Product, Relationships and Teamwork with Chiedza Muguti

Hi everyone. My name is Patrick Akio and if you're looking for Effective product teams and how to get there from a technical side or from a business side, then this episode is for you, my guests yet. Some agouti is currently product leader and chief product officer and ALT EOS learning how to roller skate. And originally from Zimbabwe. I really love this conversation with her. And I had a lot of learnings, I'll put all her socials in the description below.

Check her out. And with that being said, enjoy the episode when it comes to roll right now, could you tell

us a little bit on how you got there when it comes to product ownership and product vision and stuff like that? Yes. So right, so we drove me to start from like the beginning or just really specifically the role you can start from the beginning. That's fine. Okay, cool. So I started as a business analyst so I was working in a

delivery team. Very closely with my David people engineers and Architects and qas, but when I started, I was working in a more waterfall model so you know really writing very detailed requirements are private. But anyway to cut a long story short, I moved from being a business story is very long. It's trying to compress 15 years and to 10 seconds. But yes, I moved from being a business analyst and then over time moved into more of a product owner role. And then moved into more product

management type work. And then now obviously working in product leadership for the last the last few years. So I always tell people that I spent a lot of time like in the trenches doing very detailed work working with Engineers. So really understanding the whole implementation and delivery cycle, how that works, what they need? The kind of challenges that they face when we are translating.

Out of business, Commercial requirements into things that technical teams can work on. So that's also really helped me in terms of being interviewed the ship, because I have a very holistic understanding of sort of how things come together. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. When you say product leadership, what do I Envision their than? Are you responsible for like on a managerial level of the product owners? Or are you more of a business owner of a group of products? How does that work?

Yeah, good question. So I think it depends on the organization but the companies where I've been in product leadership, it's actually being responsible for because they are smaller companies. So being responsible for a number of different whether you want to call them domains or product lines. So being responsible for all the delivery around it, all of the discovery work that goes around it and really taking the company mission and vision.

Translate that into what What do we need to do from a product perspective, to achieve our goals on organizational level. And then, of course, the most important part is, the people part. So growing people, recruiting people and obviously retaining people. So how do you make sure that people are feeling happy and challenged? And they've got a good balance

in their roles. And then a lot of also product leadership work involves processes because the product touches so many different parts of the organization. So, You actually have a lot of influence over the processes because, you know, product teams need this. And that with is from illegal from compliance from sales from marketing. So it's really important to have a really good handle on the processes to make the whole product life cycle as efficient and as fun as possible.

It's not just about efficiency, but also about everybody having fun. Yeah, yeah, I can imagine that. But then the position you're in right, if a company has a mission and a vision and it should translate back into the product, your then in between the product teams that Actually execute and where that mission and vision is coming from probably, like on a more managerial level, am I understanding that correctly? Yeah. So where I'm at right now is I'm in the leadership team.

Yeah. And then at that level, we're talking about the mission and the vision. And then my role is to say, okay, what does the product strategy look like to actually make sure that we can achieve those goals? So how does the product team contribute to our mission and our mission? So that's what I'm responsible. Before. So I don't I want to make sure it goes from the senior leadership team into the team directly.

So it's my job to make sure that that there's a lot of back-and-forth going on and it's not just me, right? So products are done by a group of people. So making sure that it's not that I'm the bottleneck that I'm the only person who's speaking to the senior leadership team about our product strategy, but that everybody is actually empowered to do that as well. Yeah, I love hearing that but

That that's some to me, sounds like a very difficult task. Like, what are some of the biggest challenges they're in translating that to work that a product team can do or can kind of Taken refine? I think that From my perspective, what makes it difficult is because of my background. So as I explained before you know a lot of my work is very detailed.

So I think I tend to have a fear of like another really big and exciting sort of mission and vision that's super super aspirational because a lot of my thinking is really rooted in reality and I'm thinking about like okay but this could happen and this could happen and what about this sort of product ID that we have and how we going to make all of this happen. So I I think for me what I always have to do is just allow myself to feel comfortable in the uncomfortable and in the

unknown. And this for me is the hardest part when it comes to especially being in a sort of leadership position because you really have to speak at that Mission Vision level and then really empower the team to work on the strategy. So I do have to be a lot more aspirational kind of saying, yeah we're going to shoot for this really high thing and try and quieten down. At Super pragmatic technical voice that I have inside.

That's like, oh my gosh, how we're going to handle this house was going to happen and everything. So for me this is probably that from the personally. This is the biggest challenge for me. Yeah, that sounds super recognizable because I'm a very pragmatic person as well. So being on a more like I would say, longer-term Horizon I guess and try to inspire people's is something that's challenging for me as well.

But you mentioned something specifically in in Being comfortable in uncomfortable situations. I actually did a talk about this like a five-minute talk and I'll send you the recording after this, when I have it. But how do you deal with that? How do you get comfortable?

When it's kind of an uncomfortable situation for you? So I think, for me from quite from quite a young age, I've always been a very expressive person. So someone who, you know, really sort of shows how they feel. I don't necessarily verbalize it, but I definitely show it. So whether it's in my face, oh my body language, but you can really tell a gay something's not quite right. And I used to be Very feisty again, not used to be. I'm still fighting might be like, very, very fiery.

I would say and then sort of over time I learned how to manage that. Right. So for me, what's more comfortable is being super expressive and being quite fiery and feisty? But when you're thinking about the context of the workplace, yeah, there's nothing quite land, especially if I think about, you know, cultural differences.

