products are made for agents, they're not made for humans. And so we also talked about that and how do we make sure that we accommodate both those things. Uh and so where we kind of landed on that is like even if a product is for the benefit of an agent, that agent, like ultimately at some point down the line, it needs to be of benefit to a human. And so even in that context, you should be thinking about the consequences for the human. At some point, it will have consequences for a human. But we, yeah, so it's it's a little bit loosely attached, but underneath each of those, we then have four principles under each. Uh, we did try to get it down to 12 or less, and we we felt like we were artificially doing it or we were missing really important considerations if we brought it down any less. And so yeah, we decided it was better to sort of have the coverage, uh the breadth of things that we needed to consider rather than trying to keep it short because it's it's not meant to be memorized and repeated off the top of your head. It's meant to be used as a reference point that you could use for things like developing skills or competency frameworks or pro your product processes or thinking about who you need to hire and how they operate. Um, and so it's it's not necessarily meant to be memorized like um quickly. And so that's why we we chose to have more rather than less so that we you know covering the right things.

SPEAKER_00 14:29

And it's available both as you know, a PDF that you can download, but also as an MD file, because you can uh put it into Cloud, you can put it into OpenAI, you can put it into whatever, and use it as a guiding principle or as a bedrock for when you're building. So it is meant to work uh both for humans and for agents.

SPEAKER_02 14:47

We actually have some people running some experiments on that at the moment. It's A B testing the impact that having the manifesto has on the agents versus not.

SPEAKER_01 14:57

Interesting. Yeah. Um I look forward to the results of that then. Um and so one of the one of the elements of the manifesto is everything may be possible, but not everything is worth building. And you know, you I think you both mentioned this earlier, but in a in this era where it's suddenly so much cheaper to build all sorts and anyone can do it. How should teams be enforcing this kind of principle? Like how should teams be using this manifesto in real life to kind of enforce some of these guiding, guiding principles?

SPEAKER_02 15:34

Yeah, so this one is part of the purpose over possibility uh value. So it's it's really talking about the context within which any team, and that can be humans and agents, is operating. Uh, and so it's understanding kind of what do you stand for? What is it that your your product is about, and what are you, what's your purpose? Um, but also understanding your competitor landscape, understanding what's possible with technology, but looking for the opportunity within that possibility in terms of what you can do with it to help do more for your customers. And then the last one is then talking about being more ambitious. So, you know, this technology means we can do so much more than we could do before, both in a practical sense that we can do it quicker. And so there's not such a trade-off, but also the technology itself just it does it does things that we historically couldn't do very well previously. And so it's this is really a call to arms to sort of be really clear on like why do you exist? What is it that you're trying to service and who for? How does that fit within a very rapidly changing landscape, far more than it ever was before, which and historically has not been something we've put a lot of effort, investment into understanding, but also like, yeah, we've got this amazing technology available to us now. Let's like let's use it. Uh, and so this this kind of idea that um not everything is worth building is is saying like understand your purpose, understand why you exist, and focus on solving that. Like give yourself, you still need focus, you still need a reason to exist. But exploring and understanding what's possible within that can take many forms. Um, I've heard, yeah, I've seen on LinkedIn debates around like we should finally be doing discovery now. And you kind of go, well, actually, like building is a way of learning, right? And actually it's far easier to build and learn that way now. And so I I do think there is a balance between doing your homework up front to understand kind of what your customers' needs are, what what um what the problems are, what what's well serviced already by other products, or you know, what's possible, but then also you know, learning through actually building, but having the discipline around making sure that not everything you build will work and work well. And so how do you manage that in that context? And so it so I I think in this context, experimentation becomes far more important. Whereas you know, historically, B2C products will be pretty good at that, not so much B2B. I think um in all cases, it's really it becomes more critically important.

