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Thoughtful Edge, Episode 7: Interview with Ian Johnson, Fueling the Future – Striking the Balance between Customer Wants & Needs
50 Plays1 year ago
🚀 Thoughtful Edge Podcast: Fueling the Future – Striking the Balance between Customer Wants & Needs | Guest: Ian Johnson, COO of Kinesso
🚀 Join us as we explore the complex world of product management with our esteemed guest, Ian Johnson, COO of Kinesso. Discover how to strike the right balance between immediate customer desires and long-term goals, the importance of fostering innovation and adaptability, and the role of collaboration within an organization. Ian shares invaluable insights, strategies, and real-life examples of successfully managing customer expectations while addressing long-term requirements. Dive into the challenges of differentiating between short-term demands and future necessities, learn how to prioritize and allocate resources effectively, and envision the evolving relationship between customer desires and long-term needs. Lastly, we explore the future of and discuss how businesses can stay ahead of the curve. Don't miss this insightful conversation! Press like and subscribe to the Thoughtful Edge podcast. #leadership #productmanagement #careerdevelopment #thoughtfuledge
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Transcript
Introduction to The Thoughtful Age and Ian Johnson
00:00:01
Speaker
Hello, hello. Welcome to the Thoughtful Age podcast.
00:00:06
Speaker
Today's topic is related to product management, entitled fueling the future, striking the balance between customer wants and needs. And my guest is Ian Johnson, CEO of Kinesa. And about four years ago, I embarked on a new adventure by joining Kinesa. And I did know nothing about what I will
00:00:34
Speaker
have to do there with people I will meet but fortunately
00:00:41
Speaker
that led me to cross the path with Ian, a remarkable individual who would leave a lasting impression on myself.
Ian Johnson's Career Transition to Startups
00:00:48
Speaker
And at that time, Ian had a senior leadership position, and I always looked up at him as an example of an engineer with a successful career. And it's worth noting that both of us are coming from engineering. Ian had a degree in engineering and computer science, and his career started
00:01:10
Speaker
as someone who worked in the telecom and building the networks and designing networks and working in that direction. However, at some point, he realized that he wants to start his own company and become a CEO himself. And he started to venture in the ad tech. And according to him, in that point, he became addicted to startups.
The Art of Product Management
00:01:33
Speaker
And
00:01:35
Speaker
As engineering career progress, we often realize that there is much more to learn beyond just the engineering craft or the coding craft. For example, the product management or product development. And I believe Ian can tell us a lot about that side of tech business and that side of career path.
00:01:58
Speaker
So today topics is directly related to product management and managing user experience while balancing immediate customer desires with long-term goals. But before we dive in, Ian, can you please introduce yourself and tell our audience what made you focus, what made you switch focus from engineering to product management and what is your main focus right now?
00:02:23
Speaker
Yeah, thank you for the kind introduction. Yeah, I think, you know, when I started my career in engineering, I, you know, it was a simple goal. I wanted to be a chief technology officer. And, you know, typically in engineering, you go in one field, you kind of stay there. So, you know, for whatever reason, I was brave enough to kind of move around, which actually I needed to become a CTO. And then having become a CTO, I was actually CTO for
00:02:52
Speaker
Photo phone in Portugal for a while and it's okay. Well, I've got to that. What next? Do I just want to be CTO of a bigger network with the company bigger whatever and I came to the conclusion that well, I wanted to run businesses.
00:03:08
Speaker
And so it's okay, well, you need to be exposed to commercials, you need to understand sales, you need to do this. So, you know, basically, I said, okay, well, let's start a business strategy. So I kind of moved out of technology, I moved back in, in a few spots along the way.
00:03:27
Speaker
But the product is an amazingly rewarding kind of area because you touch everything. You actually have something tangible at the end of the day that you build. And it's very rewarding when you get it right. It's horrible when you get it wrong, but it's a very rewarding job. So I enjoyed my time in product management.
00:03:50
Speaker
Yeah, that's really inspiring. And the story you have is really interesting. And when it comes to the product management and the today's topic, what are some significant challenges companies face when trying to satisfy customer desires while also addressing long-term requirements?
