hi everybody today chat with dendel marki product manager engineer reverse engineer of things and a whole lot more well my goal was to talk to him about all of his really fun side projects around taking the Halo video games and making it easy for you to visualize your game statistics in them we instead deviated and talked about some other really fun topics instead we talked about why some products succeed why do some products fail what does it mean to have a great product and what is the role of engineering and product management in building great products especially when we have ai breathing down our necks and doing some really great work without having to have all the skills that traditionally went into engineering and product management and

we cover a whole lot more as well so you don't want to miss it it's a great topic pull up a chair stick around it's going to be fun all right Dan it is great to meet with you online I believe you know I think we chatted about it just before the call that you and I saw Med in real life actually I think on the Microsoft campus long time ago maybe 12 years ago 13 years ago you know Beyond 10 is like you know just long time ago territory so I have no idea about it so it's just great to catch up with you in you know again after all this time and of course I've been following your work ever since then as

well so in many ways I feel like I know you really well even though through your work even though I haven't spoken to you directly until right now yeah I'm I'm

excited to be here thank you for having me and I mean it goes both ways by the way like kuuba like your website folks have not checked out his website yet go do that right now pause the this podcast go check it out because there's you know like if you look for somebody that has both design and Engineering shops like Kupa is your man so do that yeah we talk a little bit more about this technical content Creation in the world of AI later on as well because that you know this brought up an interesting idea of like you know what will the next 20 years of me doing this look like and you've been writing tech for a long time as well so be curious here like what

your future up all of this looks like as well but before we get to all of that you know who are you and then how do you get started in Tech which is my favorite question to ask whenever I'm in these

conversations yeah that's that's going to be a long long story but uh so I'm

and we have time we have time for the full long

answer I I like that about podcast so we we're pushing the bounds uh so I'm Den uh I'm a product manager at Microsoft before that I've done uh a couple of other things so I've been at a startup I've worked at another large company uh that shall remain unnamed uh before that I was a Microsoft twice actually so this is my third time coming back I boom Boomerang twice back to the company so you know you explore the things and you realize like actually it wasn't that bad and you join again and then you go out and be like you know what maybe Microsoft is a thing so I'm a Microsoft now uh I've been in the security space for the past like close going on two

years now so uh I work on a team that builds the identity SDK so if you're using any kind of you know o in your apps websites that use Microsoft entra ID that's that's my team but before that you know you asked like how did I start that I want to say in the most kind of typical cliche fashion for somebody working in Tech that it was like starting from the early childhood like when I was about like seven eight years old something around that uh as you said you know once you go past a decade back like it's all a blur uh but I think my parents were the ones that kind of instilled in me like hey there's this cool thing called the computer you

should learn how to use it and luckily like we were not a wealthy family by any stretch of the imagination but in our house we always had like growing up there was a computer like one of those like old 486 machines that are just like running like what like Windows 95 I think even before that we had a box that was like um a Soviet knockoff of an IBM machine that ran like some quasi Doss system that was kind of cool because you could run this I forget the name of the game but it was basically this like bartender that has to jump between like different levels and like pick up like beer bottles and then put the beer bottle empty beer Bott like it it was

just this very fun game and I remember spending a lot of time on it with these like 5 inch floppy discs uh that you know you you ask people now what's a floppy disc that's another podcast for you but so back then this was kind of what spurred my interest in technology and I was like oh this is kind of cool what happens if I want to build something for this computer what if I want to build this game and that's when I started learning Visual Basic and that was the gateway to me realizing that I actually want to do this long term because Visual Basic 6 that was I think the first time that I saw like I can drag buttons on a form and like if I

program it I say if you click this a message box can pop up and say Hello World it sounds stupid because you're like yeah there's like five lines of code for somebody that was like I don't know like said like seven or eight that was massive that was like wow like this is just the the pinle of computing and so since then I kind of stuck with it and you know through High School through college and not only did I pick up that but I also got into engineering like to me my my kind of the innate curiosity of just like well how the heck does it actually work is what kind of BU built on my experience with computers and I was like okay well how do I take it

apart and the story that I tell people is actually that's how I got into Microsoft that's how I got noticed by Microsoft is that at some point in the past I revers engineered the API for the zoom for people that are younger they might not know what a zoom was but back in the day that was a cool thing from Microsoft that was totally cooler than the iPod I promise you and they had this desktop client this app that ran on Windows that would pull your like stats around um you know like which artist you're listening to like we're going to get into the whole stats thing but like all these kind of metrics that you could pull and like that's kind of cool right

like but how do I do these so I learned how to use like wire shark and I think at the time filler was a thing by now and I put together those blog posts of like here's how to do this and also I think I stumbled across something that was like would allow me to download like the movies like the Blu-ray quality movies through zoom and I blogged about it as well and then somebody from Mar I was like let's let's chat about that and uh I don't think the blog post is live anymore but uh that open doors for me so I uh met the amazing folks that ran at the time uh coding for fun so Clint rutkus Dan Fernandez group I'm sure

you're probably familiar with them oh yeah very much so like great friends yeah so uh they kind of opened those initial doors and like Brian Peak and all of them and uh I I kind of got to know the work that they're doing and they involved me in some of the the conversations and the project that they were building and that's what kind of started my official like quote unquote career if you will so I I started as an engineer and then down the line I realized that you know what but like look I like talking to people just like you I have a podcast and I genuinely enjoy it and I was like man even back then this was like I want to say like close to 10

years ago more more than that and uh I was things like okay well like what is that job where I can combine talking to people and code and apparently there was a thing called product management that I Microsoft called it program management at the time but regardless and so I went down that path I interned as a PM and realized like yep that that's what I want to do and here I am you know 2024 it's GNA going on a a decade I think more than a decade of basically being in the field that is you know really cool and you know let's go back a little bit you know Visual Basic the thing about Visual