SPEAKER_00 18:11

And resources still aren't infinite, whether you're talking about compute, whether you're talking about natural resources or or cash or people's time and attention, they're still not infinite. You need to have a north star of what you're trying to achieve. And you can do lots of experimentation around it, but if you just ship everything, the surface that you're gonna have to maintain, the complexity that you have to maintain is going to become uh unwieldy. And more nimble people, more nimble companies will go past you very, very quickly. So the ability to know what is it you're actually trying to achieve and ship something and maintain a product uh uh that is focused on doing what it needs to do is still a really important thing. You still need need, you know, you can move faster, but so can everybody else. So being able to know what you're trying to do uh and being able to maintain it and continue to develop and support and iterate on it is incredibly important.

SPEAKER_01 19:10

Um, and you mentioned earlier as well, learning loops over launch plans. I feel like that's definitely a sort of core product principle that's been around for years. Do you think AI puts this at risk because it is so easy to just launch stuff really quickly?

SPEAKER_02 19:32

Well, so this is the one where we've had the most sort of like, oh yeah, we already do that. And I'm like, no, you don't. I think the thing here is that it is so quick and easy to either build a feature or change a feature now, that it is no longer about the fixture so much. So we used to consider something shipped once it went into production. I think AI changes that definition of done so that it's now about adoption. So we should be readily working alongside our customers, watching how they're using the product and understanding kind of what's working, what's not, where's that friction and making improvements? Like it's it's so much easier. And so, like, there's really no excuse for bad experiences anymore, where we kind of did things before because you know, something got de-scoped because you had to get it launched at a certain time, or you know, inevitably all the delight things got got cut. Like there really isn't any excuse anymore for doing having experiences that are exceptional. And customers' expectations will increase significantly with that as well. Like there are a lot of examples where you when you actually go and watch people use products, it's it's it's a bit clunky, it doesn't quite work, it doesn't fit with their processes internally. Like the way I AI works now is it enables you to be so much more flexible with the user experience, so much more you're able to be more adaptive based on understanding what the user is trying to do. And so it it really shouldn't be this sort of clunky one size fits all, kind of squish it in there. Maybe it might work for some people, hopefully. Um, like it we really should be trying to work alongside our customers, build with, not just for our customers, and create a lot better experiences. Um, so I like I've you know, with my own product, I've you know, there's been times I've I've literally sat and watched users use it, made an update, asked them three for a session, and the update's there. Like it is just that easy. Uh and so it that is fundamentally different to having to go back, write a brief, put it in the backlog. Hopefully, in two months or six months, someone might get to it. Like it's it is it's it's a fundamentally different way of working. Um I think that's that's what people need to be aiming for is creating an exceptional experience with everything that they build.

SPEAKER_00 21:55

Well, you said this one sounds familiar. I mean, uh to me, this is no different than. Fail fast, but no executive has ever responded well to the idea of fail fast. All they hear is the word fail. So this is, yeah, just hopefully this is a language that people will actually respond to. And to what Faith said, you know, putting things into production was never the idea. That is a means to an end. Distribution, adoption, usage, realizing value, those are the only important things. So the faster we can iterate and make sure people are getting that out of it, the better we're doing. And yeah, anything that helps us do that better is a good thing.

SPEAKER_02 22:36

It also means we can work far closer with like customer support, sales teams, like marketing people. Like there's no reason why we can't work alongside them. Or they could be part of the building process as well. Like we don't have to have the brick wall around the product org anymore. There's no reason why customer support can't be doing some of those prompts. And as long as it's being checked against her before the pull request is done, make sure it makes sense in the way the product works. Like there is an option to really open that up and be far more responsive to the commercial needs of the business, but also the customers and what they're asking for.

SPEAKER_01 23:11

I have so many questions, so I'm just going to try and pick and choose which direction to go in. But you mentioned there about customer service, um, you know, getting more involved in the uh product development side of things. And I think in the manifesto it talks about um makers as custodians of the customer experience. So is that the sort of direction that you see um product development going? That's you know, it's not just designers, product managers, and engineers that are building things or making things, it's also founders, marketers, salespeople, customer service people, or even AI agents potentially, you know, making decisions about the customer experience and pushing things out to customers.

