Creating great products isn't just about product managers and their day -to -day interactions with developers.
It's about how an organization supports products as a whole.
The systems, the processes, and cultures in place that help companies deliver value to their customers.
With the help of some boundary -pushing guests and inspiration from your most pressing product questions, we'll dive into this system from every angle and help you think like a great product leader.
This is the Product Thinking Podcast.
Here's your host, Melissa Perry.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Product Thinking Podcast.
Joining us today is Robin Daniels, the Chief Business and Product Officer at ZenSci, a leading human success platform dedicated to empowering employees through continuous learning, performance management, and engagement.
Robin brings a wealth of experience to the table with a career that spans executive leadership roles at some of the most influential tech companies, including Salesforce, LinkedIn, Fox, and Matterport.
Robin is widely recognized for his expertise in growth, marketing, and product innovation, and has played a pivotal role in driving companies through hypergrowth phases leading to successful IPOs and acquisitions.
Beyond these executive roles, Robin is also a seasoned advisor and investor helping shape the future of numerous tech startups across the globe.
Today, Robin will share his insights on product management, the power of product -led growth, and his approach to building high -impact teams that deliver exceptional results.
But before we talk to Robin, it's time for Dear Melissa.
That's the segment of the show where I answer all of your burning product management questions.
If you have a question for me, go to dearmelissa .com and let me know what it is.
I'll answer it on an upcoming episode.
Here's this week's question.
Dear Melissa, I was hired a few years ago by the CEO of a company to build a suite of software offerings at a company that historically built custom whatever the customer asked for.
Since then, a new CTO that only has experienced leading engineering teams has been hired and product management has been moved under this role.
I built a team from the ground up to have a product strategy leader for each offering and product managers with various levels of skill sets reporting to a group lead for each offering.
We also have peer user experience in technical communications, product documentation, teams under product management.
My goal was to remove the stigma of the product owner mentality of only focusing on current or next sprint designs and to promote constant market research before making decisions on what to build, leading to faster career progression opportunities for all product managers.
I recently found out that the CTO has decided the product management team will be split between strategy under product management, me, and product owners, and user experience under software engineering.
I'm afraid the product managers will be reprioritized to only focus on internal work and not support broader customer or market needs, leading to an output -focused organization bent on building product for product's sake and not for our customers.
How can I turn this into good for the product managers, now product owners, and how would you suggest I try to convince my leadership that this will drive an output mentality rather than an outcome mentality, considering I don't have any data about how the future will play out regarding the future team
and product outcomes?
Are there other opportunities that you can see come from this sudden change in organizational structure?
So this one kind of reeks of a little bit of agile methodologies coming over good product management.
I think one of the questions to ask is, why did the CTO get buy -in to make this shift?
A lot of times, organizational change doesn't come just because a new CTO walks in.
It's because they're telling some kind of narrative to the CEO to get buy -in to move everybody around.
So here's where I would ask, what made them think that they needed to shift this all under engineering and then leave you with just product management?
What's been the trend?
What's been the outcomes in the organization?
What have you been observing?
Is it a political play?
What are they saying about you?
That's really what I would dig into.
Now, on the change in general, this feels a lot like a land grab to get more ownership by the CTO.
A lot of CTOs who have experience only with agile development would make the shift and try to move product owners underneath them.
They see product owners usually as more of an engineering function.
What do the engineers work on?
Which is just order taking.
That's just backlog management.
That's not putting all the market research that you talked about in there.
Now, I don't believe you should have split the product strategy and the product management out to begin with, and that's where there's some struggle there.
They're now saying, hey, do the product strategy stuff and ship it off to the product owners, and then they'll go build it.
That's a little strange, right?
That's getting us into waterfall.
That's not really being very agile.
That's also saying that the product owners won't have a lot of experience doing strategic work, and that's going to be a lack of a career path for them to get better at their career.
This is why I always advocate that no matter what level product manager you are, if you're working on teams, whether you're a CPO, you need to have some kind of strategic role in your role in your day -to -day thing.
That means that a lower -level product manager working with a team is understanding strategy and vision for a smaller scope, like a feature or an area of the product.
When you go up, you're doing strategy for something bigger.
You go up, you're doing more strategy, less tactical work.
That's how we see it in most Silicon Valley companies.
That's how we see it out there in any company that's really, really good at building software.
When you do this shift and start to move things around and put them under technology, I don't think it's going to end up well because you're not going to be connecting that market side back to the software side, unless the CTO is extremely commercially -minded.
But the fact that they didn't want to move product strategy over makes me wonder if they are commercially -minded.
For the product owners, the best thing that you do is still involve them in strategic decisions.
Consult them. Bring them along for the ride.
Make sure they're still involved in customer research.
Make sure they really have a deep understanding of why they're building what they're building so that they don't get locked into waiter mode.
On your end, though, I think you're going to have to try to figure out, how do you plug back into the delivery side so that you can see the outcomes go all the way through?
You're going to be assessing and figuring out where to go from a product strategy perspective, but you want to make sure they get built and prioritized.
It sounds like the CTO is taking that prioritization away from you.
All you could do really is supply now the product owners with research, but they're going to be making the strategic decisions.
Where does the roadmap live?
Who makes the priorities there?
These are all questions that I would have.
One thing that you could do here, I think, is turn to other companies and see what they're doing.
There's a lot of literature out there about how to actually structure product management teams.
You want to show that this is not actually the way that most teams are structured.
They're usually structured under a product management function.
There's a lot of reasons why we do that.
Career pathing, job descriptions, keeping strategy aligned.
If you separate out what we're building from how we think about what should be built, then you're going to get a disconnect in there and it's going to be mini waterfalls.
