Shaun Clowes
Chief Product Officer, Confluent. On 1 show, 1 appearance. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
executiveoperatorinvestor@shaunmclowes ↗LinkedIn ↗shaunclowes.com ↗
Shaun Clowes serves as Chief Product Officer at Confluent, having previously held the same role at MuleSoft and Metromile. He spent over six years at Atlassian leading product for Jira Agile and established their first B2B growth department.
1shows
1appearances
22statements
1resolved
1supported
0contradicted
100%fully supported
Everything Shaun Clowes said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Clowes: AI will entrench dominant enterprise SaaS incumbents over startups
“The most likely outcome is that the currently dominant companies are going to get more dominant. But I don't think this idea that it would just cause a spring up of a whole bunch of new, new apps that will more easily challenge the incumbents makes any particu…”
Clowes: 10x product managers produce 100x return via leverage
“It must be true that if there's 10 times engineers, and I would argue there definitely are, there must be 10 times product managers too. But at the same time, those 10 times product managers, because product management is ultimately about leverage, so it's abo…”
Clowes: AI product quality depends on data context, not replaceable models
“What will make my AI experience really great? It's definitely not going to be the models because like these models are mostly going to be somewhat replaceable and you could say, okay, well, is it going to be the prompts? Maybe, but you know, so many good promp…”
Clowes: 90% of AI development effort goes into data management
“It's a data management problem. Like, it's getting access to good data, getting access to high quality data, getting access to timely data, and getting it to the LLM to get the LLM to make a smart decision. That's where 90% of the calories go.”
Clowes: Business rules, not UIs, drive enterprise SaaS lock-in
“The real thing, which is staring everybody in the face, is it's all about the business rules. Like, that is what drives the lock-in.”
Clowes: AI makes startup distribution harder by flooding channels with spam
“In the world of AI, it seems like distribution is more likely to get hard than easy. So, so like you know, if you think about, for example, diminishing returns on cold email, because cold email is getting easier and easier to send even worse spam. Like it soun…”
Clowes: Top professionals are scribble-shaped rather than T-shaped
“It's interesting because people used to talk about people who are T-shaped or whatever. I've never really loved the analogy, because it's more like people are scribble shaped, like, I mean, like, there's the really best people you've worked with, they're more …”
Clowes: Off-the-shelf LLMs are sufficient for user research analysis
“Mostly I find that like the straight up LLMs themselves are good enough.”
Clowes: Data acts as a compass rather than a GPS for decisions
“Data is more like a compass than a GPS. Right? Like if you look at data as a way of like giving you the answer, you're always wrong. You're always wrong or you're slow. Wrong or slow or sometimes both. Because mostly data doesn't give you the answer. It just t…”
Clowes: When data clashes with intuition, the data is usually wrong
“If you're looking at a piece of data and the result tells you something that your intuition tells you is like insanely wrong, like that you're probably not right. First believe your intuition and go and prove yourself right. Like don't just take it at first gl…”
Clowes: Great distribution and customer success can sell almost any software
“Almost all ills can be, you know, filled in by really great distribution. Like, if you have a really good ground game, really good marketing, a really good ground game, and kind of jamming your product into the channel, like you're jamming your product in fron…”
Clowes: Team killed failing product after customer offered multimillion-dollar contract
“The final straw was actually when a customer finally wanted to pay for it. Like it had been a market for two years and we found ourselves with a customer who wanted to pay millions of dollars for it. They were ready to sign on the dotted line. And that was act…”
Clowes: A product manager's job is rejecting 90% of incoming requests
“Realistically, when you're a product manager, your job is to say no to 90% of things that get brought your way. And so that kind of makes you the bad person pretty much from the start. And so you're saying no to 90%, so you can say yes to 10%.”
Clowes: Most PMs talk to familiar users and ignore disconfirming evidence
“Most of the time people go talk to the people they always talk to and they learn nothing particularly new. They don't synthesize the results that they got from the conversation. They don't seek out the counterfactual. They don't seek out the proof that they're…”
Clowes: User research reaches diminishing returns between 7 and 14 interviews
“The idea is that once you interview between seven and 14 people, you stop learning new things. Less than seven, you don't learn enough. More than 14, you stop learning anything new.”
Clowes: Ashby succeeds by embedding recruiting outcome data into workflows
“Yeah, it's Ashby. It's the one all the cool kids are talking about now. And it's funny because like people literally talk about it in comparison to all the, even the, you know, the last generation of modern SAS ATSs or whatever And they talk about it in glowin…”
Clowes: Companies will ignore end-user experience without dedicated incentives
“If there is nobody in the organization whose true incentive Is to measure that success, the end user success, their enjoyment, their happiness, their retention, their engagement early on, it will not happen. Or at best it will be a hobby”
Clowes: PMs cannot succeed if they let calendars dictate their time
“If you let your calendar rule you, then nothing good will happen. Like, you know, I know people talk about that a lot, but it's surprisingly common in product management in particular, that people end up ruled by their calendar. And so it's related to that who…”
Clowes: Glean is 10x better than prior enterprise search tools
“It's not often I use a product and I'm like, this thing is like 10 times better than anything that's come before it. It's one of those for me.”
Confluent uses LLMs to cluster and summarize inbound customer requests
“At Conform, we get a ton of inbound customer requests, as you can imagine. Coming from the field or directly from customers, we use LLMs to take in those asks to summarize what they're about, to find other asks that are like that one, like really in a compelli…”
Clowes: Atlassian kept 10% of users in a permanent global experiment holdout
“At Adassian, we did something similar. We had a global holdout group, actually, that was held out of all experiments. There was an interview, experiment platform couldn't target that group at all. So, 10% of all people never saw anything ever.”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Shaun's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 LENNY'S PODCASTLEDGER | Chief Product Officer, Confluent | 1 | 22 | 100% 1/1 | full record on Lenny's Podcast → |