Zero to One Leadership: Building Products, Confidence, and Conviction

Introduction to Product Management Journey

Productside | 00:02.242–00:49.154

Hi everyone, and welcome to Productside Stories, the podcast where we reveal the very real and raw lessons learned from product leaders and thinkers all over the world. I’m your host, Rena Lexin, CEO of Productside. And today I have the pleasure of speaking with Scott Jones. He’s the vice president of product at Realize, a vision AI company where he leads the development of plug and play AI models for human measurement of

attention, emotion, and identity. Very cool product. And Scott has very deep experience across ad tech, martech, IOT, cloud, B2B, and a recent focus on delivering zero to one products. Welcome to the podcast, Scott.

Scott Jones | 00:49.154–00:55.032

Thank you very much for having me. That was a very kind intro. No expletives yet. That’s good.

Productside | 00:55.032–00:59.906

You know, I always want other people to introduce me. I feel like they always do a better job. Well, I also want you to introduce a little bit about your story. And I love always asking our guests how they got into product management.

Scott Jones | 00:59.906–01:11.167

Yeah, that’s fair.

Scott Jones | 01:11.167–03:25.184

Yeah, that’s a great question. There’s so many archetypes, so many patterns. Mine somewhat fits patterns you might have heard before. I studied economics and film in college. I promise this won’t be like a 20 year story, but I kind of always had that dichotomy of creativity and analysis. Came out of school not wanting to make films after working on projects like that.

So I was an analyst for several years in different capacities, management consulting, economic consulting, an internal quasi consulting role inside of a healthcare provider in New York City. I’m a musician and ultimately a band and an opportunity led me to move to LA where I had the good fortune of joining an internet Yellow Pages company. I joined the search engine marketing team, still on this analyst path. I got really deep into SQL as an autodidact.

writing code that was governing on the order of three to four million dollars of spend a month with the major search engines and By virtue of doing that one day the leadership team kind of knighted me a product manager. was wondering where am I going? What’s next? And they said you should be a product manager I didn’t know what that meant, but it was ultimately my destiny. So very Very excited how that worked out

And there I jumped into the fire, jumped into the deep end. your analogy. So they gave me ownership straight up of a $150 million ad product, performance ad product with 55,000 small business customers, where the premise was pay something on the order of $2,000 to $3,000 a month in exchange for a guaranteed amount of phone call and email leads. So I dove in working with the data science team on that optimization engine.

teams who manage our APIs with the search engines. Really interesting business rules for this being an internet Yellow Pages company, but part of a traditional Yellow Pages company. So how do you translate selling listings for Chicago lawyers, Orlando dentists, et cetera, in the context of the phone book? How do you programmatically take those inputs and make effective search engine marketing campaigns at scale? So very interesting problem sets to dive in. I learned a lot.

Scott Jones | 03:25.184–03:56.79

Then I got into, as you mentioned, ad tech, mar tech, internet of things. All my experiences just kept compounding, leading to where I’m at now, where I found this really beautiful path of just learnings and insights where I kept, as you mentioned, being picked out for zero to one and along the way, acquiring so much information that just led to the next opportunity as a natural next step. So no plan really. Locked out and getting into one of the hottest career paths on earth.

I absolutely love it.

The Art and Science of Product Management

Productside | 03:56.79–04:16.852

You know, there’s a lot about your story that I have heard before that kind of, I don’t know, that visual of being anointed a product manager is very, very common. But not so often do I meet someone that also has a film background, though I have seen a few theater backgrounds. There’s certainly a bit of theater, I think, in product management sometimes.

Scott Jones | 04:16.852–05:00.332

Yeah, I think it abstracts to a comment commentary I’ve had with various people, but one in particular where he’s an artist and I can just show you my room. I’m a very active musician and artist. my office is also a music studio. So I’m always making, creating, et cetera. And the application of product, this very insightful friend of mine said, it’s art. You’re an artist. The decision is like, when is it done? What is your level of taste for what you’re creating?

All of that, it’s very creative. think any creative sort of field or set of experiences very much lends itself to the same way of doing.

Productside | 05:00.332–05:27.967

You know, I have said before that when we say the, you know, that phrase, it’s the art and science of product management. I actually think there’s a lot of science in art and there’s a lot of art and science as well. So it’s, it’s definitely one of those phrases that I don’t wholeheartedly agree that there’s a quite a specific difference of having, you know, a creative flow versus a very thorough structured flow, which is I think what the science part is supposed to represent.

Scott Jones | 05:27.967–06:02.338

Yeah, or even just to nerd out a bit on that awesome remark is looking at like Leonardo da Vinci or Michelangelo, where they go real deep in studying anatomy, dissecting cadavers such that when they’re expressing human form in marble, they can articulate stuff that they’ve seen and they just have an awareness of it. Again, as that artist, what am I trying to express? What do want to make people feel? What do want them to do? How do I tell that story?

So going deep in the science, but not necessarily having to say, all right, I’m a scientist right now, just having those experiences to refer to.

Productside | 06:02.338–06:30.89

Well, I think especially when you are doing the zero to one products, you need to have both. definitely, mean, vision in many ways is creating. It’s just in your head, right? Before you go and develop it. you, that, is a skill that I think is very, I guess, artistic. So how do you think that actually your art background helps you in managing what I believe from your team, you have more than just product reporting to you now.

Scott Jones | 06:30.89–07:43.98

Yeah, I would think about it as it feels like this notion of the Steve Jobs quote of playing the orchestra, this idea of whether you’re the artist and to carry that analogy, I am holding the pen to the paper creating or am I working with people where that same notion of expression, I don’t have to have the first order control of the pen and paper for each, but rather convey the vision, as you said, being able to kind of disseminate that.

and empower people to execute on it. Well, meanwhile, you are kind of overseeing to a degree to tune things up. Be like, that’s not quite the color palette I was imagining to carry the analogy. Different shade of blue, perhaps. But yes, you’re on the right track. I think it’s kind of like that. To go back to my film major, it’d be like, I independently making movies by myself? Like Robert Rodriguez, if you.

catch that analogy or do I learn all of that and then be able to articulate the same, now I’ve got a budget, now I’ve got a team. It’s the same idea though. Vision, execution and then in the reality of it knowing that what you have envisioned is not true anymore. So how do you adjust? How do you make it work and still land in a good place?

A Day in the Life of a Product Leader

Productside | 07:43.98–07:48.24

So can you walk me through maybe a day in the life of Scott Jones?

Scott Jones | 07:48.24–10:09.161

wow. Yeah. Let’s see. So it’s a mix of lots of customer calls. So as you mentioned, I’m wearing various hats. So in my current world and this going back to this idea of all the things I’ve been doing in my career have kind of converged to this opportunity. I’ve flexed a lot of the muscles I’m flexing, but it hasn’t been explicitly as it is now. So I.