You're going to have a lot of documentation.
It won't go as fast.
There will be no ownership over what you build.
I'd really try to clarify those roles and responsibilities and try to show how inefficient and how ineffective this might be.
I would draw on experiences from other companies, like go out there, find some literature on it, to show why this shift really wouldn't be working.
That's what I would look at there.
I would point to companies that the company feels like the leaders of the company feel like are good, that they're doing it well, and then show them how they do product management.
Can you talk to some PMs there?
Can you find literature about how they do it and show that you're not really aligned to that?
Again, go back to my first question and ask, why did this change happen in the first place?
Because when you start to understand those reasons, a lot of times they're political, but maybe they're looking at this and saying, hey, I don't think they're performing or this is not happening or I'm not seeing the results I actually expected from this product management team.
You need to be able to figure out what battles to fight before you go to make your case.
You have to figure out why this was made in the first place.
Once you figure that out, then you can figure out how to fight it.
Some of it may have been untruthful, what was told, or there may have been reasons around that.
I'd really work on communicating up here, understanding the lay of the land, and really understanding what were the reasons behind this.
Hopefully, that helps set you in the right direction.
I hope that helps. Again, if anybody has questions for me out there, go to dearmelissa .com and let me know what they are.
Now, let's go talk to Robin.
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Find the link in our show notes.
Hi, Robin. Welcome to the podcast.
Hey, Melissa. How's it going?
It's great to talk to you.
You've had such an extraordinary career that spans leadership roles at some of the most influential tech companies, from Salesforce to LinkedIn to Box, Matterport.
Can you tell us a little bit about what led you into product management and marketing and what keeps you excited about these roles?
It goes back a long time.
I kind of grew up as a nerd.
I always loved tinkering with technology.
I had a really good role model when I was a teenager who taught me everything he knew about computers.
And it really kind of inspired me to go the direction of becoming, I would say, a technologist.
Because I love how technology can influence the way we work or the way we live.
And so I started coding at a pretty early age.
I'm a self -taught programmer.
I started building websites in the 90s, like really early days, coding in HTML, JavaScript, Java, and so on.
But I actually studied marketing in college.
And so when I went into the professional world, my work ended up centering around really coding kind of websites front -end and stuff like that.
But I ended up having a boss very early on in my career who kind of said to me, what you're doing, based on your personality and your skillset, you'd be better suited for product marketing and product management.
You should go that direction.
And she kind of took me under her wing, and she kind of pushed me in that direction, gave me the confidence and skills to go and pursue a career that way.
And since then, when you look at my trajectory through life and Salesforce, and Box, and LinkedIn, and Matterport, and all these different companies, I've been more on the go -to -market side.
But I think what has made me an effective leader is because I've come from a deep technology background, I understand exactly what's going on with technology, how it's built, how you kind of translate the features, the functionality, everything else that product team is trying to do, what the engineering
team is trying to do, into something that makes sense in the market.
Because at the end of the day, I think nowadays, if you look at any modern organization, it's really impossible to separate go -to -market, the three kind of components of go -to -market, which is product, sales, and marketing.
Those three are so much like, if you don't understand all three, it's very hard, I think, to be an effective leader.
So my success has really been, I've been more on the commercial side, but I've always deeply dabbled in product, helping guide the roadmap and what should be built for customers, how we can beat the competitors, and all this kind of stuff.
So, I'm super passionate about product, and I continue to be so.
And in my new role here at Censi, I'm the Chief Business Officer and Chief Product Officer.
So I run go -to -market, and also the product team as well.
Because again, this is kind of one of the three discussions I had with our CEO when we were talking about me joining last year, is that in a modern organization, you really should have all these aligned product marketing and sales into one organization.
It doesn't mean everything falls under me, but it's a big team, lots of great leaders and so on, but having somebody who can kind of have that purview is really important, I think, nowadays.
It's funny. I just did a podcast episode too with Mercedes Sheffield -Taylor, and she's a recruiter.
We're talking about Chief Product Officers and she said, something that was resonating with me as you were talking about that, if you're a Chief Product Officer and you don't know how your product is sold, that's a problem.
And I think that's the importance of marketing and go -to -market.
Also, especially now with PLG and freemium and everything else, it's more important than ever that you're so aligned.
First of all, I think Mercedes is great.
She's one of my favorite people.
But she's absolutely right.
I think Chief Product Officer really has to understand the commercials.
Because if you understand how to take the friction out of the go -to -market, then of course, the stickiness with customers will be much higher, the initial onboarding, the love of the product, ultimately.
I always say, if you want to create a super brand, and every CEO I talk to, and I spend a lot of my time as an advisor to companies around the world, and CEOs and VCs, and they always say, everybody wants two things.
They want, I create a super brand that stands the test of time.
Well, okay, well, here's how you do that.
And they want to create repeatable and scalable kind of revenue.
There's also Playbook for doing that.
Doesn't mean it's not.
It's exactly replicable for every single scenario.
But those two things, there is a formula for how to do that.
And for the first one, if you want to create a product at a brand that stands the test of time, you have to first, of course, make people aware of who you are and what you do.
Then you have to make people use your stuff.
And then finally, you have to make people fall in love with yourself.
That's where a product really comes in, right?
That's not something that sales and marketing alone can do.
At the end of the day, there has to be a product that people ultimately love and use and find utility and value and ultimately want to tell everybody else about.
Yeah, I think that's so important for product people to know.
And you've been part of a lot of successful companies, too.
You've seen companies through IPOs.
You've done high -growth phases.
When you look back on your career, what are some of your proudest accomplishments?
There's been a few.
Not everything I've done has turned to gold.
