Loading summary
Transcript98 lines
- [00:04]
A
The one component that I am yet to fully find a really neat and perfect allegory for is this HR business partner. It occurred to me recently that the problem is actually in the name of this role because it says business partner. In disaggregating this word into what we actually understand the kind of multi sided platform of a company to be. We've got working customers, we've got paying customers, we've got owners, and the business isn't actually a thing. And so with whom are the business partners actually aligned and who are they for? That is a significant change that's potentially required for us to update our ontology. I think that's one of the things that perhaps the new paradigm may have to leave behind. That's a thing which I think is still needs a little bit of thought.
- [00:56]
B
Welcome to the Work for Humans podcast. This is Dart Lindsley. One of the core ideas that we've explored on this show is that work should be treated as a product. But when we're serious about that, it raises a harder question. Who does the designing? Is product management itself the missing discipline in the future of work? My guest today is Chris Metcalfe and he's a real deal product manager. Chris spent nearly a decade at workday leading the European teams behind its core HCM product and then moved inside organizations like Primark as the head of product for people and culture. Today, he helps people functions become what he calls the R and D and go to market function for the product work. And he's not borrowing product vocabulary as a metaphor. He's asking what it takes to manage work with the discipline used to build great software. What parts of product management transfer directly, and what has to be rethought to make that all work. In our conversation, Chris lays out the seven levers that move an organization from delivering services to running a product operating model, from visible leadership commitment to funding durable teams instead of projects, to measuring outcomes instead of outputs. We talk about why nobody wakes up excited to use your HR services, and we identify a few places where Chris and I genuinely disagree. For instance, whether you can solve every need employees bring to work, or whether product strategy is at its heart an act of making the hard trade offs. As Chris put it, we differ by degree, not kind, and it's a productive difference. So if you enjoy the show, please leave a review and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. With that, I am delighted to share my conversation with Chris Metcalf. Chris Metcalf, welcome to Work for Humans.
- [02:55]
A
Thank you. It's amazing to be with you.
- [02:58]
B
I have been wanting to have somebody like you on the show for ages. We have had people who have been product managers, we have had designers by the score, we've had human resource practitioners, but we've never had anybody who crossed over from product management to teaching people how to manage work as a product. And so it's just a unique path and it's a really important thing for us to talk about. So that's what I want to talk about today. First of all, what was your path as a product leader in your organizations before you moved over to.
- [03:44]
A
I started product straight out of uni. I left university, I needed a job and I went to work for my dad. My family business, which was an importing company bringing expensive European toilets and taps and basins and showers and various things into the construction market, I guess. And my first job, I think had some title like sales manager. And I was on the road a lot and selling things. And through the course of learning how to do that, I realized that what we did is we sold expensive things infrequently. So kind of low volume, high margin. And I thought to myself, well, maybe we could also do the inverse of that. Maybe we could sell cheaper things more frequently and maybe we're making a little less money per unit, but maybe that's a way that we might think about expanding what we do. So quite honestly, I found myself in China as a 23 year old green as it's possible to get walking around trade shows and trying to source and bring product back into market. We had all sorts of crazy fun adventures and it was a phenomenal, amazing learning opportunity pretty much straight out of college. And I then met an Irish girl to whom I can now tell you very proudly that I've been married for a long time. But that prompted a bit of a existential career moment for me and I chose to leave New Zealand at that point and I've been living between Dublin and Ireland and London ever since. And so that kind of forced a bit of a career reset. And that really was the first moment where I found the people and what you might typically referred to as like HR technology space. So started out temping and I was just taking odd jobs just to fund various excursions around Europe while I got settled here and eventually made my way to London and got incredibly lucky with an amazing opportunity to work at a very large multinational engineering company. And the work that they had me starting out doing was helping the CEO make his slides look nice for what transpired to be a rather phenomenal transformation that this new CEO was about to undertake at this engineering company where the idea was that this company was made up of different holdings, independently operated businesses. And his idea was that we should integrate all of the back office functions and make it a kind of integrated operating model. And so that set in course six, seven, eight years of doing loads of fun stuff. So I had no idea what I was doing. Met an amazing person. I think in my career I can count on one hand several prominent central protagonists who have really set me up. And I honestly look back with a lot of gratitude to one particular manager leader who took a bit of a chance for me and gave me loads of fun stuff to do. So I was building software, I was working on offshoring and all of the things that go along with transformation. And particularly then it moved into technology led transformation and found myself doing centralization of all of the HR technology. So I ended up doing the whole transformation and as part of that, got to meet the team at Workday, really in the early, the first kind of five or so years of that company existing in its current form and really thought that they were the next thing. And on the back of starting our family in London, my wife and I decided to move back to Ireland where Workday had recently made an acquisition and I managed to get a job there. And then that turned into another set of amazing opportunities and experiences. The Irish operation at that time I think was maybe about 100 people and it's certainly well over 2000 now. I left there after nearly a decade later and in between really began to learn and understand what it means to actually do product management, to be a product leader. I had an incredible opportunity to become the first product manager located outside of the HQ and the very first product manager in Ireland, from which that team became the patient zero for the scale up of what is now a very substantial operation. So I played a very small part in that and managed to see how that grew and scaled.
- [08:33]
B
A lot of that, by the way, sounds very familiar to me. It's that funny role of that part where you're trying to integrate everything. It's that role of we need somebody who can clean up a big mess and it's a bigger mess than we can even comprehend. So we need somebody who can somehow grapple with this. And I've told people that it took me a long time to realize that my superpower was solving big, vague problems. The bigger and vaguer, the better. And so that's the sort of thing, that's the sort of thing they gave you one of those, because you showed the aptitude for that.
- [09:12]
A
I think it's really interesting you've kind of picked up on some of that stuff. In terms of what I do now, I think I operate best where there is very little coherence. This word coherence is. I don't know, sometimes I feel like I'm. It's almost like a mantra, but it just comes up in so much of, I guess, what I like about work, but what I seek out and what I'm good at helping other people try to figure out. So where there is an absence of coherence, generally what I like to do is to try and come in and figure some of that stuff out.
- [09:43]
B
And so along the way, here's what I imagine, shall I imagine it going? You're grappling with gigantic, vague problems and you're making up the methodologies as you go along. And then I'm guessing you find product management methodologies.
- [10:03]
A
Yes.
- [10:03]
B
And start to apply them. How'd that happen? And what did you discover that you didn't know?
- [10:09]
A
This journey with workday began in the very early years of the prior decade. And product management as a job, as a function, as a defined thing, was still very early, very emergent. Still, at that point, agile was about 10 years old, and there was an emerging set of writers and folks who were. Who'd kind of grown up with the new Internet economy, who were starting to codify a lot of these ways and just through, I guess, LinkedIn and various other blogs and podcasts and various things, started to discover few of the prominent voices, some of whom you've had on your show. So I guess Marty Kagan and John Cutler and folks like that, Teresa Torres, Melissa Perry, kind of the seminal works of what does it actually mean to do product? And what does that mean? Became a kind of central organizing principle of what I really loved about the work. And maybe just to divert back into the career story and then back out of it, in terms of, like, how I ended up in this chair talking to you after a long time at workday, I think just personally felt like I wanted something more, something else. And looking back, I was in a great role. I was leading the teams who are based in Europe for the core HCM product. And at that time, so a few years ago now, that represented about 40% of the total subscription revenue for the workday product in its totality. You know, at the time of, you had to have the product that we were building, but it was kind of the unsexy one. It was the thing that spun off all the cash that all of the fun new R and D programs were funded by. And so I kind of wanted to take a step. And ultimately that meant choosing between moving the family to California or changing roles. So we chose that path. And interregnum between then and now is a couple of years working as a product and design leader at a smaller company, a learning management company based out of Italy, and then subsequently as head of product for people and culture at a very large European retailer called Primark.