Basic right you say only fance a code but the reality is that in a world before Visual Basic existed yeah drawing the window drawing the Button getting the event handling all that stuff working that was like easily hundreds of lines of code and the funny thing is that I think a lot of people today just don't understand how amazing it was to have something where you can go from like I launched a Dev tool I did something very quickly and got hello world up that it's actually not just like a console message or like you know just like simple text on a page but actually was like part of a you know a full windowing system like I think that's just one of those things where

you know you've been in in the developer space for a long time so you might relate is that I feel like as an industry we' just gone backwards in so many areas when it comes to like how easy it is to build web you know content like you know I was in the whole Windows development space like you know windows and WPF of course was huge when I was at Microsoft for a long time and so I was there but then I went to the web world and I'm like wow the website is so you know outdated compared to how easy we had it on the desktop side and of course you know the flash world was very you know unique in that sense was like it

was the web world but it gave like that flexib ility of like a full desktop compositor and all the things without having to do that work but that of course unceremoniously like you know no longer became relevant very quickly but I think that's one of the most interesting things is like you had to go back in time right and I always wonder

if Visual Basic did not exist and the barrier for building apps or just even getting started was extremely high like imagine a world where you had C or C++ would you or would I or others who are currently having a very similar path have gone into the industry and stay there for as long as we have yeah that's that's a great question mainly because I think I I'm a firm believer in removing barriers to entry for folks like I the nothing I hate more than gatekeeping right like there there's a lot of these conversations where folks talk about like well you're not a real programmer unless you understand these algorithms and can write assembly code who cares like literally who cares right it's like what like we forget that using computers

it's a tool it's a tool for something it's a tool for entertainment it's a tool for solving problems when I write code I write code to address a problem and the problem can be you know I say problem and this very broad term of like it could be my curiosity like I'm curious how this works and I address that problem by writing code and I don't believe that there is kind of any inherent kind of benefit to saying like well you can only be classified as a programmer if you fit in this like narrow box and to your questions like I I don't think I would be in the field actually if the barrier to entry was higher or maybe I would have gotten in

the field but much later primarily because think about it like I was not a super smart seven or eight-year-old like I was not one of those like genius kids that is like yeah age four they can speak seven languages and write like you know assembly code like I I was not that kid and if to me if the barrier to entry is like well learn this like cryptic language that has zero like human humanness to it I probably wouldn't have stuck with it right um and I I think it was a a massive massive benefit that computers were accessible that by then they were well I don't want to say like super accessible but they were more accessible than even a decade prior uh languages were abundant like we had

basic there was uh Pascal which was very easy at the time like turbo Pascal was a thing even though it did not have like a gooey component but it had its gooey version which I believe was dely um so there there's all these tools like it it just so happened to be like the timing was good and then on the web uh kind of side of things you had front page from Microsoft that also helped you kind of like the drag and drop things and uh I I think that that definitely accelerated my interest because also that gave you the kind of instant gratification of like oh I want to build this app for my school that did like quizzes right like you click a button

and like it tells you you pick the right or not or the wrong answer and imagine writing that in the like assembly or C like with like win32 like MFC apis or it's horrible it is still horrible today like even for me now if you tell me like go write some C++ like win 32 code like can can I do something else right like it's I I think it's definitely like that that Paradigm helped tremendously in me picking up the interest in seeing the words and then after that of course as as I built my experience I started diving deeper into a lot of these topics like well now if I want to do you know reverse engineering on specific like file formats I need to

learn how C works and how C structs are like laid out in a specific binary file but that stemmed from that understanding of like but I I I already knew how some of these things work at a high level and now I can do a deep dive right like if you think about the analogy of learning how to swim if I you know take you by helicopter in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean and drop you off and be like all right good luck learn how to swim horrible like what are the chances you're going to come to shore versus if you start from a more shallow pool and then you're like okay now I kind of get the idea and I can be more comfortable

and get it to a deeper and deeper level I think that that analogy still stands yeah that's actually a great way of looking at it's actually funny because I brought up a swimming analogy my previous chat with someone else earlier as well so the different one was still swimming related so there must be something in like you know you're I think you're you're Pacific Northwest right like oh yeah no yeah there something in the air here know I'm also here like there's something in the air here where like swimming you know analogies our bodies of water that's it

exactly exactly no I I think it's you know an interesting way of looking at it because you know programming itself is hard but if you take many steps back is that you know yes we write code but the people who end up benefiting from that don't really care they have a problem they're trying to get solved and how it gets there and how it works out less interesting for them you know and this is a classic Model of like you know we all drive vehicles we don't know the internals of like you know at least I don't on like how every decision was made and why the car was made the way it was and what works there but there are people out there who do care about it

I'm glad they do care about it and they very passionate about that just like you know developers are in this case but if you take many many steps back and this is probably the product manager in both of us speaking it's like if you take many many steps back you know where's the real value ad in this is a real value ad in knowing how to write assembly codee or is a real value ad in being able to have something in Market quickly that solves the problem very well yes one could make the case that the performance could be you know a little bit better if you wrote you know assembly if you were in an unmanaged code stack and things like that but then

it's like I don't know about that and what about crossplatform what about all these other things you kind of get you know in many ways I would say for free it's always a cost but the developer cost might have been a little less and those are all the attentions that you know I definitely saw growing up you know when working with developers and of course at Microsoft I saw that all the time when we make that shift from like unmanaged to manag and you had net and you had long horn you had you know all those various things where like will managed code be in Windows itself will it not be in all these things so you know we were like right in the middle of

all these conversations and and today it's kind of like the gatekeeping in some ways does you focus on web development for example is someone who uses framer or Wix or Squarespace oress to get content out there would they be considered a developer or would did not be considered a developer because they didn't actually go and like run some npm you know command to create the entire scaffolding for an entire app and do everything from like you know markdown scripts and so on it's a hard question and but I agree with you though like in a grand scheme of things does it really

matter I I'll tell you this like there I have a friend who's an entrepreneur and he is non-technical like we're talking like he doesn't write JavaScript or HTML but he's great at executing on the business side like he he he can kind of figure out the end to-end story of a business very quickly and so when I talked to him recently the same topic was kind of brought up I like well if you need to build like an e-commerce site or if you need to build an experience where you have some kind of checkout flow how do you do this right it's like you're you're not technical he's like well you know what like it's true but also there's a lot of tools that are available today that can kind

of piece this thing together for you like you mentioned Wix there are Squarespace and then Shopify has their own like store and you can customize it and you know what he's still successful it still brings like five figures every month it's ridiculous and we're we're like right like he solves a problem he found a problem and he's addressing it through some SAS business and he did not really build the kind of the the core kind of components to it and there's going to be some work that he needs to do to make sure that you know oh I need this like custom flow to get like track like customer orders or something but there's a lot of stuff that you can basically use like Lego bricks where you can just

like put it together and it kind of gets you like 90% of the way we need to get and so in this example he's solving a problem he's doing the thing he's actually having running a business is bringing the money does he care that behind the scenes the users view or react or like I don't know whatever other framework is famous in this week I don't know he doesn't care doesn't matter

yeah exactly right and there's this moment you know or Le movement like you know like five six years ago it's like you your performance of your content needs to be really really high because if it's not it's going to be you know not great Fore from an SEO point of view and things like that as it turns out that's actually not very true you know I don't think know SCH really at least frombody think publicly doesn't really care about those kind of things it it also it's like we're talking about performance and it's funny because sometimes people conflate this especially in a technology space as to where performance matters and where it doesn't and I'm not saying that this is like an incentive for you to go and

build extremely slow websites because those are like super frustrating like I uh Reddit I'm looking at you your mobile app is freaking horrible I'm never using it I'm not like and their mobile site is even worse because it starts all these like it loads and it starts spinning