SPEAKER_02 24:02

That is the opportunity, I think, but but but it there's a big caveat to that. So for that to work well, you have to have really clear context in terms of the direction that you that you're trying to move in, uh, which is one of the other principles, right? Making context explicit. Um for people to understand the trade-off decisions, like on what basis should they go ahead and do things or not. But also have the right um, so that we talk about accountability, have the right checks and balances in place uh in terms of who makes the final decision on yes, this is okay, we can go ahead. And that that shouldn't, if it's material, if it's going to have a significant impact on the customer experience, on data security, on safety of any description, uh commercial implications, then a human should be accountable. But there is there is a lot of opportunity within that in terms of you know, that there is no reason why it has to be a product person. In the same way that I think designers have been really great at embracing the fact that they don't have to be pushing every pixel anymore. That you know, they set up the organ the design system, they they enable the rest of the organization to apply good design in anything they are building. I think the same principle can easily apply in terms of what we're building within the product across the organization if people choose to set it up in that way.

SPEAKER_00 25:24

I'm gonna disagree with you very slightly, Faith, in that what you said about uh it doesn't have to be a product person. I absolutely do think it has to be a product person, but they don't have to have the title product manager. So a designer, uh customer support, uh dev, anyone, sales, marketing, they can all be product people, but as long as the context is explicit enough. The best teams I've worked worked with over the years, even before AI became an enabling tool and a problem, um, were teams that were very inclusive, that had sales, that had customer success, that had support, that had marketing explicitly as part of the team. They were working towards a goal of creating and realizing value, and they worked together to make that happen. That doesn't mean they all came to stand-ups and they all had took Jira tickets, but they all were explicitly focused on the context of what is the thing we're trying to do and what does success look like. And I see some people arguing now, and this is uh a continuing conversation we're having within the working group and with some other people, uh, which is what is a team look like in the age of this? Does it go down to one person? Because, you know, we talked to Dan Dalton ages ago, and he said, you know, he's hooked up his design system to an MCP, and so he can push production-ready code. So is he a one-person product team? You know, we used to talk about the the two pizza team, and it may not be that many people anymore, but it's probably not a meal deal team of one person either, because people use tools differently. They communicate, there's good friction that comes from trading ideas. And so I don't know exactly what the team looks like, and I don't know exactly what the specific roles on the team are in terms of titles, but yeah, there definitely have to be product people regardless of whether the title is there or not.

SPEAKER_02 27:13

And it depends on what part of the product you're talking about. If it's something that's like really core infrastructure, then clearly you'd want an entity looking at that. Umya McKay, who's one of the contributors, she's the CPO at AutoGen, which is one of the original AI native businesses here in London. Um, and they create uh their product sort of helps create business proposals, the really complex big, big business proposals. And they've they've been doing this for four or five years now. So they've been through a lot of different iterations of different things that they've tried in terms of building AR native. And they, you know, they had prompt engineers and then they um, I think they got rid of most of them. But she's she actually said, she said that one of their big best prompt engineer actually they have in the organization is one of their SMEs. So someone who has spent their entire career writing these business proposals. And it just so happens that the skill set of writing a business proposal is very good for writing prompts because you have to be so specific about your word choices. Um, but also like he he knows exactly how the features should work. Uh and so I I think there is something in that in that depending on your context, you know, compliance regulatory requirements is another one that's always historically has been quite difficult to translate things. There are some really savvy compliance people who are very great product thinkers. Uh, and so actually, like you could really fast track thinking about what's possible with people who are SMEs if if they are part of that process.

SPEAKER_01 28:46

Interesting. So, on that point, really, as well, uh, you mentioned that in the manifesto there is uh, I think it's one of the principles about durable advantage. So, what does durable advantage look like when everyone has access to the same uh AI capability and everyone can move fast? So, you know, your competitor can build a feature and you can build that same feature the next day. Like, how do you really dig out that uh durable advantage?