So I'm from Zimbabwe and we Very expressive when there's a phase of voices, the way we speaking, you know, sometimes people might think we're fighting or arguing, but we're just having a very animated conversation. So I would say, from early, on, in my career because I didn't was working in the UK, is, I've mastered the art of I really want to express myself, but this is not the time, which is a comfortable balance, right?

A second, internal tension that you have to actively manage and just be like, okay, I can do this, I can I can get through this meeting without showing like a crazy facial expression. That's like, what are you talking about? Why do we do this though? I think from there, that's when I started to really excited to learn a lot about being comfortable, in being uncomfortable and just constantly telling myself that you're not going to be sitting in this situation forever, right?

Everything comes to pass. Like literally everything comes to pass and this is also helped getting older. I'm turning 40 December. So you know, it's also helped with age where things that seem like the end of the world from you and I was like 25. Now, you know, at 39/40 I'm like, oh yeah, it's not such a big deal, you calm everybody. It's all five, I mean I'm going to keep saying this probably but I recognize in myself that I'm very expressive me.

And my girlfriend sometimes, look at me, I'm a very animated on this podcast and she's like you make way too many faces I That's just me. Like that's just how I look who I am or and I I mean suppressing that or thinking of suppressing that I think I would go insane. Yeah. But I do get that. It can alarm people if you're like hold up like the shit, the sink, the ship is sinking like we need to do something. Yeah, I get that.

I think on that point. It's also about, you know, I think when you are in a leadership position it's actually really understanding that how you come across and how you communicate. It has such a huge effect on people. So if you are super animated or your super, you look super anxious, or you look super stretch, you're actually setting the tone for that team and setting the tone for those people.

And when I first became a leader, I didn't really realize like how my emotions and my emotional expression really had such a huge effect of other people. So it's also over time learning that, you know, No. I mean I'm not talking about being so clinical that I don't show any emotion but just being aware of, you know, hey actually, I am going to really affect people and trying to really think about that a lot more as that's happened. Over time. Interesting.

When was that realization? Because I ate, it must have happened a bunch of times and you would have seen the effect of it before you would realize. Okay, this is basically when I need to, okay? Tone it down or think about how I act. Because, you know, then the roof group Colossians. Yeah, I had a meeting once and

it was a team and I cried in the meeting because I was really know what sort of stressed about something and I just burst into tears and that meeting and I could see that the they didn't know what to do, right? So they were just looking at me like, okay, what do we do? Do we comfort her? Do we like what do we do? They were, it was A very uncomfortable situation and I think I was so in my emotions that it took me a while to realize that oh, actually to

know what. I'm probably, this is not the right place and I need to kind of step back. I need to take time out for myself and really calm down. So I said, okay, I need to step out the room and, you know, you can all finish the meeting and then, you know, if I don't come back in time, we can just wrap up and I just sat in the bathroom and for me it was like because I'm what Someone who really picks up a lot on people's emotions.

So I resent that tension in the room that discomfort and almost like that, you know, like when you want to run away when something is happening, you know, like I think some of them wanted to leave the room but just were like she's our boss and like can we actually just walk out on her? But this is super weird and awkward. So I think, you know, I really sort of set with myself after that and he spoke to my manager and also spoke to a friend of mine and you know to my mom Managers credit.

You know, he was really great because he asked me how did it even happen? How did it even get to the point that you started crying and I was alone? I was like really emotional and he's like, yeah, but they must have been things that had been happening or things that were piling up and then that's how you had that Outburst. So actually it's about managing those Prix events rather than acting that, you know, you cried. But it's like know, how did you actually get to that point?

And then he really made me very conscious about that, you know, that gradual like Upset, I'm upset, I'm upset. I'm actually not really upset so he he really taught me a lot about like really recognizing that this is happening and not letting be like the subconscious program that's just running. And then all of a sudden it's like it's like it's like a volcano. Someone I know very well, very famously called be an absorber, okay. You know, I think she just absorbs four weeks.

Almost had it. Oh yeah. Yeah, I love that example for sure. I want to zoom in on because you misspoke before the show you mentioned. You love when a team is really collaborating right? When it's a smooth operation when it's effective in what it's doing, but a team doesn't get to that point automatically. It needs to go through a lot of rhaegar and figuring things out. Figuring out how you should align and how you should work before.

You can get to that point, what have you seen that makes the

team really effective in either your Leadership position that you are in now or maybe from a product on a perspective that you had before. I think the biggest Epiphany that I had is that my sincere belief is that most of the time when a team is not working well together is because they've got a very different understanding of where we're trying to go and that rests with the leader that rests with the person who is supposed to be leading with it. Is that team or that department

to make it very clear. This is where we're going so that we're all pulling in the same. Same direction because my fundamental belief is that people want to do a good job and people want to work together. But I think the one thing that we need to do a lot more is like that, you know, that really intentional relationship building, you know that really intentional.

You know, Patrick. I want to understand you as a person not like I want to know like everything about you but I want to understand what makes you take. What do you like what don't you like and you know what are the different ways that you receive information? Because you know, It could be that someone says something I could say something that I think is hilarious and someone takes offense. So, actually really understanding those nuances in how we communicate with each

other, and how we come across. I think, especially now, in a world where people have a hybrid way of working, which I think is amazing, but some people are in the office together. Some people are remote, some people are fully remote. So you have to think about how can you actually make that intentional relationship building happen?

You know, when people talk about meeting at the ice water ice water machine, where you can just get nice water but the water machine, where you get what you just start chatting with someone, you know, one of my closest friends, I met her at the printer. At my first job, we just saying she was in marketing. I was working in like, the product team and we got chatting and she was always my in whenever we had a bottleneck with marketing.