- [12:21]
B
But that's interesting because something just changed there because you just added culture. So does that mean that you took on a CPO role? What did that mean?
- [12:35]
A
So the difference between the 10 years working inside a software vendor building products for the people function as the buyer, is a definitive set of experiences. Preceding that, I'd also worked inside the company, I guess inside either the technology or the people function as the buyer, in a sense, or as the customer. And then so that last role was moving back inside, as it were, into the technology function at a very large business as it decided to undertake technology transformation into a product led motion. And so kind of had 18 months really walking the talk as being a transforming agent. And I think I reflect back on that time as one of several successes and a few things that I would probably do differently given another opportunity. One of the big successes was completely invisible. And it's foundational to, for example, how we fund work. We'll get into this, I'm sure, but the difference between, like a project model and a product model is how work is allocated and how work is funded and how work is measured. And so inside a product model, really, you're funding capacity and then allocating that capacity to solve problems measured by progress and outcomes. The inverse is a project model, which is we need this piece of work to be completed, and we incentivize completion. We incentivize tasks, project plans, Gantt charts, contracts, and then the product model is very much we incentivize outcomes. And so I think the big success in Primark was really working as a partner to the finance team to move more away from how we fund work. And what I found at the end of that experience was that I think I can actually do this, but at scale. And there was a bit of a mismatch, I think, between the speed at which I wanted to transform the company and the readiness to match up to that. And so that led me up to this moment where I have my own business, I offer these services out to the broader market. And I guess what that means is having lived the life of the buyer inside the people function, having lived inside a technology function, inside a large company, having built software and understood what it means to create products that sell very well, and most importantly, the operating model around how to do that successfully, and knowing this people space very well. Back to your first question. I think there's just the intersection of four or five different things, which is very much a product practitioner's perspective on the operating model that leads to good product outcomes.
- [15:29]
B
Now, what I think you were just describing, and I hadn't really thought about that whole question of funding before and how product is funded differently. And you said it's funded based upon outcomes, and the outcomes referring back to Marty Kagan are solving customer problems. So I think what you just described is the difference between what Marty would call a feature factory, which is delivering features, and getting funded for that, as opposed to solving for customer problems. And so I want to go through the nature of the transformation that an organization that's working in the one form, the sort of feature delivery form goes through on the way to becoming a product led function.
- [16:18]
A
I think there are seven different levers of transformation that are available to anyone who has the mandate to try and change a company from the inside out. One of the first things to kind of ground ourselves on is the difference between the before state and the after state. We may get into this separately too, but I think there is a lot of energy out there in the world at the moment inside the people space to do something new. We know that the function as it's currently constituted, something needs to change. There are push and pull factors. So there's a push coming from all of the things that are happening in the world, macroeconomic, political, technological. Then there are people like yourself, pull factors. This podcast, Jessica Svan's books. Luke, all the other folks out there in the world who are doing lots of amazing work around this new paradigm, those are prompting a lot of energy. What people then immediately decide, I think then I'm generalizing now, but I think often folks say, yeah, brilliant, that makes perfect sense. We should be more customer centric. We should be more joined up. We should think about the experience of our customer. Our employees are our customers. So we'll take the thing that we already have, and that's our product. Now we've got this inventory, this catalog, and I think there's a very distinct failure mode inside of that. So having said that, once we're able to help folks move past productizing the thing that they already have, which is a Very solution oriented, to speak very plainly, anti product idea, where we are starting from the thing which we have rather than the problem that someone else has, the customer has. We really have about seven levers that I can figure out. And the best answer before kind of dive into those is basically we use the product methodology to implement the product methodology, which ultimately is about identifying a problem to solve, uncovering and testing our assumptions, making a first step, which basically just means doing something, then learning from that action, and then using that information that you receive back from that action to inform your next step. It really is as simple as that. So underneath that, then to make that go well, there's kind of seven levers, I think, one of which is visible leadership commitment. So we see two different Personas. There's the renegade guerrilla revolutionary who wants to change the system from the inside. That can be an amazing thing to try and harness. And it can also be a very disheartening experience if you're trying to fight a solo battle on your own. But once we see visible leadership commitment at a senior level, a lot of doors are unlocked. And so that's really one of the first places that we try and start from.
- [19:13]
B
Okay, before we go on, because that's a really. It's super important. Whose problem are you trying to solve? And I ask that because the history, I believe, of HR has been solving leadership's problem in regards to acquiring talent as opposed to recognizing employees, people at work as customers.
- [19:38]
A
Until recently, I would have talked about employees and the business, these two characters, Personas. I think speaking with you recently, I've learned, I think there's a much better way of framing that up. I love what you taught me recently around working customers and paying customers. And that has certainly given me a lot to think about over the course of the last few weeks since we had that conversation. I think as well, the business, there's a bit of a thinking error in that framing. It's something that I think is referred to universally as this thing, this entity. And I think that there is a disaggregation that's required to understand that the difference between owners and the platform and the folks who are outside and the platform as the mediation layer between each of these participants. Once we understand and accept that, we can then see that the problems that we're trying to solve are for our customers, and that can be paying or working. There is, I think, a major structural, and if you'll allow me, a small divergence for two seconds, building products for paying external commercial customers, as we might refer to them, everyone understands, okay, you have like a product function, you have this R and D group, you have a go to market group, you have sales, you have all these different things. It's a simple heuristic. One of the most powerful teaching aids, I think in coaching aids is just to find the analogs and the proxies. Because almost everything that happens in the commercial function also exists in some form inside what we might call a people function or an HR function or whatever the thing is currently called. So what does a product manager do? Product manager is there to steward the investment of the business, to channel that into things that are going to create value, solve problems for paying customers. They are accountable to an R and D function, a go to market function, for the definition of a couple of different things. So the first is what are we going to build? That's ultimately a response to the core problem that we're trying to solve. What problem are we going to solve? The next thing I think is around how to win. So that's what is it about our product that is differentiated so that someone will choose it? And then the third thing is where to play. Meaning what is a sustainable, repeatable, durable path to adoption? And in a commercial products sense, profit and recurring revenue. So organizationally there is a locus, there's a center of energy where product managers and the folks who are associated with either the development of those products or the deployment and sales and positioning and offering around that are all kind of coherently organized. And I think we need a corresponding, essentially symmetry inside what we currently call the people function. And so I like to begin by trying to convince my clients that what we currently call the people function should become the R and D and go to market function for the product of work. Now it takes a little bit of a leap to get there, but it is something that I think folks are starting to get their head around. And once we frame that, then we can start to see that the problems that we're trying to solve are for our working customers. And then we start to get into, okay, well where do we even start? What are the problems? And there's a whole thing that we can talk about there. Because product management at its core is ultimately just about choosing. And good product managers are very good at choosing and are very able to make peace with what certain choices mean. And the skill of being a good product leader and a good product manager in particular is being able to understand those choices in the totality of the system in which you're operating, the market in which you're operating and then be able to rationalize that and then bring a group of people with you through, through the process of activating the natural kind of logical consequences of those choices.
