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We've definitely seen brands who don't have a clear idea about who they're trying to reach, what they're trying to achieve with this, how to follow on from that. Like, usually a launch is part of a longer journey with that customer. So not just that launch, but also how can I keep things going after the fact? People who are really successful are the ones who've really understood from the very beginning this is the demographic that we're trying to reach. And here's the kind of feeling we want to evoke with our customers. Like, often it's very much on feel. And if you destroy people's trust through a launch, you can really do damage to that feeling. So I think that's incredibly important. Don't be dogmatic. In anything you do, there's always things to learn. There's always things that are going to bring you insight into what you're doing. There's always a change in tooling or like a change in the world that means that there's a different way that you should build or there's a different product that you should build. And when you see incumbents get stuck and stopping innovating, like that's an enormous problem. And like, I always want to stay nimble, I always want to stay able to move with whatever changes we see in the world. That's a really important thing for me. Creating great products isn't just about product managers and their day to day interactions with developers.
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It's about how an organization supports products as a whole.
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The systems, the processes and cultures in place that help companies deliver value to their customers.
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With the help of some boundary pushing guests and inspiration from your most pressing.
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Product questions, we'll dive into this system.
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From every angle and help you think.
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Like a great product leader. This is the Product Thinking Podcast.
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Here's your host, Melissa Perry. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Product Thinking Podcast. Our special guest today is Michael Dodsworth, the founder and CEO of Fanfare. Michael is at the forefront of turning product launches into immersive experiences that captivate audiences and drive real time insights. His journey from engineering leadership roles to pioneering new ways of creating customer excitement is truly inspiring and I'm thrilled to dive into his experiences and explore how storytelling and strategic alignment can elevate product success. Welcome Michael. It's great to have you here.
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A
It's great to be here. Thank you.
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B
So how did you transition from engineering leadership to Fanfare? Tell us the journey.
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A
I think over time you realize as an engineer like you start off in life, heads down, kind of blinkers on focusing on one particular problem. And I think through my time at large, companies like you can stay doing that for some amount of time. But then you realize if you really want to get anything done, you really have to bring people into that development. You have to build something significant. You have to rally around a particular cause or rally around a particular group. And you realize to do that, you have to tell a story, you have to talk about the consumer experience, you have to sell that feature, that motivation behind that particular thing that you want to focus on to a larger audience and bring people in. And then as you move up the number of people that you want to sell to, the number of people that you want to rally around, that cause increases. So I feel like it naturally happens that you have to, if you really want to build something of merit, you really want to make a difference, you really have to be able to bring people together around that cause. So I think through my time at Salesforce and then into optimizely, that absolutely happened. Like I found myself trying to solve particular problems that it was infeasible for me to do on my own, and I had to naturally gravitate towards people that could help me do that. And seeing other people do that in their roles as an engineer, but maybe a product lead, maybe a cto, seeing how the CTO brings people together to move the ship in a particular direction was really impressive at those places. And then through inter rival, we were solving a pain point that I feel like everyone feels. Trying to buy tickets to live events is an incredibly painful consumer experience, and solving it is incredibly tough. There's all kinds of things on the consumer side, there's incredible challenges on the vendor side. And you have to then reach out to teams, vendors, venue owners to try and understand exactly what pain they're feeling so that you can build the right product. It's pretty easy to be heads down and focus on some technical challenge that doesn't solve their problems at all. So I think in service of building the right products, you have to be good at telling that story and listening to people tell their story.
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B
Storytelling is a critical skill in product management that we talk about. Can you tell us a little bit about how you view storytelling as a skill in product development? What made you realize, hey, this is the thing I need to hone in on and how do you see people use it?