We are a realized, company I work for is a very hardcore technology company. Two thirds of the company are engineers and scientists. So very intentional that budget goes to the R and D to the heavy lifting of the problems we’re solving, which are like very leading edge all the way up and down the stack of how computers work, things like that. So very low level code knowledge, et cetera, where it’s kind of esoteric, such that you want to really fund that. And so I am living

What I, my understanding is kind of echoing how the original founders built the company, where they are handling sales. Like, how can I find product market fit? What is the intersection of what I’m building versus what the market actually wants? They are handling those calls on the front lines. They are handling business development. They are handling marketing, kind of wrapping all of their arms around all of that to find this kernel of, yes, there’s an opportunity. Money is flowing through it. Now I can build, now I can build a company around it.

So I am living essentially an echo of that. I am wearing all of those hats. And when I do have, in this very entrepreneurial fashion, if I don’t have direct resources working for me to solve those problems, it’s kind of beg, borrow, and steal being scrappy. Hey, creative director, I know you’re working on that other thing, but I’m working on this. I would love to have an updated version of this story on a slide. I can kind of do it. Here’s the story I’m telling. Can you help me with that?

Hey, content team, we’re working on a new marketing play. I’ve stubbed out my version of it. Can you make this a blog post for me? Stuff like that where it’s like, yeah, I can kind of fit that in or with engineers, the same deal. I know you’re not devoted to what I’m working on right now, but can you do me a solid engineer or data scientist and cut off this thing for me and I can run with it? So it’s managing all of that and to…

Navigating Imposter Syndrome and Entrepreneurial Mindset

Scott Jones | 10:09.161–10:32.184

kind of as this army of one, navigate this ambiguity of crossing the desert, crossing the chasm. Again, pick your analogy such that I can say, nope, there’s a repeatable path here. We’ve got something. Let’s build a team around it versus the common pitfalls of, let’s just get money and start building stuff and build a team and then find out what we’re doing is not relevant.

Productside | 10:32.184–10:42.706

So I feel just in how you’re describing it, it’s a very, you called it like an echo of the founder motion, but it feels very much real, like the real founder motion around you’re listening to customers, you’re figuring out resources. It’s a, what is it? Entrepreneurship definition is the going after an adventure without necessarily having all the resources. That’s really the definition of entrepreneurship.

Scott Jones | 10:42.706–10:58.07

Yeah.

Scott Jones | 10:58.07–11:01.016

Mm-hmm

Productside | 11:01.016–11:17.032

So how do you, given that at the end of the day, you’re owning product success, but then you also have additional resources, is there a benefit to having just this wide scope in your work or is it a challenge for you?

Scott Jones | 11:17.032–13:39.32

I would argue both. When I was hired for this role, was, I’ll be kind to myself and say three months. It was really maybe six months up to a year of imposter syndrome. Like, can I really do this? Can I really pull this off? So that fear eating away at you where just intuitively, he’s taking a step back and imagining those kind of four or five swim lanes I’m owning. That’s a lot. That’s a lot of information. So how do you synthesize that?

I think I have a, I’ll say it this way, I think I’m on the autism spectrum. I hear this a lot, I’m neurodivergent, I get that feedback such that I am kind of a nonlinear thinker, leading to my creativity and kind of all these things. I’m not normal in the sense that I need like straight lines of information and then the next I’m very multi-dimensional, I would say, and like concurrent processing where I’m kind of.

This thought, that thought, wow, that’s the sales input I just got. That ties to this thing I heard on that call two months ago. Wow, new opportunity. What do you think, advisor team I’m working with? So very much fluid, navigating all of that, where yeah, there is a feeling that, my God, I could fall off this horse and it’ll keep riding. And I’ll be like, shit, where’s it going? But at the same time, it’s very exciting in that entrepreneurial sense of, wow, I’m doing all of this. They’ve given me this trust. This is amazing.

I’m learning so much that you, I always think about intentionally diving into pressure situations like this. I had this conversation with my children. We’re late to getting them into basketball. They’re 11 now. Kids they’re playing with have been playing since they were four. They’re now in their second year. And my story to them is you want to be the worst person on the team. You want to be the dumbest person in the room. That’s how you learn. You want to be like, I’ve never done that before. That’s exciting. That’s how you learn and grow. And that’s exactly what’s happening here.

done things I had no idea I could ever do. You like psych yourself up before calls selling to enterprise clients like billion dollar companies. I’ve never done that before. But it’s working because of this kind of entrepreneurial mindset of I’ve never done that before. Let me test this approach. What happened? Reusable parts or learnings on what to do next or no, that’s a dead end. Like, don’t do that.

Building Confidence in Product Management

Productside | 13:39.32–14:04.976

I’m glad you spoke about the idea even of the imposter syndrome. I will tell you right now, Scott, I don’t think there is a, well, maybe there is, but I think majority of true leaders, they have that feeling at some point in their career. And it’s a very natural and a very good signal. So when I hear somebody say it’s a good sign for me, because you’re supposed to have imposter syndrome, because this is something, I mean, you’re always doing something you’ve never done before.

Scott Jones | 14:04.976–14:07.544

Mm-hmm.

Productside | 14:07.544–14:23.856

have to figure it out. No one is going to tell you word for word what to say in that meeting with an enterprise client. You’re going to have to figure it out. So it’s a really good sign. And I think also very credible in what you’re teaching your kids around the importance of resilience and framing that there’s just you’re part of this journey. Start here. You’re going to get there. Don’t expect yourself to start there. So I would just say.

Scott Jones | 14:23.856–14:31.206

Mm-hmm.

Scott Jones | 14:31.206–15:45.464

Mm-hmm. Yeah, wait, just wanted to jump in what you said. It’s I’ll frame this in a way that doesn’t open up a can of worms. the idea from if you imagine people for whom the mindset of this sort of zero to one, it’s not all tech product management’s like that. Certainly not. Maybe we’ll talk about that to the different environments you might be in and what might hurt or not. But if you are in an environment where you get to go zero to one.

That’s not a fit for all personalities where they want certainty. They want to always sound like, know the answer. I’m very smart. Look at my credentials. I always know the answer. You’re not going to have that. I’ve learned this much. I have a pretty good hypothesis. My confidence meter is like up here now. Ultimately, I want 100%, but I’m like past 50 right now. I feel like I’ve got enough to go a little further. A lot of people can’t handle that. like, I don’t know what to do. And I don’t want to tell people I don’t know what to do.

There’s this comfort you have to build up of the unknown and how you navigate that and that’s a competency I’ve built up such that I’m now hired for that. Like we don’t know how to do this. Like show us. Like, okay, cool. I don’t know how to do it either, but I’m gonna learn and we’re gonna learn together.

The Importance of Cross-Pollination in Product Management

Productside | 15:45.464–15:52.922

Tell me about this confidence meter. When do you start at, when do know that you’ve started at zero and how do you raise it to 50?

