[00:00:38] Andrew Michael: Hey, Carlos. Welcome to the show.

[00:01:25] Carlos Gonzales de Villaumbrosia: Hey, Andrew. Thanks for having me. 

[00:01:27] Andrew Michael: It's a pleasure for the listeners. Carlos us is the founder and CEO of product school, the global leader in product management training with a community of over 1 million product professionals. Carlos is also a member of young presidents, organization and leaders in tech and prior to product school, he was the co-founder and CEO of Flock the largest marketplace for online courses in Latin America.

So my first question for you Carlos is. What's the biggest shift you've seen in product management from the time you started Product School school to today. 

[00:01:56] Carlos Gonzales de Villaumbrosia: Yeah. So a lot of things I started this company seven years [00:02:00] ago when product management wasn't cool, as I always say. So a lot of people would ask us around is this project management or do I need to know how to code?

Do I need an MBA? So there wasn't a lot of confusion in general because this wasn't that mainstream seven years forward with a pandemic in between. Obviously this is a whole different space. We've seen an explosion of digital transformation beyond tech companies and beyond Silicon valley. So the role of the product manager.

At the table, in many cases that companies have a chief product officer that is literally an executive at the same level as the chief marketing officer or a chief technology officer. And that's elevating the role in general. That's also creating much more opportunity for people because no, you're going to need to be a software engineer and know you will need an MBA in order to build excellent products.

[00:02:54] Andrew Michael: Yeah, very interesting. And I definitely recall as well, all those moments back in the day when I was like, what [00:03:00] is product manager, product management. Like you always go into these discussions. What do you actually do? And I like the point I'm making is now we have C-level roles in this space and it probably didn't really weren't really that prevalent seven years ago.

Where do you see like product management going from here? So obviously you have a unique advantage of seeing, like having a close yet to so many different product managers coming in. What are some of the trends you're seeing now going forward for product management? 

[00:03:28] Carlos Gonzales de Villaumbrosia: So we actually published a report called the future of product management.

And this is really helpful for us to identify trends and yes, tap into our community and see how their team knows those opportunities. But at a high level, broad management is here to stay. So this is not like a COVID bump. This is definitely an absolutely strategic role in any organization that is driving.

Innovation and change. So we're seeing more and more companies, not only elevating product people to two different areas of the organization, including the C-suite. A lot of CEOs actually come from a [00:04:00] product background. So that's really impacting the entire culture of these organizations. They are becoming more prevalent, which is another key word that you probably are tired of listening, because that means that now organizations understand that product doesn't come.

At the end. It's not that the sales team would sell something, using a PowerPoint and then full product team is going to try to deliver on the promise that someone made over the phone. Now the product is your entire company and it's part of the entire user journey, even before the user pays for your product, which that means it's.

Users are now much more educated on what they want because they have more options. They have the internet, so they need to be able to go to your website. They need to be able to check you out online and other sources. They want to actually use your product. In many cases, we see how these companies are offering a free version or even a free trial, which is really relevant.

So when those users come and need to talk to sales for an upgrade, they are in a much educated position. And that means that, that's. And ultimately that gives you more buy in [00:05:00] internally because it's not that, oh, someone who is going to sign a check for a product is never going to use it. In this case, we're seeing how this bottom up approach where the users are using the product before they request a purchase.

It's actually a much more efficient model for everybody, both consumers and. Another macro trend that we are seeing is that the no code environment we're seeing more and more co tools becoming visual, which means that you don't really need to be a software engineer or a data scientist in order to make sense of data or be able to build something.

So those trends combined are really pushing the industry. 

[00:05:37] Andrew Michael: Yeah, it's interesting too, to bring both of those trends up. I think no-code differently with recent news as well, a bubble rising of a hundred million. There's huge investment going now into the space and for good reason, I think if you've played around with some of these tools, I think Webflow is one of those ones.

I think that gets jump punched into the no-code space. And I think for myself personally, like the south side built with it, like you can see, you could almost build [00:06:00] anything eventually with just a little bit more logic added to the flow. You could actually end up generating some really cool apps.

And I think that is the general direction that we apply is flowing in if I have to take that, but it would be interesting to see what they start moving in the next few years or if they started coming up with so Carlos. Talk us through a little bit about the idea behind product school, like when it started, what was the motivation?