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I think it's been around people who I saw being exceptional at something. Like I was always that heads down engineer when I saw people use that skill and I saw how capable they were at doing something that, again, felt completely alien to me. I was kind of in awe of people who could do that. And our CEO at rival, Nathan Hubbard, he was CEO of Ticketmaster for a time. He is just such an exceptional threader of a story in everything he does. And it's incredible to watch and like seeing behind the scenes of how he structured it and how he thought about it, it wasn't just it felt natural when you saw him do it, but realizing there was clear intent, there was a clear like weaving together of something that was cohesive and seeing what the effects of that were and how successful he was at that. I think it made me want to pursue that, made me want to understand the ins and outs of how he did that. And then through, into starting my own thing. Like I realized that was always going to be a critical component and through. From the early stages of pitching your idea, selling people on the technical merits, unless you're doing something in deep tech, and even if you're probably doing something in deep tech, you're never going to get there. You have to tell a story about the problem that you're solving, why it's important, why this could be a bigger thing. And if you're not successful at doing that, like it's a non starter, you're not going to get this thing off the ground. And then talking to customers is something that I definitely had to learn quickly. I'm still learning for sure, but it's something that you can again, if you're from an engineering background, it's easy to get focused on the technical aspects of what you do. And again, you just have to listen to someone else tell their story. You have to understand how you can weave a narrative together to pitch, to sell your product to. You can see in their eyes where you hit on something that really resonates with them and then you're off to the races. So you just have to find the right way of structuring things and just rinse, repeat was my kind of way of going about that. But it's a real skill that is incredibly powerful once you can really figure out how to do this.
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What do you think? You mentioned too that you watched your CEO do it and then you studied how do we get to a great story? What do you think are some essential components of storytelling that product managers need to nail simplify?
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A
I think just finding the two or three points that really going to get attention or really going to resonate with the people is really important. I think making it a personal story Too really helps. Like finding examples from your life that are going to resonate, especially with life ticketing. That wasn't all that hard. But, like, finding the little nuggets that are really going to stick with people, where they're going to leave that meeting and they're going to tell their friends, their colleagues. That little bit is going to be such a repeatable, memorable moment in that narrative that it's going to be something that kind of lives beyond. That meeting, I think, was really important. I saw Nathan do that time and time again. He would just find the three elements, like the three pithy mentions that he would do, and then he would keep saying them, like, repeatedly, and he would keep coming back to them. And then that was the thing that really stuck. So I think simplify and try and make it something that resonates with people, has some grounding with people.
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B
How do you find, like, those components where you go, oh, this is the thing that resonates?
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I mean, some trial and error for me. Sure. Talking with people. And the more you do it, I think the better you get at listening to people. I think it's the listening, especially in the early stages, you're really just trying to prod and poke to find the common elements that people share with you. And it's a real challenge to ask questions properly. There's a book called the Mom Test that was helpful for me that I recommend. But you can often ask questions just to reaffirm something that you believe or just crop something up that you believe. And I think that's not what you want. You really want to try and tease out what their pain points are and what they're after and what they're going through. Like the pain that they're going through day to day, the pain that they go through. Black Friday, Cyber Monday, like, how does it affect them? How does it affect their team? All of those things. So I think it's asking questions and listening properly in the early stages and then being able to weave those things into a story.
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When you're thinking about moments for storytelling in product development, if we're product managers, which parts of the product life cycle, we should be really focusing on storytelling here. Which parts are critical?
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Yeah, I think in the early stages especially, I think that's when you're designing a system or you're thinking about whether you should take something on, whether you should rule something out. You're coined to quickly come together on something that you can build upon. I think it's most important then, because I think that's the Point that you can rule out the mistakes, that you can find the problems in your thesis, that you can really get groundswell behind your idea. I think once you have that and you're off to the races and I think it's a little easier. So I think in those early stages especially rallying people towards a cause is really important.
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B
Some of the things that we talk about storytelling with in Product two is around messaging and I guess it's around product launch too. So, hey, we're going to put this out to the customers. We have to really make sure we have a story down. If you're thinking about putting a good story together for a product launch and a good product launch together in general, what are key components or what's the anatomy of a product launch, let's say to make sure that you really nail it.
