Trisha Price: [00:00:00] How do you do that? How do you help your product teams as they move through that maturity matrix to make sure that what they are measuring aligns to sort of the bigger OKR business outcomes of the company? 

Noa Ginsberg: Yeah, this is such a tough one because at the end of the day, it's top line and margin and EPS growth that matter.

Noa Ginsberg: I would say that our headline metrics approach has been a, our best stab at that, which is providing this portfolio of metrics that you could view for any product to see how it's impacting on the user side. So it doesn't really directly impact but it helps you to gauge the quality of your revenue.

Noa Ginsberg: And I think that's a big piece. 

Trisha Price: If you build software or lead people who do, then you're in the right place. This. Is hard calls, real decisions, real leaders, real outcomes. Hi everyone. I am Trisha Price, and welcome back to Hard Calls, the podcast where we bring on [00:01:00] the best product leaders from across the globe to talk about those moments, the decisions that matter, the hard calls.

Trisha Price: On today's show, we have Noa Ginsberg, who leads the Product Management Center of Excellence at FactSet. Noa and I have known each other for about four years now, since I joined Pendo. When I met Noa. She was starting up a product analytics and product center of excellence function for FactSet. I really, right from the start, admired Noa's approach to the role, her commitment to excellence, and her ability to build strong teams and relationships.

Trisha Price: In addition to Noa sharing a hard call that's made a big impact on her career, we're also gonna dive into what does it take to create a product center of excellence and the benefits that the team has on being a product-led company. Noa's gonna share her insights on why product operations is the glue that binds all of the pieces of the org together.

Trisha Price: Her learnings on how to keep product teams close to the [00:02:00] customer and how AI is changing the product landscape. This is a truly knowledge rich conversation, and I can't wait for you to hear it and to jump into it. Welcome to the show, Noa. Thank you so much, Trisha. It's great to be here. So, Noa, you know that the show is called Hard Calls, so looking back over your career.

Trisha Price: Or even just in the past year, can you share a hard call that you've had to make? What made it so challenging? What considerations or process did you follow to make the decision and what'd you learn from it? 

Noa Ginsberg: I'll start off by saying, first of all, I'm thrilled to be here. I saw the list of other guests and I was super flattered.

Noa Ginsberg: So really appreciate the opportunity and I love chatting with you and talking shop and the opportunity to do that. It's awesome. So thanks for having me. Hard calls are pretty much what we do in product. I think there are very few easy calls, especially as you know, mature in your career, you start seeing only hard calls.

Noa Ginsberg: and I've noticed that [00:03:00] for me, the hardest calls tend to be at the intersection of people and priorities. And each of those are hard. And those are kind of what we do in product. Again, people, the people on our team, the people we hire, the people we work with as our stakeholders, our clients, importantly.

Noa Ginsberg: and then the priorities we set as a product team are pretty much our bread and butter, and that's how we master all our resources together and deliver value for our clients to, to be successful. and. The intersection of those are when I think it's the hardest call. So I can think back to a time about four years ago when we really wanted to double down on our ability to run a real true product organization, as you might see at any tech company, and we've been around a long time.

Noa Ginsberg: So we've been around since the late seventies before the internet, before ai. so we've had a lot of different ways of doing things, but we had the opportunity to really double down on product thinking, a product mindset, the product toolkit that you need, the skillset that you need. [00:04:00] but that was a major transformation and a huge undertaking, and we did it so that we could deliver on our strategy, and we did it so that we could deliver for our customers.

Noa Ginsberg: and make them more successful, which is what we're here to do. but that was a tough thing to go through because it was a real shift for a lot of people in their, their daily roles. mostly very positively received, and we've come a long way. But we had Pendo was a part of that as we stood up product analytics, to give a, a single platform for people to be able to monitor things rather than having to stand up their own.

Noa Ginsberg: It was, it was, it was a hard call to move forward with that versus being successful as we are for so long. Making that shift, getting everyone on board, getting the tools and processes in place to support that from a product excellence perspective is definitely. A very hard call, one that I think we are now seeing the fruit of because we have positioned ourselves so well to take [00:05:00] advantage of this new wave of technology with AI in the last few years.