My girl was on top of things, but it's because we had built that relationship. But it started at the printer. So for me, I always see that teams. I think fundamentally want to work together, but it's just about understanding. What, what does this actually look like? How are we going to be judged to be successful as a team? And do we all understand that at the same level? And are we reinforcing that?

And how are we intentionally? Trying to build relationships to know each other yeah-hoo-hoo from your perspective should

drive that like should that come from the team? In and of its own, or should a product owner drive there, a scrum Master like, where should that come from? Because I fully understand what you're saying, and I'm recognizing it within my own team. Especially now that we're remote, those printer conversations, the coffee conversations, they don't happen. So we more actively have to work on team building and it gets even harder when you have a big team. Yeah, yeah.

I think, you know, I mean, the Temptation is say, it should come from leadership. They should be something but I definitely think that everybody has a role that they can play. So you know, for me I know that, you know, early on in my career I was always so enthusiastic about trying to get people together to work together to hang out, have lunch, have a drink. So I think it can also be within the team. So I think what the leaders should do is give people the space to actually be able to

share ideas. Like, hey, I think we can do this for team building, or hey, I think we can come together and do this. This activity I think it could be fun for us as a team. So I think there's one party as absolutely leaders should role model. And so I think leaders should always kind of be and I know it's not easy, right? Kind of opening yourself up.

I did this before at another role where I would put out like a schedule and just tell people like, hey you can book 30 minutes for me with me for anything. With it's work-related or you just want to chat you want have a cup of coffee. You want to have a laugh.

You can book this time. Me and I remember the first quarter, I don't laugh, no one booked any time and I was like, absolutely embarrassed and devastated, and then I said, oh actually, and then the next quarter started and then after a few days, people were like, well, where's that showed you? And I said, well, no one booked it last time, so I didn't put it out again. We want to be embarrassed, but they were like, well, actually, it's the it's the fact that it's

there. It's actually of a comfort and I thought, you know what? It's no, it's no water of my back. Like, if I still put it out there because, you know, I guess what, even if one person books 30 minutes that's really, really great.

And then I put it out again and then the uptake was a little bit better, but I think people were just like, oh, and then people started doing it with each other, you know, just being like, Oh let's just like have a child I've seen chairs or does it. So I think that's super cool. So sometimes it also can be the leader can role model, but also should say to the team. Like, you know, if you want to

do stuff like just let me know. So that I Can also maybe it's a providing a bit of budget or space or time in over teams, they like, hey, we won a couple hours to just chat and just give them that time. Yeah, I can imagine I mean Time

is usually the issue is what I feel because the team comes together to fix a certain problem. There's pressure on that problem, they want to fix it as fast as possible, but then you just work as a group of

individuals, right? You don't work together as a team if I'm responsible for the back end and there's a lot of back-end work then I'm going to feel a lot of pressure to finish that instead of it being a team responsibility, I'm going to feel like it's my responsibility but the way that we get there is to actually take time for team building and then Has to come from somewhere. So if, if there are a lot of like strict deadlines, how would you still advise taking that

time? Or should it just be facilitated through leadership in that way? What are your thoughts? I think that when we think about planning, I think it's an age-old problem in software development, it's over commitment, you know, over commitment because what you don't want to do is commit people to the point of your almost committing at 120 percent, right? So people don't even have a moment to breathe and then there's just this angst everywhere, right?

People are you done yet? Are you done yet? Have emerged yet is a test, has the as you know, and and always, you know, say two teams. Like, you know, actually let's just come together. What is realistically possible? And then okay, we should be ambitious, but actually, let's place also have this rooted in reality, if we're having

delivery problems. Now if they are things that are late now, there's no point the next time over-committing again so there's something fundamental that we need to sort out so that we can commit and say okay we're good and then once we're good and we feel safe and also a lot of that comes down to safety, right? People are also afraid you know, be ambitious because they are afraid that oh my gosh if we don't make it we're going to be like the example, everyone's

going to be like right? They didn't read it. So it's really thinking about and I think this is something that comes from leadership, is that you should really look The teams and understand it. Okay this team how are they doing? How they're performing and if there are problems, if things are flashing amber I'm a really big fan of trying to deal with things when it's flashing amber

rather than when it's red. Because every time I've waited until a team is in the red zone, it takes out so much energy from everybody just to try to get to some sense of calmness. So when flashing amber what what's going on there.

And, you know, sometimes as a leader, you have to To face up because remember a lot of it is that upward communication that expectation management and just really you know, be the leader stand up and say to the leadership team we're not going to make it. We don't we don't have the capacity, we can't do it. But this is how we are going to mitigate the situation or this is the reason this is the plan.

I think sometimes we leave teams too much to fend for themselves rather than as L. Just be like, hey, I put my hand up and I take responsibility for the situation that this team is in. This is how I want to remedy it. This is what I've learned from it, and this is how I want us to move forward. Yeah. I like that, looking forward and not too much on things that have happened, right? Because they've already happened. If you're already at that point,

that things are flashing red. The only thing you should do is look forward. Look at your learnings and try to do better as a team as an organization. So I love that you're saying that I love that.

Turn flashing amber as well. But I have a hard time trying to figure out what our kind of symptoms. What would you say is a good symptom that something is flashing amber or that you've seen. So One symptom that I think I've seen quite a lot of the time is, for example, when teams are like, oh yeah, we don't really. Okay. So we all know about all of the different ceremonies that are job teams have.