- [11:14]
A
I think being like understanding why you're doing it and what you're going after. We've definitely seen brands, retailers, vendors who don't have a clear idea about who they're trying to reach, what they're trying to achieve with this, how to follow on from that. Like, usually a launch is part of a longer journey with that customer. So not just that launch, but also how can I keep things going after the fact? And I think the people who are really successful are the ones who've really understood from the very beginning, this is the demographic that we're trying to reach. Here is what we're trying to achieve with this particular product and this particular product launch. And here's the kind of feeling we want to evoke with our customers. Like often, especially with these kinds of products that are scarce, luxury products, collectibles, it's very much on feel. And if you destroy people's trust through a launch, if you aren't successful, if you don't live up to the hype in that moment, you can really do damage to that feeling. So I think that's incredibly important too. Like, really think about why you're doing it, how you're structuring it, and then just making sure you deliver on it.
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B
With the product launches too, I've seen people not involving the right teams, let's say inside an organization. Right. When you're a product manager, there's always a question of, am I responsible for the launch of the product? Is a product marketing job? Is it marketing? Like, how do we think about bringing all of those teams together around it? And what does product own versus what does product marketing own? Especially when it comes around telling that story and reaching the right people too?
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Yeah, I think again, the best teams I've seen, they don't treat it as a kick it over the fence to product marketing. To try and market this thing. You can build hype and then once the launch comes along, we'll manage that process and then after the fact, then it's customer success who are managing what happens, good or bad. Like, you really have to bring people together to understand exactly what it is we're going after. How are we going to manage this event and making sure that all of those bits fit together? Well, it's actually one of the problems that we found with product launches is people are often just grabbing bits and pieces and kind of smushing them together to try and create an experience. And often those are from different worlds. So you have something from the marketing world. They smushing together with a Google form and like all of that together just does not work. You don't capture the information that you want. It's not the experience that you want. It's not cohesive. I feel like when you create these launches, the whole thing needs to feel cohesive, like from the marketing, from the very first announcement that you make all the way through. And it has to be cohesive with the brand. Too often you're trying to create some feeling around not just that product, but the larger brand. And if you have something where you've offloaded to another group that's never going to be successful. So you definitely need to try and bring people together. And I think having tools that allow you to work together is helpful. This is a humble plug. But I feel like again, having your customer success team work in a different silo from your marketing team, from the product team means that they're seeing different things, they're looking at different metrics, and they're not really bringing those together to try and form something that's a cohesive experience. Like, here is the group that we want to go after. Here are the metrics that we're looking at for our advertising, for our product launch, and then for the success after that. How do people feel on X? How are people posting about this on Instagram? All of those should be tied together to understand whether you were successful in that experience.
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When you're thinking about how do we communicate and how do we collaborate around that launch too? Is there like a template that you love or like a meeting or do you form a little group? Like what do people do practically to make sure all those things are aligned and we're doing at the right time to ensure the success of this launch? I'm excited to share that I'll be joining Product Weekend in New York City on November 14th. An incredible event powered by Localize. In the last edition of May, I had the chance to meet a few people from the Localize team and some of their clients and. And it completely changed how I think about localization. It's not just about translation. It can be a real growth driver. In fact, some companies attribute up to half of their revenue growth to localization. Localize helps teams do this at scale with over 3000 companies using their AI powered localization platform to speed up translation, ensure quality and deliver better experiences worldwide. Head over to Localize.com to learn more and check out their localization revenue report to understand more about how localization can help scale your business.