Noa Ginsberg: if we hadn't had the foresight to really position ourselves for that, I think we wouldn't be where we are. And we are pretty far along and ahead of the curve, especially in, in a space that can tend to lag that adoption of, of these types of things. So it was. Risk. But, it's always good to have a balanced risk.

Noa Ginsberg: So I think that's a key part of hard, a hard call. And we use Pendo, we use a lot of other tools to help us make like de-risked decisions, but there's always some element of risk in any call, or we wouldn't be making it, it wouldn't be a hard call. So, yeah, 

Trisha Price: I I love that you brought that up because hard calls are a little bit of our experience.

Trisha Price: And our gut feel combined with data and tools and bringing our stakeholders together, all of those have to come together, to make those hard calls. But I always like to tell my team too, [00:06:00] no decision is also a decision. And so like, while a hard call might be difficult, not making a decision is just as impactful and a lot of times worse.

Noa Ginsberg: Yes, absolutely. We try to bring more speed to decision making here. But yeah, you have to pull it forward. You have to make the hard call, you have to make it clear to people too, what the call is. And I think recognizing where you are, whether it's a people call or if it's a priorities call, I think knowing where you are is always important in order to.

Noa Ginsberg: Get where you wanna go, you have to know where you're starting. And that's something that we've, we think about a lot. We have a lot of good, tooling in place. And you mentioned instinct versus data. I really think our gut feel as you gain experience is a bunch of data that's just sort of in your own LLM, in your mind of what you should do, what you've seen this before, you start to have some pattern recognition.

Noa Ginsberg: [00:07:00] Always relying on gut checking that not only with the data, but with other experts, other stakeholders with our customers within our own teams, always validating that. So like, trust your gut, but verify I think is very important and using all those tools at your disposal. So you do make the best decision. 

Trisha Price: That is great advice. I wanna dive into some of the things you mentioned in your hard call a bit in the Product Center of Excellence. But before we do, Noa, maybe you could just tell us a little bit about FactSet and what you do, and particularly your role and your team before we jump.

Noa Ginsberg: Yeah, definitely. So FactSet is a financial data and analytics provider. So we have workstation tools that you might use, to monitor the markets, to make trades, to research companies, to catch up on earnings. And it's used by over 8,000 of the largest financial institutions, over 200,000 users, and with 95% retention.

Noa Ginsberg: So we've been around [00:08:00] for 46 years. I've been public for 30. I actually used FactSet in my first job out of school. I was a user of FactSet for a couple years when I started out in investment banking, and I'd always been interested in finance and technology, so I went to a bank and worked in the technology group at the bank.

Noa Ginsberg: Used FactSet, loved the tool, loved the people, loved the client focus that they had. The real obsession with the user was clear to me as a client. So I came to work for FactSet and I've been here for 23 years now in a bunch of different roles, but I started out supporting our clients as a consultant on the help desk.

Noa Ginsberg: We would answer the phones here in New York, from the bankers calling at 2:00 AM who needed help. So you gain a lot of empathy for the role of our clients, and that's inherent in everyone who works here. A lot of people come up through, right outta college, answering phones and things like that.

Noa Ginsberg: So, FactSet's a pretty indispensable tool to the investing community. So anyone you know [00:09:00] who works at a wealth advisor or a hedge fund or an asset manager or an investment bank definitely uses FactSet or has in the past. So it's really part of the fabric of. Of how the investment community operates and we are known for our service and our client obsession.

Noa Ginsberg: Really, that's a big differentiator for us and something that I think is only continuing as we're seeing the pace of change increase so much. So it wasn't surprising to me when we made this shift to have a product management excellence group because it really does help enable the whole company to have that client obsession, which we already inherently have as fact setters, but it really helps to bring scale and consistency to that so that everybody can do things and maybe there are even fewer hard calls for others to make.