SPEAKER_00 29:18

It might take you a few days in some cases, but yeah, quick. Yeah, within a week.

SPEAKER_02 29:23

Uh well that that that's the point is that fixtures alone are no longer remote. Um and so it's things like you know, I think purpose still plays a role in that, how you think about the problem that you're trying to solve. But a lot of it comes down to data, relationships, distribution, you know, different business models and pricing. You know, they aren't they aren't all necessarily new things. Um what what it's saying is you can't you can't just rely on your figure set as a basis of protecting you uh in terms of your your value proposition you're offering to customers anymore. And so thinking about what else needs to become a really active process because it I also don't think the the concept of product market fit is static anymore. So that concept comes from the idea of you know you spend maybe a couple of years working out your customers' needs and your product design, and you get to the point where you've got this sort of lovely match and that's distinct from your competitors, and then you double down on that and you just keep scaling and scaling and scaling until you're like really big. Um now the the competitors are rapidly changing around you, and your product is rapidly changing, your customers' expectations are therefore also going to rapidly change. And so product market fit is something that can you can come in and out of pretty quickly. Uh, and so it's really thinking about how do you it needs to become a living, breathing part of your decision making within your business around how you build that advantage. And it's it won't it won't be static anymore.

SPEAKER_00 30:57

I talked to Sarah Stone McDevitt for the podcast uh the other week, and that I'm not sure if it's coming up before this one or right after this one, but she uh talks a lot about people and her family and the the relationships that they formed and how that was a uh specific moat because no one could replicate their understanding of the customer, their attitude and their relationships, and the loyalty that people felt towards them. Um and I like to look at parallels to other industries. You know, when YouTube came out, when Spotify came out, or even before Spotify, when streaming and and uh free streaming or piracy first came out, there was the idea that originally the big record labels were the big record labels because they had distribution. They could get you into your music into the record store if you were a band, so you want to sign with one of them. They didn't go away when streaming happened because they had marketing power. They could still buy lots of ads. There were still things that they could do, but the band, the balance of power shifted a little bit, and more bands did more indie things and and more people came out without signing with those labels, but those labels still had real power. Having money and having a dominant market position is still a huge advantage. It's just not as much of an advantage as it used to be. And it's easier to break through, but it's not a given that just because you're a good product or have a good idea that you will break through. So it's a combination of luck, it's timing, it is uh as well as having really amazing distinguishing yourself really amazingly on some dimension that your competitors haven't. And that's kind of basic marketing and positioning theory, but it's really important. It's not just building the thing, it is what you do with that and how you do it. That is incredibly important.

SPEAKER_02 32:40

I think they're real it's something that we're yet to really see the impact of, but NCP connections make it so much easier to pass data between systems as well. And so I think where before we had sort of systems of record, and that that you know, you could be in a pretty lazy position if you were the ones that held that data. Um, I think that would change quite quickly because people could shift it in and out of systems uh much easier. And so I I I do think there's going to be a lot more of this relationships, is definitely one of them. But you really do need to have a product that people love in that context, because if they if they kind of make do, then they'll find something else pretty easily, I think, in this human environment. Interesting.

SPEAKER_01 33:22

So you mentioned earlier, Faith, that you are working on an AI native uh business yourself. And you also mentioned that you were sat next to one of your customers and just sort of like updating something on the platform and seeing them sort of use the update that you had literally just been working on. And I think one of the principles is of the makers manifesto is to stay close to the people you serve. How do you see that changing with the AI world that we're in now? Like I've seen lots of tools out there for creating synthetic users, lots of AI research summaries. There seems to be this like sort of proliferation of shortcuts when it comes to user research and getting close to your customers. So, how do you really stay close to your customers in in this day? Yeah, and in French Discovery helps do some of that.