But when team starts saying like oh yeah we don't really I need a retro because nothing ever happens that I know like okay, something is like something is not quite right here and that also is actually on me, right? It's not about the team because what the team does is they take the time to have all of these ceremonies, they put all this amazing information for, you know, leaders, whether it's an ocean or Confluence or Google, Docs, whatever, and we don't read it, we don't read.

We don't look at what's happening, right? So and then all of a sudden it's like What's happening guys? And it's like, well actually we've documented this in like six retrofits and nothing ever happened. So I think also, when teams are sort of disheartened and then the other thing that I do see sometimes is, you know, I'm okay it's not being nosy but when, you know, select channels or, you know, in most companies, I've worked in a, we use slack.

But when I pick up on people being quite short with each other, honestly, I just monitor it. Kind of see what's happening, but if it does persist in a carries on, then I, you know, I'm just straight in there, like, okay. Is there something I need to know about? Is it something that I can

support you with? Is there a reason that you are feeling this way, you know, with this particular team / person and then sort of trying to get in there while it's like not super rude but it's really like you can hear the tone is like if you don't do this I saw this. So, like really and then I think another one is when, you know, when teams are talking about dependencies, like, okay, I need this from you so that I can do this and when the, when the conversation is not

constructive, then I know. OK, I need to figure out like what's happening with these two teams and luckily, you know, as I'm on the product side, a kind of will take their product managers and be like okay you know you've got these two And then she's like, let's talk through them, what's going on. And then some understanding, like, okay, what are the issues

that are going on? So for me, these are some of the things that are flashing amber, all when I get things, like product, never do dot, dot, dot, dot dots. Then I know like, okay, what's happening? I've never heard that one actually thinking back to kind of your personal experience because I've had a lot of experience with product owners, right?

From a development, from a developer, Perspective in a development team and there's always or mostly sometimes a fight about responsibilities and expectations, right? If they're not on the table we need to put them on the table soon as possible. What do we expect of each other in which degree do you create stories? Who's responsible for the technical stories more for the functional stories? Like it's always a discussion and it there slight variations in different teams.

Sometimes, there's the tech leader takes a bit more responsibility and take some weight off a product of Owner who then focuses more on stakeholder management, and and like, product Vision stuff like that. But before we get into all of that you transition from a

business analyst position or to a product owner position, how did that transition going? And what, we're like the biggest learnings there was it like, because that's what I've seen in certain organizations or we have a team of Bas. Are you all going to be product honest just just like that. This is kind of the way of working figure it out. Figure it out, or was it more gradual in your way?

I think for me moving from business analyst to so specifically for the type of person that I am, I'm really happy that I started out as a business analyst, right? So I could really have a good understanding of very good grip and also on the basis of my degree because I did information

system. So I've already got like that strong sort of technical background because I truly believe that my superpower is being able to translate things to different audiences because Cuz you know as a product person, you're trying to take something that's super technical. How do you explain like you're refactoring something for better performance to someone who is working in like a customer support team who just wants to know, like, why are you not resolving his outstanding

customer ticket? I could just, just tell me in very basic terms, right? Rather than coming and being like, Oh yeah, so we're moving from this server to the server and then we need to decouple these services like the customer support team. Don't But that just tell them, what is the result that's going to come out of all of this, really, really great. Amazing hard work. So I think for me, moving from business analyst to product, as I started to really realize like there is such a big gap.

If you don't have like a business analyst, which is solely relying on people, who are doing brother, pure product rules, the Gap with the technical team gets bigger and bigger, and bigger, and quite a lot in Stars. To get lost in translation. And also all of this amazing work that's happening in the discovering sort of phase of things is not actually being told to the teams that are delivering. So they can also start to prepare their thinking or the appliance so that you're all in

sync with each other, right? So I'm not talking about, make sure the engineering is in every single Discovery session but they should have like some sort of a sense of what's coming. So, I think for me, this is something that I really really took from being a business analyst was too. I to make sure that there is some sort of awareness of what's coming with the with the engineering team and also thinking a lot about how can I be a better Ally for the

engineering team, right? How can I really translate into business terms, all of the amazing great work that they are doing so that people recognize that, you know, these two weeks friends that we take for granted when things have been delivered is actually a lot that goes into it a lot of thinking of hard work. Work. You know, a lot of tension towards the end of Sprints, I'm sure you've experienced that. Yeah, so, and, you know, I don't want anyone to listen to this and think, oh, God.

You know, here's another person saying that you have to be technical to be a very good product manager. That's not what I'm saying. I'm talking about specifically,

especially to do knees. I've worked in so like, you know, payments and really thinking about all of this stuff around like Financial Services infrastructure, there's a lot of really technical stuff that you need to try to Understand with the AIDS is as compliant is the scalable, is going to be the most efficient way of doing things. What are our customers expecting? How are we going to make money? So where do we need to optimize

the most eccentric cetera? So I think it's also organizations need to think about In the context of what we want product to deliver, what type of people do, we need to fulfill these different roles because it might be that a specific team might need someone, who's maybe got over business at his background, but another team, which maybe has a tickling who is having to take on some of the responsibilities? Like exactly what you were saying? They may be, they don't need someone like that.

But it's just also making sure you're balancing all of these different things and not it's not a cookie cutting machine, right? Not everybody, same experience. So You can't expect the same thing from every single product person because people come from so so many different backgrounds. Yeah, I completely agree. It depends on the context, right?

