In this episode of The Next Next, host Jason Jacobs interviews Jeremy Crane, head of product at Ankored, about his extensive experience in product management across various startups including HubSpot, Jasper, and The Wanderlust Group. Crane shares insights into how AI is transforming product management roles and processes, highlighting the collapse of traditional product development roles into more integrated, strategic functions. The conversation delves into the impact of AI on coding, the changing nature of competition, the evolving go-to-market strategies, and the increasing importance of brand and customer relationships in an AI-first world. Crane also emphasizes the necessity for product managers to actively engage with new AI tools to stay relevant and innovative.
The Future of Product Management in the AI Era with Jeremy Crane
In this episode of The Next Next, host Jason Jacobs welcomes Jeremy Crane, Head of Product at Ankored, who shares his extensive experience as a product leader at various companies including Jasper, the Wanderlust Group, and HubSpot. They delve into topics such as the evolving role of product management in the era of AI, how AI tools are transforming team dynamics, and the balance between traditional processes and emerging technologies. Jeremy also discusses how product leaders can navigate the accelerating pace of technological advancement and leverage AI to stay competitive. This episode is a deep dive into the future of product development and the essential skills needed to thrive in an AI-first world.
00:00 Introduction to Jeremy Crane
00:40 Why Jeremy Crane?
01:18 Welcome to The Next Next
02:07 Catching Up with Jeremy
02:51 Jeremy's AI Journey
04:35 The Changing Role of Product Management
09:56 Product Development Processes
14:58 Balancing Process and Flexibility
18:19 Customer Feedback and Innovation
21:01 Future of Product Leadership
24:32 Unlocking the Value of Secure Data
26:53 Building Customer Intuition
29:37 Navigating Rapid Technological Change
33:38 AI-First Companies: Buzzword or Reality?
39:49 The Future of Software Engineering
42:38 Implications of Easier Software Development
45:17 Advice for Product Leaders Embracing AI
47:10 Conclusion and Final Thoughts
Jason Jacobs: [00:00:00] On today's episode of The Next Next, our guest is Jeremy Crane. Jeremy I've known a long time. He's currently the head of product at Ankored, and prior to that he was head of product at Jasper. He was Chief product Officer at the Wanderlust Group. He was VP of product at HubSpot. You get the point. He's a long time VP of product and he also happened to be a course creator on Reforge, Brian Balfour's company, another recent guest on the show, and that course was around mastering ai, rethinking how you build products in an AI era where the constraints and possibilities have radically shifted.
Now, I wanted to bring Jeremy on. For a few reasons. Selfishly, as a longtime head of product, uh people fancy me a product focused founder. But I, I have to say, especially as it relates to scaling teams and processes, I still feel a little out of my element. So I wanted to learn just what being a product leader [00:01:00] entails and what the typical process looks like.
And I also wanted to better understand how AI is evolving that process and what are the elements that remain, and what are the elements that are shifting? And if they're shifting, how they're shifting. We get into all of that and more. I hope you enjoy it. But before we get started.
I'm Jason Jacobs, and this is The Next Next. It's not really a show, it's more of a learning journey to explore how founders can build ambitious companies while being present for family and not compromising flexibility and control, and also how emerging AI tools can assist with that. Each week we bring on guests who are at the tip of the spear on redefining how ambitious companies get built, and selfishly the goal is for this to help me better understand how to do that myself.
While bringing all of you along for the ride, not sure where this is gonna go, but it's gonna be [00:02:00] fun.
Okay. Jeremy Crane, welcome to the show.
Jeremy Crane: Hey Jason. Good to chat.
Jason Jacobs: Good to chat with you. Yeah the nice thing about this podcast is it's just a good excuse to catch up with people that I should be catching up with anyways. And if it happens to add value for anyone else, then great. But but even if it doesn't, I get to catch up with you, which which I'm looking forward to.
Jeremy Crane: Yeah. It's been we caught up briefly, but it's been a while. We first started chatting back in your Runkeeper days, and that was a long time ago now,
Jason Jacobs: yeah, it's crazy. That was, it was probably like 2009 or 2010, which somehow was like 15, 16 years ago.
Jeremy Crane: Yep. Yep. It was you were a super small team at the time when I first started chatting with you, so I think you had six people on the team or something,
Jason Jacobs: yeah. Oh man, I remember it well. I thought it'd be interesting to have you on you you've been part of a number of scaling startups in product leadership roles, [00:03:00] and you've also been mucking around with some of these AI tools, and you even taught a course or two on it, right?
Jeremy Crane: I did. Yeah, I taught a I started, so it was interesting. I, it was this, I. Scratched an itch of my own around building an application. I wanted to see what I could build with using some of the AI tools that were out there. I was seeing how effective it was at coding and decided to go and build my own stuff.