Scott Jones | 15:52.922–18:07.126

I think that’s kind of just the name of the game. seen, I saw on a, there’s so much content flying by on LinkedIn and I saw someone who I believe was a pretty high level product manager at Google who literally formulated, this is my confidence meter. And it’s like shades of, wow, I made a heart. That’s amazing. Didn’t mean to do that. Cool feature. That’s awesome. I love what I’m about to say.

where it was like very discreet. This means I talk to like general framing of an opportunity, some first order amount of research to say, yes, there is a problem and some sense of a market there. And then the next might be, I’ve had customer conversations and maybe it’s that end of 30 or what have you, but I talked to them. And then another is I talked to our engineers and said, is this realistic? Can we even do this? Does this violate the laws of physics? They’re like, no, we can do that. Cool. Go to the next step.

And the idea you can be very intentional and frame it as these sort of gated checkpoints in this circular framework that this person made. And when I saw that, I was like, that’s really cool. For me, it is more abstract. It’s this constant idea. And I think this goes back to the entrepreneur. You’re constantly cross-pollinating ideas and insights. You’re learning something and being like, this is interesting. I haven’t heard that before. I’m going to go talk to 20 more people like them.

and maybe not say exactly, you believe this? But try to get at that same thing and be like, wow, validation or no, that person’s totally different. It’s talking to experts. So I’m very blessed in my current world to have been given an advisory panel who are experts in this particular vertical we’re going deep in. I get to do that with them. Hey, I heard this thing. I’ve heard it five times now. It doesn’t jive with what I’m hearing from you.

I think it’s an opportunity. Let me frame, let me relay it to you. And they’ll be like, wow, yeah, that is true. That’s an interesting insight. We hadn’t accounted for that. So it’s that constant idea of capturing information, cross-pollinating it, being, I see this, what do you think? Bouncing it off as many possible things as you can, as many possible stakeholders, subject matter experts, people in the market or markets like yours, technologists, whatever.

Scott Jones | 18:07.126–18:24.632

such that you keep kind of polishing this opportunity and be like, yeah, there’s something there. And you can never, I would argue you’re never gonna get 100 % confidence. I would love to be thinking about like how I can minimize risk at each step of what I’m trying to do. It’s just kind of a, it’s like an in.

Productside | 18:24.632–18:28.6

Yeah, you should play the rock market if you can get up to 100 % confidence on something, right?

Scott Jones | 18:28.6–19:22.764

Yeah, but the argument, the common refrain is if you get to 100%, if you build something and make it gold plated and beautiful, you waited too long. You wasted time and money because your odds are very strong. You did something that’s not relevant. So it’s like, how quickly can I get those feedback loops? And I’m literally thinking about that every moment of my day, everything I do. How do I say this? How do I articulate that on a slide? How do I…

How do I have this sort of conversation? How do I try to convert someone from, that’s an amazing demo to, wow, I’m going to buy it now. The economics make a lot of sense. Let’s sign a contract right now. Like all of that across all the swim lanes, all the hats, very much just looking through that. What’s the least I can do to prove this? And how confident can I be to inform the next step while minimizing risk and not losing my shirt?

Experimentation and Validation in Product Development

Productside | 19:22.764–20:05.315

Yeah, I think what’s powerful about your, I think unique position, not a lot of leaders in product management and product managers themselves, they don’t have the aperture that you do, given the scope that you’re operating in and really powerful. And that’s why I think a lot of the recent, like the founder mode situation is that way in that founders are the chief product officers because they have all of this information, all of this context.

Context is required for you to build a vision because without information you don’t you will stay at that zero percent confidence level and so what you’re really talking about here and what I’m hearing is experimentation like how do you get more information and then how do you constantly validate that where the path that you are trying to go towards is a good path versus a different

Scott Jones | 20:05.315–20:15.459

Hmm

Scott Jones | 20:15.459–20:34.584

Exactly right. And I know that’s a question to explore on our agenda. Like I said, I’m literally thinking about it in every possible micro decision I’m making as macro. So for example, go ahead.

Productside | 20:34.584–21:09.226

How? Well, my real question here is, so that’s what you’re describing is about, you know, how to run experiments and you you have that vantage point. Maybe I’ll ask a different question of if you’re talking to a product manager that doesn’t have it, it’s maybe operating because you mentioned there are different types of environments that product managers operate. There are product managers who operate in siloed situations where they don’t have easy access to information, customers, all of that.

So how do they become great at what they do?

Scott Jones | 21:09.226–23:23.234

I think it’s this sort of cross-pollination idea, going back to that philosophy I shared before. I love this analogy. Not an analogy, this is real life. one of the campuses that Apple built pre the disc or whatever they call it, so it’s probably in the 90s, Steve Jobs is very intentional. He’s like, I don’t want bathrooms in a centralized place. I don’t want bathrooms like in an easy to find place. I want them far away. So everyone has to go there.

You might say, why would you make that decision, Steve? And the idea is like people interact. So you’re like walking to the bathroom and be like, Hey, I’m Scott. what are you working on? interesting. I’m working on this thing. That, wow, that we should talk more. That idea of just creating an environment where people communicate more, they trade ideas. And that’s like one of the key kernels of innovation. can’t be siloed. So if I’m working in a company where I am compartmentalized, it’s like, I draw all these boxes on my screen, I’m in.

this box over here and other people over here. It’s very much like my experience working in enterprises where it’s incumbent on you, you’re going to have to network, you’re going to have to make it happen, you’re going to have to like introduce yourself, get your social game on, find compelling ways to kind of liaise your way as a diplomat. Like, hey, I’m Scott, I’m working over here.

I’d love to learn more about what your team’s doing. When I coach people on this, kind of like starting with your manager telling that story, I feel like I’m kind of in a box. I wouldn’t maybe not say it this way. I feel like I’m in a box here. I want to learn more about how our business works. I want to learn more about what other teams are doing for my own edification, not because I’m trying to leave your org. I love your org. know, however you tell the story. Play out like how that…

that kind of social order and what the culture is like because in some places they might be afraid like what is this guy doing but in others if you tell the story right they’ll be like no that makes sense I want you to know about this business they might create those connections for you or they’ll just say no go for it and then you tell the same story like contact the the managers of this team that you’re interested in learning about tell that same story I’m over here I’m working on these things I would love to learn more about what you’re doing to learn more about the business but also I have a hypothesis that we might be able to

Engagement in Sales Process for Product Managers

Scott Jones | 23:23.234–23:57.016

team up and then it kind of gets this entrepreneurial flex going for you on how you become such a valuable resource in companies like that. Where I think about it’s almost like connecting circuit boards or something right now all these circuit boards are independent but you can find ways to wire them that the organization left to itself where their culture led them to silo everyone they’d never think of that. And you can you can like demonstrate powerful things in doing that and that’s been exactly what I what I did it.

large enterprises where that’s exactly what the culture’s like.

Productside | 23:57.016–24:09.666

Scott, I think throughout this conversation, I keep getting images of neural networks from you because that’s how, I mean, that’s just how thoughts and ideas get connected. And it’s the same even with people. Yeah. So with now just talking more about early stage products, because you started mentioning it I want to kind of bring it back there. How do you know?