And the experience within the team, the difficult part is usually people just are maybe bunched together as a team and it just expects the expectation is there for them to operate as a team and I love that you said earlier, right? It takes time to grow a tree. Takes time to grow as a team and to not act as that group of individuals. So then the thing that you Should he need is time to get to know each other right? Time to focus on that collaboration. And then you can probably notice

where the gaps are, right? If we do need kind of representation in product Discovery phases, in more of a business analyst role or maybe we do have a tech lead role that can fill that, right? And then you are accommodated

for exactly. And the thing you have to think about is if you want the technique to do some of this stuff, then make sure that when people are thinking about how much work a team will deliver that, I'm not saying this Tech lead is going to be focused on coding hundred percent because they're not going to be right. So also making sure that you don't count that person so that they can actually do that thing that you want them to do properly.

But exactly what you're saying for people to sit down together and talk about like, hey these are my strengths. You know, this is an area where I still really need to improve. How can we optimize the way we work to be able to be able to make our team fly? And then also, for everyone's thinking, Actually, maybe there's some things that I need to learn and understand that will also help me, right?

So for example, I also need to learn a lot about like Financial modeling because that's not my strongest suit, but I'm learning, right? And I'm open about it that I need to learn. So I like hanging out with the content of questions. Like how does this work? And what this mean, just really rise myself with the stuff. Yeah, I was, those are she one of my questions?

Students because as a product owner or product Visionary, product manager, you get to jump into a lot of domains and sure, some domains might be familiar, but I'm expecting that. A lot of them are also unfamiliar, like, when you get that role and you're responsible for a product that's called a chat bar or its payments, or it's econ. Whatever. How do you familiarize yourself with that domain? Is it just sitting a lot with the stakeholders, or how would you do that?

The first thing I do is just I'm, I'm, I like learning in a mess. Way, although with Jim and this is not working at all, is this test is stresses being immersed. My German teacher. I've just like, you can talk to me in German for an hour and she's like, but this is how you're going to learn its immersive learning of. Not know, that doesn't work. But anyways, so what I do is that I like to spend time with the different teams, right? So just figure out like, what are they doing?

So may be going to some of their like, planning sessions or Go to the sessions where they are doing refinement so that I can at least start to hear all of the different terms and I start writing. So I've got loads of notebooks so I just start writing down lots of terms that I'm hearing in these meetings and then of course spending a lot of time with all of the different stakeholders and really understanding. Okay what's this domain will about? I really want to learn.

I want to understand. So now I'm working in insurance. This is like a whole world for me like a big one. It's Huge. It's super complicated and it's very new ones too. So, you know, reading you're trying to get myself into it. And, you know, I was really, really lucky that, you know, people in this new company, you know, they really willing to sit with me for, like, two hours at a time, going to Basics, right? Psych, stupid down to Basics.

And the thing that I learned really early in my career is that there's nothing like a stupid question. So I ask all the stuff that, you know, before I might have been like, oh my gosh, I Can't believe I don't know that but I don't have any shame and just asking the questions then of

course there's reading. There's also a lot that you can get from reading, but also I shared someone in our customer care team who was working on resolving different customer tickets and he was sitting there so patient explaining everything to me like why the customer was contacting how this insurance claim process, works what to look out for what I need the

different information. How they get that information, how they make that judgment, and just spending that timeshare doing that person, I'm actually going to be doing it on. I'm trying to do now they're going to hear this is a oh Lord, here she comes. But I want including to do this on a monthly basis because, you know, really being that close to the customers is super important, right? When you're working on the future of the product, right?

Because you need to understand how our people actually experiencing the product like and obviously with Dance like making a claim is like the hardest part, right? Buying the policies, not that bad because let's be honest, how many people read the actual policy but when you need to make a claim that's when you're like, oh God, like how do I make this

claim? So, really sort of understanding the process that customers go through and what better way to do that, but just sit with someone who's actually working on that. So I found that to be helpful. Yeah, I can imagine that. I mean, I know that has helped me in the past from a technical perspective. So when it comes to the product that you have Value that you need to add. I can completely understand that. That is like, you can't go without right? You need to know what a customer

deals with. You need to know what your business Representatives deal with on a daily basis, right? Or at least have have that monthly check-in that you're going to have that when it comes to stepping into a new domain.

Like I love that you say immersing yourself, but that is one thing, right? That is a step in kind of gaining the knowledge. That is needed to figure out what value is there with. Value can add. But when it comes to prioritizing, then how do you do that? Or how do you take that next step? So I mean, the most important thing is that I have to understand what does success look like for our company, right?

So what does success look like for our board our investors so what are the things that they want to see us doing that? They will say like hey you guys are on track or you're not on track or you're exceeding our expectations. And then, for me, from the product level to now, start to put things together. So I am the queen. Everyone who's worked with me, knows that I'm the queen of putting things into buckets because it's the best way for me to actually think things through.

So, I have one way of thinking where I have a bunch these up with its product people processes and technology. So this is one way that I put everything together and then I say, okay, I know what other people concerns the person's concerns, the product consists of Technology Concerns. Someone might say, oh, why aren't you worried about process? Because actually, I love times. Your processes are actually hurting your product, right?

So, if your processes are a little bit bumpy or something is not quite working, in terms of collaborating teams, collaborating with each other, then, actually, your output is not great or outcomes are not going to be as great as you would expect, or you would want them to be.

So, actually, it's fixed the process, and then my other buckets are Revenue. Incheon Acquisitions of purely, new customers and then growth, which is, you know, I know people say like old growth and acquisition, but the way I see it as acquisition is every new customer and then growth is that if you have multiple products on offer that your customers are using products as the breadth and depth of Youth increases. So for me, this is, this is also growth.