Built three or four different things, prototypes. Started playing with this, started to realize how powerful it was over the past year, and then built a little process that worked really well to get really good results from. The coding and reached out to Brian Valour at Reforge and mentioned it and he was psyched.
That sounded like a good thing, connected me with them Before you knew it, I put together a course and helped a bunch of people build some mobile apps for prototypes and things like that, and yeah, it was super fun.
Jason Jacobs: Yeah. One thing that, that I'm curious to just. Understand better is I mean I've spent [00:04:00] some time on the show looking at these no code tools and and how it enables non-technical people to code stuff, but also how it gets, how these tools can give leverage to technical people to make their coding efforts go further.
Stuff like refactoring or if you give it clear direction to go and, and and build out a module or things like that. But I haven't spent as much time with product people. And it seems like some say that the product management function might even be under threat. So as a long time product leader and someone that's been mucking around with these tools how are you thinking about how the product.
Function is changing and what the implications of these tools might be as they continue to get more advanced and wider spread.
Jeremy Crane: Yeah. Yeah, it's a good one. So I would say. I both agree and disagree, or I don't know what the term is. I think the role is changing, right? [00:05:00] I think the role is gonna change drastically over the next couple of years, and I think it's gonna happen really quickly. On the one hand and I'm not the first person to say this by any means, I don't think this is novel, but you know what I agree with that has been said out there by folks and that what I'm seeing is.
If you are a product manager that is essentially more of a project manager in truth, right? You are, pushing priorities around a board and writing writing up tickets and handing work to engineers and they're just programming and executing on the tasks, then yeah, that role is probably gonna go away, right?
That's not a function that we will need anymore. What's super interesting is, if you are somebody who is more strategic about your thinking, if you are, you think of your role as being an enabler for the team to understand the end customer and the end user, and to navigate the journey of the product and the business and that [00:06:00] connection, I think you'll absolutely have a role because you're gonna, you're gonna play a really critical component within that team.
The thing that's really interesting that I also see happening for. Smaller startups and through mid stage that is super powerful is the three primary roles that we've had traditionally on a product team, product development team are all collapsing, right? So we're seeing de product design, engineering, and product managing management start to move together and engineers can do more product management.
Designers can do more product management, product managers can do more design work and engineer, and all three of those combinations like you, it's starting to collapse. And so what I think is super interesting is folks that are out there that are product leaders, that have a product mindset, and by product mindset, I mean you think about, basically value and viability, which is the core tenets there, which comes, I can't remember the guy that's, again, stealing that [00:07:00] from other folks. Like all good things. If that's what you think about and now you have the ability to execute on those, right? If you don't think of your role as like pushing projects through that's what's gonna get really exciting because as an early stage, product leader, you can.
Do design work with these tools that's exceptional, right? And bring your ideas to life in a way that really is really effective. You can start to code prototypes. You can get prototypes out there. You don't have to use you don't have to burn your expensive engineering resources. It doesn't mean you don't need engineering later in the process to build really effective, secure, scalable software.
But you can actually execute much earlier on in the ideas and bring those ideas to life in a way that's functional, right? You don't have to do hacky prototype, clickable prototypes in Figma and other tools like that anymore. You just build a prototype. Just build the thing that you want to envision, show it [00:08:00] to a real engineer and have them, bring that, go and test it, right?
Bring that to life. One of the things you mentioned, I think on the other roles in thinking about that collapse that I think is super interesting. The, I think these tools are absolutely changing the perspective, right? So product managers can build prototypes, as you mentioned, and you've got this whole like, vibe coding thing where, you know, that I hate the term, but it's, it seems to have been adopted now, so whatever.
Can't fight the masses. We'll go with it. You mentioned on the engineering side, I think one of the really interesting things is how engineering is gonna change as well and is changing. And these are really powerful tools to accelerate engineering productivity and move from a world where an engineer can start to think about product strategy and how it gets executed in the product and not have to worry about burning all of their calories on ti and time on typing.
So we're gonna move to a world. I would say I don't, I'll make a bold [00:09:00] statement, within the next five years, I think very little actual programming will be done by human figures, right? It'll be orchestrated by very smart developers that will level up and start to think about things at a much more scalable level.
They'll be doing real engineering. They just won't be writing the code. Because why would you, it's so much more effective to have the machine do it. So the challenge will be for a lot of people and the wave that we're going through, same thing that's happening on the product management side will be, you have to be the type of engineer that wants to lean into that, right?
And you can't look at this as a threat. You have to see this as an opportunity and a tool for you to level up and be better. And I'm definitely seeing that bifurcation happen both in product management, in engineering, and some people leaning in and saying, oh my God, this is amazing. And others saying.
No. It's not gonna work. That's, you'll always need somebody doing this or that and that kind of thing.