- [23:53]
B
Of your seven points, the first one that you pointed out was visible leader commitment. Part of my question, and the reason I took that to customer, is I can imagine visible leader commitment as being commitment to product leadership. In other words, we're going to be a product organization that could be done completely independent from the working customer, is the customer whose problems we should be solving. And so does it require both commitment on both of those things?
- [24:26]
A
We can't take a position that we're not going to stop people from taking the first step towards something that feels safe and achievable. We never reinforce that thinking pattern. We're challenging it every single step along that way. So we can say, sure, let's take something that is immediately within your control and run an experiment. One of the core methods is experimentation and close management of risk. So if the leap from where we are starting from to this fully realized utopia of the post transformation world feels like this vast chasm, we work with our clients to basically say, let's take a small step, let's run a small pilot. But we are always, always, always coming back to the core principle, which is, and I have a slide. I mean, there are two different versions of it. There's the one which has very, very plain language, which is, no one really cares about hr, unfortunately, and that is often very well received. So a different version of that is no one wakes up in the morning to come to work to engage with your HR services. It is a thing that is happening alongside and inside the totality of this much, much bigger thing. And so folks can get their head around that. But it is fair to say that what we see very often in terms of failure mode is a default to, okay, well, I have this thing, and therefore it's my product, and that is not what we want to start.
- [25:55]
B
It really sparked something for me, by the way, which I'd never realized before, which is that services are things that when they're really working well, they take less time and experiences. This is Joe Pine. Experiences are things that you want them to last longer, and transformations are things that you're the thing transformed. But HR services are things that you want to be invisible. That's right. In other words, nobody gets up to use them because when they're really working well, they're mostly invisible.
- [26:23]
A
They're utilities, more or less.
- [26:24]
B
Yeah. But there's this whole market for problems to Solve that's above and beyond that.
- [26:31]
A
Correct.
- [26:31]
B
When you start asking the working customer what they're actually after.
- [26:35]
A
Yeah. And so to link this back to the transformation lever, the reason why we need visible leadership commitment is if we as a people function, stop organizing around the services that we've always delivered, then what are we actually for? If the thing that has always defined us is suddenly no longer the kind of center of gravity of our purpose, why are we here? And that does very quickly lead to a very big identity crisis. So there is a mistake in centering that service layer as the thing that we will design. You should design it. But the thing that we do is we will hold up a mirror. So we're working with a very large European HQ retailer right now and we've had a lot of success helping this team see the world through what we call types of work. So we break down their commercial product organization. We brought their commercial product folks in to talk about, okay, so we have folks who do like commercial and strategic work. What problems are we going to solve? What markets are we going to play? How do we win in those markets? Then we have product and go to market teams, engineers, product managers, designers who are there to activate those strategic decisions. We've go to market who are there to position and sell and drive demand on the market side. So we're in that constant dance of trying to find product market fit. Then we have a whole bunch of like a post sale org. So we have enablement and we have customer success. We have folks whose job it is to make sure that customers are activating into the product and maximizing the amount of value that they get from it and also feeding back into the product and the strategic team, how people are actually experiencing that. And that's real life, an important signal. And then we have operations. So it's really, really important part of the product experience. So this online retailer, they have this incredible moat which is their supply chain. They actually offer their supply chain to hire out to other businesses because it's such a strategic point of leverage that they have. And what we can see is that the product manager and the designer and the software engineer, they're not driving the truck, they're not designing the depot, they're not working inside the supply chain. But without that experience, that operational layer running like a perfectly oiled machine, the product experience as it manifests to the consumer, which is a digital experience online where they're being shown products that they might like to buy. If we can't get them to their front door, the whole Thing falls to pieces. So the allegory here, and I think the kind of analog, is our payroll and our compliance. And the things which just have to work are part of the operational fabric. They are directly and massively important to the totality of the experience. But they are not the product. They are a means to an end. They're part of an activation of the totality of that experience.
- [29:40]
B
So part of what you're saying, think of it as two different ways. One way is there's the experience of drinking a cup of coffee in a nice cafe, listening to nice jazz. There's an enormous backstage service system that's making that cup of coffee land in your hand. And that is critical path to ultimately solving the problem. There's a second thing going on though, which is that there are some things that are just satisfiers, which is you only notice if they're bad. And there are things that are delighters, which is you only notice if they're exceptional. And if you fail at the satisfiers, I think they're called satisficers. I think I can't remember what they're called. It's in the Kano analysis. There's delighters and satisfiers. And satisfiers are you go to your hotel room and the sheets are clean. You can only get them so clean, nobody will notice if they're cleaner. People will absolutely notice if they're not clean or if they have bed bugs
- [30:43]
A
or something horrible in them.
- [30:45]
B
But then there's the mint on the pillow. And the mint on the pillow is above and beyond. And you notice that it's a delighter. But the truth is, if the sheets aren't clean, you don't care about the mint.
- [30:57]
A
Maybe even reinforces my frustration on why did you spend all this time on the mint? Could you not please just give me the towels?
- [31:06]
B
Yes. And so some of it's that too, which is that some things are completely hidden. They're back office and they have to be there to make the front office work, the front stage work. But then there's this other thing that some things, they're not really backstage, but they are things you want to not notice.
- [31:25]
A
That's an interesting angle and one that I probably want to give a lot of thought to to understand the analog there is. You'll know if your pay is wrong, you'll know if you've paid too much tax, you'll know if you can't get online and your laptop doesn't work on your first day, or things of this nature. Right. And so yes, there is a baseline level of service which we just have to have in place in order for us to execute on the work contract. The thing that actually drives value for people is manifestly different. And I tend to think about the architecture of that experience through a few different lenses. The process of transformation, the second, and I think equivalently challenging is moving ownership close closer to the work. What this works from is the idea that the people who are speaking with customers every day are best placed to make good decisions around how we should solve those challenges. And I guess this needs to be held up in contrast of against what Marty Kagan describes as feature factories or like stakeholder driven roadmapping and planning. Me and the guys had a chat and we've decided this is what you're going to build. This is a significant challenge for leaders to. Marty Kagan says lead through context, not control. So that changes from Me and the guys had a chat and we need you to build this to here is a challenge which we are facing. This is how we will know this is a leading indicator of customer behavior that will help us understand that this is improving for that customer. And so we want to see you and the team focus your efforts on moving this outcome. And that is a very simple thing to explain and it's a very hard thing to do in practice. So that's lever number two. The rest of them, the remaining five are quite simple because they're mostly just around ways of working. The next one is enabling structures and support. Forgive me, this is actually more of a challenge too. So this comes back to the one of the things I mentioned at the top, which is around like for example, funding what gets funded. Are we funding durable product teams who are allocated to problem spaces? Or are we saying we're going to stand up this group of folks who are focused on this point in time, effort, and we're going to make sure that they do the work and when the work is done, we stand them down. So there are infrastructural things which also need to be established.