I think obviously there's like a thread I can see pulling between like the previous experience with flock, but why product school? What was your motivation back then? Yeah. 

[00:06:31] Carlos Gonzales de Villaumbrosia: We're so Product. School is a solution to my own problem. I come from an engineering background and I soon realized that I didn't want to spend the rest of my life coding.

Unfortunately, I didn't even know my options. I come from Spain and I remember studying computer science, raising my hand saying what if I don't want to be a software engineer is oh my God, that's not possible. I sang that for a four year degree and everyone around me seems to be okay with that career path.

So I didn't even know how to deliver it to my technical background in a different way. So only [00:07:00] until I came to Silicon valley, I started I went to business school in Berkeley. I first of all, had two breaks. One is I met many other engineers that were thinking business, which was really refreshing, but I also met a lot of business folks that wanted to work in tech and they were feeling very intimidated by not having a technical background, talking about management consultants, marketers people in ops.

So here were two different. People trying to tackle the same problem, which is we want to be in between worlds. We want to know enough about tech to be dangerous, but we also want to know enough about business. We want to build and both engineering school and business school wasn't really optimized for that.

So that's ultimately what led me to create a Product School, which is a hybrid that takes the best of both worlds and trains people on how to get a job in product and do it in a much more efficient way than traditionally. Cause my year, my business school program was a two year full-time too expensive and didn't even have a single subject on product management or digital marketing data analytics, a [00:08:00] lot of the skills that a lot of people in tech use on a daily basis.

So in private school, we do the opposite. It's a two month part-time program on week, nights or weekends. So people don't have to quit their jobs. It's obviously much more cost-efficient and then the secret sauce is the instructors. They are product leaders who are actively working at some of the best companies in Silicon valley, like Google and Facebook or Airbnb or Netflix.

[00:08:22] Andrew Michael: Yeah, I love that. And I think for me, this has always been a challenge with universities and degrees, especially in the tech space, is that things are evolving and changing so fast. That it's almost impossible to keep up and adapt from a university specs out to update the curriculum, to change things, but really like where you focusing on inside experts like working in these roles day to day.

You can really bring those best practices directly to the students as they're happening as they're learning them. I think that's excellent. So switching topics a little bit saying to the context of the show and Churn FM when it comes to thinking about retention and churn, how much [00:09:00] of the training goes into this and what sort of things are you talking about in these courses with your 

uh, 

[00:09:06] Carlos Gonzales de Villaumbrosia: We talk a lot about different things including retention, of course.

So we have three different levels of certification depending on where the student is. So we have one for spiting PMs that want to get that first PM job. And then we have two more for experienced PMs that want to get a promotion. But in, in actually all three certifications, we cover this topic because I believe it's the future of how business are going to grow in a sustainable way.

If you look at a funnel. And I'm breaking it down into different levels where top of the funnel is like acquisition, right? Like new users that sign up retention is the next level is making sure that those users come back the actual afford to acquire a new user. It's exponentially higher than the effort to retain an existing user.

If obviously you provide value. So examples of incredible retention models can be outside of tech, like Costco, for example, [00:10:00] and where most of the people need to buy a membership. And that gives them access to the store and the churn rate actually it's incredible. And I think is so low that.

Assume that the lifetime value of the user is going to be for at least nine or 10 years. So if you think in those terms, you can, then you can change the dollar perspective from your business, because it's not just about, oh, I'm going to have your sales people closing a deal. And then customer support answering questions on the end, the sales process, or like the engagement with the user.

It goes across every single step of. And that is important for product managers, because they are also owning that funnel these days. And even though they might not report for revenue, they need to be very smart around how to prioritize the features that are going to make biggest impact on the lifetime value of their customer.

[00:10:49] Andrew Michael: Yeah. I think you spoke to a lot of it as well when it comes to retention and especially in subscription businesses as well, like that is your business. You have a subscription and if people aren't renewing that [00:11:00] subscription, there's no business, but really it is like, It's the biggest growth lever you can pull, because once you have that mindset, like you said, of eight to nine years, knowing that a customer is going to stick with you that sort of opens up a whole lot of other opportunities on the other end, it's okay, my lifetime value goes up like eight, nine X now that means I can spend eight, nine times more to acquire customers.