Noa Ginsberg: If we in the center of excellence are kind of providing what's, what tooling should we use? How do I do user research? What design systems should I use? Trying to solve a lot of those issues at scale, for people so they don't have to make those hard calls. We've already [00:10:00] made them. That's, I think, a huge benefit to the team as well.

Trisha Price: Wow. You know, first of all, incredible, longstanding successful company with a incredible reputation and what. An interesting career for you to come, have joined them so long ago and done so many different roles there. And now to be leading this product center of excellence, which I know the entire product team at Factset really leans on you for best practices, for insights to really make sure that you can execute on that.

Trisha Price: Client obsession or as we call it at Pendo, our core values, maniacal focus on the customer. So we have that in common. And I think that that's I think a big part of not just our love of product, which I know we'll talk about today, but our obsession with customers has definitely brought you and I together over the four years as we've talked.

Trisha Price: So, really excited to dive in. [00:11:00] You know, I get the question a lot, Noa. When I'm out talking to customers or just product managers and product teams and product leaders is product operations, center of excellence for product overall. How do I do it? What does it look like?

Trisha Price: So I'm really excited to spend this time today with you who is truly a leader in setting up a center of excellence and has done just an incredible job with it for, for people to learn from you. So maybe like, tell me, do you think, because I get asked this a lot, do you think every company should have a product management center of excellence or if not, is there a time or a level of maturity when you think it's time to establish one?

Noa Ginsberg: Yeah, great question. I wish I had a book to read, to tell me about every specific situation. There are a few out there on this topic and I've, but I've found that we, nothing really it's great to take those as inputs, but you kind of have to do your own [00:12:00] instinct, combination with data to decide what works for you.

Noa Ginsberg: So I think certainly a large company FactSet has 13,000 employees globally. It's a big company, hard to keep everything coordinated. So sometimes that can be sort of a warning or like a, maybe a light going off on the dashboard to say, "Hey, maybe you should think about this?" So there are a few things that I think you could think about.

Noa Ginsberg: One is probably coordination. So if you're starting to feel like things might not be. As smooth as they could be. Or you're seeing a lot of Conway's law, maybe if you're big enough where you're seeing multiple kind of conveyor belts coming outta the company and to the consumer or the end user, it's like, looks like a bunch of different companies.

Noa Ginsberg: That's obviously a red flag, that would say like, Hey, maybe we should benefit some from some less duplication of effort, from more coordination. That's one thing that I think any kind of centralized team can help with. And another one is related to that probably stakeholder. [00:13:00] Confusion. So does product marketing know how to work with each team in the same way?

Noa Ginsberg: Is the process in one team totally different and then when another central team tries to work with that product team, it takes too long because it's learning a new way of doing things. same thing with support or sales. Like, do we have a well-oiled machine? Does everybody know what to do? You don't always need people to set that up.

Noa Ginsberg: You can just be clear of how things should go with existing personnel and staff. But beyond a certain scale, I think it's very helpful to have a central team like this that operates almost like a platform team would, like a platform product team, but for the product of building products, which is a little bit meta, but we do think about it as a product.

Noa Ginsberg: What we do, what we put out from our team is a product and what. The people using it internally at the company are our users, and we are very careful to always stay connected to our users. It's very important for what we're doing. And then I think the last thing I would say is if you find that the language [00:14:00] you're speaking is not the same as another product team, there might be some differences that are necessary depending on the kind of product you have.

Noa Ginsberg: But if you're all talking about adoption and you have a different denominator for adoption. It's very hard to compare the success of one product versus another. And when you have a large product portfolio, it's very important to be able to have an apples to apples comparison on the success of that product.

Noa Ginsberg: So those are kind of three areas, I guess I would say where you might wanna think about it if you don't already. And I would say even if you can see a little bit ahead and anticipate those things, you'd be even better off. Because once you have a certain scale, I think it really helps to have some central coordination.

Trisha Price: I am so glad you brought up the stakeholders piece. I am such a firm believer, and I know you are too, that the only reason we do product investments or technology investments, depending on the kind of kind of company you are, is to drive business outcomes, right? It's either to drive revenue, to cut costs, to reduce [00:15:00] risk, and the.