There's been some good wins in there.
One of my first early experiences was really, it was really formative for me.
I would say a place where my career really saw hyper growth was when I joined Salesforce in 2007.
We had a great leader, Mark Benioff is one of, I think, the best leaders of all time.
And I was surrounded by just incredible people in all parts of the organization.
And I led one of these products called Chatter.
I first came in running product marketing for Europe, Middle East, and Africa.
And then I moved to Salesforce at the end of 2009.
And I ended up taking over the go -to market for one of their products called Chatter.
And it was really meant as a, at that point in time, an internal slack for companies to better communicate and collaborate.
And the gating factor was that you had to have a Salesforce license in order to do so.
And so we said, well, what if we kind of ungate that?
What if we just give everybody in an organization a license to use Chatter?
Communication and collaboration will become much smoother across the entire organization.
Let's say you have an organization with 100 ,000 people, and maybe only 10 ,000 of those are in sales.
What about the 90 ,000 other people who can also benefit from communication and collaboration?
What you see was slack nowadays and so on.
But back then, I think, it was a more radical idea.
There was a couple of other companies, Yammer and Jibe, who were kind of glomming onto this.
But they never had the core benefit of having a stickiness of a CRM system.
So we said, that's the core.
How do we end people's communication around the issues that really matter and break down the barriers that exist to really great companies to form?
We ungated that. But then we said, well, how about we take this even further and we release a premium version of this to the whole world?
And we said, well, in order to do so, we actually want to get as many companies to sign up really quickly.
And we said, what's the biggest stage where we can go and talk about an enterprise collaboration tool like this?
So we sponsored maybe the first ever enterprise ad at the Super Bowl in 2011 with the Black Eyed Peas.
And we ran a Super Bowl commercial for Chatter because they were playing the halftime show at the Black Eyed Peas.
So we did a Super Bowl ad with them.
We actually did two, one before halftime and one after halftime, showcasing the benefits of what Chatter was.
With, of course, the call to action that you should go sign up right now.
And it's such a proud moment for me because in 24 hours, we've got over 20 ,000 unique companies signing up for Chatter.
But it was so many challenges.
It sounds simple like, oh, you just promoted that to Super Bowl, right?
And so on. Yes, it's expensive, but the logistics is actually making that happen.
Because back then, mobile phones weren't really as powerful as they are today.
Taplets weren't really as big a thing as they are today.
But we also knew that people are not going to sit watching the Super Bowl with their laptops ready for signing up for something.
So how do you make this experience optimized for a kind of janky old phones or a really weak tablet or something that people can do with as little friction as possible?
And this comes back to one of the big insights in my career.
You have PLG and Freemium.
It's like the whole goal is really to take out the friction at every step of the way.
That's all the way from first awareness, then to sign up, then to the information you gather.
Then once you're in the product itself, what do you do with the first touch that you have and so on?
We had to optimize that whole kind of chain of things that were happening in order for it to go smoothly.
So we did this thing and we announced Chatter, Freemium at the Super Bowl.
Yeah, and we got over 20 ,000 unique customers signing up.
And of course, for us as a company, we were not in the business of just having Freemium users.
So we can now go and, of course, upsell the page, Chatter or even full CRM products to these customers.
But it was a great experience.
And then from there, Aaron Levy over at Box and the team over there came to me and said, Hey, whatever you did at Salesforce and for Chatter, come do it for us.
Because they also were struggling with figuring out how they figure out the Freemium kind of side of things, as well, and getting into the enterprise.
But that formative experience at Salesforce really kind of changed my outlook on what was needed for products to be successful.
What's interesting about that story to me too is that a lot of people would think of Super Bowl ads as something that's very B2C.
And you went after it for the enterprise.
Yes, I don't know for a fact, but I think maybe it might have been the first enterprise ad at the Super Bowl.
Because we're not interested in individuals signing up for Chatter.
There's no benefit in that for us.
We wanted companies signing up with as many users as possible.
So it was really interesting challenge.
I think nowadays you see quite a few B2B ads.
I think you've seen Slack actually have been there.
And I think many other companies as well.
Service now and whatever.
But I think we were one of the first ones.
And it's just, I would say so from here's my lesson also, honestly, from an awareness perspective, it was amazing.
Over 20 ,000 customers signing up.
People were talking about it.
I don't know if it was the best ad error, but that's not the point.
But in terms of actually turning into revenue, that's still a little bit more up in the air.
How much of it actually turned into revenue.
And I think companies nowadays have gotten a lot smarter around PLG.
Getting people signed up.
How do you actually get people on an onboarding ramp just to then, of course, become paying customers?
Back then, we were very early days with this.
I don't think our strategy was sound enough.
Like, we just wanted people to get in and sign up and get in.
But from there, it wasn't as clear as what did you actually do when you were in the product?
Nowadays, I think companies are way better at doing this stuff.
What do you think is that key moment after you capture their attention, they sign up for free?
Ma 'am, that helps product managers think about what to do next to get people to convert.
Well, there has to be some kind of utility that you get.
If it's some product, there's utility in it just for you as an individual, right?
If I sign up for, let's say, a Dropbox account, there's instant utility in me just signing up.
Whether I use it myself or with other people.
That's instant utility because I can, of course, keep all my stuff in the cloud.
With other products, I think it's a lot harder because you have to spark those instant moments when you start sharing with other people.
If you sign up for a free Zoom account, as an example, there's no benefit in pursuing with yourself.
You have to instantly figure out how do you get other people to use that with you.
So it's really about figuring out what to do.
I mean, another example in my experience is when I was over at Matterport, the previous company in WhatsApp, we created this 3D camera because it's just a piece of hardware.