I can push competitors out of channels. I can really by spaces, which are those cons, because I have really strong retention. So it really has this compounding impact all around the business which I believe. And it's obviously why I love the topic so much. And the show in SaaS in general, but you mentioned Costco as an example of like how we can have this retention mindset and I'm interested from your perspective as a school, like, how are you thinking about retention and not really having a subscription service yet.

I think that might be something on the plans, but how do you approach like thinking about how to keep your customers, your students coming back 

[00:11:55] Carlos Gonzales de Villaumbrosia: that's a great question because traditional education hasn't been particularly great at [00:12:00] retention. We come from a world where we are supposed to study full diamond in our mid twenties and then stop and get a full-time job until we die.

Yeah. That's pretty much it teeth. They stoned people come back for business school, but that's pretty much it. The concept of lifelong learning, assuming that you are constantly growing, you can't stop. And the fact that you study something 10 years ago is an a neck though today. It's still not there yet for a lot of people.

So that's definitely something that we are trying to incentivize. First of all, because our trainings for professionals, they are already in the system and they recognize that the same way they can allocate time for working out, being with the family or being with the friends. It's also good to spend some time just to invest in yourself.

And so with that being said, obviously because we have different certificates at different levels, we've seen students who. Got one program. Then once they ended up landing the first job, then they came back because they wanted to take that next step. And I liked that option to create a menu, instead of trying to [00:13:00] stick everything down people's throat at a point in their career where the content might not be that relevant.

So we try to make it more flexible. But regardless, I think of product school as a community and not so much as a business or even as an education. Community means that we are all in this together and that not everyone learns the same way. Yes. Courses are a good way in some cases, but there are many others.

Got me reading books. It can be attending conferences. It can be mentoring, you name it and that's all. Okay. The point is. It's important to be in a safe space where you know that you are with peers who share similar interests that are going in this journey together, where you can once, sometimes they learn sometimes teach and sometimes speak the right resources at the right time.

And I'm very excited about this because I didn't have access to a community or to the right mentors when I grew up. That's why he said that this is a solution to my problem, and really literally building the school that I wish I had. When I was getting started, then over 90% of the resources [00:14:00] that we provide to the community are absolutely free and available.

[00:14:04] Andrew Michael: Fair enough, scratching your own itch. Then I think the community aspect is really powerful and it's a retention lever in its own rights in the sense that I think what you alluded to as well, is that the typical sort of a model of shipping people into school? Degree, got a job and then continue working that models like from the factory line days, and things are changing and the world's evolving faster.

You need to continue learning, but you also don't want to like, just shove a whole bunch of courses on your throat and they may not be ready for. It reminded me as all have like similar challenges when it comes to retention of different companies. So when you don't have the frequency there where it's not like a daily active month, last week, I quit might be like, I need to learn this piece of information today.

And in three years from now, I'm going to be looking for a promotion then I'm or six months or 12 months. So it's unpredictable, but I like what you do with the community aspect is that really. You come in, you do a course, but then you have this community afterwards, you have this like minded. So [00:15:00] you are still keeping product school top of mind fresh.

So the next time they want to come back to do something. They remember, okay, I'm getting all this great content I'm learning. Fantastic. And they have these ways. And how much of that is like a part of your thought process in terms of like how to keep the community around and the customers coming back?

[00:15:17] Carlos Gonzales de Villaumbrosia: That's core to my values and I started with the community mindset is the very. So I remember back in the day I was hosting all their workshops, myself. They were all free and we continued doing that right now. We do around a thousand events per year. They're all free. We host conferences, we produce books.

We have a job board, we have discussion forums and different other resources. I believe in adding value because I don't think you can fake it. Maybe you can fake use that acquisition in some cases with some hacks, but you're going to treat the use of constantly at some point, if the user doesn't get value, they're not going to come back.

Yeah. So I think it's the way I approach business is as a community. I want to make sure that every single interaction that [00:16:00] you have with them. You get something out of it. And I really don't expect anything in return. I think that's the beauty of building community. Now I know that in order to build a sustainable business, there has to be some sort of business model.