Trisha Price: Leaders of our companies, teams, investors, they expect a return for this investment that we're making. And you know, I think it's easy in product to get too focused on the feature you're building or the product you're shipping and not the outcome you're driving. And without that really strong stakeholder communication and coordination, you won't get those business outcomes that you need from your product. So it's great that you talked about how you operate and the processes with your stakeholders being such an important part of A COE and when you need a COE is to standardize that because without those relationships and without the processes to partner, if sales isn't selling it and support doesn't know how to support the new features and products that you're putting out, and you don't have a convenient way to work with those people 'cause they have day jobs [00:16:00] too. It's kind of like, why are you building what you're building? 

Noa Ginsberg: Totally. We've tried to really provide data around that too. So we, on our agile teams, we have stakeholder assessments that some of the teams can do to see assess how well the team is meeting the stakeholder's expectations on things like communications or value delivery, or timing. So those things are all really important to monitor. And then we also have a portfolio of headline metrics that is visible to everyone at the company, across the product portfolio. And those are the headlines that we want people to be talking about. And that can be used to compare across products.

Noa Ginsberg: So a key one for support would be supportability, some of these sort of hidden. Costs, trying to bring them to light so people really understand the full implication of a product. It's not just who paid for it and how much they paid, but how much it costs to support the product. [00:17:00] And that's something we've tried to bring forward.

Noa Ginsberg: So stakeholders have more realization of that too. 

Trisha Price: Yeah.

Noa Ginsberg: And even within the product teams to be able to have that visibility. 

Trisha Price: Yeah. It's good that you brought up supportability, because we often, as product managers get pretty good at Voice of Customer and whether that comes through our sales teams or through customers directly or customer success teams really understanding what it is that our customers are looking for, but indirectly it does impact our customers. And if we're gonna be customer obsessed, if a product's difficult to support and support's not educated on it, not only does that drive costs up of your overall product, but it does impact customer happiness. And you know, it may be okay for a period of time where your support team can cover up for you, but in the end, if your product's not easy to [00:18:00] support or there's a lot of support tickets coming out of a particular part of your product, that's equally important to fix than like direct voice of customer.

Noa Ginsberg: We try to monitor, some buddy metrics along with supportability, so we're not just looking at does support go down And then because people don't like it and stopped using it, that's one reason it could go down. So we always pair it up with NPS, which we do get from Pendo, and we track NPS versus year over year change in supportability for cases per active user.

Noa Ginsberg: And we have tracked that for years now since we've had Pendo and NPS in place, and it's been really helpful to see that validation that we are improving and we're not not at the expense of our customer satisfaction. So that's something that's really important to us in terms of supportability and voice of the customer.

Noa Ginsberg: And we've also gotten so much more data in the last four [00:19:00] years since standing up this team. We really didn't have a centralized place. We have a lot, again, a lot of connectivity with our customers, super focused on them and really at the core of everything we do, but a systematic way of sharing that, making sure it's available to everyone.

Noa Ginsberg: You know, it didn't exist. You had to know someone or know who had it or find it somewhere. but we've. We've kind of brought that together into an inventory so we know what we're getting, what streams of VOC data we have, who owns it, what the follow up is that's expected and that's a work in progress.

Noa Ginsberg: Like we still wanna expand that. We wanna do more there, but we've come a really long way, and I think it shows in how we develop our products and ultimately what we deliver. 

Trisha Price: So we kind of dove in a little bit into some of the things your teams, your team does and focuses on around analytics and voice of customer and stakeholder management.

Trisha Price: But [00:20:00] for those just getting started with a product center of excellence and maybe just establishing them. How do you get started? What are the things to consider? Like do you jump right to some of the mature processes you're talking about with NPS and data collection and standard analytics and adoption?

Trisha Price: Or are there more simple places for people to start? What are the considerations for folks to think about? 