People could go around, they could do these recordings of their residential space or the commercial space, and we'd put it together and become a beautiful virtual walkthrough of these spaces.
On top of that, we built a software service platform, a cloud platform, and it was a very massive lot of IP around that.
We needed one in order for the other to work.
We said, well, one of the gating factors that we had, one of the limiting factors, is that in order for us to really scale further, we need to unbundle the idea of having to buy a camera first a fairly expensive camera, $3 ,000, first, in order to actually use Matterport.
We could see how every human being in the world occupies a space, and that space can become more interesting.
You can share with people, all this kind of stuff, if we can figure out a way for people to actually capture that space in some way.
And so we said, well, what if we can figure out a way to put the technology that we've now created for this proprietary camera on a smartphone, on an Android or an iPhone?
That would be a huge unlock, because then suddenly every person on the planet suddenly records the home they're in, the apartment.
So if you're trying to rent out your home for an Airbnb or you're trying to buy a new place, it's much better to actually be able to walk through that than just seeing a static picture.
But we also knew the gating factor was that camera.
So there was a lot of engineering effort that went into how can we put that technology and make it adaptable for a phone that you have in your hand, but the quality is maybe not as good.
Your hand is not as steady because you're not on a tripod.
You don't really know because it's not just about it's not a recording you're doing.
You're actually standing in a spot and you're kind of turning in a 360 degree motion around that spot in some interesting way.
And then it's recording that.
Then you're moving to another spot four, five, six feet away.
And then you're doing the same thing again, over and over again until you have a full kind of map of that space.
But we knew if we could figure out a way to do that in a way that got people to understand exactly what to do when they signed up on their smartphone.
And they could then do it really simply without many steps as their full camera.
And then once they've taken a full scan of their space, their apartment, their home and so on, and they can then do what they can do with it.
Do you share with a friend?
Do you share with an interior designer?
Do you share with a real estate agent?
Do you want to put it on Airbnb or something to rent it out?
Lots of different use cases for it.
And so we finally figured out the engineering behind this.
It's just some really smart people who worked on that.
And we've released the first version during COVID.
And in the first week of us releasing this smartphone version, which was pretty honestly rough at the time of release.
But kind of an early beta version where we said, let's get it out there.
We don't want to wait a year from now because we're in this moment of time where everyone's stuck in their home.
Let's release an early version.
But in the first week of us releasing that, we got more signup in the first week than within the first eight years of being in business by selling the real big camera and the cloud plan.
And we got about 80 ,000 signups or so in the first week.
And about, I think 12 percent of those ended up turning into paying customers over that first year.
And many of them stayed on the premium plan.
It's just like you got one space for free.
But many of them turned out to be paying customers like Starbucks and Walgreens and all these kind of cool companies were signed up.
Ended up using it for brand management, inventory management, all kinds of cool things.
And some of them ended up buying the bigger camera.
And some of them just kept using the smartphone cameras.
One of the customers was this retail store.
And they had all these retail stores around the world.
And they wanted to use their employees in the different retail stores to record how the layout was so they could optimize and make it uniform across all their stores.
Instead of sending around people to kind of check on that which is very time consuming, costly and so on.
But it was really around, well, coming back to the original question, can you make it a utility and useful from the initial?
Because if you land in a product and you're just like, what do I do now?
Then you're dead on arrival basically.
So the goal for me has always been premium.
It's like, how do you make it useful from the initial interaction with that product?
I don't know if you were seeing the same thing in your world, but I'll be curious because I always feel I can learn more as well.
I agree with you. I think a lot of products get people in there and then they get stuck.
It's like, how do you keep them coming back?
How do you do that?
And a lot of tactics that people would use are more like, hey, let's notify them or let's email them.
Let's do that. That's not sticky enough.
That's not enough to get them to remember to come back.
So what I love about your story was how it integrated into their lives to solve their problems.
From that, though, I'm so curious.
You now have these companies doing all these things you didn't expect.
How did you go back and think about the future of your product and the vision and reshape it based on all these different use cases that you were finding out about?
I would say suddenly that takes center stage because you realize when it unlock it could be, I think, beforehand.
If I rewind the clock 10 years ago, I probably thought of premium and maybe didn't use the word PLG really because I think it's more of a modern term.
But this idea of in -product upgrades and growth is kind of more of an aster thought in some ways.
I think nowadays, I think it takes center stage.
I think any company that wants to be successful nowadays has to put that foot in center.
So meaning for me, it's all about the moment you land in the product, can you find utility in it instantly?
Can you find some use for it?
And not just that, you then end up figuring out how do you use it enough that you end up falling in love with it?
That it becomes such an inescapable part of your daily life that you can't imagine a world without it.
And so this company I'm working at now, for example, we sell a learning product.
We sell a performance management product and then employee engagement product.
What's interesting is a learning product is something that a lot of people use because they have to, if we're honest about it in the past.
Your company is saying you have to take this training, you have to take this cybersecurity course, the sexual harassment, this training on whatever it is.
A lot of people go through the training and sometimes they have another screen going while the training is going and so on.
But we also know at the same time that people are hungry for knowledge and skills and growth in their careers and all these kind of things.
What if we turn training into something that people seek out and want to do, kind of like you do in your personal lives?
And so my goal is, but it's not enough to just say that, you have to of course have a product that can foster that and be where you are when you need it.
But in order for the product to understand who you are, what you need, and the moment you need it, we need to know more about you.
That's where I think performance management and employee engagement comes in.
So if you think about the reason you are where you are in your life, I assume it's probably because you've had a lot of great teachers and mentors and parents and siblings and coaches and bosses and so on.