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A
Okay, so yeah, the way we do this at Fanfare is to really understand their customer pain first. Like, it's important that we understand what research we need to gather, what kind of insights that we want to pull, who we want to reach out to, all of those things and what are we trying to verify, what are we trying to validate? And if there's anything on the engineering side that we can help tell that story, is there something that we can help in putting in front of customers? Because often it's a very visual thing. Like we have brands and retailers who maybe don't think in terms of workflow diagrams and things like that. So actually seeing what the experience looks like may be a valuable thing just to vet things out. And then we gather, we get together and we talk about the feasibility, the challenges, the roadmap and how this fits what else is competing for our time and attention. We have to stay focused. And from my perspective, like, who are we focused on right now? We started life focusing on people who already struggle with drops, people who are launching products and are having failures around those launches. So that was Streetwear footwear. There are obviously a lot of people who fall into the bucket of scarce products who are struggling to launch those products. But we have to stay focused. So this may be someone we want to. A problem we want to solve, but maybe not now. Maybe this is something for like when we reach out to restaurants or hotels or like those kind of things. We'll have to, you know, having a timeline and understand where we are, not just in terms of product roadmap, but also like fundraising roadmap and all of that stuff.
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What's one of the product launches you guys did that you're most excited about?
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We did a product launch. It was actually an in real Life launch that we did with Denim Tears and Levi. This is one of the early ones and it definitely sticks with me, holds a place in my heart. There's definitely some scar tissue around it too, too. But it was, it was definitely. We didn't have an enormous amount of time. Denim Tears is an incredible brand with an incredible narrative. They had all kinds of issues with their drops in the past just around security, like incredibly sought after products lines around the block. And they wanted to have a smooth experience and they wanted to create some feeling of scarcity and excitement, but not the crazy chaos that they saw previously. So we got together, we talked it through and then in that moment, going to the conference with them and helping them set up and being with customers as they use the product, being with the vendor as they're using the product was really an amazing experience. So that definitely lives with me. I definitely have some damage on my feet from wearing very uncomfortable sneakers because they looked cool. But standing for 14 hours on the conference floor was not comfortable. So that definitely I remember very well.
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B
Cool. When you built Fanfare, you talked a little bit about the problems that you're trying to solve with making sure these brand launches go off without a hitch and people are struggling to get the attention. How do you use technology to help with those things too? What does Fanfare do on the back end to make sure that these product launches are successful?
- [19:38]
A
I think coming from my time at Salesforce, I worked in search, which is like one of the most trafficked areas of Salesforce. So anything we rolled out had to deal with enormous traffic on launch day. If we made a change to how global search worked, every single Salesforce customer is going to land on that page Monday morning, so it has to be ready for that. And then through into optimizely. I worked for a couple of years. We would often get paged in the middle of the night because there was some newsworthy event that caused the New York Times to get this huge surge in traffic. So again, like, having to build systems that deal with that kind of scale is not a simple thing. It's absolutely not something that you can tack on after the fact. You have to weave it in through the product from the very beginning or really pay attention to it as you're going. And I think that set me up for this because through Rival, we were targeting the Taylor Swifts of the world. We were working with the Chromkeys on SoFi Stadium and we were thinking about 3, 4 million people coming into a process. What does that look like? Technically, it looks like a DDoS attack. Like, it looks like you are like enormous spike in traffic that just comes from nowhere. And if you fall down in that moment, you cause enormous frustration. So we had to stay up. We. Again with fanfare. We're targeting those kind of events too. And like I say, it's not something that you can just tack on afterwards. Which is I think why you see vendors like Ticketmaster try and get their arms around this problem. Taylor Swift's pre sale goes badly, a mess. They have Oasis. Yeah, they have Oasis coming up. So surely they would get on top of it for that. Nope. Then Ariana Grande. Nope, Same thing. So it's not something that you can just address with a small team. Just. It's not a small problem. It's a huge problem.
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B
This is so interesting too because I feel like normal places would look at the problem of scale or traffic spikes as like tech debt or infrastructure work that's not related to core value proposition for customer. And you're almost flipping it and saying it is an infrastructure problem, but it's more because it solves this problem for our customers and this is the nature of their business. So this is the core reason why, why we have to do this now. It's not just an infrastructure tech problem.