Noa Ginsberg: Yeah, I think it's important to know what good looks like. As I said, sort of where you wanna go and where you are and try a, try to chart a path to get there. But obviously you can't start with everything and like good product people we know we have to prioritize.

Noa Ginsberg: So I would look at what is the biggest pain point for your product managers or for the business? Like what visibility is missing? In the KPIs we're using to track our investments or to track how the company's doing as a whole. What are the blind spots? Maybe you don't have them. Maybe that's really well [00:21:00] oiled machine and you don't need to focus on the metrics piece.

Noa Ginsberg: I think there are some companies that probably are there just. Starting off. But if, if you have that, great, you can move on to something else. But I think, having a centralized qualitative and quantitative view is very helpful and those things inform each other. So that's another one. So if you don't have a user research function that is central, I think that's another place that could be a kind of high leverage place to start.

Noa Ginsberg: As well as a system to store the user research you're doing so you can share that knowledge broadly. that's really important because product people can conduct user research and do it very well, but they're not laser focused on that. They don't know all of the methodologies that are available necessarily, right?

Noa Ginsberg: So having a centralized, really skilled user research team can be very helpful. And again, bring leverage to the product teams. I think there's also some, some goodness in [00:22:00] centralizing how we communicate with clients. So in app, whether it's a homegrown thing or Pendo, we use a combination, how are we communicating to clients with our voice?

Noa Ginsberg: And then how do we get information from customers in the app or in email or in other channels. So those are some sort of good ideas to start. I think even when you have started, we actually, we work on this maturity assessment for ourselves. We made an acronym out of it so that we could remember it.

Noa Ginsberg: 'cause we like acronyms in finance and at FactSet. So it's FACT is our own internal maturity model specifically for product analytics. But it's foundational, aspirational, competitive, and then transformative. And we use that to assess. Ourselves, but also how well our product teams are using and leveraging the data that we are providing.

Noa Ginsberg: And that helps us see, okay, let's think about where we are. We've come [00:23:00] back to it when we're setting goals for the year. You know, what do we wanna do to level up the whole function? And look what's, well, if we're in column A, we wanna move to column C, what do we need to do? Or what are the things we could try or consider doing next year to just move us forward?

Noa Ginsberg: So I think that's, whether you're at a zero or you're on your way, I think that's just a good outlook and way to frame it. 

Trisha Price: Yeah. It forces us all to constantly get better and mature and see a path to that no matter where we are. Noa, when you're, when you're moving through your maturity matrix or aligning on which metrics matter for a particular product group.

Trisha Price: How do you align what your product teams are measuring to what your leadership is accountable too, right? Because I see this is really hard. I think in product, I think this is one of the hardest [00:24:00] things that's hard for me. And I mean, we at Pendo are an analytics company and it's still really hard to go from, "Hey, we're trying to drive revenue.

Trisha Price: Hey, we're trying to improve cross sell. Hey, we're trying to reduce support cost," to this is the particular part of the product I'm gonna focus on and I'm gonna measure. You know, time to value or retention, like how do you do that? How do you help your product teams as they move through that maturity matrix to make sure that what they are measuring aligns to sort of the bigger OKR business outcomes of the company?

Noa Ginsberg: Yeah, this is such a tough one because at the end of the day, it's top line and margin and EPS growth that matter. so I would say that our headline metrics approach has. Been our best stab at that, which is providing this portfolio of metrics that you could view for any product to see how it's impacting on the user side.

Noa Ginsberg: So it doesn't really [00:25:00] directly impact, but it, it helps you to gauge the quality of your revenue. And I think that's a big piece. So whereas a SV, what we call annual subscription value, because we're a subscription business, is a lagging indicator. We want more leading indicators. We wanna be able to assess the health of our customers better.

Noa Ginsberg: So the more data we have on how the system is being used, what tools they're using, what data they're using, the better we can understand the quality, maybe better address at risk, and build that success profile based on the data we have. So I think without a basic set of metrics, and we only have a handful, right?