Challenges in Balancing Customer Demands and Long-term Goals
00:04:11
Speaker
What are your thoughts about that? Yeah.
00:04:16
Speaker
My experience, right? So just to kind of qualify that way, customers want everything now, right? And they typically aren't thinking too, too far in advance. So the kind of longer term challenges you have are easy ones and hard ones. And the easy one is typically scaling, right? When you've got a startup and you've got a few million from VCs, you've got one client giving you a few hundred thousand dollars, so you're still not cashflow positive.
00:04:43
Speaker
you know the solution that you can afford then is very different to the solution when you've got tens of millions of dollars coming in and you're trying to look after hundreds if not thousands of kind of customers so the good news is those longer term needs how do I make my platform scale typically comes with more resource you've got more money coming in so you can kind of afford to set up separate teams to kind of work on how to do the
00:05:06
Speaker
kind of upgrade. There are other changes that are equally compelling. You have to do them. There's regulatory change or one of your key partners is changing an API and they're giving you 12 months to do it or whatever. So you know if you don't do it, you're out of business. So it kind of makes it easier to kind of free up resource
00:05:29
Speaker
The hardest is when you start a company or when you build a new kind of product, you believe something, right? And it's like you believe that there's a headache out there that there isn't a good cure for. And so you kind of set around to kind of build that thing. And when you go to a client and get your first one, you're very excited. But typically they want it to be, if it's like an ad server, my first startup was a video ad server for the mobile channel.
00:05:57
Speaker
And the number of clients said, well, I want it to be just like double click only twice as fast and half the price. And it's like, OK, but actually the mobile channel is problematic compared to having a wired connection to your home. OK, these are all the things that you need to change in ad server to kind of make that work. And so making sure we're having sufficient cycle time to deliver against the vision of the company.
00:06:21
Speaker
against what the client wanted, just make it like a double click. That was the, you know, that's always a challenge. And that's the thing where you have to keep reexamining your kind of north star of where you want to get to. But you do need to maintain a degree of customer satisfaction. Otherwise, you know, you want to have that customer live on new customers for too long.
00:06:44
Speaker
Yeah, those challenges they usually quite significant and it's a good point that you always need to keep in mind that North Star and North Star metric as well, like one of the guests will already discuss that thing. And I also remember myself being in the same situation, like I was hired to lead a team that
00:07:06
Speaker
was dedicated to building some set of dashboards to monitor the infrastructure state and the health of the hardware and everything and we were just focused on building feature after feature and the customer was just requesting and keep requesting them but we didn't have the whole picture in mind and the ultimate goal we want to achieve and that definitely led us to
00:07:30
Speaker
some problems after a year of the development we realized some of the strategic goals we didn't address and didn't consider before and then now it requires a significant investment just to get to the same point which will drive us forward and will allow us to scale much better and will allow our company to be more successful.
00:07:56
Speaker
Yeah, so let's dive deeper into how companies can differentiate between immediate customer demands and their future necessities. What strategies or methodologies have you seen that have proved their success and effectiveness?
Strategies for Differentiating Needs
00:08:14
Speaker
Yeah, I think the key thing is, you know, agile is a very flexible development methodology, but you need to be agile in your mindset, kind of flexible how you how you do things right, you know, if you first
00:08:31
Speaker
customer is not happy, you're not going to have the reference that enables the VC use to kind of give you more funding and similarly it'll be hard to win your second client when your first client kind of walked out the door. So you know maybe then you do put all of your resource to make sure that that client is landed unhappy
00:08:53
Speaker
but generally you do need to make sure you're up with tech debt. You do need to make sure you're delivering against your kind of strategic imperatives, which does mean reserving a part of your resource against that kind of part of the roadmap.
00:09:10
Speaker
I think every product manager has a different version of the two by two matrix that they kind of love and adore and kind of influences their decision making process but my two by two matrix has complexity on the bottom access, easy to implement or hard to implement and on the y-axis it's
00:09:32
Speaker
not differentiated, i.e. me too, and the other bit is differentiated. The thing that makes you have a winning company and a winning product is that top right-hand corner. It's hard to do and it's truly differentiated.