- [34:03]
B
Question, which is the product one? Is it we're going to stand up a team to solve a problem or
- [34:10]
A
no product teams should be durable. By durable we mean the problem doesn't go away. So the solution. We were chatting about this about shoes, right? So Nike haven't solved shoes. We will still continue to buy shoes. That is a problem which is we were kicking around different. What's the job to be done that that problem is solving for? I think it was something like help me to move around, perform and express who I am. Something like that. Right. That is a durable problem. It will continue to exist as long as people are here. And so the art of product strategy is finding these durable problem spaces. So significant structural pivots or strategic changes may necessitate the addition or the reallocation or the redesign of how these durable product teams are allocated. And by the way, I'm working at a particular level of scale. If you're in a people operations function where you have like two people, some of this stuff isn't going to apply. But at scale, which is the environment that I come from, we're working off the basis that we have cross functional groupings of people that we can allocate to durable problems and we measure those results on a medium to longer term basis. So more than one to two years usually.
- [35:29]
B
So I'm going to summarize here because this is really super interesting, which is there's the first leadership commitment, which is product led, customer focused. Here's our customer. There's the second one. The second, which I'm going to call the second one, is also a leader commitment, which is we are going to let the context lead. It's probably the most important leader commitment is we're going to let the context lead and we're going to let the customer problem lead Product development.
- [36:01]
A
Yeah. And the unit of productivity there is an empowered product team, meaning the team have autonomy to solve that problem in the best way that they see fit, as long as it's conforms into, for example, the product principles, the kind of constraints, the enabling constraints that we set.
- [36:19]
B
Love it. There's an episode that's going to drop before this episode, which is with John Kania talking about the conditions of systems change. And one of them, one of the conditions of systems change is how resources flow. And one of the conditions of systems change is power structures. And so we're talking about that product managers are autonomous. They are not entirely autonomous, but they are very free to act and are very powerful in organizations. They are really leaders. And then he also has the flow of resources as one of the conditions of systems change. And so this is very well aligned to that.
- [36:58]
A
The remaining ones are more around what we actually think of, perhaps what springs to mind when we think about a product team working in an agile, customer centric, problem focused way. So instead of measuring a team by outputs by completion, we're measuring the success through outcomes. Most importantly, those need to be leading indicators of customer behavior. We need to be able to see results Inside a constrained window of time. And that is a phenomenally difficult thing to do. If you speak to product leaders inside large organizations, they talk about the hardest challenge, defining and getting super clear on the inputs into the model. Right. The drivers that they can tweak.
- [37:42]
B
I need to know more about that. So I think what you're saying is I need traceability between what I do in product and customer behaviors.
- [37:51]
A
Correct. That's the whole game.
- [37:53]
B
And the connection between those two things, it's not like billiard balls. It's not like we can see the causation there. And so we're probably looking for correlation. Is it even possible?
- [38:04]
A
Yes, it is possible. And there are all sorts of different frameworks to help refine, but it's a long game. Sometimes you have to start by throwing a pebble into the pond and then learning from that environment and gradually adding to your body of knowledge and your data set. But measurement and instrumentation telemetry is a huge thing inside digital products. And so there's a significant amount of maturity that's required. If over the course of the next 10 to 20 years, as I believe we will see product methodologies expand inside the people space, there's a whole unmet need for doing non creepy, non surveillance observation of behavior, customer behavior in that environment. It's a little bit easier In a digital world and the post Internet economy, there's a whole new industry which has emerged in the last 10 to 15 years because as people started to sell things on their websites and as websites even became a thing, we were able to see like how many visitors we had. But then we have complex purchasing pathways and we had virtual servers and all sorts of different virtual infrastructure that necessitated the ability for an infrastructure engineer to actually understand the system. And we had to basically give up this idea that we could see at any one point in time the health of the system. And so there's a whole sensor network that's out there on the Internet, which allows a product to track pathways and journeys and various other things. And so obviously, when you're talking about the world of people doing that in a way which is not creepy, which respects human dignity and privacy and ethics, but also provides a product manager with insights that they can use to place bets. This is another thing that we do is we use the language of gambling because it carries with it risk, it carries with it return, it carries with it the sense of the unknown, and it also allows us to try and ask questions. What information would I need to improve my confidence that this is going to result in the outcome that we're trying to drive. One of the best coaching questions I have for a product leader would be, would you bet an uncomfortable amount of your own money on this thing, whatever it is, being a success, I do not want you to actually do that. But if you get a little sick feeling when you consider that that's probably a little bit of a signal that you're flying a bit blind. So then if that is the case, what more information would you need in order to increase the likelihood that you would take that decision? And then number two, we fly in a completely disinterested third party observer. So dart you are now you get to wear the black and white striped referee costume. Your job is to objectively referee the outcome of this bet and you have zero context. What are the criteria that we give you to say Chris decided to gamble the company's time, money, resources on or invest is another word we would use on this outcome. Did that outcome eventuate in the time domain that we set out? And so again, if you can't write that down, what are you doing? These are skills. So redefining success through outcomes. Three more new operating rhythms. So we have governance, we have sprints, we have the language of agile. I don't talk about agile a whole lot, but we tend to disaggregate work down into its smallest pieces and we break it down and we ship quickly. A lot of this stuff, by the way, comes back to discovery. We focus on problems, problems, problems, problems. The language of discovery can be easy for us to get lost in discovery too. And we often need to anchor back into. The whole point of doing discovery is so that you can ship faster and with higher velocity and with higher confidence. And so shipping is literally the point. And there's a proven set of techniques and methods to ship fast. Mindset and language shifts. So we spent the first 10, 15 minutes of this conversation just centering in on what is the product, getting everybody together on the same page, a glossary of understanding some of those big concepts you will start to see that emerge and then feedback and learning loops. So as I mentioned before, there's a whole thing around data, but how do we build learning in at the center of everything that we do. And also a huge thing for folks who come from a traditional HR background, I think is this idea of failure. And there's a lot of cliches about making it safe to fail and all this kind of stuff, but I do think that there is, in the language of the HR industry for the last 20 or 30 years, these deeply held core beliefs even in how we describe the teams inside of hr, this is a center of expertise. So experts know, right? And they bring with them part of their cachet and their status is the fact that they are an expert and that they know what good looks like and what best practices. And we have to kind of dissolve a lot of that identity stuff to realize maybe, I don't know, and that's okay. In fact, learning is the point. And if we're going to experiment, a unexpected outcome of an experiment is that the experiment may not produce the results that we are trying to get to.
- [43:26]
B
On work for humans, we've been exploring the principles of multi sided management, which is the belief that work is a product that every company designs, builds and delivers to employees. Along the way, people started asking how they could put these ideas into practice. So I founded the work design firm Elevenfold to help your company create the kind of work that makes teams feel alive and engaged in instead of dead and dull. So you can reduce turnover and build commitment. We're doing something revolutionary here. Learn more@elevenfold.com that's 11fold.com this is a really important point because I've seen it be a failure mode for companies that are moving the people practices into a product led version, which is that it becomes adversarial with centers of excellence. These two things may be mutually exclusive. Which is a center of excellence says I know how to do this and I don't necessarily need to talk to customers about their problems in order to do it. And this can get crazy political.