So I put things into different buckets and then understand like, okay, what are we being was the most important? Work that we need to shift right now is it like a revenue metric and then thinking about the products the people that process and Technology what are the different things that can affect our Revenue that we need to prioritize?

And then it becomes a much easier conversation because once you put all these things into buckets that we all kind of speaking the same language I do and you start to have a more reasonable conversation where I can say Patrick, that sounds more like a retention thing and we're focusing on Revenue, it's

not so much a subjective thing. Like all but I think this but we're talking about the same thing and when you have those buckets and you have those ways of actually really putting things, very, very separately from each other.

I know there's some gray like retention can kind of come everywhere, but I do think that this really also helps to use when you're having those discussions plus also when you're communicating the hard decisions like you know sometimes if we're really focusing on Revenue we might be having a An issue. But there's nothing we can do about that in a meaningful way for us to make that promise.

So we have to be very clear. Like this is what our goal is, is there a way that we can kind of put a Band-Aid over this retention thinking? And then when it really you have the capacity to do it, they will do it in a meaningful. Proper proper Focus way, rather than sort of kidding ourselves thing. I'm going to do a bit of acquisition, a bit of retention of everything, and a bit of

growth. Because when you try to do that, The thing that you're going to do is you're going to totally stressed out, all of the other teams that end up supporting these launches. So, like, product marketing and sales, and Business Development, you know, what they need is something chunky, something they can really communicate to be like, hey, we got this thing rather than I've got a little bit of this little bit of this, a little bit of this little bit

of that. Yeah, I love that because from a technology point of view like stories in a vision is usually broken down in epics and when we are When I let me, let me give it to myself and working on, like a thousand different things, or at least, that's what I'm feeling with in a Sprint. Like, I lose focus of what we're actually delivering at the end

of the day. And I think that that is the result of us, not focusing on one of the buckets or two of the buckets or things not being in Pockets, which means everything is just kind of Blended together in that way. Do you see it that way as well? Sorry, I didn't I lost you for a second. Sorry about that. So I was saying the way you explained the buckets to me, that's kind of a reflection of that in a development team.

If I'm working on several aspects or if I'm feeling like I'm spread out over several domains, then the conversations is not happening in buckets or they don't exist or we're just taking everything which means we're kind of doing a little bit of nothing. Yeah.

But I think it's also like from, you know, this is something that I also challenge the Is you know, if you see a Sprint which doesn't have like a coherent story to it or you feel like, you know what I'm doing this thing, but I just don't feel like it's really gonna move the needle or actually really don't think there's gonna have that much impact. This is where, like, you know, it would be so good to like speak up and ask the question, is this really the thing that we

could be working on? And if you know, that there are things that actually, if we worked on X, Y Zed, we really could, you know, Make a big difference, then that should also come up. So I think it's trying to get all sides to actually come together and really thrash things out. And I think some tension and some disagreement is totally fine as long as it's in a respectful way. So I think it's fine to disagree on things. But, you know, I always say like

disagree and then commit, right? Once the decisions made the decisions made and we all push in that direction. But the important thing is that, you know, people ask picking up saying, you know, I had to be For where, you know, I had to engineer who sent me a DM on slack and just, you know, because I have this whole presentation and I thought it was great. And then he was like, man, that did not make any sense to be, you know, what?

I'm focusing on, you know, he was talking about another of, like things that needed to be sorted out on a technical level. And it was like I was not aware of it. I didn't actually, you know, and actually can we sit together and talk about it. And then when he explained it, I was like, oh okay, gosh, she had. This is actually we can Something quite important because I know what's coming into two, three quarters. And this needs to be done properly first for us to enable

us to do those things later. So it was good. That that person felt comfortable enough and I think this is the thing about being approachable, being open and being quite vulnerable. You know, I also tell my team about things that I've done that, I'm not quite right or when I reflected never made mistakes. So then, they also feel like, okay, I can also tell her that. Hey, I'm not happy with X, Y Zed, We should be thinking in a different direction. I like that a lot.

I mean I do it naturally, maybe it's because I'm stubborn but I want to be effective as a team, right? And I want to add value. If I feel like the thing we're working on is only affecting like 0.5 of the customers. Well, a different slice, could affect 20% in a better way. Then I'm going to be like, okay how much customers does this affect do? We really need this versus the other solutions that we can build? But I've also seen colleagues and people in the past that love

a Ology solution. If you have that problem, we can solve it with this and like, but do we need to write? Someone needs to be able to ask that question. Do we really need this versus the being the person that brings the solutions because bringing the solutions. I love that as well, right? Don't get me wrong, you solve a thing feels good, but it needs to have impact, right?

And the right impact in the right value for the company and for the customer and I think they're usually the friction losses as well or Dare is where the most discussions line. Yeah, you know this is something that I remember you know, really

early in my career I had a boss. He was so brilliant. So you know we would come up with this is how we're going to do it and then he'd be like why are you making this so complicated? Like what do you think?

What do you what do you think the business will get poor game by you sort of over complicating this a overcomplicating it because you just kind of want to deliver a really complex solution for your Our own vanity as a team or actually really focused on what you need to deliver because it doesn't have to be that complex. So he was very good at deconstructing things and then helping us to reconstruct it. But in a way that was, you know, really really efficient from a

capacity perspective. I don't like to use resource because I don't like that word. I think it's he should say capacity capacity perspective. So I really took that at the listen for me as I went on is having that Be healthy and I can say it is friction right? Really having that healthy debate like okay if we make it over complicated, do we really really have to do this to be really really have to solve it or in the first version of The Office of the product that we're

delivering does. Every single pot have to be super slick or do we need to focus on part 1, 2 and 3? And then let's see how it goes and then we can do part 4, 5 and 6 ones. We've got a bit of traction or we can see that it's really working.