Scott Jones | 24:09.666–24:23.362

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Productside | 24:23.362–24:39.062

How do you know that you have enough? It’s not confidence, but maybe enough of an MVP. How do you judge this is good enough to know that you’re not embarrassed? You’re not going for the full gold-plated version. So what does that mean for you?

Defining MVP and Validation Phases

Scott Jones | 24:39.062–26:26.128

phases of validation and we’re sharing images that pop in our mind. For me, it was like these concentric circles expand out as I just said that. So imagine the near and dear circle to me are who’s within arm’s reach, who are experts I can talk to, friendly customers, whoever it might be where we validate problem and solution. Like this is a pain point for you, what if this and the idea of

Within that first circle, you can start with low res mockups. You could start with just a storyboard. You could start with a clickable prototype, whatever. That whole philosophy of, don’t want to build a Ferrari to find out what this first circle wants, but rather tell the story, give them a sense of it. From there, then expanding out, cool, think I’ve got something here. Let me build, and then hear the philosophy of what is an MVP? What does that mean?

Let me build something that doesn’t solve all the problems, it doesn’t do everything, but it solves enough of that kind of core thing we identified and validated in that first circle. Now it’s like a real thing that can do that, such that I can show that to people, have them light up and be like, yeah, yes. Number one, problem, yes. Number two, show me what you got. Wow, yes, that does it. And then tie it around with the story of cool, well, let me show you how easy it is to get this and what it

costs, it’s completely disruptive to anything you’ve seen before. And to have all of those sort of three things. Yeah, problem validated, what you showed me. Yeah, that looks really awesome. I would love to use that. Wow, that’s how cheap it is? Cool. And that’s kind of the rinse and the repeat. And then from there, just building up more where you hear things of, that’s really cool, but does it do that?

Scott Jones | 26:26.128–27:31.926

Not right now, but it totally could in production. Let me show you in a POC what it does now and how it solves all of these problems. And then totally that layer you want. Yeah, I could totally do that once we’re in a relationship. So I think it’s I call it kind of jazz hands. It’s more of that salesy business development vibe that not all product people will have right away. But it’s something you can kind of build where in the moment I’m not just reading a script. I’m not just like. I’m not.

This is how I always do it. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. What do you think? But rather it’s conversational. We’re playing ping pong. I’m exploring the space with you. I’m exploring my sense of, think these are the problems relevant to you. Tell me about your life. Like, what’s it like now? What’s the pain of the current world? What are you doing about it? Why doesn’t it work? All of that to just nail all the checkboxes. Yep. What I’m about to show them is going to blow their mind. Cool. Let’s do it. And just kind of fortifying that through massive repetition.

and building up, expanding those circles with your reach and the validation you get with each stage saying, yep, we should keep going, yep, we should keep going.

Different Environments for Product Management

Productside | 27:31.926–27:50.026

Yeah. So I think what you, again, what you described very much around experimentation, validation, getting those proof points and signals. I love that what you’re also talking about is being involved in the sales process. I think more product managers need to be involved in the sales process no matter what. Yeah.

Scott Jones | 27:50.026–28:56.662

No, it can be scary from what I hear, or it can be, I don’t want to do that. I want to just build stuff. As we said a couple of times in the call, there are pretty much environments for everyone. So if you just want to be, I build things. Just tell me what to build and I’ll execute. There’s definitely roles for that. If it’s, I don’t want to just build stuff. I want to be like more strategic. What are we building? Why are we building it? You’re going to want to have a seat at the table you just described.

Like what not just, I’m building stuff, but for whom, in what context, how would they use it? Would they use it? Like getting a seat at that table in that conversation is so valuable for the knowledge, but then also just for you as a human, because it’s not just building. It’s the common, the common thing I see on LinkedIn now. It’s like, would you rather have a horrible product and great go to market or great go to market and horrible product?

Most people are gonna choose number two. Number two makes a lot of money. Number one, you just have like a great product that I can’t sell.

Productside | 28:56.662–29:06.003

Well, great product and horrible go to market versus horrible product. Great. yeah. But the retention on the last one is going to kill like.

Scott Jones | 29:06.003–29:18.838

Yeah, that’s the thing. It’s like you can make a lot of money, but you’re going to that leaky bucket. But all to say, like people have built businesses that way. The other one would be like, I built this great thing. No one wants it. Well, I’m out of money. It’s because you didn’t sit at that table about how it’s being perceived, how it’s being sold.

Productside | 29:18.838–29:26.466

Yeah. So I.

Productside | 29:26.466–29:39.773

So I do want you to share, if you can, a bit of the product. Before we do that, you mentioned a few times there are different environments. And I would love for you to define those environments for me.

Scott Jones | 29:39.773–31:57.795

Yeah, let’s see. So I’ve had experiences, I’m just imagining in my mind, some of them are kind of similar between startup and enterprise, but startups, I, for like going back to about 12 years ago, established this competency without intention of kind of being the zero to one person, just kind of differentiating myself on the product team of being

given these directives from the CEO where I was able to navigate that ambiguity and deliver things faster than others such that it became, give that to Scott. give that to Scott. I don’t know how you necessarily repeat that, but that was an environment where you can prove yourself. I’m not just an executor. I can be strategic. You can start giving me things where we got this concept, like thank you for proving yourself on executing that or taking this idea I drew up on a cocktail napkin and went on iterations for.

and you’ve shown the value, you’ve shown how to actually steer that ship and deliver things to the market. Thank you for that. Now here, we have this general idea of what we want to accomplish, but we don’t know how to do it. Here’s a data scientist, here’s some engineers, figure it out. And have had multiple rounds of that, which is very exciting, but I don’t know how to like pattern match and say that’s the environment you can find. I’ve been at…

startups as well where it kind of felt like that, but it was more feature factory. It’s we’ve got this new strategic directive we want to go on. We’ve got a sense of how to do it. Work with those engineers and just execute it. Not as exciting, but it’s still fun because you’re innovating. You’re solving new problems. It’s just not you’re driving the chariot. And when you just to.

think out loud, a little nonlinear, but when you’re interviewing for product roles and people ask you about that, and this happened to me, I had like a very angry interviewer who said like, so that wasn’t you, you didn’t come up with that opportunity. was like, some environments are more dictatorial where you are told what to do and then after doing that, you earn the ability to guide ideally and sometimes not. And some people can’t handle that.

Scott Jones | 31:57.795–32:07.096

So that’s an environment where you can still do cool stuff, but it’s more feature factory and you can probably earn your destiny of being higher up the food chain. Enterprise. Sorry, say again. Yeah, that’s a great way to say it. I’m going to try to remember that. Yeah. And then enterprises, the general feeling I’ve had there is what we describing before, the boxes. Like Scott, we’re hiring you into this box.

Productside | 32:07.096–32:26.715

It’s like earning decision rights. That’s what you’re talking about, right? Earning decision rights.