So in our case, we chose education. So for people who are more committed and they really need that extra push, they can choose to take some of our paid certifications, but truly like anyone who wants to learn more about product can get started and there's no expectation to pay for anything. 

[00:16:31] Andrew Michael: Yeah. I love that.

I think that also comes back to the premise when it comes to gender and attention, and then there's like people come to for, they have a problem. They're looking for solution. If you can provide value and you can solve that problem. There's no reason for churn. So it all comes down to delivering value.

And if you're not delivering value people in live, you can't fake it. A reluctant point. I want to dive into a little bit though, and I think this is like a really interesting topic, and I think you've built an unbelievable community at product school. So maybe [00:17:00] you can go a little bit deeper, like on those early days, like getting started getting set up How did you go about building such an unbelievable community?

What were your first steps? Like day one, you said, okay, this is a problem. I see. I want to try and solve this for myself. I'm going to go out and build a community. What did you. 

[00:17:15] Carlos Gonzales de Villaumbrosia: That's a fantastic question again, because being Silicon valley, there's a lot of pressure around growing really fast and sometimes in an artificial way.

And I don't believe you can really build a strong connection with people if you are doing that. First of all, I've been bootstrapping since the very beginning and that gave me this control or my own destiny and make certain decisions. Maybe any investor would agree with, but that just made me happy.

And I just thought it was generally better for the members of our committee. So I started literally focusing on the next first in the next customer or the next community amendment. I wouldn't even call it customer. So what I did was first of all, I invested all my time. I was spending around two to three hours per week on quora.com, answering questions about product management.

There are [00:18:00] so many them and other forums like Reddit. And eight with literally spent time to answer questions where I can see the name of the person asking. So it's not an anonymous forum where people are just saying random things. This is I was spending time to make sure these are acquired the answer.

And there was no gut at the end in terms of, oh, sign up for these. You will not know I'm giving it to you all upfront. And since I wanted to start really small. In cases of those members who are in San Francisco, I will follow up with them in private. Maybe be either direct message or connection on LinkedIn and make sure that, that answers I can slide them.

Or in some case I offered to grab coffee because it was also part of my own user research to know how can I potentially scale that and turn this into a business. So it was a mutual relationship because first I. And then if someone wanted more, we could have a coffee and I would pay for coffee right away, but they just gave me more insights around, like, why are you on that photo?

Why what's happening? What's the real [00:19:00] problem and so on. So the next step for me was to start organizing some free events in Gorgon. I would be the speaker. So I would pick topics that I think I'm good at. And I would make sure that there's also time for seven DVD where imagine a, I have a one hour workshop on prototyping with another hour for Justin and DBT, where we'll get to knit together and just chat.

So I'll do this once or twice a week in different coworking spaces in San Francisco. And you, I start noticing. Users people who will love it so much, they would follow me. And it was started. I knew their names. We connected on LinkedIn. We saw each other, at least once a week, they started referring some of their friends to those free events.

So it was really organic and very nice because we connected beyond yes, an online forum. We knew each other's family names. And I go, I to, and it was just really like the fundamentals of community and making sure that the few five, 1,000 people are getting value, not just from me, but from other members.[00:20:00] 

And then from there then is when I had to make the decision. To create a space for other. So I started inviting some of my friends who are product leaders at amazing companies like Google or Facebook or optimize next week or BNB. I don't have time to do everything myself. And I also think that I'm not the best.

So if you can come and give a, 30 minutes to 60 minutes of your life, just to the community, that would be amazing. And the breakthrough for me there was that. The speakers love it. There's a lot of events out there for founders or CEOs for investors, but the product management committee was completely underserved.

These are the real doers, but they don't have a platform to do to give back. So I created that platform in a way. And that also helped me to realize that this wasn't just helpful for me. Aspiring PM's. There was also very helpful for the product leaders that wanted to do join, because the problem that I had when I was younger, I wasn't the only one.

[00:21:00] Yes. If you ask any PM how they broke into product, they will all give you different answers. But the common ground is that there was no product school. Yeah. 

[00:21:08] Andrew Michael: I love that the whole story like just getting started from a very basics as well, answering on Quora. I think it must've taken like a lot of persistence and a lot of like in the early days, like how long did it take you to start to see results in socks?