- [44:40]
A
It can, yeah. And that's why the visible leadership commitment is really, really important. We are going on this journey. We don't know what all the answers going to find out together. And a really, really powerful tool is that types of work analog that I shared earlier. Finding the equivalent inside the commercial org and then having that coe talk to the equivalent in the commercial org. So a reward coe, for example, there might be a bit of a split between operational work, like the application of a pay cycle. That might be a thing that we continue to do that lives inside operations. It's a really necessary and important part of the process. But the strategic price, like we can think of it as like a pricing or you know, commercial thing, the availability of money inside the system. That's actually a very important strategic thing. And what it does is it actually helps leaders figure out the bits of work that are most important to retain. And then again, we can work through these challenges just by applying the same mindset that we take for granted inside a commercial organization and just finding the proxy. Now, not everything works perfectly. I'm yet to figure out the business partner thing.
- [45:51]
B
By the way, what do you mean by the business partner thing?
- [45:54]
A
Yeah, so HR business partners, almost everything that exists inside your traditional HR function has a very neat proxy or an analog to a corresponding piece of the commercial product world. And so it becomes simply a question of equalization of how we see ourselves. The change is very often not structural or organizational. It's almost entirely in the minds of the folks whose identity has always been, I am part of this coe, for example. And so the transformation is very often not about changing. The organization usually has quite a bit to do with changing the ways of working. But the main thing is how we understand who we are and what our purpose is and what we exist to achieve. And so a really, really helpful tool is to pair off someone from the corresponding component. And the one component that I am yet to fully find a really neat and perfect allegory for is this HR business partner. And I think that the language, it occurred to me recently that the problem is actually in the name of this role because it says business partner. And then I think in kind of thinking a lot about what that is, the business is this rather abstract concept of many different actors. And in disaggregating this word into what we actually understand the kind of multi sided platform of a company to be, we've got working customers, we've got paying customers, we've got owners, and the business isn't actually a thing. And so with whom are the business partners actually aligned and who are they for? And I think that that is a significant change that's potentially required for us to update our ontology. I think that's one of the things that perhaps the new paradigm may have to, to leave behind. That's a thing which I think is still needs a little bit of thought.
- [47:56]
B
I have some understanding of that, which is there are two flows that are under consideration. One is the flow of quality work toward the working customer. But the traditional flow of value, which is super important and it's not wrong, is the flow of quality workforce towards the work.
- [48:17]
A
This is the procurement model, right?
- [48:19]
B
It's the procurement model, yeah. But the business partners are partnering with leaders who are very concerned with the flow of value toward the paying customer. In order for them to deliver the flow of value toward the paying customer, they need a workforce that can do that. And so as a part of the flow of value toward the paying customer, those leaders stand as a proxy for I understand the work that needs to be done to create value for the paying customer. What we're introducing in this conversation is the importance of really focusing on this other flow, which is the flow of quality work toward the working customer. And this is a bidirectional flow. It's hard to see them both at the same time. It's hard to keep them both in mind at the same time. But the leaders who are very close to the paying customer have the power and write the checks. And so it's part of the reason why we have really not looked closely at the flow of value toward solving problems for the working customer.
- [49:20]
A
I think this is something that needs, for me personally, just more thought. And the simple heuristic of using an existing role inside a commercial org is yet to satisfactorily handle that. I think the manager, the team leader, is really, really nicely aligned to a customer success type role inside a B2B function. You're there to receive the customer from the kind of sales cycle, or you may even be involved in the sales cycle. And your role becomes about activation, smoothing the onboarding process, a point of contact, and then activating value. And then the types of things for which you're measured over time, I think are around revenue retention, value retention for the company, and then value expansion over time potentially too. I like those stories, and they become part of the toolkit for helping folks who are starting from the old paradigm to see that it's actually not that massive a change. In fact, almost always there's limited change to the org structure and to the design, but there's a substantial change in how we understand what we are for.
- [50:36]
B
You and I have had not enough discussion, honestly, but a handful of conversations where we are figuring out a difference between my approach and your approach. And it has a lot to do with the. The research I've done around understanding what people want from work. And so people who've listened to the show know that I ask all the time, what job do you hire your job to do for you? And have this giant collection of answers and they are uncurated. They're like a stack of need. And I have not tried to resolve them into Personas or anything like that. And I just say, we need to solve all these things for a customer. These are the jobs that they want to get done. And your response has been, you can't do everything for everybody. How do you translate research, customer research, into something that's not solving something for everybody?
- [51:39]
A
The simple answer is product strategy is the act of choice. It's the bridge between research and insight and where we invest and product strategy in the Marty Kagan model fulfills Essentially, there's three big changes that we're making inside a product operating model. We're changing how we solve problems so we're going to continuous discovery, continuous delivery. We're changing how we build, which is through small iterative deployments with learning loops and telemetry. But the biggest change is how we decide which problems to solve and product Regardless of product leadership, product management, it is the job is to choose. So where I absolutely, completely agree with you is work is the product completely agree on the company as a platform mediating value? Completely reject that internal customer employee idea? Completely moved my thinking along there. I cannot wait for your podcast to drop every week. I'm absolutely enthralled by it. I love listening to the question at the end, and I think that that is a real market map, but I think it is the market as it exists in the macro sense. It is an inventory and a catalog of, you know, if we were to think about it in a retail space, it's all sorts of different categories. I think it's shoes and it's jeans and it's women's wear and it's kids clothes and it's summer clothes and it's winter clothes. As a supplier, we may choose to play in a particular segment. It is a necessary decision. Kind of think about a few related concepts. So the first thing is just because demand exists does not make supply an obligation. That's the first thing. And there isn't a singularity of products which 100% of companies provide. That is the nature of this economy in which we operate, which is there's a plurality of suppliers and different needs. And so I bring that same thought through with me. I think there's a couple of different dimensions as I try to, like, figure out a way to explain this as I was preparing for our chat. The first thing is access. I'm probably never going to be a brain surgeon. That's not a work product that is available to me. So there's all sorts of different things that maybe inhibit my access. The first being where I am in the world. Maybe there are other barriers, such as accreditation, certification, training, you know, all sorts of different things, legal things. Am I even legally allowed to work in this particular jurisdiction? So I think there's like a base level access component.
- [54:51]
B
And let me just give an example of that.
- [54:53]
A
Yeah, yeah.
- [54:54]
B
I am a manufacturer of physical products. I simply cannot offer a remote first option for how people Work can't do it 100% completely. That's like an example of I can't be in that market. That's not what I do.