it's like whatever framework they use can you please not but it it like the the the focus on performance perance often times takes the developer Centric view instead of the customer Centric view oh I'm a developer I want to increase performance okay like you're going to squeeze like 7 Seconds out of some request somewhere doesn't matter for the customers of your marketing site I don't know but most likely not like I don't know never in my life have I went to a site and like wow this loaded like half a second faster than it could have that's impressive oh I look I went to a site to like place an order or watch a video or whatever it doesn't matter a lot of times the customer

doesn't care it's a lot of this developer driven oh I need to squeeze every every like millisecond out of it and it depends on the context right like if you're working on something that is a backend service that is a distributed system yes every millisecond counts you want to squeeze as much performance as possible but for a lot of things like oh I'm building a website for my customers to read a blog or something like oh one framework gives you like 3% faster load times like does it really

matter I don't think so yeah and especially true if what you're building is unique where there's no competition for it you know like for R Reddit can be 10 times slower but because the things you want to read are on Reddit and nowhere else we're going to be like yep we're going to take a little longer you know same with Amazon same with some of these other various things you know the there are cases where if what you're building of course it's a commodity you know I look at new many ways as an example where a lot of this republish you know you know the Associated Press or reuter and things like that yeah I'm going to go to these sites that have fewer ads and fewer like you know things

like pop up saying like you know subscribe or do something like that I'm like you know I have my Buy store like okay I'm gonna avoid those kind of sites but those aren't by you know and large like the most common things that people spend exactly like my bank website is slow am I going to stop banking now no I'm going to still figure out okay let me use a different browser because it's not working in this browser like something you I'm going to jump through hoops because there's no alternative and I think that often gets missed as well because as a technologist you're like I'm going to spend an entire Milestone doing you know these kind of things when the reality is like you know if you reduce friction as

part of your checkout flow you know if you reduce few of these interstitials if you autofill things in a more Smart Way those are probably going to be much more meaningful than improving the performance by a certain point no agree It's Tricky yeah I I agree and especially you know even kind of building on what you just said of like websites that you don't have a choice like oh you can find a product but it's only on Amazon are you really going to stop using Amazon to order it probably not that's not necessarily you know a forcing function for Amazon to say like oh we don't care about the performance then like your checkout process can take seven minutes and who cares like you still want to make sure that it's it's

good it's a good us exp to me like as a customer I enjoy when websites are Snappy they're fast they're responsive like these are all the things that matter uh I want my bank to be responsive when I initi like an external transfer or something for that to be responsive and I don't need to click twice on a button because I didn't realize that it's actually loading already and then yeah we like executed transaction twice I don't want that right but there's a marginal benefit to it like oh but if the statement loads you know on some marginal Improvement faster do I as a customer care probably not like there there's bigger fish to fry and to me again this is I've seen this play out multiple times where a lot

of times there's kind of this enthusiasm that's very kind of engineering driven I was like wouldn't it be cool if it made this more performant totally it would be but if you have like a list of like 10 other things you can actually improve that your customers would meaningfully benefit from I'd rather do that yep and I think this you know I think you touched upon it indirectly right now I know I worked at you know different companies and I worked at different teams that Microsoft all had a very different culture in many ways I do think that in sit situations where engineering drives like you know the large part of the influence over what the product ultimately does there's a slightly greater emphasis on things like

performance and these other metrics whereas I've seen like when you know either product or design happens to be like you know more influential in these areas where this sometimes I take a you know like a different you know different prioritization where like you know does this make the user feel more emotionally attached to your product you know it's so maybe this little animation I might add like you know maybe 0.1 second of extra like you know file size and time it's actually worth it because you know it's going be memorable people going to like the brand of it and things like that more whereas if you look at it purely from a rational you know metrics driven only point of view you might be in a situation where like yeah we're

going to you know there might be something huge that is actually a real problem behind why this app is really slow but I'm going to block this net new thing you're doing because that's what at least not going to add to the problem more and so it's easier to say no to something than it is to like actually go and like refactor something that's actually like probably the real course Source yeah of like the the performance problems and It's Tricky you know and I think you and I probably you you say work at startups and large companies I

love working at large companies you know I love the drama I love the chaos I love the you know when you survive at a large organization you realize that those skills are very valuable in you know only large organizations doesn't really translate to other areas quite as effectively and so I've seen like this play out so many times and it's just one of the things where like you know hopefully you're lucky to be in a place where you know that level of pragmatism exists but if it doesn't it's the Healer want to die on us I'm like sure fine you know what yeah go go shave some 10 kilobytes off of this no one's going to care but if it keeps you happy and you

know I have the freedom to continue executing my road map go for it I like

that framing mainly because I also think that often times we sweat like the small details and we think it's so important and I I like the frame of like that's not just the hill I want to die on like does it matter like in a year who's going to remember that we shaved off like 10 kiloby or something like yeah see I don't know not that many people who's going to care about any decisions that we make in like one year five years unless you're working on something like medical equipment where it's like literally life saving like there is huge you know there's a huge liability on you to do the right thing as good as possible most of us don't do that most of us build like CR apps and like sdks

and applications and it's like yeah there there's some things that are critically important and that's why I

said like context matters like if you work on like I work in security and for us like performance matters when you deploy some kind of container that does like authorization authentication logic every like shaved off whatever second amount is important if I'd be building an SDK for talking to I don't know my roadter here on my desk it's like I don't care it doesn't matter there always an interesting thing about you know especially with PMS who are working on developer facing products is a very different world than a consumer product where like consumer product you know you want to minimize friction you want to make it very easy for people of all experience levels and abilities to be able to use your product very well whereas with developer facing

product it's like well you know there's a certain level of technical depth you probably need to have you know to be able to be successful in this area anyway so if there's a little bit of friction there a little bit of extra work you need to do to be unlock it's okay you know we're willing to sacrifice some of that because you know fit and finish and polish may not always be needed and that's always ATT tension though like you know we you know at Microsoft you know like different teams you know we know we want to speak say them out loud but we know some teams really care a lot about developer experience and do a really good job like making really polished apis and like you

know experiences on the console on the web and the CLI and all these things other teams really really don't but at the end of the day though does it really matter because you know if you need to do something Mission critical and there is no alternative and you already bought in on this like overall stack you're going to do whatever it takes to get done because again as a developer you're flexible you've seen worse things in the past you probably you probably wrote assembly you know back in the day so for you like you just have like a mouse and a keyboard can visually do something even if it's like you know writing in a terminal that is huge and I feel like that luxury that all of us who are you

know both product managers in a developer facing space operate in you know it's both a curse and a blessing 100% I all I can say is I agree so