Jason Jacobs: Now, you've worked in a number of different organizations and [00:10:00] seen a number of different product processes do with the benefit of hindsight, is there a particular process that you have the strongest conviction in or can it work a number of different ways or I guess flipped around?
Can it not work? A number of different ways.
Jeremy Crane: Yeah, so I guess so, so you're, you mean on just generalized product development processes?
Jason Jacobs: Yeah, we'll get into how AI's changing it, but first I just want the context of just like historically is there an objective right and wrong? Or or are there many different ways to make it work that vary greatly from team to team, from founder to founder, et cetera.
Jeremy Crane: Yeah. I think at a hundred percent it varies depending on the team, depending on the organization, depending on the customers, depending on the product and the space. I do not think there is one right way. I think there is a right way for every company in their given space in, they're given [00:11:00] customers, right?
And they're, and. Your goal as an early stage startup and company that's building is to find that right way. And by definition, find all the wrong ways, right? You're gonna find the wrong ways of doing that process. And so simply copying another company that has done it in an amazing way and you've seen success and taking their process and just blindly copying it, is generally not gonna work in terms of product development.
I've. Every company I've worked at has had drastically different product development processes. And some of them have really struggled and it's been, and those companies frankly, struggled. And others have had success in the way that they built their own process. I think HubSpot was one of the ones that for me, was truly, it philosophically shaping for me because one of the things I saw at HubSpot was this evolution of the product development process. [00:12:00] What we did early on didn't last as we scaled the company. And as we got bigger and as things changed and as our team changed and grew it, it just didn't, it didn't translate.
And we actually had to get really good at saying, okay, what are the philosophical tenets we're gonna hold onto? And what are the like little process things that we're gonna change because I. We can't actually execute on that philosophical tenant anymore because our process is getting in our way. I think there's a, and so the philosophy at the core of all of it is what matters more than anything. And this is for a lot of folks is very bread and butter now, but you've gotta find ways to get the customer problems, challenges, and experiences. As close to the builders as possible.
How do you get that primary information from here to there? Now, depending on your organization, that you may need steps in that process based [00:13:00] on the people you have in your organization, the types of customers, the way you can talk to them. We had a great opportunity in the HubSpot world where.
We could expose engineers to customers. We would get them on meetings with customers. That became a foundational part of what we did, and it was really valuable to have that primary experience. And the product management role was not a gatekeeper of information, it was a manager of exposure to information in a lot of ways with things in, I've worked in a couple of enterprise type environments where that is much harder.
It's much harder to get engineers on the phone with that customer. So you have to figure out how to, like, how do we capture that information as primary as possible and get it in front of front of engineers, get it in front of the builders and the people who are actually building. Those are the primary aspects of what you need there.
So you're solving. Fun. You're solving and understanding the fundamental problems. So you can think big picture, right? And you can think about how all these pieces fit together and how you're gonna actually change the experience for your end users. [00:14:00] That's a, that's one, big tenant.
The other one that I've carried throughout, regardless of the company that's more of a philosophy is just this, that idea of, paying attention to your competitors, but not really studying them, watching them, copying them. Just, be aware of look for ideas, right?
Be aware of what they're doing for interesting ideas and things, but not really worrying about what they're doing, right? Because at the end of the day, if you're paying attention to the customers and you're really focusing on that more than anything. You're gonna build something and you're smart, right?
You like, you have smart people on the team that know how to like, solve problems and things like that. You're gonna build something just as good, if not better than the next company out there that isn't doing that, maybe, right? So those are like the core, but the process is very different depending on the company.
And you have to figure out, what it is, what your process is.
Jason Jacobs: In terms of keeping all the trains [00:15:00] running, how do you think about the balance between two process heavy and not enough process?
Jeremy Crane: Yeah, so I tend to be pretty, this is something that I've become aware of or have been aware of for a while. I I'm a little process allergic. I just, I tend to not like rigid structures, and I think that has taught me that. I am, for the most part, a relatively early stage guy because of that,
I
Jason Jacobs: what does that mean? What when does it graduate from being early stage in your mind?
Jeremy Crane: yeah. I think for me it often is about the number of opinions that are involved in the process and the number of bodies that are involved in the process of building which generally aligns to some extent to revenue. But we're seeing all that change with the scale of some of these AI companies where you've got, I, we.
I won't get into the exact numbers, but tens of millions of dollars was being generated [00:16:00] by a team in the single digits at Jasper in early days. That's, it's crazy talk, right? So those things change, but it's really about how many people are in the process and how many teams are involved.
I would say. When as we got to a more divisional structure at HubSpot, for instance, where we had large groups of engineers, we had something like 300 engineers and product in product development in general, engineers, product managers, designers in that product development organization, towards the tail end of my time there.
There some process was needed, right? We, the engine starts to shake and that's probably the biggest signal is when you're not able to effectively deploy solutions and product improvements to your customers at a pace. That feels like you're staying ahead and basically making progress, then you inevitably have to have some process in [00:17:00] place.