Scott Jones | 32:26.715–33:46.006

I’ve been hired specifically because I have those startup chops where you know I’m not going to stay in that box. Like I’m going to have the skills or the ideas about and the hypotheses to test about how I can wire that neural network, how I can find ways to solve problems by navigating this giant Rolodex of 50,000 people where you’re trying to pull threads and say, I learned about this from them. I’m looking about solving this problem. And you have eight people who tell you that’s impossible.

One person says, that’s impossible, but talk to this guy. And you talk to that guy and he says, yeah, that’s impossible, but you should talk to this guy. And you keep following the threads till you find that other board that you can wire up and you keep doing that over and over and over. So it’s this balance of they’re hiring you to stay in a box. The culture is going to tell you stay in the box, but you can disrupt that and you can solve problems by doing all the things we were talking about earlier. Being that kind of internal entrepreneurial force.

But not all cultures are gonna want that. So there I was hired for that competency. I was different than the people who built their careers in the enterprise and they were looking for people who thought differently and could do that. And essentially disrupt how they’d been doing business for decades.

Earning Decision Rights in Organizations

Productside | 33:46.006–34:07.355

last one is very hard to do what you’re describing because it’s not just it’s what actually it’s what you just said it’s disrupting how people do something for decades it’s disrupting their entire pattern and it’s creates fear uncertainty and creates ambiguity for people who are in those boxes because they don’t want that ambiguity

Scott Jones | 34:07.355–35:57.388

Yep, exactly right. So a story I’ve before that’s a good data point on what this is like and how you can disrupt it. It may be get fired. We didn’t get fired. But Hewlett Packard Enterprise, we were building a new as a service storage business. We were disrupting so much, like consumption based billing using credits. That doesn’t exist in a hardware company.

a new way of marketing where I could truly market to people, bring them to a landing page and have them use our service using just a credit card. Like nothing like that exists in hardware companies. So we didn’t want to use the traditional marketing. We didn’t want to use like the standard look and feel of their websites. We wanted to make something that felt like as a service, cloud consumption, put together designs on it, point of view on it, go to the HPE marketing team. They’re like, I might be able to do that for you like next year.

So we went rogue and we built our own microsite, setting the archetype of what we described, like the look and feel of an as a service business inside of Hewlett Packard Enterprise that solves all these like leading edge cloud storage problems. We put that up and I think like the hand was slapped, like you can’t really do that, but we didn’t get fired for it, which is good. And ultimately we set an archetype that led to the evolution of this storage as a service business overall where

that example and many other things we did set a template where we got elevated and they said, these guys are figuring this out in a way that we’re not at large. We should learn from them. So that’s an example of disrupting, shaking the cage, potentially being told you can’t do that or you shouldn’t do that or you’re out of here. But then ultimately like, okay, that worked. We’d like to learn more from you.

Disrupting Established Norms

Productside | 35:57.388–36:22.779

Yeah, so I want you to bring up the demo and just I’ll respond. I have seen obviously at product say we work with different enterprise and a lot of them look to essentially the entrepreneurial people who are at a point in their career where they still want the entrepreneurial aspect of it, but they want something more stable. I’ll call it.

Scott Jones | 36:22.779–36:24.852

Hmm?

Productside | 36:24.852–36:56.634

and so there are all of these labs, entrepreneurship departments, you know, trying to build startups within these large enterprise and a number of them, like other startups, the initiatives fail sometimes because the connection to the enterprise, like ecosystem is impossible. As in you’re building something, but it can’t plug in to the old systems. and other times it fails just because it’s.

Obviously there’s just a lot of failure also in zero to one.

Scott Jones | 36:56.634–39:09.464

Yeah, one of the failures I witnessed firsthand that was painful but a powerful learning experience was at Lenovo. I was reorged after a year working on really interesting stuff on the consumer side. They put me on the enterprise side and I was given ownership of a predictive maintenance product. And the concept was, imagine you’re a global consultancy. You’ve got 40,000 laptops deployed around the world.

That’s pretty hard to manage for an IT manager. So imagine there’s AI running locally on each device and syndicating through a federated model with like a central brain. And that can raise to this IT internal admin persona things like, of your fleet of 40,000 next week, the system’s predicting 10,000 are to have blue screens of death. These are the drivers you need to update. Click here and propagate that at scale. So solving all the common themes kind of

in business in general, but certainly in IT, do more with less. Automate, automate, automate. So I’ll just say, like, really shiny, cool thing they’ve been working on for years and did really heavy R &D, built this really impressive system that can do this stuff. And the challenge was the failure, at least in the moments I was with it, was that this is so different for their sales team. The story’s hard. I can’t sell that.

The product sucks, you know, all that common stuff because it’s not as easy as relying on, pretend I’m a basketball player, relying on your jump shot. I always sell these things to these relationships. When I bring this up, they’re like, that’s not relevant. That’s a dumb product, whatever, however they give you the feedback. But I’ll just say, like, the disconnect is what you’re doing is so different and so forward thinking that your incumbent sales team can’t handle it.

and they’ll just tell you your product sucks, but it’s like, well, does it or can we work together so that what we mentioned before, can I get closer to the sales side? Can I live and breathe what you’re living and breathing? Can I find those opportunities? And a lot of these enterprise companies will be like, no, we’re gonna have calls where we yell at you, but I’m not gonna get you closer to my customers. It can feel very much like that.

Challenges of Internal Entrepreneurship

Productside | 39:09.464–40:02.647

That kind of scenario breaks my heart because it’s enterprise getting in its own way because of the strict structures that they follow, which helps the enterprise grow. mean, a lot of these enterprises, are sales led motions, right? So they tend to, know, whatever sales says goes and they’re very protective of their relationships. And I understand that, but it’s…

It is why, you know, a lot of them do see competition from leaner, smaller startups and scale ups that don’t have that kind of culture. Speaking of sales though, you sold me immediately. Like, I loved meeting you and seeing this really cool product and I really want to give you some time to share it. So do you think you can have the demo up?

Navigating Enterprise Structures

Scott Jones | 40:02.647–40:13.43

Yeah, you want to, I figured I would kind of to a narrative we earlier discussed. I’ll show you, oops, I’ll show you.

Productside | 40:13.43–40:23.993

And for those that are just listening, if you’re on your phones, this is going to be more of a visual part of the podcast, but it is so cool.

Scott Jones | 40:23.993–42:46.392

So I figured per the kind of narrative we discussed, I’ll start with attention and emotion and then describe the interesting pivot we had. So you see my face with some interesting markers on it. For context, Realize is a computer vision company founded in 2007. So I always think about it as kind of early and waiting for this AI renaissance that has happened in the past few years. It’s the way I articulate it. And the idea being

After founding in 2007, the co-founders had this concept of attention and emotion measurement using webcams. And that led to a business that’s been running for more than a decade since now using a larger library than what you see on my screen of emotion classifiers. And I’ll show you attention in a moment as well. But the idea of deploying these proprietary classifiers for ad testing studies.