but you know getting back to the zoon you know I I love the zoom probably the you know I had so many I had like at least five of them you know every generation of it probably the best hardware I've seen best screen at the time for like being being able to navigate and for me the best part also was like you know every time I have like friends over like a party I'd actually have my zoom docked to the television and then the actual visuals that it would play like it' be like album art some lycs and like the animation behind it no one else ever did that really well even when the Xbox replaced it you know for a brief moment can play like music

on the Xbox and you can have it be streamed it was never the same Fidelity of the visuals it was like more like this it's more like what Spotify is today you know almost like you know 15 years later where it's like yeah you see the album art you might see some colors or something about the artist going on behind the scenes but it doesn't look as Tastefully or as designer friendly as it was and also you know the zoom was one of the few ones that actually didn't have like a a converter from like analog to digital when you were actually project was an HDMI connection was fully digital so if you cared about the audio quality which I'm not sure my ears could

ever detected but psychologically I was like wow I'm actually like getting the best quality audio that I can because there is no you know translation going on between like analog and digital you

know for for all the for all the crap that sometimes like products like Windows Phone get and you know like some of that is Justified zoon was one of the best gadgets that I've ever owned like I'll Echo your sentiment it was just such a polished experience I felt like you know from just like the the box that you held in your hand with like the design of the box and the unboxing how you kind of get the the actual device and they had like the touchpad that you can kind of navigate that was not just perfectly round but it was this kind of rounded rectangle shape and yeah and it was just it it was so good and then you plugged in your computer and then the zoom

client would fire up and like the like I said like the visuals of like artists and syncing and it was the the first client that actually like it bootstrapped the whole concept of Metro design I I don't think they call it Metra anymore I think they at some point I got replace with something else but it doesn't matter so that design language is what that was kind of those initial steps and it was so good and when they discontinued it I was like man that's that's extremely disappointing because I love my zoom it it was one of the gadgets that I think I will say the unpopular thing I I liked it more than the iPod I think the iPod was the first but the zoom was better and you know but

I don't I don't want to get on a flame war on

this I mean I think at this point like people have no idea what an iPod even is either so I think you know we're in very territory that's true because when I was an intern at Microsoft it's probably like 2007 2006 the intern gift was um I think it was a Toshiba gigabit you know I was running the portable version of Windows Media Center UI almost in many ways and that was also absolutely beautiful like I think Windows Media Center also didn't get enough credit for like how well of a UI it had for like the 24 or 12 foot experience and that in a portable screen was fantastic like I love being a kind of like the the rectangular with the glossy in the

shadows I think you know I was actually watching a video of it just recently because I always like just like to go back and be like man we had it so good with some really good UI back then right

yeah even now it holds up extremely well of course the zoom holds up very well even now because that tastes fulness of like a minimalistic design that has like you know B colors and edges it's Timeless in so many ways and absolutely and I think this goes back to like what you just talked about right now with developer tools and so on is like you know does it really matter did it really matter that Zoom had much better UI much better packaging at the time much better you know all these things I think Zoom was also the first one to have like a a monthly past right like you have unlimited songs for a monthly fee 10 songs that you can download for free every month you can keep them exactly

exactly the zoom pass had all these things going for it right but the end of the day it didn't matter and it always I always remember that part because I was like so in the middle of a lot of these things with the Zoom team on like how it works on the runtime capabilities and so on and working developer division at the time and it always go back to like you know it doesn't matter if you build a better product it doesn't matter if you do all these things there are more fundamental forces at play here and sometimes distribution is critical sometimes having the you know the partnership with the big lab so that you get some songs on day one far more important than being able to have like

other things and at that time Z had really good marketing as well so you can't even say like you know micros wasn't investing enough into it and so on it's like they did all the right things it's just that like you mentioned it was not the first MP3 player by any means I mean NE was the iPod there were many MP3 players that were around at the time like but it was definitely the one where it it wasn't was not different enough in the areas that mattered where it C people to be like I'm going to switch away from what I'm going to do I'm going to switch away from the trend of people buying iPods to try this thing out

yeah I think that there's fundamentally a shared understanding across good product managers is that for example being the first is not the most important thing right it's like it's sure you you can be the first in certain things but often times the second product can win at the same time and this holds true as well is often times because you gave up that first place and then you're second like you said there is more forces in play now that you need to overcome which is if I'm a user and I need to switch my uh let's say the zoom came how many years after the iPod like I I can look it up right now I can Google it but let's say like two years

hypothetically if it's two years off of the iPod or three years that means that those three years the customers have already kind of bought into the the competitor ecosystem right they use iTunes they bought a bunch of music and at the time don't forget iTunes was DRM so the music was not easily transferable so I couldn't just plug in another MP3 player and just copy my iTunes music on it like it was like oh no this music plays well on your iPod but good luck if you want to take it somewhere else or I bought movies on iTunes that are also DRM that I cannot take anywhere so those three years establish that kind of foothold of like all these customers now have this kind of in they've invested

into this platform to some degree so you coming in with something else it has to be massively better for them to abandon all of that if it's just another one like oh but we also do music it's like well yeah all right and it's a totally fair thing right it's like there needs to be some kind of benefit of saying like why would I switch and yeah we can argue about the fact that there is kind of new customers and there's existing customers and maybe they should have pursued a different market and like I have not worked with the team I don't know what their plans were I don't know what the data they had at the time but ultimately what matters is like you said like the the

competition kind of showed that the the iPod won and then you know there was the iPod touch and then after that they just wrapped it all up like nope it's just the iPhone now but yeah you know I always think about like you know because we both work on products and you know even we don't work exact on MP3 players the similar forces exist you know that influence exactly what happens here and I always have this model where I think of like you know these I think of like multiple sine waves you know kind of going parallel I look at three of them at least one is technology itself you know technology is evolving and so what you're doing today you know it's going to be really cool for a couple of bit

and it's going to become boring it's going to be that's like the that's like the Valley of the sign the PE is like something really cool is happening then there's the whole user preference user Ben you know what users really care about as well like you know for the most part you know there might be a certain need that comes out where us like oh this is exactly what I need then they're going be like okay I'm bored I don't need it anymore so I'm not going to use it anymore so that there's a little peek and Valley of that that goes on as well then there's the actual team who's building it themselves oftentimes like you know when you look at PMS you have

the founder type of PMs and you have the operator type of PMS as well and so often times when you're doing something brand new and something really cool you know you often have the founder type of PMS who are like willing to be dealing with ambiguity and working on some of these things and then they eventually move to do something else and you're left with a different kind of also equally important on how do you now take this product and make it sustainable and make it go you know in the long way and so what I always f with the iPod and Kos them in some ways is that they had a technology Trend right and so as the screens became bigger as the form

factors were able to be smaller as you can do more things with touch you don't need to like have like you know physical buttons and so on they kept up with the trend so they never let the hardware itself language and it's of software as well you know like all the stuff that kind of played in the color screens came in it was really cool they had the like the really tiny form factor they the smaller form factor like the of course the larger size ones they're almost like iPhone size they had all that going for them and you know they also read the trends effectively where not only they first in reading that you know people want music you know everywhere they go maybe audio books and maybe videos as