SPEAKER_02 34:15

So we we pull quite detailed competitor profiles and I'm seeing competitor landscape, but also your customer segments. We create personas, the jobs to be done. We look at your different competitors' features against those jobs to be done. Um so so we do help shortcut some of that. I think that the big caveat within that is it doesn't replace having the relationships with your customers and actually talking to your customers and building that understanding. And so there's two points in the manifesto we talk about judgment, like the basis of judgment, having good judgment. One is understanding having those relationships, and the other is understanding I think your strategy or kind of your purpose and what it is that you're trying to achieve. You can't like there's a lot that you gather from just sitting and watching or having a conversation with your users and your customers that you you just don't get through a transcript or you know, an AI summary that's come from somewhere. Like you you lose a lot of the meaning and intent behind things. But I also think, you know, I I'd for years I've said that people who are doing user interviews should understand the markets or the context within they're doing that interview because they'll underst their understanding of what comes out of that feedback will be different based on having a better understanding of how the market works for the where the user comes from or you know the way their process works. And I think that's that's true here. Like if you rely too much on AI to do all that heavy lifting for you, you are gonna miss the gold nuggets that gives you the opportunity to do something that's truly different and special. And so, you know, in an environment where it's gonna be much harder to differentiate, the ability to differentiate is going to come from that inherent understanding of your customers. It only comes from direct interaction.

SPEAKER_00 36:04

Faith, I think we've got time for one last question, and I'm gonna sneak in with it this time. Let's talk about how should people be using this? What is the call to action around this? I mean, a manifesto is meant to be provocative and and uh spark a movement. Uh, and you know, granted it's not like the Agile Manifesto did that overnight. It was a long, slow build. What are you hoping? You know, you've been the driving force behind this. What are you hoping is going to happen with the makers manifesto?

SPEAKER_02 36:33

Yeah, it's interesting. Um so we've had we've had that feedback that it, you know, it feels like there's nothing different here, which is absolutely not true. Like if you understand the nuance in some of the word choices, there are fundamental shifts under depending that. So I think that's on us. We need to be much more explicit about that. So we are working on some updates at the moment where we talk about sort of some of those, you know, some of the shifts that we believe are coming and that are driving some of these principles. We may also, you know, the whole environment with AI is so rapidly changing. We we may update this as well. It was always something that we thought it's better to get something out there than have nothing, because people were genuinely feeling quite lost and anxious and burnt out and overwhelmed by it all. And so we felt like we needed to give something that people could refer to and use as a a reference point or something to hold on to. Um, but what I guess what's different in this context to when the agile manifesto was created is like the agile manifesto was um it it did create that alarm, I guess, or that like people did really rally either for it or against it. Whereas that's already happening with AI. Like it it the world has sort of already been turned upside down. Um, and actually it's I kind of feel like the role of this one might be slightly different, maybe. I'm opening to it, not being, but in that it's it's really about giving people a a reference point or something to hold on to to be able to filter all the noise and work out what's important. But it is there are there are some huge fundamental shifts. And I think we have exactly as we just talked about with learning loops over launch plans, people are interpreting it based on their existing understanding or knowledge, which is still wildly different. Uh, and so I think what we need to be clear on is what are the fundamental shifts on what's really different here and what do people need to be aware of. Um yeah.

SPEAKER_00 38:29

So you know, we one of the the core tenets of being agile is that if you're not embarrassed by the first thing you put out, you waited too long. And I don't want to say I'm embarrassed by this because I'm incredibly proud of it. I think I stand by every uh every value and every principle. I think it's incredibly important and incredibly valuable. However, it is also a bit anodyne. It is not as stride in or provocative. Uh, it's not people aren't gonna carry banners with this one on uh with these things on it. They're just solid and good. And I think that is very much recognized within the the signatories in the working group around this. And one of the challenges I've had to back to people is I totally agree with you when you say it's not good enough, it doesn't go far enough, but what should it say? And it was only, I think, last week, maybe two weeks ago, that somebody came back with a provocative version of it that goes further. And my my feedback to them is was there are a couple of things in here that I totally disagree with you on, but there are other things I'm jumping up and down saying, yes, yes, yes, yes. So now we're in the refinement phase on that, and trying to say, do does everyone agree on this? Is there enough agreement on some of this? Do we want to moderate a couple of the principles or change a couple of them? But I'm looking forward to, I don't know exactly what this is gonna look like, whether it's gonna be, you know, flight levels of this is a basic version, and then we'll have a more advanced version, or whether there will be a version two or what it might be. But I'm really looking forward to seeing what this looks like. And the big ask that I know Faith, you've had and I have, is for anyone who's listening to this, anyone who goes to makersmanifesto.org and reads this, please feedback. This is not meant to be a sacrosanct tablet that is etched in stone. This is meant to be a starting point and we want feedback, we want iteration, we want evolution on this. This is meant to be, you know, it's not the agile manifesto, but we are agile about it and want feedback in it to change.