And that's, for me personally, that's the time when I'm like, ah, this, I'm not the best guy for this anymore. And that was, generally that was the time I left. Ended up leaving HubSpot as they were two years post IPO and we had a pretty big team and we're still growing like crazy and it was great people and great product and all that.
Yeah. So that's how I would say I've seen other flavors of this at other companies, when I was at Wander Less group time there for about four years, we had some periods where we tried to force some process in place too early and it was. In my opinion, pretty ineffective, right?
It stagnated a lot of what we did because we felt like we had to push all the buttons on all the things instead of just going and talking to the customer and attacking the next thing on the pile. That was most important based on what we were seeing right now and the general opinion in the room, right?
We were never that big of a team, but that we felt like, oh, we need to get better at this feels messy. It feels messy and [00:18:00] it feels like we're all over the place. We need to add some structure and some process. And I think that was a little bit of a mistake. It didn't kill us. But definitely slowed things down.
And the beauty of the chaos early on is some magic can come out of that.
Jason Jacobs: And I think similarly, how how do you think about. Validating and spending time with customers, as you said before, getting engineers time with customers and stuff with what people like Steve Jobs have said about how if you listen to, or Henry Ford, if you, if I listened to my customers, I'd build faster horses.
Or if I listened to what the people wanted, they wouldn't want faster horses, they wouldn't want to, couldn't imagine a car. And Steve Jobs talked about how like the customer, give the customers. What they need, not what they think they want. Like how do you reconcile that kind of feedback with the importance of learning from customers firsthand?
Like when do you listen and when does the customer not know best?
Jeremy Crane: Yeah, so generally my take is you don't listen when the customer tells you what to build. That's like the simplified version of my take When customer [00:19:00] says, you should add this feature, you should add this button. I wish your product did this. That's when you say, oh, that's great. Now you ask a question that gets you to what you really want.
I think the Henry Ford quote gets misused a lot, and I guess it, it gets construed as, if I didn't understand customer, like you don't need to understand your customers. That's not what Henry Ford said at all. Henry Ford understood people and customers and transportation what we really needed to be able to accomplish.
He didn't. Ask them what feature to build, right? That's his point. And so when customer tells me I need to build this, my first question is, oh, that's super cool idea. Let's talk, let me, help me understand why you want to do that, what you're trying to accomplish. Tell me like, what are you hitting right now that's pausing this?
Why is that valuable to you? Tell me about the greater process that you're involved with. That you're trying to attack here so that I can really understand it. Not saying no, I'm like, I'm not saying no to your [00:20:00] feature and functionality. What I wanna do is maybe there's something I'm trying to get at, something better, something bigger, something more cohesive.
At the end of the day, the thing they suggest, it might be great, right? It might be something that you do go and build, but if you don't understand the why behind it, you're gonna end up with really messy, like it's inevitable. Because I've done this right. I have been the Vic. I have done this and seen this firsthand in my experience, doing exactly this, building exactly what the customer said and adding a bunch of buttons and knobs and dials and features and functionality in your product, and it becomes essentially unusable.
And that's the challenge of doing that versus holistically understanding the problem and figuring out who you wanna listen to, who you don't wanna listen to, and what the why is. And if you get to that, why that's the goal, right?
Jason Jacobs: I've been poking around because I, I wanted to just get a sense of, how, what rhythm you've fallen into after being through this rodeo [00:21:00] a number of times. If you look forward how much do you think about how product leaders have been trained. We'll still be relevant as we enter this new world.
Is it just about incrementing and evolving the fundamentals, or is it almost better to start with a clean slate in beginner's mind and completely rethink how we structure teams? What processes we run? Will will the fundamentals still hold true? It.
Jeremy Crane: I think some of them will. So I think what's interesting to me is that piece that we just talked about. If you're the type of person who digs for the y. It digs for an understanding of the problem space and where to apply your calories for and thinks about, okay, how do we, how should we create value?
And what is viable to create? If that's how you think about the world and how you attack the problems, now you are a weapon to wield these new tools, right? You don't care about execution. You don't care about how we get it done, what process we apply, [00:22:00] right? And yes. All of those processes are going to change.
I have no idea what the future product team looks like, but I do know that the smartest leaders will be thinking about how do we apply what's available to us as tools to attack the problem in the right way, and how do we leverage these things to think about how we might even solve these problems. So I think to an even greater extent, we will get to a world where.
We won't actually be solution it. Like one of the, one of the worst things you, I think you can do as a product manager, for instance, right? To date right now is say, here's the solution, here's exactly what we need to build. Hand that to your development team and tell 'em to go build it. And the problem with that is because you haven't re, you might not necessarily be understanding that, that core why and that problem right now we're moving into a world with AI and all these tools where. Maybe we don't even have to think about [00:23:00] what the best solution is, because as long as we pick the right problems to solve, the tools are gonna come up with the best solution for us, right?