well and as they got to the point where like you know what maybe privacy and not privacy but the being able to carry your music on any device listen to any machine without having it be DRM and so on not a bad idea also and we can actually do some of that they stayed up to trade on all these kind of Trends so it's a case where like the opportunities most products you know most successful products end up going to this period where they're like they just they struggle they become they go to dark days and then they eventually emerge at some point they're lucky but you know with I think in the case of the iPod they were firing on all cylinders consistently really well the opportunity

never came to point where like you know that product was at a Valley and the zoom came in at a peak where they the the differences between what made the zoom truly valuable what made the iPod truly valuable just didn't quite exist and I look at that in terms of many apps that I use on a regular basis as well because my favorite example always is like not taking apps right like you know the not taking apps I use have evolved you know over the past like 15 16 years you know it used to be notepad on my Windows machine like I use a notepad file and like many notepad files of various things I do and then it went to Evernote for for a brief while then it

went to like you know one of my friends built a not taking app I think I forgot what it's called this point wow I forgot was called completely but who's let me ask who's your friend is Pascal D Silva I think I know the what you're talking about but yeah he created a company called thinko t i n KO it was probably the most colorful most visually stunning note app again very simply to take note apps in hang on let me let me now I to Google this find out right now thinko note taking app I'm just really really curious now because I've never heard of this actually I think I've heard because the name Rings a yes and pasc has been a regular on my

podcast as well and he's like you know he and I work close together on like various design things as well so okay you know I mean this might one to we edit out in the final recording because we're both Googling this but hang on thinko no taking it it was actually it was also on the Windows phone it was a Windows Phone app as well and so that's why I remember like you know using it quite a bit thinko Pascal note okay I'm seeing okay I think I'm on the right page now let me go and see what's the first result okay I think I go to archive.org at this point wow this is what happens when you know you've been doing things for like so so

long that that you it's kind of like living long enough where the stadium gets built and torn down and rebuilt again I think I've been in Seattle now long enough where that might be happening again you know with like I think the the Sounders and things like that okay I'm at 2017 let me see a snapshot of what's going on here redirecting go for it let's see okay 2012 looks about right in some ways okay I'm on the website right now so I'm on the right page light box okay Dracula this is before then I mean you can always find it later it's no big deal that's true that's true you know I do one more click okay I I'll find it later we'll talk about be edited

out as well we'll include it in the show notes it's fine it's it's post edited that's it's great yeah so for whoever's like watching after at this moment yeah den and Ice probably spent like maybe you know three minutes going like archive.org and all these things to to find it out but yes you know getting back to like what I was saying about no taking apps always a great example like you know what made me choose it back then what made these products really cool what made them no longer cool like did they just keep adding more and more because you know my goal for no is like simple easy to use I can access it from various devices that I'm on very quickly what seem very fundamental basic kind of

a point but you know over the time all these products they had something there they somehow ruined it but some other reason and then something else came in which basically you know five years later was basically V one of the product I'm replacing from like five years ago like you know look at notion I'm like yeah notion you know four years ago was exactly what Evernote was like you know 10 years ago and now I'm I just use Apple notes right now and I use quip every now and then most at sales force and quip was really popular and and quip still maintain that very simple kind of a model like I can write something I can share with someone very quickly no complicated UI just primarily

focusing on text I'm like this is actually pretty cool has commenting capabilities as well and so so that's why I still use even now but I know at some point it's going to be like okay they're going to add more features because that's what you know that's what do they add more features to things and then it gets to the point where like I can't use it anymore so I'm going to wait for some other company to basically copy what was done by quip you know seven years ago or six years ago yeah

well and that there's a misconception that every Market is a winner take all market and that's not true now let's be clear there are winner take all markets for example we talked about Windows Phone early on right Windows phone came on the heels of iPhone and Android already being a thing right and both iPhone and Android had a bit of a head start in terms of building their app ecosystem like yeah we all know that like iPhone launch without an app store and then it came eventually and it did not have copy paste which came eventually but when Windows phone came on the market that ecosystem already kind of almost like cemented itself around two key players and as it did that a lot of

people realize like well hold on my Windows phone doesn't have a copy paste right they're like oh but that's okay the iPhone didn't launch with it either yeah but you're competing Now with an iPhone that has all those things right you're you you have an inferior product that you're competing with something that is much better they failed to pick up traction on the kind of the app ecosystem right like the I remember look I was a Windows one MVP like I I I I was pretty deep into the ecosystem and it sucked that my friends with iPhones be like hey have you seen this like cool thing that was like Doodle Jump or some like one of those like Flappy Bird and whatever and I was like nope not on the

Windows phone all right man oh Snapchat is on the iPhone have do you want to do you want to like send a receive Snapchat you know like images and I was like I don't have Snapchat on Windows phone right like that thing it killed it I mean when you don't because there is a win or take all Market there it's like whoever was the first and then you invest in the ecosystem and you your ecosystem involved and then another product comes in that doesn't quite match up to that ecosystem those apps are not there those capabilities were not there no matter how good your camera is or like how fancy your messaging interface like it doesn't matter but also there's markets that are not win or take all like we're

thinking about like SAS businesses right like a lot of SAS businesses there is opportunity for everyone like you said note taking like how many note taking apps are there there is one note there is Loop there is note Droid there is bear for iOS and Mac there is um like Evernote I don't know if they still exist or not I think like didn't they sell out or something but um that there's plenty of them and there is a market for all of them because they all solv their kind of oh there there's notion of course uh and they all solve their individual kind of Market needs like I don't want notion I want something simple so I'll just go and use notejoy I you know or Apple notes or

whatever like something simple doesn't mean that there all needs to be Consolidated across one no taking app a lot of SAS business are the same and they're not win or take all markets and that's kind of the misconception a lot of people like we have to be the only one in the market like or not if you have like a thousand competitors that's probably a problem if you have five competitors I can totally see another business living there I I think the bigger risk you know in many ways where this often comes up is if your success is dependent on the attention of some very small skilled number of individuals in the case of phone is developers you know are developers skilled enough to basically build for you know your

platform and the other platform and the other platform in which case in many ways they're not they don't have time you know I mean zamaron there was Cordova there is react native there's flut all these tools that are existing today but you know they all have their small quirks and TR off where like yeah you know I'm going to focus all my attention on you know either like you know iOS or Android so Windows phone was always in this weird spot and of course they had a very different programming model from everything else as well and it got to kept changing those which

changed halfway I was just going to say

like that that was another thing that a developer said like what like you want me to relearn the thing that I invested just the past three years in like that was that that was it like when that happened I was like I'm out yeah it was really tough and then you know the web View apps came in but you know web View apps were never quite as good or forant or as nice as the native app so you were like okay you know this is just not a not a good case but about noting apps in particular you're right you know when you when you're you know when having many many products doesn't cause any like I guess I'm going to call it like you know Supply constraints you know