[00:21:22] Carlos Gonzales de Villaumbrosia: I saw results almost as the beginning. The first event, I think I only had three people, but the second one had 50 and that was a key moment for me. I almost gave up. Remember, after bring so much time, you set up an event, pay, be to reserve the room and everything, and then out of three people, but it's let's make the best out of him.

Actually, those three are still members of the community. So it was more about really the quality than the quantity. And and then of course, like it's a roller coaster, I can say, oh yeah, we started doing this and now we are ship. We are humans and we have our own struggles, but I think that we, as you mentioned, that consistency and.

Obsessing around [00:22:00] quality and really making sure that every interaction is positive for the members is what took us today. The committee two days over one medium. 

[00:22:09] Andrew Michael: Yeah, it's unbelievable. And I think as well it is very easy to give up. It's a point I remember, like with the podcast as well, originally I would start and I was doing it in the early days.

People said why are you doing? It's what's it for? And it's it's something I'm learning in the process. I have a plan for it. Like, how do you make money as I'm not doing it to make money. And like, why are you spending so much time not to make money? And I even remember for the podcast, like it took probably like 50 episodes for really to start taking off for where I felt like there was a meaningful interaction and there was things happening.

But it took all of that time. And like a lot of moments where I'm like, ah, should I continue doing this? Is it worth the efforts they care? And, but like today it's just been unbelievable. It's given back as well. And then Dan and I were chatting before the show, I launched my own company. We recently closed a pre-seed round and six of the eight investors.

We're podcast guests. Like I [00:23:00] never expected that to be, it was never the goal sort of thing. But if you look at sort of the ROI at the end of the day, like what it's given as a platform to start the new company, a new business, it's been unbelievable from then it goes back to what you're saying, like just really having a core focus on how can you deliver value.

We can regard how can you consistent with it? And consistent with it? And, um, nice. So start inviting people then to this network. Product experts. What was the next step from there? Like how did you take that jump then from these events to building product school? 

[00:23:32] Carlos Gonzales de Villaumbrosia: So the next step was to create the first certification program and I worked the first instructor.

I created the first version of the curriculum and in order to break, even, I only need. Five or six students. I guess want to make sure that I think grow or try to fake that growth. I wanted to pick five people from that small community that knew me, that trusted me and what I trusted them and be like, Hey, I'm running a pilot.

So I literally going [00:24:00] to do this at cost. It seems like you are really serious about growing your career and you are going to spend time with me for two months when I'm going to be your coach. And I'm going to go out of my way to make this happen because you are representing my company. If I do a good job, you are going to then tell others.

So that's how I started. I was there first, instead of going to grad school, I probably did it for too long because it was two years, every week, nights and weekends. Teaching multiple cohorts of art, tennis students eat in San Francisco. And I was also running the school and organizing the beds. And I know we love them, all the things that you need to do to keep the lights on.

So it was intense, but it was also a good opportunity for me too. To get feedback directly from the users to ensure that the quality was there. And it's true, like that best mark, the best marketing for us was what a month. And I made sure that our students really not only had a good experience in terms of the value of education, but they would also go [00:25:00] there and secure jobs and good interviews.

And I asked them to write a review online when Yelp, LinkedIn. So next time someone will done to me asking who are you? I would say why don't you check my references? Why don't you talk to one of my students? I was literally making interest. Yeah. Because this is the stuff that I didn't get when I was still at, I was purchasing a master's degree based on a logo without really even knowing the subjects that I was going to take, or the teachers that I was going to have.

It was, I was basically reverse engineering, the pool experience that I had as a student in a traditional way. 

[00:25:35] Andrew Michael: Yeah. And probably if you ask slack students that have gone through to build a university, it's would they recommend it to a friend or colleague versus something like a product school, which is much more tailored, much more specific and focused to achieving what you're trying to achieve.

I'm pretty sure the NPS on both would be drastically different. For sure. They're not, so I want to have one question. I ask every guest to join the show. What's one thing that you know today about [00:26:00] churn and retention that you wish you knew when you got started with your career. 

[00:26:05] Carlos Gonzales de Villaumbrosia: But that is something that I put a lot of time learning, especially this year because I started this business.