Noa Ginsberg: It's five metrics working on six, but, Adoption sentiment, which is from Pendo NPS, engagement supportability. Those are the main areas that we are providing for everyone else to monitor that. So I think then beyond that, [00:26:00] beyond sort of equipping people with the basics, it's also fostering some experimentation and being okay to experiment because, we might say that we think this is a leading indicator, but it may not turn out to be.

Noa Ginsberg: You can't argue that adoption is a good thing. So you want higher adoption. Yes, you wanna build something. It's like everyone's worst nightmare. Every engineer's worst nightmare. Every product person, you build something and no one uses it. No one uses it. And it could be a marketing problem, it could be a, a good market problem or a sales problem.

Noa Ginsberg: Like it doesn't it radiates out from the product though. If it's not a good product, it doesn't matter if you have a world class.

Trisha Price: I always say that, you know, if you have an adoption problem, it's the product. Now, those other groups could be making it better or can cover up really well to make it less bad.

Trisha Price: But at the end of the day, if we have an adoption problem, we have to look ourselves in the eye as product team and ask ourselves what's going wrong? 

Noa Ginsberg: Yes, a hundred percent. And if, and so we wanna always [00:27:00] in increase adoption. And we work very closely with go to market. Like we've actually, we as the Center for Product Excellence, we redefined our product lifecycle.

Noa Ginsberg: So that, again, everyone's speaking the same language. Everyone knows what we mean when we say the ideate or validate or build phases. And we work with product marketing to be very close throughout the lifecycle, especially at the earliest stages. Yeah. So that they're involved. And it isn't a handoff where it's like finger pointing happening. But we've got, we've gotten a lot of runway out of that and it's, it's really improved, especially over the last few years.

BREAK

Trisha Price: Well, Noa, your team is so important at setting these standards of facts, your maturity matrix and how to work with stakeholders and really ensuring you get business outcomes from your investment. But they're not the ones. [00:28:00] Accountable or owning the actual individual products, right? They're that messy, middle, supporting all of the other teams around them.

Trisha Price: With that I know you've talked about being customer obsessed is so important at FactSet. How do you motivate your team, make them feel connected to the customer and accountable to outcomes when you are sort of the messy middle and one step removed from the end product. 

Noa Ginsberg: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we do work really directly and as one with these teams, especially the pillars in my team are UX client help and communication enterprise, business agility, and product analytics.

Noa Ginsberg: So those teams are working closely with the product teams. So they're part of the team and they're invested and they. Understand as well as the others on the team. What we're trying to drive and understanding the user is always something we are seeking to do. But we also have another set of users, which is [00:29:00] our internal users.

Noa Ginsberg: So I've tried, and I think most of the team has always seen it as what we do as a product for internal consumers and we are very closely connected to them. We run cabs, we do annual surveys. We check engagement with the tools that we build and the products, quote unquote, that we release. And some of those products are, are events, things like we run this annual idea, hon, which is a pretty unique innovation tournament that precedes our hackathon and it seeds the hackathon with business validated ideas coming from, it can come from engineering, but it often comes from outside of product engineering design. It comes from sales, it comes from finance, it comes from hr. So it's really the whole company putting forth innovation ideas and then people can take those forward to the hackathon. And so we try to foster that innovation and that feeling of a product mindset, even within our internal [00:30:00] clients and our internal teams.

Noa Ginsberg: And I think that's really important. But when you're setting goals, it is hard to. Especially OKRs, right? They're supposed to be within your line of influence and something too far beyond it can be difficult. So the we, we are challenged by that, but I think we try to focus more on the direct impact we're having and then sort of the second order things we do follow also.

Trisha Price: Yeah, that's great. It is such a critical role, and it is critical to keep people feeling connected and tied to the business outcomes, and I know you do a great job of that. A few minutes ago you mentioned your product development lifecycle and even changing it up and standardizing it to make sure that everyone, even your stakeholders knew it.