there's no short of developers and that you don't have to worry about that you no taking apps unless you're building a platform which notion does have a platform but if no one built on noi's platform the core product as a note taking app though is absolutely fantastic and and no one really has ever come to me like hey can you not taking app to a b and c mine can and I'm never like oh man I need to go switch that other exactly never happened right because that that this doesn't exist at least in that world maybe it might the future who knows but it definitely hasn't happened before so in those cases even if you're a successful product or company have like one% or 2% 5% of the

market that's absolutely fine and of course like you mentioned like in the SAS Market having like 5% of you know instead of paying customers to use your product and you have 5% of any like large Market that is huge you don't have to have 10% even like a 90% it doesn't matter like Salesforce has so many competitors yet they're still very successful all their competitors are very successful like there's never been a case where like we need to basically have 100% of thisat it's just never going to happen and that is completely okay because you know you're not constrained by anything and I say it's also the scale is different depending on who you ask and who you talk to that is if you talk to somebody that's like you

myself that works at a big company like there's all these conversations about like okrs and kpis and like we want to drive this up and kind of 5% of the market might not be enough right to sustain a product but think of like I'm I've been lately very into kind of the SAS business kind of angle of things like the Indie founder Indie startup stuff I'm kind of like exploring like I was like I wonder how that works like I've never been an indie founder not that I want to quit my job and do an indie founder thing but like it it's an interesting domain that I'm just kind of looking into and people misunder understand like look if you have a th000 customers that pay you $10 a month

that's 10 grand right there a month that's nothing to sneeze at as an individual right like for a business that like oh I charge $10 for somebody to pay me for this like not taking app that is very specialized to some Niche you only need a th000 people that there you go like you're not cornering any Market per se but you're addressing a niche need and that's kind of cool right like the scale of like bringing in $10,000 some like a lightweight business that's great like it's not always about the the millions of dollars and I think at larger companies with larger products of course when you talk about the the cap haacks uh and opcs and all these kind of breakdowns like you end up with like

okay well if we invest so much in R&D and we then do all the uh distribution and all these things that compounds to very very very very large amounts and so like at a big company or more con in terms of like this needs to be actually you know like growing in the Market at a certain rate when you're building something small for yourself like a lot of like no taking apps you're not constrained by the same forces or you don't have the same pull and then you can be okay with something much smaller that still is kind of smaller in the grand scheme of things but for an

individual it's freaking huge yeah I think Indie hacker space is like a really fun one you know so much of my Twitter feed is filled with like Indie hackers doing really cool things and the what always makes it exciting when sh is missing in large L large companies is that almost every Indie hacker built something because they're solving a problem for themselves they're like I need a better not taking app or I need to have a better head shot app for taking better you know photos and I'm want to use AI a little bit to do some of these things and you know I think it's like you know level level SI is the oh compuer levels yesu levels right I mean I I don't know if it's him or if

it's someone else but I think his entire operation is a single PHP file for the

back end you know yeah I think going back to the earlier point it's like yeah it doesn't matter how you build it as long as the end result is like I mean I'm not going to be like man I wish this was like you know this complicated you know serverless solution nope it works and makes them very happy and you know very successful in that fun I I listen to a recent podcast where uh they were interviewing Peter and uh by the way Peter like does a lot of like great stuff like I don't necessarily agree with like everything that he says but he builds and he's actually like a doer there's a lot of people that you listen to they're like quasi entrepreneurs and

they all they do is just talk Peter builds he actually does the thing and it is kind of cool that like you said like he is very much like look I have a PHP file I rent a VPS I throw my PHP file in there and there's some database and that's it that's kind of the thing um we tend to over complicate things like oh but like what about this kubernetes cluster and all these like site car things that need to like what are you building right like I I years uh back I uh was doing these like Seinfeld clips and I would just remove the sound and overlay with like Seinfeld and Tech and one of them was the kubernetes one about like how Kramer

wants to do something with kubernetes and then jer's like what are you building and it's like oh some like dumb site and there's just so much of that in real life where you're like oh like we need kubernetes and like an AKs cluster and all it's like but what are you building like oh a Blog really like like what scale are you preparing that for like why do you need this or same the people talk about you know it's like oh for to get a personal landing page use like react and all these like components and then do like or just open notepad and drop some HTML that does the exact same job with just vanilla JavaScript right and I think a lot of the stuff is we're going to come

to the point where that bites us back there like that overly complicated stuff that's starts breaking unnecessarily you're like why am I dealing with this I need an HTML page that was actually very frustrating for me recently I was looking that um just bootstrapping a website for one of my projects that kind of you saw that I'm working on like the the thing called open Spartan and that kind of tails on my kind of fandom for Halo but it it basically is some like home brew projects for me to track Halo stats and I was like look I want a website for this I want a landing page page and I want some documentation that's it that that that's all I need I want plain vanilla markdown

that I can convert to docs and I need some plain HTML and I use Hugo as a static side generator um and I was looking okay surely this is like invented like there's templates that do this and literally every template that I would look at like we use like react and then you have to install a bunch of npm packages and I'm just like WTF man like I'm literally looking at the simp like I want to slap an image in the middle some text some links and then a download button and then I go to another button and it takes me to a documentation site that's generated from markdown it was insanely hard to find something that is simple I found I did land on then like a

theme because like look I don't want to rewrite a theme from scratch like I have better things to do but like all of it was so overly complicated like all of it was just like oh download these mpm packages and then go and configure this and that and it's like why why why is this so complicated for

something so simple yeah because I think the number one thing right is always like well people like what I'm creating you know is it like even worth it like what am I doing here and the quicker you can go from like I have an idea to I'm going to Val and see if it works that's your number one problem not what your text T going be exact single PHP file

and things like that the thing is in very small teams or if you're the founder or if you're an indie hacker basically you can try to keep that you know Focus you know always there you know you and I work at very large companies and we know that it doesn't always scale that way when you go to a large organization where you have people whose full-time dedicated jobs as it is to like Oh I'm a database expert I got hired as a database expert therefore everything I'm going to do is like make sure we have database solution yes and I always sit back and go like you know I love working on like zero to one products that's what I spent most of my career working on and I'm always like

very keenly maybe like almost like paranoid about making sure that every person we bring on to the team has a mindset where it's like okay the biggest problem we have right now is what we're building worth it will people like it and things like that it's less about you know how do we scale for a billion users and if you can't get one user if you can't get 10 users can't get 100 users I don't care about the billions solution as long as we have a way where I can go from a solution has like 10,000 people using it a thousand people using it 100 people using it can also scale to sing 1 billion eventually without like causing the entire service to be you know