Etc. Etc. So So I think kind of having those conversations as a team as well, but making sure you actually come back to do the improvements because I know that this is where engineering teams also lose trust with product to use is that we say like, oh no, let's just do the basic version and we'll come back and we'll make it better and then two, three quarters later, they're

talking about the same thing. And then a year down the line is like, oh, we want to do this and then they like, hello. Remember that thing? That we were supposed to prove? We never get back to it. So this is also It's about, you know, trust and making sure that the product team, you're remembering all these things and saying, you know what? We made a commitment that we would improve this thing.

Let's not break our commitments. It might be that we have to think about what we have promised that we're going to deliver and come back and say, like, you know what? We have to improve this. This, this which will take capacity away. Yeah, I agree. I always, I mean, I divide it into two problems that were

solving as product teams. I guess, business problems and Technology problems. And the more Tech that you build up, the more technology problems. You're going to have to figure out and solve basically. And at some point, if you don't give that attention, then your technology problems are so much that your speed of delivery of the value that deliver either. You can't because of the technology problems that you've created, or you're just slower.

And then people are going to notice in the output is not going to be the same, but, but technology problems are business, property. Excellent. Yeah, exactly. This is the thing, you know, I was telling a friend the other day, I was like, you know, I feel like engineering, they need like a PR team that and, like, explain things in a way that it's got impact and people really understand it. But not from people who are very non-technical, can understand it because I think that we have

created this thing. We, we talk about technical debt as if the technical teams have implemented something that they just dreamt up themselves. House. But a lot of times where do those shortcuts actually come from? They come from we've committed a date of delivery or we've said that we are already going to

deliver excellent. Or customers or X number of Revenue. So what we need to do is like, really short cut that solution that we're going to deliver and just to live with the shortcuts, right? And a lot of times you know the a generative they don't want to do that but they are like pushed into that corner so I think that we need to Rebrand things and just say like Business or organization or debt, then you can break that organizational business debt. A lot of times.

There's also problems with processes though. It's not always the actual coding. It's not always, I think this is just a piece of the problem, but there's so many other factors that really severely affect that part, which is the actual coding. Yeah, I think I might adopt that business debt and it's reflected in the code base. Yeah, movement. Got a movement. I like that a lot. Because you're right, right, the business decisions.

That we make based on the assumptions that we have are based on the current point in time, in the context, that we know they can change over the future, right? And your Co place is always going to reflect the current state and if your future has changed, then we're adopting future features. Then some we need to do a cleanup or we need to adjust for the future knowledge that we've gained. And if that doesn't happen, that

is business that in that way. But we call a tech that Yeah, it really is the now we started, we started a movement. I think we don't use technical debt, anyone's business. I'm going to put you in my team. One of the one of the final

questions I had and it's because it's a issue or a potential issue I'm struggling with now in my team is that size is becoming an issue? I love that you pointed out, communication is key and getting to know each other what they want to do, what you can do, and what you can contribute within a team, knowing that of each other allows you to collaborate. It better and be more effective as a team instead of a group of individuals. But the bigger the team is the

more time it's going to create. If I'm in a team of eight, I have seven other people that I need to kind of give attention to her. Give the same attention to for us to be effective as a team. Have you seen that as well with the rest of Team size wise? Because I don't have a good

solution in there. I think from a managerial point of view sometimes there's a stigma of, let's throw more people in there and then it's just gonna fix itself and then sometimes people split up and they Of two smaller teams, which don't really communicate and you have different problems. But team size is always going to be an issue.

So, I think, you know, I've been in a team myself where there were 10 of us, I think, the most important thing actually was that from a, from an architectural / domain perspective, we could actually work on this thing as a group of 10. I mean, I wasn't doing Hands-On coding. So they were, I think a Engineers, so they were able to do it without stepping on each other whatever. So I think that's the first thing to make sure that you can actually work at that size.

And be efficient, I think that the whole thing about getting to know each other and understanding each other is it doesn't have to be like this whole like, oh my gosh. We're taking like a whole day out and we're going to, like, hang out as a team, but, you know, like something I say to my all the different teams that I work with is you have all these regular ceremonies in your Diaries? Why don't you just like do it piecemeal, like like just do it iteratively? Maybe on.

My day, make your stand up a little bit longer where it's a little bit more. Yeah you do the updates within a 10 degree to. At the end of the week, talk about my car, to the, we go for you with anything that we can do differently or once in a while. Why don't you make your Red Crow a little bit longer and have that those discussions? But it doesn't always have to be like this.

We're taking 10 people out for a whole day but you can really sort of take those opportunities when you have that time together because I think what has to happen is, you know, we think that way be efficient by just focusing who work for that 60 minutes. But then they probably are some underlying issues that if you were to resolve those underlying issues you might not even expecting.