So the value isn't coming up with the solution. The value is in that problem, is the right problem to solve that will produce value and drive business value for us as a company, as a team, as a goal, and for customers in general. So that's like that key important piece that like if you're a really good product leader right now, you focus on that more than anything and then you leverage your engineering team to come up with that solution and execute.
Now you're gonna be able to do that at a much bigger scale by applying AI to think about, okay, how should we solve this problem best? And even beyond just the code execution, right? So one of the things I spend a lot of time doing now is, I'm. I have conversations like all the time, all day with Claude, getting feedback on problems we have and how we might approach it, and like just digging and [00:24:00] ideating on what are some solutions here.
Sometimes it's great, sometimes it's not, sometimes it's very cookie cutter and you're like, this is crap. I gotta think, go think about this on my own. But sometimes you get really novel approaches to these things, right? And that's just gonna continue to accelerate.
Jason Jacobs: So what's an example of something you might talk to Claude about and sort through together?
Jeremy Crane: Yeah, so let me think through it. So I might, there it is. It's often pretty nuanced to the product problem. Trying to think of a specific example. So here's one.
Jason Jacobs: I.
Jeremy Crane: We've been thinking about, yeah, there's a set of like very secure data that we collab. I'm gonna try to anonymize this a little bit just so that we don't get into too many of the details With the current company there's some very secure data that we collect from individuals right now that we need to on behalf of what we're doing and for the core to our business.
And it's [00:25:00] collected and stored and not readily available to you. Can't. You can't generate value from it. Right now it's just collected to check the box. And that's problematic because at the end of the day, this is actually really useful data for I'll just say what we do is keep kids safe, right?
This is useful data. If we can expose it and make it available and make it readily accessible, we can keep kids a lot safer in youth sports, right? Because that's what we focus on is youth sports compliance. But it's. Just collected and stored in these piles of data that's inaccessible and hard to use.
And so one of the things I actually en engaged with a few months ago with Claude to dig into is like, how can I think about exposing, like how do I extract value from this data with ai? What are the things I need to be thinking about because this is sensitive, secure data? Like, how do I need to think about like how I would engage with ai?
How do I leverage these? These models. I can't expose this data publicly. I can't [00:26:00] pass this stuff to chat GPT or Claude, just the foundation. Open a APIs, I've gotta and so I wanted to think through all of the challenges that, and also think about the product experience that I might leverage. And so there's, I had a lot of back and forth with it, thinking about, okay, how do I simplify this down so coaches can get some real value out of this when they want and administrators to know what's going on.
And how do I, and how do the underpinnings of this have to work? What are some key components and requirements that I need to have in this system and what's available to me now? And then doing, and then also, like one of the things that I did is I used tools in tandems, like perplexity to do search alongside Claude.
Now Claude has web enabled as well, so I actually use both and dig into that. But that hopefully that's like enough of an example without going into too many of the like underpinning details.
Jason Jacobs: Do you have a set way that you go about building intuition for the [00:27:00] customers that you're building for? And is that evolving as the tool sets under your feet continue to evolve?
Jeremy Crane: Yes I have had, I want, I won't go so far as to say it's a set way. I have some approaches. Which is generally taking every opportunity I can to listen to customers and engage with them, especially early on when I'm, like, right now I'm pretty early on in the journey at Anchored, a few months in.
I spend as much time as I can on some sales calls so I can hear the pro sales calls are really valuable and cool because. Salespeople tend to be, good salespeople tend to be good at digging into the problems that are exposed. And then you'll hear about those problems more firsthand before they've been tainted by a product experience and before they've actually adopted.
And so it's that is gold right there, right? So I love hearing from those prospects. Spend a bunch of time with. S customer success and support so I can understand, [00:28:00] what are like, I have a weekly meeting with customer success and we go through support and we go through what's working, what are the needs, what are the biggest, what are the top, I force some prioritization from them.
What are the biggest challenges they're facing right now? Is it different or. It the same as last week. Those are general things that I just do everywhere of it's a bunch of conversations with the folks that have the most primary connection to the customer. The things that are changing and that I've layered in is you can actually have conversations with the tools that are out there, whether it's clogged or perplexity or chat, GPT and leveraging, even for the deep research side of things.
To have conversations with those tools as if they are customers. And so it's not exactly the same as talking to a customer and hearing that. But what's interesting about it is you are getting a flavor across a cross section of customers if you know how to work with them and use good prompts to [00:29:00] set them up and say, here's how I want you to think about the world and this is what's important to me.
Tell me about the challenges you're experiencing in this space. It's. It's quite good at exposing a bunch of information and challenges that might be faced, and it gives you a starting point to go and then take that to real customers and acid test that, Hey, is this a real problem? Do you have this challenge?