interrupted and having a recovery rewrite I'm generally okay with like that level of flexibility and it comes from having you know both that's why that's we talked about earlier is like why so the side projects and the side is that I never lose that you know that muscle because it's very easy to be in a large organization and just get comfortable with the idea of like I'm going to move the needle from one part of the table another part of the table and that to be success whereas the real metric is like you know can we reinvent a category can we do something completely new and that requires having this constant questioning of am I making sure the team is working on making that happen or are

they now optimizing for things that are not necessarily optimized for right now exactly yeah I mean we talk about Peter and this is kind of one of those things where he does it really well is just focusing like I solve a problem and we'll cross the bridge when we get to it of like billion of users but like why Design This when he was writing his book I think it was called make um he literally was showing that he was writing inside a vs code and he's I'm just going to write in vs code or like a Google doc or something for like a draft and get feedback and then I'm just going to convert to a PDF there there you go there's the book right how many people

do you know that will try to write a book it's like let me find the perfect software for this and how do I lay out the pages and let me pick the font for it and like how do I like align this and we're spending so much time like bike shedding instead of actually focusing on what's important is like I want to ship a book I'm going to write the book and I'm going to deliver it and I'm going to on it and over time if it becomes more popular like I don't want to speak for Peter of course like he has his own mind on that but like in my mind if I'm writing something simple and then I evolve it and I iterate based on

feedback like oh now everybody's downloading it I better go and figure out how to do XY and Z instead of me spending like six months trying to be like I'm gonna make it perfect and then I launch it and nobody's using it yeah I

mean what he described and you know and what Peter does as well like seems like common sense yet I always feel like you know whenever you are in a large you know venue or like a large group you explain this like wait what are you talking about like who's going to do abnc or what about that or what about this I'm saying like why what planet are you from like if you do this you're basically just asking for someone like Peter or someone like yourself to just come in and be like okay there's a problem here I want to solve it I'm out the door with it whereas like you'd still be like you know writing a PRD and like getting approvals from all these

kind of things and exactly and that that's the part that is always like worrying some times we look at software development and just a complexity of things and not to mention with AI with some of the you know the tools that are available now what used to be needed to be able to build an app that does all these things yeah the barriers is being lower and lower and I think in many other Industries and many non-tech areas you know if if you were to ask me like okay you need to go replace like the tire in your car I would be like great I'm going to go to a shop I don't care if it's a best shop it's going to be in town they have an availability they're

going to pick a tire that you know I'm going go to Quick reviews it's GNA be done done that's it I'm not going to like oh what kind of tool should I get to like replace it you know what do I do myself like I'm not going to do any of that stuff right so when you apply the same thing to programming there's going to be a lot of people entering this field who are not going to be in the bike shating mindset they have no concept they don't care about half things as programmers be worry about all they're going to be like okay I need an app that is abnc I'm gonna tell this thing an agent or some AI capability that I want to do

abnc and and when that happens it's going to create this huge influx of a lot of of people whose their careers are built on bike shedding and probably very successful careers based on bike shedding are going to be in for a rude awakening where they're going to realize like wait what do you mean ship something what do you mean actually finish the book what do you mean actually you know take something you have as an idea and actually get out the door and so I I see that happening sooner rather than later nowadays oh yeah and especially because the the tools that we get now like we we think

we see what I I call like AI because it's not truly like intelligent right it's it's it's it's it's autocorrect on steroids right like in a way that how an llm works but it's an amazing thing like it's freaking fantastic my use case for that personally is I use it to write SQL queries like I hate dealing with SQL primarily because there's just so much kind of flexibility in how you compose and do these joins and stuff and then especially if you need to join between like seven tables it becomes this overly complicated I was like man I'm going to spend like half a day just just writing this query for data that I already have I go into chat GPT on paid version by

the way 3.5 and I say here here's the database that I have here's the table here's the 10 12 columns that it has this column has a data structure of this Json this column has a data structure of this Json uh give me a query that and by the way there's more than one table so i' be like there's like two three four five tables whatever give me a query that extracts me this metric that's it from these tables above and I can give it hints and say like oh but like use the value of metric ID from this column or this met it computes me the entire like this like three-page squl query that does the whole like Json parsing and it extracts the field into

its own column and then joins that and then and then and I would ask okay now this query can I optimize it and I literally would just ask it can I optimize this query be like oh yeah actually instead of this joint you could use this join and I'd be like okay but like let me go and actually cross check because I'm not a SQL expert necessarily but I'll go and check and I'll go and like look up on like stack Overflow or whatever and like okay yeah this this seems like it would optimize the performance it makes sense I saved myself like half a day in at most like 15 minutes of just like and now I have a working SQL query that extract me the

data the SQL query is not going to go anywhere in production it's not Mission critical I don't really care if it's optimized to the the the millisecond that it could squeeze out of it and be like did it give me the right data and then I will go and check and I will actually like you know validate that it doesn't produce junk because in the quer is like oh it missed a column and now it's Computing the wrong thing like I would still look and see like I don't just blindly use it but it's a freaking amazing tool because it saves me so much time and there's this kind of anxiety our industry right now it's like well is it going to replace developers is

it probably a certain degree of optimization will happen like I think if we think about the entrylevel careers that landscape I think will experience some tectonic shifts because you know the people that just you know toss out like crud apps they like oh it's like talking to this database all that stuff can be like automated if you saw like the developer AI I think it's called Devon that they released it's freaking amazing like sure we just saw the demos we did not see it in practice but it it is just like the the pace at which we're going is not the pace we will see in 5 years like that's my prediction I don't predict many things but I think that's my prediction pretty safe bet by the way

like I'm not putting much on the line here because given the the velocity of everything we're we're we're seeing but the the these optimizations will land us in a position where like a lot of entry-level jobs might disappear oh you need like an HTML developer that knows CSS and JavaScript to like spin up your marketing sites entirely automated gone oh you need like this entry level like database analyst that's going to run and compose SQL queries gone so now you end up in a position where you're like okay but now we need to figure out like what is an entrylevel job once that actually happens and you know you might need some different level of expertise uh you might need to be be um able to learn more in- depth topics

about programming and we talked about like the the barriers to entry at the very beginning may maybe that will get a little higher because like you'll actually need to have certain level of expertise in certain domains that is going to put you above kind of the the fold but at the same time like the technology is not slowing down like it's already like again like I see it in my job right now is like if my job right now would be like just purely writing SQL queries to extract data like I'd be worried

yeah I think you you're more of at this point more of a conductor you know you may not know how to play instrument in the orchestra but you kind of have a good sense of like you're both the conductor and the composer and maybe in the short term conductor long the composer where you you kind of like know that this is what it want it to sound like you don't exactly know the details of what instrument to play when and where so you're going to be experimenting using the AI as like a sounding board it's like you know maybe the first 10 attempts bu it will be bad but you know enough about quality and taste to be like okay this is a good solution this is bad this be tweaked