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A
Yeah. Performance is one of our primary features. It has to be in everything we do. We have to make sure that whatever it is we build on the platform should be able to scale to several million people showing up all at once. And if we don't, then some of the other bells and whistles, they don't matter. Like your service is down. No one can use those bells and whistles. So it's a real, it's a real challenge. So those for sure are technical challenges. Brands have issues with bots and bad actors coming in to these experiences. You've created an incentive for people to show up because they can sell whatever it is on the secondary market for 10x the price. So now you have a real issue, not just of real people coming in on launch day, but bots and artificial traffic causing you enormous pain. So again, it's an arms race that you're getting into as a brand and again, even someone well resourced like Ticketmaster can't get their arms around this. What chance have you got if you're a small up and coming brand? So that's where we come in and deal with those issues for you.
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B
That's cool. We were thinking about some of the problems that you're addressing. They are core to engineering, but they also are Core to your customers on this side too? I think there's a lot of product managers out there who struggle with explaining that to stakeholders. Right. Like, even though this is a technical issue, engineers as well, let's put it that way. Even though this is a technical issue, it's actually core. You might not see it on the front end, but it's going to be experience driven. How do you help them tell that story or how would you advise them to tell that story to help resonate with those stakeholders and get buy in for these types of things?
- [23:46]
A
Yeah, I think that's the reason that our ICP was the brands that had already experienced drops and the negative aspects of drops because they were already sold in on it. They understood how powerful the model was. They understood that when they launched things in this way, enormous audiences showed up and they also know what happens when it goes badly. And again, that was an easier sell, I think, for us because they're immediately there. You can point to a drop that they did and you can see on their face they remember what happened, like denim tears. They remembered what happened. They reached out because they wanted to avoid it. So that was for sure an easier sell for those brands. I think for other people. Understanding the power of the model and again pointing to people who've been successful at this. It's not just streetwear and footwear. If you're a Stanley, for example, you've tripled your revenue over the last three years because you went after this model of scarcity and trying to create moments and viral moments around your brand, but collectibles, luxury items. I think this is a model that they see people using collaborations to drive an audience more and more. If you're a Kardashian led brand, there's enormous value in being able to drive an audience to your product, clearly. And we see more and more brands coming around to it and I think it's on us. Give them those case studies to make them understand what it is those brands did. It wasn't just happenstance. They absolutely went after this model like Stanley did and what it is to be successful in doing that and helping them do that. Like I say, a lot of these brands are just throwing things together and just hoping for the best. Like crossing their fingers is the model they're going after and making them realize, like, we can help them set up their announcements. We can help them understand whether they've been successful in the channels that they're using, the people that they're reaching, making them understand like this is how people are going to Come into the experience. We're going to strip out the bad actors, the bots, and then we're going to let you do all of these interesting things after the fact to try and keep people engaged with the brand. Like, that's really helpful to them.
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B
So one of the things you talk about at Fanfare is building these immersive experiences for the product launches. What does it mean to be, like, an immersive experience there? What's that concept?
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A
Yeah, I think you have all of these people show up, right. Like you have. You're launching your tickets to Taylor Swift. And what is the experience for that? We've all been there. It's a very flat, dull experience. Right. You're staring at a spinner, you're. You have multiple tabs open and you're just sat there for multiple hours. Exactly. What does that even mean? There are 10,000. Yeah, yeah. Is that a good thing? Is that a bad thing? Am I going to get through? When am I going to get through? Disney, actually, for their season pass sale here in la, they have this process where it says, there's a big banner that says, you may be in this line for 24 hours. What does that mean? I can't leave my desk for 24 hours?
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B
24 hours? Yeah.