So helping brands and agencies de-risk media spend by acquiring very discrete audience segments. So if anyone’s familiar with ad tech, it’s that kind of vibe, like women with children who drive Subarus, have credit scores like this, shop at these stores, whatever. Acquire that audience through the mechanics and ecosystem of online consumer and market research. Bring them into an environment hosted by us. We expose them to channel-specific variations in ads. And meanwhile,

behind the scenes, we’re measuring telemetry like what you see here, such that we can deliver insights for that very discrete audience segment for the optimal attention and emotion engagement. On TikTok, you should run the version of the ad with this hero, this call to action, that color car, et cetera. But on YouTube, you should run this other version. Like I said, that’s driven the business for more than a decade. I was hired two years ago to lead a platform play. And the thesis of the platform is instead of having to

only get access to our market leading models through our ad testing business. Instead, I own a library of very easy to use plug and play capabilities such that customer partners, hardware, software, what have you can now see the user and do really interesting things with that. So what you’re seeing right now is a demo app showcasing some interesting things about our technology. The entire Vision AI system is running locally inside this app on my Mac right now.

Innovative Product Demonstration

Scott Jones | 42:46.392–44:34.89

It’s processing in real time, so depending on the platform, that varies anywhere from 25 to 46 frames per second, leading to then we aggregate that processing at a rate of every 200 milliseconds. So five times per second we are aggregating. What you see here, this is an example of the telemetry. These are real-time probability curves derived from those snapshots.

Leading to market leading response time. So if you watch the happy curve and I smile or you watch surprise and then disgust, disgust comes and goes. I have to work on that one. And then for attention, the neural networks are looking for signals that you’re not paying attention. So if I take a sip or if I turn my head away. And then for mobile and tablet, we do have a concept of are your eyes on the screen. So all to say my first

a few months after joining in the fall of 2022, were picking up where our founders left off on discovery for this platform. The thesis then was we’re targeting scrappy startups. So imagine games, well-being apps, online education, employee experience, any number of technologies looking to solve problems where these sorts of measurements would be very useful. So trying to find scrappy startups where I could go them

show them the demo, show them the problems we solve, tie it to the problems they’re working on. Ideally, get them into POCs and then saying, great, I want to buy this. If we all turn back our minds to the fall of 2022, most companies were trying to stay alive at that point. They were not saying, I want to put vision AI in my apps. what’s that? Yeah, exactly right. So like really cool, but I’m trying to stay alive.

Productside | 44:34.89–44:43.745

End of Zerp. Right. It was end of Zerp.

Scott Jones | 44:43.745–47:11.168

So this led to this really fascinating pivot. We have a very deep relationship with a leading consumer app product. We do really interesting work for them around things like AI data collection. It’s a huge competency we’ve built up for decades now. And the idea of recording faces, annotating them, et cetera, such that you can train avatars, build systems like that. So through that relationship, we learned this consumer app company was looking for a face verification model.

And we kind of pulled that thread through really powerful Intel gathering, this effectiveness of which I’ve never seen before. This leadership team is extremely impressive and learned so much from how they do it. They found this opportunity two months after I joined. We had a meeting with the board talking about it. We had a subject matter expert from that company join us to kind of give us these advisory insights, all to say we should throw our hat in the ring on this face verification RFI.

We did so. We joined the RFI that January. So within weeks of our call where we said, all right, we’re going to do this, we joined that RFI. We essentially bluffed that we were already working on this. We went zero to one in about two months, won the RFI at the end of March, which is super exciting, kind of a pinch yourself moment, like, my God, we did that. Then wondering, well, cool, what other problems could we solve with this? And this tied to a theory in general.

What we learned from winning that RFI and what I’m about to show you and other opportunities that have come up is this new identity category we’ve gotten into was more tangible, was easier to understand, was a fairly, I’m not going to say easy sell, but a sellable sell to enterprises such that it made a very compelling pivot from focusing on attention and emotion. What I found with attention and emotion in the demo I just showed you,

It goes from, wow, that’s really cool. And I would try to say, yeah, the low-hanging fruit for your use case would be these sorts of things. They’d be like, interesting, but I’m really interested in this more longitudinal thing. What is the relationship between these measurements and downstream outcomes that might happen in six months for education? Do they get better grades for well-being? they, is their mental health better? Whatever, you can imagine as I’m saying this, all of those are like very longitudinal R and D. It’s like, yeah, that’s cool, but that’s gonna take a really long time to find value.

Pivoting Business Strategies

Scott Jones | 47:11.168–47:46.616

The identity category is so tangible. The use cases are so easy. And what we’re finding is they lead to this natural, the first step of using my platform. cool. You can combat fraud for me with this plug and play thing. Awesome. also you can measure attention of people while they’re in my system. I want that too. and you can do emotional recognition. Yeah, that’s cool too. So it’s like this, we backed into this order of operations for selling it that we did not know upfront.

leading to really compelling opportunities. So what I will show you now.

Productside | 47:46.616–48:06.367

As you’re pulling it up, I just want to reflect that it’s… How do I say this? It’s written on your face, right? The attention and the emotion, it’s right there getting direct feedback from your users. Product managers in general, I think, would love to play with this. I’m even thinking about Hot Jar and Full Story. They let you see what people do, but not how they think and feel.

Scott Jones | 48:06.367–48:17.022

Yeah.

Creating a New Identity Category

Productside | 48:17.022–48:23.763

And it’s like, this is so valuable, but you’re right. It’s like also hard to really prove that value versus what you’re about to show. It’s like, it’s right there. I see it.

Scott Jones | 48:23.763–48:27.956

Yep.

Scott Jones | 48:27.956–50:47.272

Yeah, and those are a lot of the use cases that keep coming up. So I’ve had conversations with very large enterprises where they have like a UX department, as you can imagine, like a big team of people, and they want to get out of the, I’ll use the word handcuffs of testing in a lab environment. That might not be fair, but the idea of I need you here where I can watch you. I’m relying on self-reported data. You’re clicking through and I say, what do you think about that? I like it. Okay.

Did I delight you? Did I piss you off? What happened? The idea you can get this more. Not necessarily, I can’t tell you what they’re thinking, but I can tell you that something cognitively happened. There was a moment there. There was an engagement that was different from what came before and after. I can provide that telemetry to you, which is extremely powerful and different from what’s available right now. And you can do it at digital scale inside of mobile apps, inside of browsers, whatever you want.

So what I am sharing now, this is what we ended up doing with that new identity capability. So going back to March of last year, we won that RFI. were kind of all, it’s a remote company, so doing high fives over webcams. If you can imagine, like that was amazing. Now what other problems can we solve with this? And because I’m working on a platform and one of my favorite philosophies is this idea of reusable parts. So how can I make this reusable parts and extract more value from the same thing?

And going back to that ad testing business I described, we’ve been running that for so long. And a big theme in that world that we’ve been suffering from firsthand is a steady rise in fraud. So it’s bots, it’s click farms like professional operations. It’s people pretending to be who they’re not. So people who make a lot of money doing online surveys all day long say, I’m a woman, I’m a man, I’m old, I’m young, whatever.