And what I'm finding is more, it's as the models get better and the tools get better, it's more often than not, you're having that conversation with a customer that's yes, that's our number one problem, right? And so you can get that stuff quicker and faster and at scale.
Jason Jacobs: And as the models are improving so quickly does it feel a little bit like, building a house on a beach that you know is becoming a victim to accelerating erosion.
Jeremy Crane: Yeah, so I've I've got, I haven't come up with a good name for it or I've talked to other folks. I'm sure there's like an actual term for this, but it's like a rocket. I call it this, a rocket ship problem, which is, it's really hard to [00:30:00] navigate right now because, and where I describe that is, and the analogy is, I could build the absolute best rocket I could ever imagine with the latest and greatest technology today, and I could launch it for Mars, right?
We're gonna go to Mars on this rocket, I'm gonna send it to Mars and then that's gonna get there and say, I this, I'm gonna challenge my math in two months or whatever it takes to get to Mars right now, tomorrow. I'm gonna have some technology that's available to me that I could now launch that rocket tomorrow and it will get there in a month and 20 days and the day after that it'll get there in a month.
So it's like when do you punt and say, I'm gonna wait. Because it's like the thing that you could do to do something amazing. And we've always had this, we've always had this in technology, but it's the timeframe of this acceleration is. Getting so compressed that I do think it's really hard, like this is an ongoing challenge.
Jason Jacobs: You know what it reminds me of though, is [00:31:00] that one of the things so I had a Tesla and now I drive rivian, but one of the cool things is that you get the car, but then after you have the car keeps getting better under your feet because of software updates. So it's like how do you architect your system to use that Mars analogy in a way that once you leave from ours, it can continue to get better once it's in flight.
Jeremy Crane: Yeah. And I think that's so that's gonna be the answer, right? I think we're gonna see, and there's already some of these companies out there that are starting to crop up to basically become the middle layer that will solve some of these problems for software teams that are dealing with this challenge.
It's actually something that we spent a bunch of time it's one of the best things that I think Jasper thought about during my time there. And that was, we had. We built that middle layer to allow you to manage multiple models across the platform and to be able to essentially to begin with, it was like manual switching.
You could swap in a model and it would take, 10 minutes to swap in a new model and update it in, and everything else would just work. Eventually it got to the point [00:32:00] before I was leaving where it was an automated process where. Based on the prompts that were coming in from users, we could on the fly path that to different models in the system and we would basically just enable them in this, and we call it, this Jasper AI engine, but the idea is this middle layer architecture that will allow us to abstract away from that.
And as software developers, product developers basically just point at that middle layer and let it give you the best results possible. At the end of the day, it does. It's still, the challenge we face with these tools is that what is truly possible is also changing. So it's not just that we are getting better at solving the known problems, it's that our scope of the problems we can actually attack is completely changing every day.
Like I just read this article today, which is mind blowing in a completely different space that, that [00:33:00] open AI has some models now that are actually getting to the point where it's able to do cross discipline, scientific comparison to come up with novel ideas for scientific solutions that no human would ever really think of because you wouldn't think about.
Like looking at biochemistry and comparing that to electronics or something like you just don't have, most humans don't have that expertise in one head, so they don't think that way. That's crazy. Like crazy. Like expansion of problems that now become viable for us chasing in terms of solutions.
Jason Jacobs: When you think of the term AI first as a company, is that just like a buzzword or does it actually mean something profound in terms of how companies get started and scaled?
Jeremy Crane: Yeah. It's certainly a buzz word, but it actually think it has meaning, right? I think it's in a lot of cases it gets thrown around and folks will [00:34:00] say, we're an AI first company, and really they aren't. They're, but. There are a bunch of companies out there that I think are truly AI first and are thinking about it.
And for me what it means is, it's exactly going back to what we just talked about, which is in an AI first mindset, the set of problems and the way you would solve those problems is completely different than it was five years ago. The world of possible is so expanded at this point that.
It's just completely different, right? And so the biggest change I would say is if you are an AI first company and mindset as a software product team, you think in terms of goals, not in terms of actions and tasks, right? So if you build in the old way of building software Dharmesh talked a bunch about this early on, early days, and I think it's a hundred percent in the old mode of software you built.
TA software that executed tasks, those tasks [00:35:00] could be extremely complicated. They could be all, you press a button, it does a thing. The thing might be hugely complicated under the covers, but it is executing a task, a dumb task. Now we move to a world where we are pointing the software at a goal, and we're saying, achieve that goal.
Here's a bunch of tools, here's a bunch of capabilities. Knock yourself out. We don't care how you do it. That's crazy. And so that mindset of being goal oriented and thinking, if I'm building a CRM, what is the goal here? I want to expose data to the right people at the right time, have it at their fingertips.