- [26:54]
A
That's not going to work. These are people spending thousands of dollars on Disney season passes, and there's nothing that you want to do for these people. For your most loyal swifties, you could come into a live stream, have the artist actually be there with the community and provide an experience. So even if you don't get through, you feel like you were valued through that experience. So I think that's a part of it, having some community aspect where people are coming together. And maybe a cosmetics brand can do a how to. Here is how I recommend you use my product. Here is a celebrity that can come in for your subscribers to actually meet with the people and talk with the community. Like, it creates more of a feeling of engagement with your customers instead of just staring at nothing. Like, it's such a missed opportunity. You have a captive audience and you deliver nothing to them. Seems like a huge miss. So I think it's that. And it's also just the things before and after the event. So you want to create like a whole advertising campaign that engages people, not just flat magazine ads. Like, you want to create something that's more of a living, breathing thing on Instagram and TikTok and have people collaborate with you and get things out into the world. And then after the fact, like you can deliver recommendations to people. You can. We had a brand that had an L club, so if you fail to get your sneakers five times in a row, you've got exclusive access to the next drop.
- [28:26]
B
That's cool, right?
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A
That's an amazing experience. Like you feel valued in that moment, right? You're just unlucky. You tried, you spent hours with the brand and just pure luck you ended up not getting your product. So we'll bring you into an exclusive drop. So that I think creates more of a community feel. I think creating loyalty means creating that feeling of community with your brand's fans, with your team's fans. And I just see a lot of people having squandered an opportunity there. And there's so much opportunity in that moment.
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B
Ready to level up as a product manager? Product Institute offers online courses that teach you the strategy tools and data skills you need to make confident product decisions, access expert LED videos, practical worksheets and proven frameworks, all at your own pace. This holiday season, get 40% off all courses with code HOLIDAY through December 31st. Visit productinstitute.com and start thinking like a great product manager. Training teams. Email infoproductinstitute.com for group options. How do you think some of these principles to translate to either software or like software companies doing launches or things like that? Or even enterprise companies like banks launched new credit cards like Chase Sapphire Reserve. Right. Like these, these luxury type items. What should they keep in mind and maybe what's similar or different about some of these principles too?
- [29:49]
A
Yeah, I think it's the same like don't just launch the product and expect people to find it and expect people to know how to use it and expect people to understand it. They won't. It's on you to educate them, to show them the value and to sell them on the product. So that's definitely an early learning is doesn't matter how good your product is technically if you don't have the right narrative around it, if you don't launch it properly and have all of those things in place, it won't be successful. I think that means finding people who you can point to as case studies, having clear a clear value prop for the things that you're launching. And for me like having walkthroughs, like I say, a lot of our customers and me personally, very visual and making sure that you're talking in the language of your customers. Right. It may be the most thorough, detailed product spec in the world. If no one reads it, then it didn't Solve the problem. No one's going to pay attention to it. So find the thing, the way of talking to your customers that makes sense to them.
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B
Yeah. So don't be dogmatic about this too. It's highly experimental.
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A
It is. I think that's. We see that from our brands too. Is one of the great things of this model is you can run experiments at rapid pace because you don't have to fill a warehouse with a product. You can have 10 of a product. How does this sell? What was the price point, what marketing worked, what didn't work? And then you can move on to the next. And move on to the next. So I think, yeah, experimentation, especially in the early stages, is really critical. Like staying nimble and not been too dogmatic, like not been too invested in a particular direction, I think really helps with that. So you can move and as you find out more from your customers, you can adjust. That's really important.
- [31:44]
B
How does your team at Fanfare weave experimentation and discovery into your process for building out your products and working with these brands?
- [31:55]
A
Yeah, I think it's actually changed in the last 12 months, actually. I think the tooling that's available now means that the product team, the engineering team, can build out proofs of concept way easier and to a higher level than they would be able to before. So instead of spending weeks on something, they can draft something up having just spoken to a customer and get that in their hands in a day or two.
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B
Cool.
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A
And I think that's been really amazing. It's amazing to see how quickly the pace of development has gone with this tooling and what it's allowing us to do. But that's for sure one of the clearest ways that we can get feedback from our customers. Because when they see it, they're like, that's not exactly what, like, even though we were like diligent in answering questions, when they see it and they think of their customers going through that experience, they can give us like very direct feedback. So that's been. Thanks.
