About this episode
Todd Olson joins me to talk about making analytics worth paying for and relevant in the age of AI. The CEO of Pendo, an analytics SAAS company, Todd shares how the company evolved to support a wider audience by simplifying dashboards, removing user roadblocks, and leveraging AI to both generate and explain insights. We also talked about the roles of product management at Pendo. Todd views AI product management as a natural evolution for adaptable teams and explains how he thinks about hiring product roles in 2025. Todd also shares how he thinks about successful user adoption of his product around “time to value” and “stickiness” over vanity metrics like time spent.
Highlights/ Skip to:
How Todd has addressed analytics apathy over the past decade at Pendo (1:17)
Getting back to basics and not barraging people with more data and power (4:02)
Pendo’s strategy for keeping the product experience simple without abandoning power users (6:44)
Whether Todd is considering using an LLM (prompt-based) answer-driven experience with Pendo's UI (8:51)
What Pendo looks for when hiring product managers right now, and why (14:58)
How Pendo evaluates AI product managers, specifically (19:14)
How Todd Olson views AI product management compared to traditional software product management (21:56)
Todd’s concerns about the probabilistic nature of AI-generated answers in the product UX (27:51)
What KPIs Todd uses to know whether Pendo is doing enough to reach its goals (32:49)
Why being able to tell what answers are best will become more important as choice increases (40:05)
Quotes from Today’s Episode
“Let’s go back to classic Geoffrey Moore Crossing the Chasm, you’re selling to early adopters. And what you’re doing is you’re relying on the early adopters’ skill set and figuring out how to take this data and connect it to business problems. So, in the early days, we didn’t do anything because the market we were selling to was very, very savvy; they’re hungry people, they just like new things. They’re getting data, they’re feeling really, really smart, everything’s working great. As you get bigger and bigger and bigger, you start to try to sell to a bigger TAM, a bigger audience, you start trying to talk to the these early majorities, which are, they’re not early adopters, they’re more technology laggards in some degree, and they don’t understand how to use data to inform their job. They’ve never used data to inform their job. There, we’ve had to do a lot more work.” Todd (2:04 - 2:58)
“I think AI is amazing, and I don