Trisha Price: You also just mentioned your idea on, and your hackathon right now. All of us, our product development lifecycle is in flux and the tools that we're using and the pace at which we're ideating and validating is [00:31:00] changing. And even things like ideathons to hackathon. It used to be probably two years ago or a year ago, if you did an ideathon, they probably ended up in some sort of slides or maybe a document outlining the idea, and now I'm guessing you have a full blown prototype even without engineering involved. So tell me about how you think about that and how the roles are blurring and just how are you responding and changing in this sort of a new era of product development. 

Noa Ginsberg: Yeah. I mean, everyone's head is spinning, but in a really exciting way. I mean, I first entered the workforce around the.com time and that was also super exciting, that feels the same to me. We are really forward thinking on this and from the very early stages we had our own internal AI tooling. So everyone at FactSet has [00:32:00] been able to play around and get good at these technologies for years now. Of course that has different implications, but we are a pretty creative group of people. We're like high agency. It's a very entrepreneurial kind of environment for a large company. And so we've seen a lot of that happening already.

Noa Ginsberg: We've got the builders coming in no matter what their role is. Everyone's now a builder it sounds like. So whether you're a product person or a designer. Or an engineer who didn't know front end development, like now everyone can do that, of course, not in production, but it really has facilitated the speed because instead of talking about doing something, we're just doing it.

Noa Ginsberg: So the early stages of the lifecycle, I think, are the most exciting and ripe for disruption and acceleration by these tools, even though it sort of started off in the development. Side with the code completion or code automation and we're seeing great, [00:33:00] great results there, but it's more incremental. I would say, when you think about the build phase, like obviously execution's very important and, but we're really good at it already and so it's hard to sort of 10 x that.

Noa Ginsberg: But I think when you think about all the communication that happens, the long documents that we would write like. I just don't think that's the future. And that cuts not hours off of developing something, but months off of deciding whether something's a good idea or not. 

Trisha Price: Yeah. 

Noa Ginsberg: And that's super high leverage.

Trisha Price: I totally agree with you. It's the confidence factor when we actually put. Engineering effort at something is wildly different now than it was a year ago. you know, it used to be, "Hey, we've got this idea. We've talked to a few customers." We've done some discovery. Let's get V zero into some sort of design partner's hands.[00:34:00] 

Trisha Price: And then iterate, iterate, iterate, and kind of constantly examine whether we're gonna kill something. But now what we can, what our builders, as you said, can build even without engineering support, can get us to a point where we can iterate, iterate so much faster that by the time we're. Building for real at the confidence level, we've gone through so much iteration and levels of discovery and it's so fast. It's mind boggling. 

Noa Ginsberg: Yeah. We're hearing teams canceling meetings because they don't need to sync up on something like the prototype kind of helps them do that. We're seeing people show a prototype to a client in the morning and then 15 minutes later show it again, and so the number of iterations is just skyrocketing because anyone can iterate. You don't need to go have a meeting, you don't need to ask the designer to redo the Figma prototype. You know, there's some downside to that and we we're gonna work through a lot of the issues it raises of like, who's, whose [00:35:00] job is whose. And you know, but I think we're an open-minded place and so I think we'll work through those things, but there are real things to consider, like how do our processes get impacted by these changes. But overall, it's super exciting and most people are really excited about it because again, we're a place where people just wanna get stuff done and want the best outcome. So I think that's gonna have a huge impact. We're piloting a few different tools here for product and design.

Noa Ginsberg: For the AI prototyping piece, we're working on an agent backlog for accelerating the product lifecycle. And obviously our developers have been at this for a while. When tools like GitHub, copilot and others came out in cursor. So there's a lot of exploration happening and we don't want people to have to go do it on the side of the desk or you know, in their spare time.

Noa Ginsberg: Like, we wanna provide these tools, we wanna change the way we're working and be at the cutting edge here. Because, it's a huge opportunity. [00:36:00] 

Trisha Price: So you talked about utilizing all kinds of different tools that give you productivity. AI really supercharging and giving you productivity. You just mentioned an agent.

Trisha Price: Is that an agent? You guys are actually thinking about building that's particular and has context about your processes and your products. That helps your product managers be more efficient. 