It was a transaction and business in a way that yes, we have this community where people are pat off and they're constantly engaging with us, but the business model was very transactional. If you want to pay for a course, then you enroll. And then if you want to take another one, then you have to come back.

And do it. So there wasn't really an easy path for continuous learning for for recurring revenue, I would say. So I'm excited that after I drink my own champagne, like I've been a student, I understood a student. I had to dive into our network, our, to to learn from some of the best that's in subscription, Netflix, Disney plus, and other companies on like, how do you actually do it?

Because I don't have all the answers. And sometimes people might expect that as a CEO, we're supposed to. [00:27:00] Say exactly what are the shots? The reality is that I don't know, but I know who to call. And that was my approach. I don't know how to create really how to make sure that we can build a best in class retention or recurring business.

Let me ask some of the people that are really good at anything I did. And I filled all of these experiences and we came up with a potential solution, which is an alumni member. And that's something that we are going to roll out very soon. And it's all about making sure that the students were really serious about it.

We already went through a graduate certification who are certified, who they have also. So some high really pre private resources to continue growing, because one of the challenges with community as you scale is that then you need to escape or create silos for specific members to connect.

When I said that we have a media members that might sound very impressive, but it's also very problematic because they don't know each other. So it's very [00:28:00] important for us to make sure that we can address specific needs from community members. 

[00:28:05] Andrew Michael: Yeah, it's very interesting. And it's good though.

I really love the points as well. That as CEO, like you don't know all the answers, so it's no point in trying to pretend you do, and really focusing and leaning on the network that you have to actually help build that out. And very interesting as well. Like now that you've come sort of full circle on this and starting to build into subscription into it obviously seeing the value that it does bring in.

The one thing I love about it is just the predictability is if you manage to build a good subscription business, it gives you a much stronger predictability in terms of knowing where your business is going and planning for it and not relying on these transactional nature where it's you're not sure what's going to happen with the next sale or things like that.

[00:28:46] Carlos Gonzales de Villaumbrosia: Bland long term, because you know that there's a certain long lifetime value and that gives you, as you say, more possibilities to invest in better community or more technology growth for your team. [00:29:00] It just changes the entire perspective around how to operate. 

[00:29:04] Andrew Michael: Your business. Yeah. Cool. I'll say one last question.

I see we're running up on time. I'm intrigued as well now. Like you've built an unbelievable community. You've explained like one of the challenges now, maybe growing too big and that also creates some newness, but if you had to start a again and do this all over and start the community and build it would there be anything you'd do differently?

[00:29:27] Carlos Gonzales de Villaumbrosia: So I definitely like the part of starting really small and spending a lot of time with the users to make sure that the product is there. And at the very beginning of the problem was me. So instead of just investing in, building something and then trying to save, it speaks like the more we can do upfront the better, but one thing that I probably stayed too long, doing everything myself.

And I learned the hard way over time that the value of delegating and maybe spending [00:30:00] more time on building a best in class team than trying to do everything myself. So now you also have a family. When I started, I was a single I'm married with two kids, and that was really an important lesson because I used to believe that.

I only have nine to work on that. Everything is, will be a distraction and that's not true. At least in my case, I am a much happier and heavier person knowing that I have the friend aspects of my life and that if I want to perform at the highest level in all of them, I need to. I need to say no to a lot of things.

And that means that either don't do them at all, or I find someone to do them, but giving myself to be a superhero is not a good long-term solution. 

[00:30:44] Andrew Michael: Absolutely. Cool. Carlos has been a pleasure chatting to Tavernier. I enjoyed this conversation is any final thoughts you want to leave the listeners with?

Like anything they should be aware of for your work? Or how can they keep up to speed with what you're working on? 

[00:30:57] Carlos Gonzales de Villaumbrosia: Thank you. I enjoyed the conversation as well. [00:31:00] If anyone wants to continue the conversation offline with me, I'm pretty active on social media, especially LinkedIn. So feel free to connect with me there and ask any questions.

[00:31:09] Andrew Michael: Very cool. Yeah, thanks so much. Call it's been a pleasure chatting Suzanne and wish you best of luck.

[00:31:15] Carlos Gonzales de Villaumbrosia: Thank you.

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