All of that, it was a huge problem for us and our own ad testing and that AI data collection business I mentioned. And we knew from our work in this space for so long that it’s a huge problem for the industry. There aren’t great scalable, affordable solutions to solve the problem. And there are kind of misaligned incentives from some players in the space to solve the problem. Because if they got rid of all the fraud in one day, they might not have a viable business.

Scott Jones | 50:47.272–53:11.738

So I’ll just say really interesting dynamics where we saw an opportunity and going back to what I mentioned before, this kind of the concentric circles, what I’m about to show you is an evolution of really what we started. Q2 of last year, because of the ad testing business we’ve been running for so long, we have a Rolodex of the C suite of the world’s largest panels. So those are the companies that manage supply and online research, as well as large agencies and companies closer to the

high side. So I was again to use the word blessed to have access to like a very powerful set of decision makers and customers to run this by. And the pitch was essentially what I’m going to show you. So imagine in the current world where by default 30 to 40 percent of what you capture you can assume is going to be bad quality. And that’s like a huge number just to objectively think about that. But there’s really no upper bounds. So depending on what your

paying for the survey, depending on the geos. Some geos are horrible for fraud. Depending on the supply you’re using, you might see that number approach 70 % or more of what you get is actually wrong. And so many companies are making decisions off of this with the research. So the premise is, what if instead I could give you this gate? And you could deploy this gate in no code, and it’ll be a redirect that you put in front of a survey or in front of onboarding for your panel or what have you.

and it will do what I’m about to show you. So the premise of the demo, let’s pretend I am on a platform that manages panelists for online research. So they have my demographics, they have things I’ve told them about my background, my interests, whatever. They’ve said, Scott, we’ve got this survey for you named Reno 1. I say, yes, I would like to do that survey. So this demo environment will take a moment to warm up, but once it does, it will.

present me with the latest version of the GDPR compliant consent framework that we’ve essentially pioneered. No one’s done what I’m about to show you on the open internet. We are positioning it as a humanity check. I just want to make sure you’re human. So trying to set the bar low for privacy and then as well calling out, we don’t store identity data. This system actually produces face embeddings. We do capture images, but we immediately delete them. So it’s an anonymous system.

Scott Jones | 53:11.738–55:17.793

In the spirit of GDPR and CCPA, the user gets access to a privacy policy and a very easy way to update their consent. I say, yes, I want to do this. So we capture camera access as a native browser notification. I give access. We’re now capturing an image off my camera, sending it to an endpoint, hosting my AI system. The image is fed in and then deleted. The system then produces the technical term is a face embedding. So you can think about it as

512 data points describing the math of my face from that image. And as I mentioned, the image is deleted. So it’s an anonymous system. The end point, the application of that endpoint created this collection I just named. It’s validated. I’m unique to that collection. So we think about what this does is really threefold. The first is personhood. 99 point trailing set of 9 % of bots cannot get past what I just showed you.

We have a roadmap of mitigation for that we’re actively monitoring, but as it sits right now, that is true. So very likely they’re a human and they’re unique. They haven’t done this before. They haven’t done the survey. They haven’t onboarded to your panel. They haven’t done whatever you put this gate in front of. However, it could be the case I’m lying about who I am. So the demo is designed to show what we can measure. The end user wouldn’t see any of this. They would be dynamically routed. But it could be the case that I am

A human, I’m unique, but let’s say my profile says I’m an 18-year-old woman, for example. We would pass this back to the customer in real time and they would know, all right, that’s probably not true. Usually you have decisions to make. You don’t have to lose the sample. Potentially you could route me to one where it’s good enough that I’m a human. It doesn’t have to be an 18-year-old woman. If I’m onboarding your panel and pretending I’m an 18-year-old woman, you can mark me for fraud and say, no, you’re not welcome here. A lot of really interesting optionality.

So if you imagine I went through that gate, I got into the survey, now I’m back outside. And let’s pretend I’m a bad actor. I’ve logged into another account pretending to be someone else. And that account’s been invited to do the same survey.

Scott Jones | 55:17.793–55:24.3

So again, I say, yes, I want to do this. And again, I am presented with that consent form.

Productside | 55:24.3–55:32.273

And.

It is just saving that print of your face. It’s not saving the image. That’s what you’re saying.

Scott Jones | 55:32.273–56:25.752

Correct. We have these records, the 512 data points that are irreversible back to the image. So if the world’s greatest computer vision scientist somehow hacked into this system, he would just see face embeddings that are meaningless unto themselves. But for us, we use some. I won’t even pretend to know the mathematical operation on it, but we are comparing those face embeddings for similarity with a confidence measure. My internet is very slow today, but.

So you saw me go through that a second time. Yep. So again, the same deal captures an image, sends it to that endpoint. The image is immediately deleted. My face embedding is generated and compared to existing faces in this collection. And there with extremely high confidence, able to tell the customer using this before I get in, that person’s already done this. They’ve already signed up for your panel on a different account. We can tell you which account. They’ve already done this survey. We can tell you which user they were.

Productside | 56:25.752–56:32.352

That’s really.

Scott Jones | 56:32.352–58:18.55

et cetera. And then really interesting too, I’ll just flash the sort of quality measures we’re able to provide. So we’re able to delineate and give optionality. Again, you don’t have to throw away all of this. You can use some of it because people are still comfortable in some cases paying for what seems like fraud and they’re also comfortable for paying for very likely humans, but I don’t know exactly who they are. And so these are the sort of flavors of quality we can parse in real time.

The green is we would suggest let them in. They’re unique to a collection and if age and genders pass to us, we agree. Block is what we would suggest you don’t want to let in, but again, you could still monetize them. You could send them somewhere else. And then here, we don’t have a full story on our side. We’ve captured a lot of intelligence, but we don’t know enough. So these are users, very likely they’re humans, but after three tries, they do not successfully give an image of themselves. Generally, it’s non-compliance.

They’re intentionally not participating. So you could say, well, they’re humans. I can use them or say, no, not good enough. And then here, it’s really interesting. What we’ve seen is 30 to 40 % at minimum of what’s out there is going to be fraud. It’s pretty intuitive. If I challenge you with this gate, a lot of those fraudsters are going be like, I’m not going to choose to do that. But you’re also going to have good humans who say no.

because they’re privacy concerned. So on our side, we have CAPTCHA scores, have Intel on how long they spent with the consent, did they engage with the privacy policy, things like that. And the best practice is to tie it to what the customer sees on their side to get a more well-rounded picture where that’s probably like CAPTCHA score of zero, zero time spent on the consent form. I’ve seen them in the past straight lining answers. Yeah, that’s a bot versus no, this looks like a privacy centered.