- [55:14]
A
And there's all sorts of similar things. There's so like I have a certain level of cost base, my life. It is not going to work for me to take this because I will run out of money. So location, money, accreditation, whatever, that kind of certification, training, there's all sorts of different things. Now inside a hospital, you might have a work offering that is accessible to a brain surgeon and another work offering which is accessible to someone who doesn't have the brain surgeon background. So it's possible for these plurality of offerings to exist from a single supplier. But I think the first thing that we need to confront is access. The next thing is the design and the shape. And this is where we have a lot in common. I have tried my best to try and draw out an architecture diagram of what I call the architecture of experience. It's a frankly ridiculous drawing. I shared it with you. It's this circle and it has all these segments and different layers. Essentially a network diagram to try and show how I perceive and understand all these things, to interrelate. So if we think about like the shape or the design as a working customer or an employee in the old language, I think there's kind of six universal dimensions of experience that can have a different element of design. So first of all is who I work with. So that's the nature of the social fabric of the organization. It's essentially who is here. As a working customer, I may not have a huge amount of agency in deciding or like that offering as it presents itself to me. The decision to on who is here isn't necessarily up to me. If I'm a hiring manager or a team leader, I may have some. In fact, I do have some involvement over that next experience dimension is what I do. So this is work design. This is the nature of the work. This is also, I think, where some of the traditional HR stuff comes in, which is. And what does a career progression look like through the process of doing that work? How do we make sure that the work that I'm doing is aligned to what is needed to be done here? You know, and traditionally that's performance and that kind of stuff. There's org design. There's all sorts of different things inside of that where I do it. Now this is something where I think this goes back to your point of the manufacturer. This is highly constrained. We have our manufacturing facility. We've poured $10 million of our capital into this. It's a fixed asset, it is depreciating, but it's literally in this town and that's where the work has to take place. There might be something around that versus another company may choose their offering to be remote first because that works for us. It can easily start to see how like working in downtown Manhattan versus rural China, you know, these things are. They're just different by their elemental components. When I do it is a designable thing. So you may have shift patterns, you may have global time zone coverage that's required, you may have weekend work. There's all sorts of different things. This also extends to the difference between working time and non working time. How we respect folks and their time away from work and how easy we make it for them to take that time away. Why goes to my own. And this is where I think your research really, really, really, really has a massive, massive richness and depth. Which is what are the personal, intrinsic and extrinsic motivators that connect me to this place of work? So my wife has never worked a day for profit in her life. She's only ever worked in the NGO nonprofit sector. She, I think you know, and then part of your question that you ask is like, what does that cost you? There is a financial cost to that, but she doesn't see it in that way because so much of her alignment to purpose is connected into the social utility of the work that she does. Me, I'm a little more of a voracious capitalist, so there's an external reward motivator there that comes from other things. But I also, and we'll probably get into this, I have a connection to purpose, which is a bit different. The reason why I like doing what I do is very different to my wife. So easy to differentiate there. But a lot of the stuff that we do inside a company relates into this dimension. Who are we? Why do we exist as a company? How do we reward people here? What are our values? How do we communicate? How do we express who we are? And then the last piece, which is very designable, which is how I do it. So there's some like socio technical things going on in here, which is like how do we fund? You mentioned earlier, before, like who gets to decision making power? How are decisions made? How are those decisions communicated? How do we do projects? How do we do change through to what tools do we give you in order to do your work? In the IT view of the world, it's productivity, technology. I kind of hate that phrasing. But can you log into the machine? Are you sure that if you turn up to the manufacturing facility, you're not at risk of losing a limb? These are things that are designable and within our control.
- [60:51]
B
I'll tell you what this sounds like to me. In business architecture, there's something called an offering pattern and offering patterns. It was invented by Art Kasdan and Sean d'. Souza. Call out to Sean, my colleague. Each row represents one of these kinds of dimensions and then there's a pick list across that row. And an offering pattern is you get to pick one per row, maybe two per row, but you can't pick all of them because you're going to specialize in one offering. It's going to include a particular route to market, it's going to include a cost basis, it's going to include all these different things. And what you're trying to do is you're trying to limit your decision space to something focused that you invest in that you're going to be the world's leading best thing at that thing, 100%.
- [61:41]
A
This is why we exist. And so basically the trick of a product strategist then is to take all of the corpus of knowledge that may be, you know, your rich tapestry of inputs from this podcast. It could be whatever discovery we go through. And we are trying to isolate and find what we call durable problem spaces where if we invest in helping customers make progress inside that space, it will help us commercially. And so there's a link between working customer progress and paying customer progress. Ultimately we call these things problem spaces.
- [62:21]
B
Okay, I have a really good example from Dropbox. We had Melanie Rosen Vosser on the, on the show. One of the jobs to be done is help me live where I wanna live. I hire my job to help me live where I wanna live. Sometimes that means sponsoring my visa, but sometimes it means locate your business where I wanna be or allow me to be remote. Dropbox became virtual first. So they specialize in that. This is why you have to focus on what your product line is gonna be best at, is because they actually had to change how they invest in real estate a hundred percent.
- [62:58]
A
There's all sorts of operational investment, financial governance, legal, tax. I mean, that is a non trivial decision. And so what they've done in that case is they've made a very clear product decision. This is our offering to the market. It is positioned in this way. We cannot solve every possible problem in the market. We cannot respond to every stated want. So we need a way to structure that problem and opportunity landscape before we decide what we're going to build. We've made a very, very deep strategic decision here as a company and now we go about manifesting that through the offering and the positioning.
- [63:39]
B
This is especially true where feature sets are antagonistic. They cannot coexist. I cannot make a company where we all get to meet face to face and we all get to live where we want to live or something like that. So I cannot build a four wheel drive vehicle that will carry a ton and I can park in the city and get a hundred miles to the gallon. Can't do that. And so you decide this is what I'm going to create.
- [64:08]
A
Correct. And so product strategy is ultimately just choosing. It's the art of choosing. And so product strategy ultimately says, how do we manifest our product vision? Product vision is just basically what is our vision of the future look like? What is our deep understanding of this customer problem and how do we imagine our solution solving that problem in a differentiated way? Product strategy says, and I'm going to give you a really great example from a real life technology build. I think it's probably safe to share this publicly. Probably 10 years ago, Workday was losing sales, new accounts in the retail space. We would go in super competitive and we were going up against competitors who had a workforce scheduling offering. So we're talking about retail, lots of frontline workers, folks whose work patterns are shift based. Workday had a time tracking capability, but it had pretty much since its foundation being built for what you might describe as like white collar or office workers. So this was a kind of missing product capability and they were losing business. And so it became not an existential decision, but a major strategic decision which is what would it cost us to add that product capability and what do we stand to gain on the other side of assuming we do that well, and what would we perhaps have to redirect or redivert investment away from and what would the cost of that be and how do those two things compare? Now in a perfect world, we would do everything. We would do everything. But we don't exist in that perfect world. And so we have to say some of our customers who have been waiting for us to invest in this thing, which is super important to them, are going to have to wait a little bit longer. And that's probably going to. It might even hurt us. We may even risk a tiny bit of churn on the back of that. But as a product decision, it is better in the medium to longer term along these dimensions, you know, so There is a hard commercial element to being a product person. I think there are a lot of folks who are drawn to design and product because high user empathy. I get to be a craft, I get to craft something. I get to work with cool technology, I get to do R and D. And that is also true. But I think that there is a commercial component which is inherent to product work. We haven't really spoken about the kind of four big risks of a product. So the first is like value, meaning, will someone buy this? Is it desirable? Second being usability. Once they've got their hands on it, can they figure it out? Third being feasibility. Can we get it done with the available skills, time and technology? The last one is viability, which is, should we do this? Does this work for the company? Does this work for the business? Again, I'm using the business in the knowingly and incorrectly.
- [67:10]
B
I'm actually okay with using the business in that phrase. I'm good with that. It has to work for the business. The business is a system that manages the flow of resources, some of which is money.
- [67:21]
A
Yeah. For the purpose of creating value in the world.
- [67:24]
B
Right.
- [67:24]
A
Net value. Yeah, yeah. So product strategy is ultimately which unmet needs are important enough for us to invest time, money and resources into.