That's you might build up so much trust with each other that you need 40 minutes so why don't you just invest that extra 30 minutes every month? May be an increased one of your ceremonies and kind of have that discussion. So something that, you know, I've seen being done, which I think is so great, which I saw one of them. Managers doing was at the beginning of the quarter, there's team at the okay, ours, but she specifically took time

out with the team once a month. I think she's to extend their planning sessions so that have planning. And then at the end of the planning, once a month, they would look at they all chaos and talk about how we want to be. Is there something going on? And we're not quite reaching our goals. She did that off her own back, and I thought that was brilliant because she's not like she was

taking everybody out. For like two hours to go through all the locals and what they were doing through the cortex, because I've been talking to them about. This is slowly, it's not thinking about the next quarter, right snow? Slowly. Stop thinking about, is there anything that we really want to put on the radar of the senior leadership team that we really

want to advocate for ourselves? The team that we really want to work on this because of X, Y Zed and there was a very big feature that they wanted to work on. They did the discovery over certain amount of They got the dependencies ironed out, but they did this over a quarter and they came with such a slick

proposal. There was no way anyone in the division, team was going to say nag guys because they were still on point, they were so ready but they had been building this app over the quarter so it doesn't always have to be this big bang thing so every so often she would send me you know the materials that they were going to use for the big presentation and I was Glue kid thinking, oh my gosh, I'm so happy to see and they were all working on this thing together so everybody when

they had some time, could kind of pop into the presentation at the employees table, but it meant that, by the end, they were so coordinated. They were also invested. They were all Super Hyper aware of what was going on that when it came to actually do the presentation. They were like, oh no, we don't all have to be there. One person can speak for all of us. Yeah, the crush that then, that's so cool. And it's a gradual build-up, right?

You don't just get Like that overnight you have to give it attention the attention that it deserves and that attention takes time and iteration over a longer period of time. Only then can you realize what you actually need to?

It always fascinates me that we expect you to just work, but what relationship in our lives just works from the time we set eyes on each other, even our parents or siblings. It's it's an Ever evolving thing. Being right? It's an investment of time of energy of emotion. It's never, you know, this is this really, you know, I know it's work but you know, you're not going to sit eyes on some and be like, oh I like working with Patrick, I got it. Yeah it's not going to be like

that. You have to invest in that relationship, right. You have to invest in talkin and understand each other and being open in a way that everybody feels comfortable, right? Because not everybody feels comfortable with being super vulnerable. But you know what is Version of comfortable. So I also know, what are you boundaries? What do I need to think about and then to build up that trust.

I have a funny story. I was in a meeting and there was a young lady in my team and she was saying like, oh she wanted to kind of speak more in meetings and stuff like that because you wanted to build the confidence and I was that old gray. I will give you as many opportunities as possible. And then over two or three meetings, I would say like, oh I'm just going to pick someone to speak in a So I picked on her twice, she set up a call with me and then she said to me, please don't do that.

Please don't please don't pick on me. Please don't pick me as the first person. It makes me really uncomfortable and I was like, okay I get it. Yeah, thank you for giving me the feedback and I didn't do it again, but it was just that openness, right? I thought I was doing what she wanted. I thought I was supporting her, but I was actually making a feel uncomfortable, but she felt comfortable enough to tell me like, yo, No. That is not how this isn't

whack. And yeah, and it's about trust because I know it's not, like I said, oh, I'm trying to support you and now you're telling me, I said to her fair enough, and I apologize if you feel uncomfortable. And I'm, you know, I really took that as really good feedback. Yeah, I think so. I mean, it's so cool that you have that environment, that she can come to you and be like, no, no, no, this is not what I meant, right? Is that safety is not there. It's gonna be Behind your back

to other colleagues are cheeks. Always calls me out first. Then like, I don't like, it makes me nervous and you don't want any of that. Yeah. And the next thing she's like maybe she would if I did she'd never said it. She just start trying to like avoid me no resentment starts to build up, she doesn't trust me. So yeah, once we got the out, the door, I was like, okay cool. Like, thank you for letting me know. And you know what, I'm not sitting here like, oh you have

always been like this. I haven't because, when I first became a man, Sure I would have taken that as such an offense. You know I'm super upset and super wound up by it but then it's really about realizing that no children. It's not actually about you, it's about that other person and this is the core of leadership. Is it really stops being about you really? It's not about you. It's about everybody else was around you. I love that that had to sink in for me, but I completely agree

with what you said. I've had a blast talking about all things product ownership, your history and your take on things as well. I love you take like I think in my past if a lot of people, if a lot of even developers or product owners or teams, adopted your thoughts, I think things would have been a lot smoother, so I hope a lot of people can learn from this. Is there anything that's still missing or any advice you'd still like to share?

I think the thing that I do want to say that, you know, I would hate for anyone to listen to this and feel like, oh yeah, you know, she's like saying that you have to be technical to be a great to be great in product because you don't have to be. I think what's important is that from an organizational level, you are set up for Success, right? So you set up for Success, if it's a very like technical thing that you Have someone who is your partner, who can support

you with that. So, you know, I think for a lot of people, it's really understanding that, you know, a lot of your success is down to your environment. So really constantly thinking about like, is this the optimal environment for me. And if you don't feel like it is, you should try to address it and try to speak up.

It's really important because a lot of times, you know, sometimes there's leaders, we get they lost in stuff and you know we think we've been helpful, we think we're being effective but without that sort of 360 feedback loop. We can get a little bit lost and we can sometimes lose sight of things and, you know, we don't know everything. We definitely don't know everything and we make mistakes

every single day. So you know, just keep us aware and keep challenging us and yeah, to be to be better, better leaders. Beautiful. Yeah, I completely agree. Cool. I'm going to round it off their cheetah. Thank you so much for coming on. Thank you so much. You've inspired me by the way. To get like a super nice settings. I can record like nice podcast love of very lucky with it. I'm gonna, I'm going to round it off here, then cheat some more cootie.

Everyone. I'm gonna put all her socials in the description below. Check her out. Let her know you came from our show. And with that being said, thanks for listening. We'll see you on the next one.