And I don't want to have to think about how I collect that data. And I don't want to have to like, I want it to just work and I want all that stuff to be there with me. I know for a fact that's how. Peachy and Christopher over at day AI are thinking about the world. And that's a, that's an AI first perspective on the world, right?
Is you're thinking about the end goal. You're not thinking about how we execute tasks to [00:36:00] get there, and then you're building your software to enable that goal oriented approach.
Jason Jacobs: So I'm sure you hear from some of your friends who are, maybe they're in a round or B round or C round scaling venture backed companies. They've been around for some number of years. They've been executing since before any of this stuff existed. At least not in the ways that it is starting to take shape and be adopted.
Now, and they've got a bit of a dilemma because they've got all their set ways of doing things and they're on a treadmill just trying to keep up with that and always feeling behind. They see how quickly the world is changing. They hear all these stories of how AI is impacting what's possible in such profound ways but they don't know where to start and they're already booked with all the things that are already on their plate.
What advice do you have for people that are in that situation? Because I feel like there's a lot of them.
Jeremy Crane: I 100% agree. And I'm frankly, I struggling with that myself, right? I look at the plate of things, and [00:37:00] we're a relatively young startup. Company ourselves. And I look at the pile of things that we have to do and that we want to accomplish and that we know will add value and that we're cranking through.
And it's just like stuff we need to do. And that consumes all of our time. And it's really hard to carve out that time to think differently and go after that other stuff. We're trying to we're. I'm beating the drum every day, as you can imagine, I'm probably getting annoying to a lot of the folks here and we'll, we'll get better at it, but I think I think it's tough.
I do think there are folks out there that are leaning into it. And I actually don't. It's like even folks that have been at it for a long, 10 years. On their journey as a startup. I just had a conversation with a friend who's a founder, and CEO was an advisor in a past company.
And he's doing a bunch of create, like he's completely rethinking his product now, and his approach to the world because [00:38:00] he thinks he, he recognizes this is all gonna change and I need to rethink it. And then even at a tactical and process level, he sat down and started writing software himself using these tools that are available to build those prototypes as a CEO and founder of a company that's been around now for 10 plus years and has a good amount of customers and millions of dollars of revenue and they're well established.
That's the mindset. You have to find ways to bring into the company. I. I, I don't really have a great answer to that yet, because I'm still fighting with it myself to find that, to carve out that time and figure out how to make that happen. I think the answer is you just, you have to find the ways.
I think the one thing that has been powerful for me personally, has been having a leader in the company who gets it, which is, we have that now. And is worried about that change. And then getting everybody in the company using the tools that are out there now, [00:39:00] really encouraging, making it easy, like we have a budget, we spend a.
We, every employee has a paid subscription to Perplexity and Clawed or chat GPT. Every developer has either cursor or, GitHub copilot or various other tools that we're using for for that. And we'll pay for all that, right? No questions asked. You want the thing, come tell me, tell us how we're gonna use it done.
'cause if you use those tools, it changes the way you think about the world and what's possible, and then that. Trickles into, oh, hey, what if our product actually approached this problem that way? And we're starting to see inklings of that. I'm a couple months in here, so hopefully if I am successful a year from now, we'll be in a completely different place.
Jason Jacobs: You, you mentioned before that in five years you weren't sure if any code would be written by humans. If if any of your kids were interested in [00:40:00] pursuing a software engineering path how would you feel about that given that, and what do you think the future is of the software engineering path?
If your hypothesis is true.
Jeremy Crane: Yeah. So I would say that I, it's what we are going to see is a bifurcation of the discipline. And what's interesting about software engineering, unlike almost every engineering discipline I can think of, I thought really hard about this. It's the only one where the engineer, the person who. Concepts, the ideas and thinks about how to solve those problems actually does the building actually does the programming, right?
So programming is very different from software engineering, right? Like the architect doesn't build the building, the civil engineer doesn't build the bridge, right? That's not how engineering typically works in every other discipline that we have out there. I think [00:41:00] software engineering is gonna move to that world as well.
Program.
Jason Jacobs: and by the way, I wonder how many robots are gonna be building the buildings or the bridges.
That's another, yeah.
Jeremy Crane: yes. That's a whole other, that's a whole other discipline. All of those. I, and I think that's right. Like I think there's a world if we want to get really big here, humanity needs to move to a world of orchestration of these roles, I think, and we can have lots of questions about what that means for society.
And I don't have any opinions on that and I don't know what happens there. But I think software engineering, I would, if I had kids going to software engineering. Awesome. One of the questions I would be encouraging them to ask their professors and the schools they're choosing is, how are you thinking about this?
Are you still just basically teaching kids to be good programmers or are you thinking about. At a concept level and a systems level and how to be a good engineer. Now, what's interesting there is [00:42:00] I think most formal education in software engineering actually does align with that. It's been one of the sort of like biggest complaints about computer science education is that it's too removed from the practicalities of actually writing code and building software.