this way and so on so it goes back to like the various ESS you often see especially in product management on you know having the core skill is important but you us like you know how do you develop good taste good product sense how can you spot a good product from a bad and those are things that often takes like years of experience to you mentioned though you're short circuiting all that you know basically there will be no intermediate steps you're going to start day one being like okay let me go right a spec on like changing this icon color from something to another that's going to be automated away it's going to be more of like okay why is there an icon even there what should the icon do

we need exactly better way of conveying this information you're moving up a level and that gets you know that is good territories for a lot of us who've been PMS for a long time but for entry-level PMS who never saw this before it's going to be scary and I agree there going to be tectonic shift and I don't know if the world or even the education system or even this onboarding plans is preparing people to

be successful for sure 100% And I think the the important part here that's actually part of the reason why I don't buy in into the idea that like there's going to be this job called a prompt engineer cuz in my mind again caveat personal opinion that's a dumb job why because you can be just a prompt engineer you have to understand what exactly you're prompting and getting out of it if I am writing SQL queries and I have no idea if the output is correct or not I have no clue how it actually works behind the scenes I can introduce so many problematic things into the fold into my product into whatever I'm building because like I have no idea what I'm doing you know I asked them to

give me the query I pasted the query I copy pasted there you go like no I still need to validate the data I still need to so that's why I really like the framing and I think not to like necessarily like call out like specific companies but like the the framing of this being a co-pilot to you as a developer as a designer as somebody is genius in my mind because it's like it's somebody that assists you it doesn't necessarily take over a 100% of what you're doing but it can help you do what you're already doing if you are a doctor that goes and says like I need to analyze these you know 17 x-rays uh wouldn't it be awesome for an AI to look

at that and be like hey like these are the anomalies that I see and then you as a doctor you're not abdicating your responsibility right you're not like oh AI said here I'm going to go to tell patients no you're not you're you're absolutely not you're still going to look you're going to validate that and say like hm okay this warrants like another test this warrants me to go and reimage same thing goes for developers same thing goes for designers same thing goes for product managers the application responsibility is just not something that I see happening purely because somebody needs to make sure that whatever the output is is actually the output just because you could type in some text and you generate an image like

hey look at me I'm a prompt engineer now look how how awesome like I I'm I I designed this thing right I produced this art like no you didn't and here's the thing like if you have like like you mentioned like if you don't have the sense of like what is good art how should a page be laid out what are the proportions what's the good color scheme you have to have that sense right like you can't just toss things over the wall and be like well well the AI told me that my page should be yellow with these blue buttons so that's what I'm going to do like I hear you Dan now I know when we started this conversation and one things I reached out to you and one the chat I

was like I want to more about your Halo Integrations and things like that I think we probably covered a lot more interesting topics than we could get to in that time frame I think we should probably have you on a future at some point to talk sure both about this as well as that but before though you know I do want to I do want to have the Halo part You Know cover you know it's one of my it was one of the formative games for me like when I first Halo on the PC that was an eye open experience I played half half all these games are cool but Halo was the first time was like wait a minute this is absolutely amazing be SC

with the warthog and like the wheel is now going on of its own because you know got destroyed like those were just like mind blowing moments for me so what's your favorite Halo game man I'm also

gonna go against the grain here and say that I actually like Halo 4 Halo 4 yes people people people bag on me for this all the time because like Halo fors when 343 took over from Bungie and they totally butchered it no they didn't I like the 4Runner story I like the deda I like the the Promethean weapons that they introduced there's a whole bunch of really cool stuff that they added that I think set the franchise in the right direction so I think Halo 4 has been my favorite like I I started my halo career uh with Halo 3 but when I saw four I was like this is like levels better than what I played in three and then with like the multiplayer and four was great

and just the Dynamics of that game and just the the visuals hands down um you know I I still like I'm in the middle right now of replaying the campaign again an MCC because I I played kind of the original Halo 4 but now I have the it's not remaster it's just integrated in the The Master Chief collection but that's that's my current uh Pastime it's just going through the campaign once again after what it's been like 10 years something like that yeah it it really

has I remember like buying it on the day of you know that Mar how you get the discount as well at the time so you know it was like on day one I was like I've been getting it going to play it and so on so what what is your take on Halo ODST or did you ever play Halo ODST yes

uh Halo 3 ODST was I think an interesting spin and I actually wish we had more of them uh because you take it a different perspective and it'd be kind of cool to see a Halo from the perspective of let's say the Covenant or maybe the forerunners like the Halo Universe is just so rich in all these different stories and like the lore behind it like I'm a nerd I'll admit it right now that like I read the Halo books like I have a giant shelf behind me they're just stacked with like top to bottom with just Halo books and I wish we had more of a perspective on that so ODST was actually in my mind really good because you see somebody that's not

necessarily the core protagonist like the master chief the Spartans you see a Spartan you're just a normal human being yes exactly you're a normal human you're a soldier and you go through the motions of what you see happening right uh and I think that was a great experience and again the the visual like the atmosphere the kind of the meme of like the saxophone starts playing as you start like walking around like it was great I loved it and I um maybe I'm just a very easy tolee fan because like I played through all the all the games and they all sound really cool to me and they all look really cool to me and you know like Halo infinite the story I think the the

spoiler alert the reveal of the Endless at the end that opens up new doors for probably future campaigns maybe like I'm excited about that that sounds great I don't know man it's it's just I I feel like there's just so much in the universe to still

explore very very last question Halo Wars what was your take on that haven't played Beyond like one or two games Okay I I look real-time

strategy is my thing I play Age of Empires a lot and somehow Halo Wars just never really clicked with me but you know what I'm I'm gonna I'm gonna try it again maybe like again because I wasn't the same I know I played Warcraft 3 and Starcraft Age of Empires and all I loved like that game I was like how can a controller and a console be able to allow me to do all these things they had really interesting ways of doing it and actually was like I think for probably a year or two it was like all my people in the team I worked at Microsoft we all would get in the evenings and play Halo Wars together and was like you know it

was actually the thing that we did actually it was actually like a lot of fun so I need to try again shot you know at some point I see like the the the beauty of this podcast is after this I'm just like man now I want to try Halo Wars because Kupa recommended it and this is like you know your seal of approval to

it oh hold on I lost your video for oh you're back now now you're back now you're back yeah well Den it was fantastic chatting with you I think we covered a lot of really fun topics on on product management which actually you know is great on everything for the most part though right you know you don't get to chat with that many people who've been a product manager in a Dev technical space for as long as you have and so it's just great catching up on all of that and you know we talk about Halo at the end as well so I think that more than you know made up for like my curiosity on like Halo in general so it all worked out that that was a great

conversation thank you so much for

having me here