- [32:55]
B
And then when you're thinking about different tooling and things out there today, we're talking a lot about AI. How are you incorporating AI into your product development practices and what trends do you see emerging?
- [33:07]
A
Yeah, it's really been through my career, a couple of decades doing this, I've never seen such a quick and important shift in how I work and how the engineers work, how the product team work too. So it's really amazing. It's an incredible tool and we've used it as a tool. We're not been dogmatic about our use of it too. If you find use in a particular area then you should actually double down on that. But for me personally, development change for me like been heads down focused on a problem for a few hours to like skipping around multiple problems and actually being more like a product or technical lead and using these things to like draft code for me that I would review. So it sped us up but also allowed us to do things that we wouldn't normally do. So tooling, internal tooling, something where you know if something was causing you pain maybe four or five times, you would spend some time building a tool to do it. That's now come down to if I feel like I'm going to do this twice, I'm going to get AI to create me a script to do this for me. Because it's just so easy. Yeah. So that's I think been really interesting. I've definitely seen a few interesting things come out of Anthropic. In particular they had this, they have an artifacts tool where you can just go in there and draft things and create whole experiences through that. That's been really interesting to see. And they had this whole experimentation thing they launched as a beta, which is I think an interesting direction, which is building an experience on top of the data just from a single prompt. And the idea that these experiences, these kind of products are ephemeral and you can lead with a description of the feature set and the functionality that you want and it will go and try and in the background build all of that stuff is really interesting, especially as the models are getting faster. I see that as maybe an interesting direction that will move in the next two years.
- [35:15]
B
Michael, it's been so good talking to you. I've got one last question for you. What advice would you give your younger self, starting out in product management or engineering, beginning of your career?
- [35:27]
A
I ascribe to process. Like stick with the process, break the problem down into smaller chunks and just tackle that. I think when I realized that's the most effective way of solving any problem, like technical or non technical. Some things feel insurmountable. Like starting a company seems insurmountable. It seems like something that you would never take on. All of the things you don't know, all of the things that you're going to have to do, it seems insurmountable. But you can break that problem down into tiny steps and then just keep going and believing that you'll get there. I think that's a really important lesson through there and I think it's come up a bunch of times. But don't be dogmatic in anything you do. There's always things to learn. There's always things that are going to bring new insight into what you're doing. There's always a change in tooling or like a change in the world. That means that there's a different way that you should build or there's a different product that you should build. And I think when you see large incumbents get stuck, Ticketmaster, for example, like when you see incumbents get stuck and stopping innovating, that's an enormous problem. And I always want to stay nimble. I always want to stay able to move with whatever changes we see in the world. That's a really important thing for me.
- [36:57]
B
When they get stuck, it's a problem, but it's also an opportunity for you. Right. To come in there and solve that problem.
- [37:03]
A
Yeah, that's one of the biggest things with AI tooling is there are so many of those problems where the big incumbent is stuck and it's easier than ever to get up and running and build something with a small team. You should go after those incumbents because they really can't move very quickly. There's all kinds of issues, bureaucratic, technical, that they aren't able to move in any particular direction. And it's a real opportunity, especially now.
- [37:31]
B
Yeah, I agree. Thank you so much, Michael, for being with us. If people want to learn more about you and Fanfare, where can they go?
- [37:38]
A
You can find me on LinkedIn. For my sins. I'm there all day so you can grab some time with me from LinkedIn. There are not many Michael Dodsworths in the world, thankfully, so you can find me there or you can head over to Fanfare IO. We've tried to build up our case studies and examples of things going well, things not going well, and what you can do to run a successful launch. And if you want to talk about anything that you see in the world coming up or in the past, I'm sure I have a story to tell about those, so please reach out.
- [38:06]
B
Love that. We will put all of those links on our show notes@productthinking podcast.com thank you so much for listening to the Product Thinking podcast. We'll be back next week and in the meantime, if you have any questions for me on product management, go to dear melissa.com and let me know what they are. We will see you next time.