Noa Ginsberg: Yeah, we're not sure yet what it looks like, but we've put the call out to build up our backlog by the end of the year.

Noa Ginsberg: And then on our internal agent platform, which we're developing, we will be building out those tools that are gonna help us to get that productivity. So it could be something more rules-based, maybe it's not an agent. There's a lot of opportunity to improve and get speed out of a process that isn't AI.

Noa Ginsberg: So we're open to that too. But there, the agentic piece is. I think going to be very important. Imagine you have an agent that updates your documentation for you [00:37:00] automatically based on the release notes or just constantly trolls your documentation to say, Hey, like these pages, and then our writers can then document so much more or they can work on other things.

Noa Ginsberg: It's a really exciting area. Our quality would be better, because it's just hard for us to manage everything, even though we have great people. It's just a lot to cover. 

Trisha Price: No, I know we haven't talked about this before, but imagine it'll be really cool. And, and this is what we're planning for at Pendo too.

Trisha Price: If, when you're building that agent, that agent would have access to your Pendo data and you could ask it even this is your agent, not the one we're building, but one you have configured and built on your own. But through our MCP server, you'd be able to ask adoption numbers, et cetera, through your own agent.

Trisha Price: And that's, I think, an exciting thing because I do think everyone Yeah, of course. All software companies, you're doing it. We're doing it, are building these agentic interfaces and agentic automation. But we also know you're gonna [00:38:00] have your own and your own's gonna have special context about things that is only relevant to FactSet and FactSet group of product managers.

Trisha Price: And we wanna make sure that kind of data is available to those agents as well. 

Noa Ginsberg: It's totally, exactly the same for us with our clients. So we definitely would want to be involved in that design partner program for MCP. And it's the same way we're thinking about both internally for ourselves, enabling that with the protocol and the agent platform, and agent re registry so that we know what's out there and can permission appropriately.

Noa Ginsberg: There's so much to consider, but we are doing that for our clients as well. So we're totally on the same page. Although that page keeps moving, keeps moving. 

Trisha Price: Keeps turning. Well, I think there's no, no better time in my career of building software than now. And I think it allows us to focus on the things that are important, like business outcomes and customer happiness and customer [00:39:00] outcomes, versus a lot of the more mundane tasks that have to get done 'cause they're a part of the job.

Trisha Price: But allowing these tools to automate more and more of those. And I think that's just such an exciting time and I think it'll help us get back to the part of our job that is the most rewarding, but also the most difficult, which. Is really the hard call and you know, how we opened it and how we can finish today, which is all around.

Trisha Price: What makes product hard is that everybody thinks they know the right answer and has an opinion, right? One particular customer. One particular sales person, but at the end of the day, we are the ones who have to make the hard calls in our jobs and you know, is this interesting? Sort of balance between gut instincts that we talked about earlier, which I agree with you.

Trisha Price: I love your analogy that gut instincts. Is [00:40:00] really data. It's just our own LLM, human processing, all of that data and pattern recognition to make decisions. And you can, you can use other people and you can use systems and other pieces of data, but your gut instincts is really data too. And I love that.

Trisha Price: and I love. You know, learning from you today about your product center of excellence and how that enables not just you to make decisions, but all of your product managers to make more informed and faster and better decisions and how you have been able to. Continue to evolve with AI and new tools that are out there, but yet still remained business outcome, analytics focused, and most of all, customer success focused.

Trisha Price: So, I just really appreciate you, Noa, been a long time partner for us at Pendo, but also for me, and I always learn something from you every time we have a conversation [00:41:00] and impressed with you and what Factset has done. So truly appreciate you coming on today and sharing your knowledge and wisdom with, our listeners and with me, and look forward to future conversations.

Noa Ginsberg: Likewise, thank you so much and I learned so much from you as well and from the podcast, so it's a great thing you've started here. 

Trisha Price: Thank you. Appreciate it Noa. Thank you for listening to Hard Calls, the Product podcast, where we share best practices and all the things you need to succeed. If you enjoyed the show today, share with your friends and come back for more.