Kind of nudged you, seen something in you and nudged you in a certain direction.
And I want to be that platform that understands enough about you that we can then say use all these data signals and to figure out what would be the best skill for you to learn.
What would be the best course for you to take?
Who would be the best person for you to connect with so you can grow your life and your career in a direction that you find joyful and hopeful and exciting for your life.
And when I look at these statistics that say that 70 % of people are disengaged, so they want to quit their job and you dig deep into the data of why that is, it pretty much always says the same thing.
Because people are stuck in their careers, they don't feel like there's anybody looking out for them or investing in them.
And it's not an easy thing to solve, but I think a lot of it comes down to giving people the opportunity to learn the skills that they need, not that you think they need.
So there's a difference.
And so I'm hoping that the future can look something like where we know enough about people and their dreams and aspirations and everything that they want to become.
To nudge them in a direction where they on a daily basis seek improvement.
It's not that you overnight from one day to another become best at something.
If you want to run a marathon or you want to become great at playing piano, it's a lifetime of daily improvements, micro improvements.
And it's the same with kind of your career or your skills that you have in a certain area.
And I want to be down at that platform that hopefully gets people to learn something and connect with the right people every single day to make that product.
But coming back to the question around how I think about it now, it's a lot about how do you institute joy into a product that makes people want to come and use this and want to share that with other people and connect with other people.
If you can figure that out, and I've got some of it figured out, but that's how you create products that kind of stand the test of time.
You can't imagine a world without it.
It's a lot of products I love, but when I wave, I find a replacement, honestly.
And I want to be that product that you can't imagine living without.
Kind of reminds me of when I teach people about the Kano model and you got that delighter on there.
That feature, that thing that's going to make you go oh wow, this is drastically different than something else.
When you think about that in your setting, especially with Zensei, what do you find are your delighters?
What's sparking joy for something that seems so mundane for people in a corporate setting?
One of the things I really found, so we have this notion of a weekly check -in.
And in the weekly check -in, everybody who uses this product gets asked a four question.
You can modify it however it is, but the standard is four question.
And it's really they're really kind of well thought out to be lightweight, but gives a ton of information.
But also be easy for whoever engages with it to respond to.
Number one is, what have you achieved this past week?
And it's a good time moment of self reflection to just think back on what have I achieved this week?
And if you realize that you haven't achieved the things you set out to achieve, you can course direct net fleet.
There are so many times in my career, I've come to Friday night, and I'm with friends or family.
And I'm talking about what I did, and I'm like, I realized how busy I was, but I didn't really achieve anything of course.
Have you ever had that moment?
It sucks, right? I was so busy working nonstop, but I didn't really move the ball forward on any of the big things I wanted to.
So the first question is really, this is kind of notion of self reflection.
What did I achieve this week?
That's number one. Number two is, what blockers do I have?
So just also a way for you to be very high open and mindful around it.
So you can of course share with your manager, but also share with the team around you.
And it becomes a great way of actually collaborating and communicating much more succinctly to the people that matter, and having this much close relationship.
So I do this with the CEO who I work for, but also my whole team, I can see their blockers.
And instead of this becoming this big thing at the end of the quarter, where I'm like, how didn't you do this?
I can instantly become much more in the mindset of being a servant to my team and say, what can I help you to unblock this?
What research do you not have?
What skills do you not have?
What's stopping you from achieving this?
How can I help? So it's a great moment of self reflection, both for the individual, but also for the team itself and for the manager.
So that's number two.
Number three, it asks the question of on a scale of one to 10, how are you doing?
And I can see over time who's trending in the right direction, who's trending down, and what can I do as a manager to kind of solve it.
It's not a big question where you have to fill out 20 different questions that I've seen in some other settings.
This mentioned just be like a quick pulse check, how are you doing scale of one to 10.
And then the fourth question is, who do you want to call out?
Who do you want to give kudos to or give a high five to?
And you can then mention people.
And this is probably one of the biggest moments of joy when you suddenly at the end of the week, both me as a manager, I see all the kudos flying back and forth between team members and the people who are calling me out.
Because, of course, I get a notification that, hey, Freddie mentioned you or Kathy mentioned you in this call out.
And it just makes you feel like you belong.
It makes you feel like you're part of something bigger than yourself.
It makes you feel like you matter.
Suddenly, it's like I think in this world where everyone's kind of working remotely, it's a great thing.
You can show you a lot of freedom, but sometimes it can feel isolating and a little lonely.
And I think this notion, because we also globally distributed team, 250 people in seven different countries, most people work remotely.
Suddenly, you see all these kind of kudos flying around.
The first week of us implementing this about a year ago, we had over 1500 kudos flying between team members.
And I can just tell now, because I see it on a weekly basis, this sense of belonging, which is really irreplaceable, that even though I don't see these people on a daily basis, we're not in the same room, I can tell I matter to their life and they matter to me.
And there's this sense of being in it together.
Because one of the things I noticed as COVID kind of swept through the world and everybody started working remotely, people were more productive and more efficient than ever.
So that went way up.
But the joy of oftentimes being in a company and the loneliness and isolation oftentimes went up as well, unfortunately.
And this is a way of kind of solving that a little bit.
And it provides such a sense of joy, of delight when you see those call outs and you're like, wow, people care about me.
I matter. It can't be under.
It's not the same as getting a promotion or getting a more salary or whatever it is, but it's just a sense of, wow, I'm in it with people who care about me.
That's irreplaceable.
And they feel appreciated too, it sounds like.
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I like that fostering a sense of community because you're right.
I think in a lot of remote teams, we're missing that.
People aren't really feeling that.