SPEAKER_02 40:28

But it is, it's also, I think, an incredibly sound set of principles for for any organization. And we've had um over 200 downloads, which I said is either for the people to share with their teams or for agents, so the leverage on that would be higher, I guess. Not saying that we can track. Uh and we've had, I think we've just cracked the three digits on the number of people who have chosen to sign or pledge their support. For this, which I find really interesting. I do wonder, like obviously I I think this is important because I created it. But I'm also gonna think, what is it that motivates people to plant their support? Uh like you can agree with something, but actually plant your support acknowledge that um I find quite interesting. So like I think that's it's a good sign. It certainly resonated with people who have had loads of people, you know, choose to share it, um, either within their organizations and on on LinkedIn. So I think it is resonating. And it's like it it's only going to get better from here. And so I think that's a really positive thing is this you know, use it within your organizations, put it to your agents, tell us what impact that has. You know, what is it that has worked really well in it, what hasn't. I think one of the things that's become quite clear out of the workshops when we've asked people how would you apply this in your organization? The one thing that consistently comes up that people say is that they're going to go back to the office and do something about now is around making context explicit. That's something that everyone sort of recognizes is front eventually different now with agents. And we do need to do better at making, you know, the strategy deck that someone saw at the start of the year and has completely forgotten about is probably not enough. Look, we need to have these things codified in a way that it can be leveraged in day-to-day decision making, both by humans and agents. And that's that's something that you know no organization is well set up to do today.

SPEAKER_00 42:18

Yeah. One one last comment about this is that I have seen other people over the years try and do a new agile manifesto, and it has always failed. It has been too long, it has said too many cooks spoiling the broth. What's really nice about this is there's a whole bunch of consultants and and you know, thinkers and speakers and those types of people involved in this, but there were also executives and doers. And having faith running the being the driving force and saying, screw it, ship it, and things like that has been absolutely fantastic. And I think it's really nice to see that that group of people. So when he went to uh when Adrian was kind enough to debut this and run a couple of workshops at leading the product in Australia, when you and I Faith took it to Productive in Lisbon, when you and Simonetta took it to Product at Heart in Hamburg, the the responses from people have been fantastic. Uh, and the workshops have been really valuable discussions. People got a lot out of it. They they uh really thought deeply about what they're going to do with this. So I think that, yeah, and I'm really proud of the work that's been done. I'm also looking forward to seeing what comes next.

SPEAKER_02 43:25

And we will, if if people do sign up to support on the website, they'll be they can choose to be added to our mailing list. And we will be running uh online webinars where people can get involved in discussion on the different principles of values and what they mean and how they can apply those to their organization, but also give us feedback. So that's also something helpful.

SPEAKER_01 43:45

Amazing. Well, thank you so much for coming on this evening and sharing um more about it with us and our audience. And uh yeah, look forward to seeing the next provocative iteration. The product experience hosts are me, Lily Smith, host by night and chief product officer by day.

SPEAKER_00 44:06

And me, Randy Silver, also host by night. And I spend my days working with product and leadership teams, helping their teams to do amazing work.

SPEAKER_01 44:15

Luran Pratt is our producer and Luke Smith is our editor.