- [67:36]
B
Did you happen to hear the episode with Peter Feder on customer centricity?
- [67:40]
A
I did. I think you can safely assume that the answer to any sentence which begins with you asking me, did you happen to hear the episode? I think almost 100% of the time the answer is yes.
- [67:50]
B
Excellent, excellent. Happy to hear that. The question there was. It's very interesting because he says, don't be product centric, be customer centric.
- [68:00]
A
Customer centric, Yeah. I don't disagree, by the way.
- [68:03]
B
I completely failed to differentiate those two in the conversation because to me, being customer centric leads to a lot of product decisions. So anyway, his point was your objective is to win the highest value customers and so you're not here to be nice to all customers. Customer centricity does not mean being friendly. It means satisfying the needs of the specific customers who are best for your business. And I think this is a. I
- [68:35]
A
mean, I would say it in a slightly different way, which is every business makes a decision around who their ideal customer profile is. I am not the target market for. I'm going to butcher this French high end high heel maker, Christian Le Bouton. I'm just not the target market for certain things. And that's okay. I am not the type of customer that that business should spend any time or Effort on trying to win. It is a core function of the role of product strategy and product management to figure out what does our ideal customer look like so that we can spend as much of our energy in winning as many of those as it's possible for us to win. And so when we were trying to figure this out, we had this whole idea of positioning, this whole idea of stated needs. We have to listen to the market. And then there is an art in making very, very. It's like a stewardship art to basically say, given constraints, where do we invest? So I think that that is super interesting. Solving problems for customers in ways that they love and also driving value for the company. That's it. It forces us to be super thoughtful and super precise for my own business. Like, I have a few different products that I offer, right? One of which is like transformation consulting. Another one is executive coaching for chief product officers and their leadership teams and practitioners within their leadership teams. Another is a group coaching journey. And then I work with other partners to speak at events and various other things. So there are very specific parameters for those opportunities that I will put all my chips on because I know that that is highly matched to an opportunity that I know that I can convert into value for me and for them. And there are other opportunities where I think this isn't a space that I want or need to play and when it goes wrong. So for example, I won't name the company, but I worked at a company where my job as leading the product and design function ultimately ended up being about chief relationship healer with customers who had been sold something that was never fit for the purpose to the extent where perhaps sometimes even things were written into contracts without us knowing about things that they were going to be done in the product. And it wasn't the customer's fault. They just had misaligned expectations around what it was that we were going to be able to do for them that we could not meet. And that is not a good situation to be in. And product strategy is trying to avoid that and to maximize the upside of those choices.
- [71:26]
B
That leads into a discussion that we probably don't have time to have. But it's the difference between marketing led brand and product led brand.
- [71:35]
A
Well, I, I mean, even within the marketing world you have brand marketing, right? Which is, who are we? What do we stand for? When you choose to buy from us, who are you choosing to associate yourself with? Then you have product marketing, which is. And the thing that you're buying has all of this capability and it will help you Solve your problem. So brand marketing is very much often trying to drive demand for sales teams. Product marketing is speaking further down the funnel. And then you also have customer marketing, which I mean, if you've ever bought anything online, you probably still get emails from them. Hey, just fy, remember that time that you bought that cool shirt from us? Well, guess what, we've got a sale on cool shirts. So it's keeping you engaged. And those three different functions often get treated as one inside the aggregate. But they're quite different skills, they're kind of doing different things. I tend to see a very close alignment between what I describe as product marketing and the customer experience function, which again isn't necessarily an org, but it's a set of practices that go from the post sale experience through to things that we do to listen and retain accounts. We might not necessarily have to do much in the product to retain them, but we can certainly make judgment calls on should we invest in this or could we achieve the same outcome through tweaking something in our services offering, for example, not necessarily in the core technology layer.
- [73:09]
B
I have made this argument that there are certain things, parts of the work offering that should be served from the center. It's things that, that everybody wants the same, everybody wants their payroll to be accurate. And I have also argued that for where there's differences between customers, we should push a lot of the decision making and design to the last yard, which is at the team level between managers and team members. And so what's your position on that? In part because I think I push a lot more out to the edge than you might. And a part of my desire to push things out to the edge is the desire to be something for everybody that we've just been talking about. And so where do you land on that discussion?
- [73:59]
A
So I think more can be designed from the center than perhaps you do. But I think we're talking about degree, not kind of so I can share an experience I had as a new leader when I was working at workday. Workday today is not the company it was when it started. And there's all sorts of different reasons for that. But when it first began, it was a phenomenally wonderful place to work. It was very well led. Dave and Anil as the founders, they learned a lot from their experience at their priority company, PeopleSoft and what happened. And they kind of set out a lot of things that they wanted to not have happen again. They personally interviewed the first 500 people. I wasn't quite lucky to be in that number, but I was certainly hired by people who were in low single digits. I was hired by those folks. And workday became known as this incredibly employee centric, wonderful place to work. And then it started to scale. And as it started to scale, it became more complex and that first layer of cultural alignment started to wobble. And it became a kind of victim of its success in one sense. And some of the things that had originally made it great became unintentionally things that were beginning to get in its way. So as a new leader, it just happened to correspond. Around the time that the CEO really grasped this problem and said, being a good person is not incompatible with getting things done here. They said, kicking ass. Being a good person and kicking ass are entirely mutually compatible ideas. Not only are they mutually compatible, but this is our baseline expectation of you as a leader here, is to conform to these ideas, you must be a good person. And that also means when it gets tough acting in this way. And I found this incredibly empowering because I had a very clearly defined set of parameters within which I was expected to operate. And then I had permission to go and solve problems that were at my team level. And there's a whole handbook. It's a core text of something I look back on in my career as a profoundly powerful thing. It was a huge investment on the company. They would fly every manager out to California for what you might describe skeptically or cynically as like cult indoctrination week. But it was done with the right intent and done with highly, highly skilled design capabilities at the core. There was no technology. You know, there was a signup page or there was travel and that kind of stuff. But the product that we were participating in, there was an experience where we were being shepherded through a process which was transformational. And on the other side of that, I then had a much clearer perspective on what I needed to do at the edges. But that experience, in its totality was designed from the center. I guess that's where I would conform and then push.
- [77:07]
B
I think this is a phrase that you created, which is that the center can design and is responsible for designing the architecture of adaptability at the edge.
- [77:19]
A
Correct?
- [77:19]
B
Completely agree with that.
- [77:21]
A
Yeah. I think of it as enabling constraints.
- [77:25]
B
It's enabling constraints, but freedom within those constraints.