So this sounds like it's bringing people back to your product, specifically for the community aspects too, but helping it hook into things that you would find otherwise just boring or, of course, I have to do this.
I don't really want to do this.
And this is where I didn't come back to the earlier part.
If a person does this every week, it says to you, Melissa, you've built out this every week.
Imagine you're doing that for 10 weeks in a row.
The amount of information I know about you and your trajectory, then I can recommend you should go take this course.
You should go learn this skill.
If I see you're constantly struggling with some interpersonal communication with some other people in a different department, say, hey, maybe you should go take a communication skills course.
Or maybe you should go learn how to be better analytics and data science, whatever it is, but it gives me so much information.
So I can guide you as a coach, as a mentor, in the right direction for your life and where you need to be.
And so this is where this kind of daily habit, weekly habit, right now, I think we at Sensai, we have a product that gets used mostly on a weekly basis.
I would love to see this being used much more on a daily or maybe every two -day basis and so on.
Because I think the more we can push you in that direction of greatness and understanding of what you need in your life, the happier you will be.
The more you will turn that 70 % of people who are unhappy into maybe something less because people feel like they have momentum and trajectory in their lives.
What's interesting to me too about what you're doing is that we think of performance management as that once or twice a year moment in time.
But it's also giving you the record of here's all the accomplishments I did do over the year.
And you're not just sitting there racking your brain about what do I write down to see if I get my bonus or not, right?
It actually can tell if you're growing over time or if you're achieving things.
What's interesting is you're hitting on something super interesting because many of our customers, they still want, of course, the annual performance review.
But here's what we do.
We make it so simple.
When you go and you click on that button and it says, show me the annual performance of somebody on the team, we take all the weekly check -ins and we use AI to highlight the key accomplishments because how many times have you done it?
I've done so many times in my career where I'm like, oh, it's time for my annual performance review.
Then you sit down, you rack your brain, you go through your calendar, you go through all your PowerPoint decks and Excel files and whatever to see what you actually accomplished.
This here will just make it super easy for you.
Basically, with a click of a button, you can see, oh, here are all the highlights from your year and then you can just send it on to your manager.
Of course, you can modify it however you want, but still often times most people, honestly, the individual hates the annual performance review, the manager hates the annual performance review.
It's not a joy for anybody.
How can we make that a little bit less onerous?
I know that there's still a value for it somehow because you get a record, but if you also ask the current generation, this is on my LinkedIn, I have enough, I think, followers that it's statistically viable and maybe not completely scientifically viable, but enough to give you direction.
I asked, how often would you like to have performance insights about you from your manager?
Weekly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly.
Most people by far say weekly or monthly.
Nobody said really quarterly or yearly.
This notion of a yearly performance review is also super antiquated.
It's not how the current generation wants, they want, there's something I'm not doing right.
I can tell you so I can go fix it.
Yeah, of course, correct, in real time.
With this stuff that we're talking about, like I said, it's something that's kind of been entrenched.
Like performance reviews have been entrenched for a while, learning management's been out there for a while.
How did you go back and start to think about what would delight our customers?
What was your process for trying to figure out that these check -ins were going to be the thing that helps you?
So we had this thinking around we have to evolve from employees, people, human resources, being something that is about managing people, which is really what it's been about, to really have something about, to much more about how do you empower people to be the best that they can be.
I think any manager or any leader worth their weight really thinks constantly about how do I empower my people to have the right skills, resources, and knowledge to be successful every day.
It's not my job to be the best at everything, it's my job to provide an environment where they can be the best.
And I think so often HR gets conflated to be something that's really taking care to have the basic needs of people, making sure they get paid on time, they take their vacation, they take their compliance training, and all of this kind of stuff.
And that's not going away.
It's been around for a long time.
It's not going to go away anytime soon.
But it's certainly not enough to provide an environment where people do the best work of their life, or where they're happy and motivated and successful.
And so we ultimately, before I joined the company, had lots of discussions with our CEO about, I don't want to join a learning management company, honestly.
I want to join a company that really stands for human power, about how do we get the best out of people.
I can get a little philosophical, but all a company really is a collection of people trying to solve challenges together.
Sometimes those challenges are really small, like on a daily basis, and sometimes they're really big existential challenges.
Competitors are coming in through the market, there's turbulence in the market, whatever, it could be a global pandemic and so on.
But all a company is is a group of people coming together and solve challenges.
And if you want to solve the challenges the best way, you've got to provide an environment for those people to do the best work of their lives, giving them the knowledge and skills and motivation to be successful.
And so many companies are so bad at this, they're really terrible at it.
They ended up thinking that just because we paid people, they will show up every day to do the best work their life.
That's just not true.
There was 70 % of people who are deeply unhappy at their work.
Are they showing up every day doing the best work of their life?
I doubt it. So that's on the micro scale, the company scale.
But then if you extract it out at the global scale, societal scale, if we want to solve some of these big challenges that we have in the world, whether that's climate change or inequality or whatever it is, we need every single person I think on the planet to be able to show up every day and kind of give
it their all, the best ideas possible, the most energy, the most excitement towards solving some of these challenges that we have.
So I think it's so important that we unlock this.
And I'm not naive enough to think that technology alone will do this.
It's about culture.
It's about leadership.
It's about the right environment.
But at some point, at some point, Melissa, you also have to have the right tools to foster this kind of thinking.
And that's where we come in as a company since I want to be one of those platforms that people can rely on to get a little bit better, a little bit more motivated, a little bit more in line with the company mission every single day so you can do great work.
But I know it's going to be a lot of things, but that's kind of the mission that I'm on because I really do think that we are faced with a lot of challenges.
I'm an eternal optimist.