Productside | 58:18.55–58:23.332

I can imagine people like hiding their face and not wanting to be a part of this. Yeah. So thank you for the demo. Again, I think it’s just such cool technology and you’re right. Like I see that, like that value right there and it translates to real dollars saved if I don’t have to spend money. I can’t almost say from a marketing standpoint, how many bots

Scott Jones | 58:23.332–58:47.97

Yep. Yep.

Productside | 58:47.97–58:57.976

come in through form fills that I wish I didn’t pay for. And here is a great tool that I wish could be applied even for marketing to kind of prevent the survey fraud.

Scott Jones | 58:57.976–01:00:35.36

Yeah, see so many, so going real deep in market research space right now because of all those relationships we had and it was so easy to go from, this idea to let me talk to like the top tier decision makers. Don’t have that luxury in other verticals, but I’ve been part of the side hustle has been lining up what’s next. So one interesting thing is just in general, we’ve invented a new identity category that doesn’t exist yet. The existing category.

is what you see at the airport or used by banks and government where you have to show a government ID and a selfie. Heavy lift on the user and the technology behind the scenes is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Is that a real passport? Does it belong to Scott Jones in Chapel Hill? Do I think this is the same person? And more. And they charge for that. So those tend to be a dollar or more per check. And the user has to not go through hell, but it’s not easy.

just doesn’t make sense for the transactional nature of market research where I might pay someone 50 cents to do a survey. So what we found, we’ve invented a new category. It’s lightweight. It can be anonymous. It’s as simple as you saw. And we’ve priced it as such. our pay as you go rate is 10 cents. if you, like I’ve had conversations trying to network into Uber, for example, if it was like an Uber where it’s millions of transactions a day, it’s like, that’ll be fractions of a penny.

So you can do like really transformative stuff to address fraud at huge scale. And we can give you these SDKs that can live in your mobile app. They can live on your server disconnected from the internet. You can use them wherever you want.

Transforming Market Research with Technology

Productside | 01:00:35.36–01:00:49.838

Yeah. And you just gave a, I will say flawless, almost like a sales pitch right here. And that’s kind of the point, right? I do think more product managers need to be in front of real customers and demonstrating their product just as you just did and modeled. So Scott,

Scott Jones | 01:00:49.838–01:00:57.218

Yeah, I think it’s a powerful, powerful muscle for sure.

Productside | 01:00:57.218–01:01:22.392

So I so enjoyed talking to you. Thank you for spending the time here and sharing also your demo. I have a last question for you and that is because of how unique this position is, building zero to one products, having all of that trust, but also all of the scope and responsibility, what advice would you give to someone who’s interested in following your path and leading zero to one products?

Scott Jones | 01:01:22.392–01:03:37.621

think it ties to some of the things we talked about before that could dovetail to what environment you’re in. Fundamentally, think all of this isn’t just product. This is hiring, human interaction, whatever. Being human on Earth, it’s storytelling. So you need a story to tell. You can’t bluff your way into this sort of role because the people who are hiring you have probably suffered a lot of pain in trying to do.

zero to one before and they’ll be like, what would you do in this case? What would you do in that case? Walk me through that. They’ll have a knowledge base where they can kind of beat you up and know this guy’s foolish. This guy’s lying. So you can’t bluff your way in. So the idea being, how do you get experience that you can tell a story that then gives you this sort of step function? Again, I was not intentional with that. It just kind of unfolded that way. So I developed this competency where after cutting my teeth on a variety of technologies,

I proved that I can execute things faster than my peers. I proved that I can find value faster than my peers. And I became the zero to one guy internally. That gave me really compelling stories where in this ad tech company, I was working on crazy stuff that again has a lot of sizzle when I tell the story. That led me to the next one of, you’ve done that. We want to hire you to build this thing also in ad tech. That led me to other stories where it became enterprise companies saying, you’ve done all of that zero to one in startups. I don’t have anyone like that in my

I would love to have someone like you because again, we’re all compartmentalized. We don’t know We can’t figure out how to do this. It feels like you could that gave me that story now I have the story of I’ve done this in enterprise. done this in startups I’ve worked on platforms like for five years where that’s its own philosophy and a story I can tell it just all compounds. So my advice would be like find your initial I don’t know about them

enough about math to say what that initial thing would be that you want to compound. Like find your initial variable that you can get some experience, tell a story around it. And if you don’t have that opportunity, then it becomes the democracy, the democratization of so many tools now. I’m trying to ramp up. Like I’m talking to somebody I just met. like, tell me about those AI agents you’re working with. I’d to start playing around with those, like start playing around with stuff.

Advice for Aspiring Product Leaders

Scott Jones | 01:03:37.621–01:04:11.778

You can build things that can be your story. And I’m seeing real life evidence that you can build an app. You can acquire users. You can say, yeah, I got like a thousand dollars in MRR. Here’s how I built it. Here’s what I learned. Here’s what I would bring to the table working with actual engineers on building things for you. And that story wins. That gets you into like top tier jobs now. So if you can’t have it in a company, you can disrupt it by building stuff, being that entrepreneur outside of it, because the tools are available.

It’s a totally different world.

Productside | 01:04:11.778–01:04:24.737

So I’m going to summarize that as make sure to play, play around with new tools, new ideas, and collect stories. I think that’s very true. Actually, put yourself in situations where you can collect a variety of stories.

Scott Jones | 01:04:24.737–01:05:09.004

Yeah. Going back to what we said before, use fear as your guide because they’re so tying a few threads together. Imposter syndrome, like even the most experienced person who’s been doing this for so long, coming into a new world and be like, God, I’ve never done that before. So even the most experienced people are going to be afraid. Using fear as your guide in my own life, like, that’s really uncomfortable. I’m going to do it. That’s scary. I’m going to do it.

That’s how you get this where you just say, I’m not afraid of anything. I mean, I am existentially, not, you need me to like figure out how to do that and sell that to enterprises? Bring me on to the calls. Let’s do it.

Productside | 01:05:09.004–01:05:19.852

Man, that resonates so much with me. It speaks so true to the entrepreneurial life. All right, Scott. So how can our listeners connect with you and learn more about your work?

Scott Jones | 01:05:19.852–01:05:57.186

I’m all over LinkedIn for the good or the bad, depending, but I’m very accessible there. I’m on social media for different activities too. Like on Instagram, I talk a lot about my work in music and art, but I’m accessible there. I think it’s Scott GZ on both. So Scott, J double E Z E Y is my kind of go-to handle, but I try to be very open and accessible. I love trading ideas.

I love talking shop about product, technology, all the things.

Productside | 01:05:57.186–01:05:57.186

Great, so you heard it here. Follow Scott Jones on LinkedIn. I think we can probably add your handles or links in the description. Well, thank you all so much for tuning into another episode of Productside Stories. If you found our conversation today valuable, don’t keep it to yourself. Share it with a friend and make sure to subscribe to Productside Stories so you never miss an episode.

Visit us at Productside.com for more free resources, including webinars, templates, and other product wisdom repackaged for you. I’m Rena Lexin, and until next time, keep innovating, keep leading, and keep creating stories worth sharing. Thanks so much.