- [77:29]
A
Correct? 100%. So I like to imagine a two by two, because I am a consultant and I can't show up to any meeting without having a kind of 2x2 rattling around in my head. Imagine, if you will, two axes, one of which is anticipate and Respond So before and after, pre and post and then another one, the other axis is enabled and stop or guardrail. So what we end up with then are, I guess, things that help us so enabling things that happen after. So how do we learn from something that's gone wrong? How do we handle that failure or incident? How do we relate to reality and evidence of the thing that just happened? Do we try to reframe that and conform it to a pre existing narrative? Or do we lean into it and embrace the difficult reality? How do we handle uncertainty? I think there's all sorts of different things inside of that. Right to the left you've got anticipate and enable. So before things happen, how are we going to lean in and embrace change? How do we reinforce behaviors that align with what it means to work here? I guess like what I just described with that story bringing everyone to California. How do we navigate trade offs? How do we handle risk? And then on the other side you've got guardrails, the things that might protect or correct. So bottom left, anticipate guardrails. How do we eliminate harmful behaviors in advance? How do we define and communicate boundaries in advance? How do we prevent harm before it happens? How do we manage power dynamics? All of these things are kind of like anticipatory. And then on the other side you've got corrective responses. So how do we solve for conflict? How do we recover when we've broken trust? How do we handle complaints and hard feedback? How do we raise problems? All those kinds of things. So there's all sorts of different things inside of that. And I think that's a really useful heuristic to set out at the core what it means to work here. So those are kind of like core beliefs and cultural principles on top of which we then build out our product capabilities. And those in my mind map pretty neatly into those six dimensions that I described earlier. Practices and processes are then emergent on the other side of that, because we've got the core belief which is very, very tightly defined, we create an enabling tool, whether that's technology or something else. And then the behaviors emerge. And then experience is the ultimate emergent property from the collective integration and interaction of all of those things across those dimensions.
- [80:08]
B
This is the weird thing about talking to you is that makes so much sense to me.
- [80:12]
A
So I hope that it's not too weird. I'm glad to hear that it's coherent.
- [80:17]
B
It's at least equally. At least we're on the same weird page. Yeah, yeah, fascinating. I have a few Closing questions, as you know, okay, I should switch them up. I should give you new ones just to throw you off. But, Chris, what do you hire your job to do for you?
- [80:34]
A
Well, I love this question so much, Dart. And as a big fan of the podcast, I've often listened with fascination to other people's responses. And knowing I was coming on gave me quite a lot of pause to think about this for myself. And I think that there's two answers, frankly. There's a simple answer. I mentioned that word coherence. I think I'm in a constant pursuit of coherence. And so that comes back to puzzles and order, trying to find order within chaos. There's a lot of creative things that I seek out. I also seek out movement and travel. I love coming up to 20 years away from New Zealand and having got to see the world. Growing up on a very tiny little rock on the edge of the South Pacific, you grow up with a particularly constrained view of what's possible in the world. And so seeing the world has been a phenomenal, a phenomenal thing. But if I really push a little bit further, there is a deeper answer. And I think it goes to something which I've had to do a lot of inner work around and to try and uncover. I can't claim it to be a perfectly original thought. It's something I heard someone else come up with their own purpose, but I felt it was such an amazing expression of ultimately what I think I'm here on this earth to try and achieve, which is a calm mind, a healthy body, and a house full of love. And so honestly, work is something that is helping me stay in alignment with that. So it is about health. It is about. I don't know if this is a word, but it's about enoughness. It's finding enough time in my week. It's about experiences like this one. And it's also about finding enough income and enough of those things that I mentioned in the simple answer, the coherence, the puzzles, solving, the kind of creativity, time to do that with people who are really interested in trying to try and figure some of that stuff out together. And I think there's also a before and an after response, too. And I'll try and be kind of brief here, but, you know, a few years ago, I was really out of alignment with that. And so had you asked me this question a little while ago, I think in honesty, all honesty, I would have had to say I was trying to get status. I was trying to get things that don't Bring me closer to the calm mind, healthy body, house full of love. In fact, it created an imbalance and to a degree that I had some health things on the other side of that. And so my work, I think, is ultimately a bit of an escape from the corporate world and a place for me to design, work around what matters most. Design the things I spend so much of my time actually doing.
- [83:26]
B
It's really wise. There's so many people I talk to when I ask them what their work costs them, and I'm going to ask you that next, as you know, and they say, well, it harms my mental health. So the opposite of calm mind, they see that as a cost. I don't see enough of my family. And some people say it cost me my physical health. So you had a situation where the cost of the work you were subscribing to satisfied some other needs. It had some attributes that you liked. Status is great. Who doesn't like status? But it came at too much cost.
- [84:01]
A
Yes, 100%.
- [84:02]
B
What is the cost that you experience now?
- [84:05]
A
I am very privileged to say very little. It really did take a bit of thought to figure that out. I mean, I run a very small business and so there's some inherent uncertainty around that. There's a degree of, I guess, responsibility that might sometimes feel quite heavy to carry. Other times I thrive in that. I love figuring out how to run a business. The travel does come with time away from home. That is a cost in the aggregate sense. A house full of love. It's not that there's any less love, but there's certainly a little bit of, like, logistical stuff that that carries with it. And as things stand today, I think, you know, starting a business is slightly capital intensive and there is an opportunity cost in there too, which is, you know, like a senior, a big senior role at a big company is a lucrative thing. But, you know, I think it's okay. In fact, I'm very pleased with what my business is able to support my life with. And this is coming back to this idea of thresholds of enough, after what level can I say I comfortably have enough and I don't need to push, I don't need to seek out. And this has a plus and minus, right? So, like, do I have enough time in my week for the things that are important to me? Am I spending enough of my mental energy and focus on health? Do we have enough money to live on? After which am I able to trade up or down on some of these other dimensions, you know, that kind of thing? So I think right now I feel great and I feel like I have kind of walked the talk a little bit too. Like design something that really does work.
- [85:45]
B
We had Stacey Barton on the show. This was a long time ago, Disney experience, designer, storyteller. And she said, I hire my job to give me abundance.
- [85:55]
A
Mm. I love that word.
- [85:56]
B
It's a very interesting word. It's a little bit more than enough, but it's this feeling like I'm not on the edge of not having enough. The word abundance can mean a lot of different things. It can mean abundance of happiness at
- [86:11]
A
home, joy, love, peace. I completely agree. I love that word. It is definitely in there. I like to think of the purpose of my business to drive abundance in my personal life. But I also think in some way that I would also love for us to restructure the way the world works around this world, you know, rather than being extractive tax on, for example, the planet. I think that there is a way for us to create a society and an economy which optimizes for human and planetary abundance. Those two things are not incompatible objectives and I completely aligned with that idea.
- [86:50]
B
I really appreciate you taking the time. We talked a long time today, longer than I usually usually talk.
- [86:56]
A
That's a pleasure.
- [86:58]
B
How can people learn more about you?
- [86:59]
A
I have a website, Red Oak Agency. The company name is Red Oak. There's a contact form there. You can, you can find me. I'm on LinkedIn. I'm not posting as much as I might have in the past at the moment, but definitely responsive there. If you reach out to me and want to talk, happy to do that. I am increasingly available and visible through my good friend Luke Omani's events. The Sapienx brand is something Luke and I are of a burgeoning little partnership. If you're in London in either May or June, Luke has some events. I'll be speaking at those events, so check them out sapientx.co.uk and you can find me there. And I also write on substack. The substack is called the Operating Model.
- [87:43]
B
Fantastic. Thanks. Thanks for joining me for another episode of Work for Humans. If you enjoyed this episode, please give us a five star rating. Wherever you listen to podcasts and share the show with one person you think would get value from it, believe it or not, this really helps us grow the show and reach more people who want to build the kind of work that people really want. As always, thank you to my producer Jason Ames at 9th Path Audio for his insights and content and is high standard for quality. Final note, the opinions shared here are my own and not the views of Google or Cisco Systems. Thanks again for listening. See you next time.