I'm always hyper positive.
But I also think that I want to leave the world a better place than where I was from.
And we need everybody then to show up and do really awesome things in the world.
I'm being motivated to do so.
And I want to be a catalyst in that direction.
It's such a good and inspiring vision, too.
When you think about setting these visions and leading teams around product management and marketing, how has your past experience here and in other companies, Salesforce, LinkedIn, all these places, how has it helped you shape how you think about building product teams?
What are the building blocks you need to make sure you're going to be successful?
There's a couple of different things.
Number one, for me, everything starts with clarity around what it is you're trying to achieve.
And that clarity can be a lot of different things.
It's clarity in the overall mission of the company.
It's clarity in the product that you're trying to build and it's clarity in the milestones that the team have to build towards.
I think that the main thing is providing clarity around those different things but then giving the team the freedom to figure out how to get there.
It's not that you don't tell smart people exactly how to do their job.
It doesn't make any sense.
They're both smart enough to figure that out.
But they oftentimes need a direction to go towards.
And I think the job as a leader, what I've learned is the best leaders I've worked for have been super great at providing inspiring and motivating vision for me to work towards.
And then I'll figure out how to get there and execute on that and provide even maybe something beyond what they expected.
But it really starts with clarity around what are we trying to be?
Who do we want to become one day?
And what do we not want to become?
Or who do we not want to be?
Because those are equally good questions.
And once you have that, then you just kind of set the team pre.
So that's number one.
It's like clarity to me is everything.
And I've noticed this trend oftentimes that people, they really thrive in clarity, hyper clarity.
They even sometimes actually thrive when the clarity is super bad because then they can go and solve for it.
The worst is when there's like non -flarity, uncertainty.
So as a leader, it's your job to really kind of get to that point of clarity, I think very quickly.
Number two is then assembling a super diverse team around solving this.
Because in my experience, people are so much better.
Outcomes are so much better when you have the right kind of mental models, the right skill sets coming together.
And there's a lot of different ways of assembling great teams.
Where it's really around assembling a diverse set of skills and diverse set of backgrounds in order to solve this depending on what it is.
Because I can't think of many things in a company that's solved just by individuals.
Most big projects are usually solved by teams coming together.
And as a leader, my job is kind of to assemble the right ingredients for that to happen.
And then provide the right frameworks and guidelines in order for that team to thrive.
But giving them the freedom and focus within a certain framework to do so.
It can't be too loose, but it can't be too restrictive either.
It's kind of like a fine balance depending on what it is.
And of course, as I'm sure you've seen in your life and career, some projects are super well defined.
We know exactly what you do.
We just need a team to kind of go figure out how to actually get some.
For example, we want to become this ish platform in five years.
I don't really know how we're going to do that.
We're going to build by partner with.
What are we going to build?
What are we going to build?
Those are like... But to me, the second step is really around assembling just a great team around something.
I'm hyper convinced and obsessed with.
I write about this a lot on my LinkedIn.
It's just the power of great teams coming together.
I am 100 % been successful in my life because of teams I've assembled.
And I fail every time I've not been able to kind of assemble the right team or motivate the team in the direction that I want to because of maybe political or toxic behavior or something.
So it's something I try to be very mindful of kind of stamping out.
But team dynamics is everything.
I spend a lot of time on team dynamics.
And I spend a lot of time also on individual motivation, trying to understand what a person really wants out of this journey that they're on.
And unless you understand, it's very hard to motivate a person towards that goal.
And sometimes a person wants more money.
Sometimes they want a bigger title.
Sometimes they want to learn a new skill.
Sometimes they just want to be proud of the work they're doing.
There's a gazillion different ways to motivate people.
But unless you understand, I just treat everybody the same.
I think you're going to miss a trick or two in terms of guiding people towards better outcome.
And then I think number three is really around accountability.
As a leader, figuring out how do you hold the team accountable to progress towards that.
And sometimes that gets on the individual level.
Sometimes it's on the team level.
Sometimes it's daily.
Sometimes it's weekly.
Sometimes it's monthly depending on the size of the project you're working on.
But I think there's also been a trend where it's hard sometimes for managers to hold people accountable because they feel like they're being too aggressive or too confrontational.
I think there's just a way of learning how to have a fun motivating environment but also be accountable for results.
But that also comes from actually being clear on what the results you want them to be and how you're going to reward the outcomes of those results.
So if you get there, what are you going to do?
If you reach this goal, what's going to be in it for the team or the individual and so on?
And if you're not clear, then it's very hard to know.
I mean, there's been many times in my career, honestly, I've worked really hard since, but I wasn't really sure of the outcome of what I was doing.
How was I going to be held accountable?
I released this feature, this thing to market, and then I just move on to the next thing.
There's no accountability.
And I think nowadays, when I talk to, again, CEOs and kind of business leaders, they all want to know, like, how do I create high -performing teams that are accountable for results?
So you have to figure out how to do that in the best way for you.
What's your secret sauce for saying, this is how I figure out how to motivate my team.
What are you doing?
How are you checking in with them?
And then what is that translating to in the way that you communicate with them during the weeks?
I try to be there for them nonstop, and I try to be available to answer questions and guide them in the right direction, especially in the beginning of big projects.
But then I try to kind of get out of the way.
I don't micromanage in any way.
I think it's super demotivating when you have micromanagers or you micromanage people.
I think you're basically implying that people are out tomorrow enough to figure it out for themselves.
And I think that doesn't motivate anybody.
But my style is very much to try to inspire and provide kind of the guidelines and frameworks for where we need to go, but let people figure it out themselves.
But have lots of conversations, both with the team and the individuals, to make sure that progress happens.