And so that's why any. Kid off the street can teach themselves to program up to this point, and they can go and build software, but they may not understand the systems level and how to make this stuff really work and scale. And that's when you need it, comp com, computer science degree to start thinking about that.
So now we move to the world where it should properly align with those kind of concepts.
Jason Jacobs: I know we're getting somewhat short on time, but another thing I'm curious about, if I can sneak another one in, is just as it gets easier and easier to build, what do you think the implications will be as an established startup as it relates to things like capital intensity, as it relates to things like competition and defensibility as it relates to things like.[00:43:00]
Pricing pressure margins, exit I don't know, just whatever the things they need to think about to build a durable company. Or at least to get a return for your investors. Is that all gonna be changing wildly as well? And do you have any hypotheses there of where that's gonna go?
Jeremy Crane: I think for the majority of companies and spaces I'd be really worried if worried right now if I was an investor for one, because I think you're just not gonna need money. You're just not gonna need as much money to get things done. And to build really amazing things that solve problems, right?
That's number one. I'm not a vc, I'm not in private equity. I'm not in any of that. So I, there's probably a lot more nuance and they have a lot more smart opinions about it. But I think like on the surface, that's one thing. The other thing that I would say is more than ever, and this is coming from the product guy, a career in product development and software.[00:44:00]
Go to market matters more than anything else that you could ever invest in as a company. Your product development, your technology, none of that is really gonna matter because everybody's gonna be able to build great software that, that sees these solutions out there. What is going to matter is how you connect with customers, how you.
Go to market, how you deliver value, how you think about your relationship, like it all is going to come down to, oddly enough, the relationships you have with your market and how you are perceived. I think brand is all of a sudden going to matter more than anything because if you think about for any given problem I've got, and I have this right now, there's a million AI tools out there and you have no idea which one to pick to do the thing.
This is also all of a sudden brand becomes the way that you pick, right? The brand that resonates [00:45:00] with you and resonates with your peers, and resonates with folks that, that you know and that. So that's all go to market. That entire go to market engine is going to matter more than anything else, and that's what it's gonna make you a successful company.
If you don't have that, you're dead in the water. You will really struggle.
Jason Jacobs: In, in closing, if if any product peers are like screw it. After listening to this episode, I'm inspired. It's time to break the ice. I need to figure out this whole AI thing. Speak to them specifically. What do you want them to internalize if they have one takeaway from this discussion as they're heading out to break the ice, what do you want that to be?
Jeremy Crane: Yeah, I think the biggest thing that I encourage folks, that I'm talking to younger folks is go use these tools. Go down. If you're not already, go download cursor and build something. Just do it. Find some goofy idea. Doesn't matter what it is, just think of something you wish existed in the world, no matter how small or big, and go build it.
You will learn [00:46:00] an enormous amount by doing that. And you'll learn and you'll get better at how do you, the biggest part of what, what is happening now, it's gonna get easier, but how to communicate with these tools and get value out of them. There is a nuanced approach and so a lot of folks approach it and they'll.
Do the throwaway request in the tool. Write me a sentence about X and it's it's garbage. And you're like you didn't, that's, you're, you. There's no context. You don't have any of that. It's but go and build with these tools. That's number one, I would say. And use the tools that are out there and find a way to consume the fire hose in a way that is.
That works for you. So that's been big thing for me. I've just, I'm spending a lot of time watching what's going on and not jumping on too many things. Watching the patterns at a high level, reading a lot of headlines, not reading, going too deep into the articles unless, it looks really interesting and you start to see patterns and you start to [00:47:00] see development.
You see these interesting tools out there, but you have to have that feed as part of your life as a product leader right now, so you can understand, what's possible and changing. Those are the big things.
Jason Jacobs: Thanks Jeremy. We covered a lot of ground. Is there anything I didn't ask that you wish I did?
Jeremy Crane: I don't know ma'am. We covered a bunch. I probably said some things that are dumb and I shouldn't have, but that's okay.
Jason Jacobs: Yeah, we all do. But I learned a lot and that's usually a pretty good barometer. If I learned a lot, then it probably means that at least some subset of listeners will as well. And that's what it's all about. So thanks for coming on. Best of luck in the new role and in the new world and excited to, to stay in contact as you're continuing to get deeper and as I do. So thanks again. Nice to catch up as well.
Jeremy Crane: we go forth into the right. All right, man. See ya.
Jason Jacobs: dude.
Thank you for tuning into The Next Next. If you enjoyed it, you can subscribe from your favorite podcast player in addition to the podcast. Which typically publishes weekly. There's also a weekly newsletter on Substack at the next [00:48:00] next.substack.com. That's essentially for weekly accountability of the ground I'm covering, areas I'm tackling next, and where I could use some help as well.
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