And so not being afraid to ask, okay, so...
But this is also where I can come back to the platform I mentioned earlier.
When you have that insight every single week, then the conversation becomes so much more natural because instead of me going into a meeting with Linda, being like, Linda, what's the status on this thing?
I know because I saw in her update what's working and what's not working.
So I can come in and say, hey, I saw we weren't making progress yet.
How can I help you?
What is it that you're not getting from me?
Or what is it that's stopping you?
Is it some team members?
Is it not enough resources?
Are you not clear on the goal of what this is?
The conversation is 100 times better because I instantly know how I can lean in versus me coming into a meeting blind and being like, tell me the status, and then I figure out that things are not going well.
And kind of you've all been in those meetings where the manager blows up and it's just not motivating for anybody.
It's horrible. So that's never been my style.
And now with this kind of platform, I'm much more in line with actually what the team needs before they even have to ask.
When you think about giving the teams just the right amount of direction so that you can let them go figure it out in your night micro -managing, what does that look like?
How do you know you gave sufficient direction and they can get what they need done?
I think usually to me it happens when we do kind of a first review of something.
When they come back and they say here a week later, a month later, whatever it is, and say here's the plan and here's maybe some early mock -ups of something.
Maybe it's something in Figma that they're showing me, or maybe it's just a plan or whatever it is.
It could be a lot of things.
That's usually when you start course -correcting, I think, and seeing whether or not you're on the right track or something.
For example, at SendSci, we have a learning product.
And it's really meant for corporate learning.
We don't do the content, we just sell the platform for learning.
One of the things our customers have been asking for a lot is that they want to offer learning for their frontline workers, meaning workers who are not sitting in front of a desk all day but who might be in a retail store or in a fast -food chain or on a factory floor or a nurse somewhere.
And so customers have been asking for it because so many of our customers, they have these kind of users, but they're not.
They're sitting on a mobile device.
That's all they have in their pocket, maybe a tablet.
And I said to the team, so we need to solve this because our customers are asking for it and it's obviously a huge market opportunity for us.
But the requirements of those workers can't just take our core platform and extend it out into kind of the mobile device and give them a different kind of license maybe because they're infrequent users.
We have to treat this more like a consumer product because these users are not as savvy maybe and they're not a device all day because they're maybe dealing with customers in a retail store or something.
So we have to take much more of a consumer mindset to this even though we sell a B2B product.
Let's take a consumer mindset to this and make it super.
All the stuff that we see in the normal mobile app that we have that kind of gives you a lot of options and all this kind of stuff to do.
Let's get rid of that.
So it becomes so simple.
The moment a frontline worker logs into the training platform on their mobile device, there's just one thing they can do.
Kind of like Instagram really or TikTok or something.
I said, I want that level of simplicity.
They came back first.
The reason I say this because the first version they came back with the team was way too complicated.
It's way too many buttons, too much of a version of the corporate platform.
Is this really right for a frontline worker?
And then they came back, they had a lot of iterations on this after the first Figma review and they ended up reiterating again and again and finally getting to something.
But it really came in the first review that we had.
I think it was a couple of months and a half into our going down the route of this project where we really kind of course -corrected, where we aligned.
It was a totally positive meeting but they came back with something and then I gave the feedback and we also went, of course, and did some research around this and so on and kind of aligned on that as well.
Very quickly, very collaborative process.
But I could have probably been more clever maybe from the start myself saying this is all about having a consumer -like experience.
That first came really to light when they started showing the first version of this, I'm like, this is just too clunky for what we're really trying to do.
And now they've delivered something that's awesome, beautiful, simple and so on.
But that's why I said clarity number first, right?
And then you give them the freedom to go.
If that had been a little bit more clear maybe from the beginning, maybe we would have saved a couple of weeks of development work on this.
But that's how it goes.
I think, too, you don't really know until people try it out, right?
It's like a test. You give them direction.
Oh, that didn't work.
Let's course -correct.
But the fact that you can actually check in, especially with their direction and the products like your building or your weekly meetings, I think that's a good way to think about how do I come back, of course, correct?
Yeah. I learned so much from my Salesforce days when we did the whole chatter thing that we talked about or Box, which was a great example of a premium product, kind of, or Matterport, this whole notion.
That was a very complicated product trying to get.
And I really have just because this mindset of for premium or for end users, it just has to be so simple because I download a ton of apps on my own phone.
And there's so many of them, I never use more than once because they're way too complicated.
And I just think, if we want this to be a delightful, joyful, surprising experience, make it drop -dead simple.
Even the whole thing I said, our engagement platform, where we ask more questions, our adventure to say that's not the right format for a mobile device or a frontline worker either.
It should be like, how are you doing this week?
Thumbs up or thumbs down?
That's probably the level of, like, insight.
And is there anybody you want to high -five?
Maybe there's a drop -down list of people you want to give it, kudos to, versus writing out a long sentence of, hey, Melissa did great this week, she did a great podcast interview, on a high -fiver.
You just got to rethink the whole experience based on the modality of how you deliver this to people.
I think that's really good advice for product people out there listening to this.
Thanks so much, Robin, for being on the podcast.
If you want to learn more about you, where can they go?
Well, the best place to find me is definitely LinkedIn.
Robin Daniels and the Chief Business Officer are at Censi.
I think you'll probably find me pretty easily.
That's the best place by far.
Okay, great. And we will put those links on our show notes at productthinkingpodcast .com.
Thanks so much for listening to the Product Thinking Podcast.
We'll be back next Wednesday with another fabulous guest.
And in the meantime, if you have questions for me, go to DearMelissa .com and let me know what they are.
See you next time. See you, Melissa.