00:09:51
Speaker
Product managers tend to prefer the top left hand corner, easy to do and differentiate it. The problem with that quadrant is if it's easy for you to do, it's easy for everybody else to do. So sooner or later your competitors see it and everyone's doing the same thing. So it's great to have an ideas factory where you can just try stuff in that kind of top left hand corner.
00:10:12
Speaker
But the thing that sometimes gets ignored is the second half, the me too stuff. And, you know, when you're selling your product, you gloss over, you know, of course we have an answer. And of course it does everything that double click does, but it does this extra differentiated stuff. And when it's coming to, you know, the first thing that you want is bulk up low, you know, they want reporting, they want a bunch of standard stuff that isn't truly a differentiated, but you just need it to be done.
00:10:38
Speaker
So those are the things that your first customers really help you with. What is the hygiene? What's good enough? Is Tableau sufficient for the visualization or do you need to do custom data?
00:10:56
Speaker
So those are the kind of things that your first customers help you with, but they don't really help you with, okay, how am I differentiated? Where am I really going? What is going to make this an award-winning, highly successful venture?
Real-world Examples from Kinesa
00:11:12
Speaker
It's that top right hand corner. So you just need to make sure you've got enough cycle time on those longer term where we need to kind of get to.
00:11:20
Speaker
yeah that's uh that's significant and sounds pretty efficient you're having this matrix in hand you can definitely say it once what is that opportunity that would that you would like to pursue and on the other hand having an agile methodology in place you can
00:11:37
Speaker
quickly verify that theory, some of the ideas and some of the capacities and how their customers will look at that and how they will use it. Yeah, thank you for sharing that. So with that in mind, I'd like to hear some of the examples from your experience where a company was able to successfully maintaining this balance between those competing interests. Can I share anything?
00:12:06
Speaker
Yeah, I think the secret is a balance, right? And as I say, that kind of balance can kind of shift depending on your pre-customer. Okay, put everything into the hard stuff. It's kind of when your business assumes you get that first customer kind of do the hygiene.
00:12:23
Speaker
But, you know, I think out the recent stuff that we've been doing in Knesso working with, Mannequin is a good example because, you know, if you talk to the campaign managers about what they want is, OK, how do you make my life easier? How can you take the drudgery out of campaign management? So it's all about automation, reducing touch points. You know, we had a solution which was associated with insertion orders.
00:12:52
Speaker
And it was forever, you know, make it simpler, make it faster, make it lower touch. But when you have the conversation with the end client, it's like, oh, great, you've made it more efficient. Okay, how much cost are you going to reduce to kind of do that? So it's very hard to kind of grow a business if your sole focus is, you know, saving, you know, 10% here, 5%.
00:13:17
Speaker
So, from a product point of view, it's okay, what's going to grow our business? And the thing that we kind of decided to focus on was more about the kind of the optimization, that kind of cross-channel, omni-channel optimization problem, because you're delivering better outcomes for your end customers, clients.
00:13:37
Speaker
the other solutions on the market. If you're optimizing it means you got good clean data which means that you're making smarter decisions so that you know it's a typical problem that you find in the kind of the media space and you know that focus on that top line optimization better outcome
00:13:58
Speaker
led to significant growth from the business. When I joined, I won't go into too much of the specifics, but we were tens of millions in billings, and currently it's in the billions of dollars in billings. So that sizable growth is because, OK, how do we grow the business? And it's really about delivering better outcomes and a continual focus on reducing costs.
00:14:28
Speaker
That's a fascinating story. Could you please tell us what you personally felt when you realized that the decision you made was right and ultimately led to this discussion? Obviously, there's probably a whole list of terrible decisions we might
00:14:48
Speaker
uh along the way but um you know it's that's what i was saying about uh product management it is so rewarding right the um yeah to have something tangible at the end of the day and to be able to grow a business on the back of the solution that you kind of recommend it and you know i think we had like 20 engineers when when i joined and you know it's you know hundreds now four or five hundred
00:15:12
Speaker
that we have now. So to see that level of growth based on a solution set that you helped kind of define a North Star and have the company energized behind it is very rewarding.
00:15:29
Speaker
Yeah, I can imagine it is fulfilling and satisfactory, like satisfying, to a very high extent. And yeah, glad that you did that. And those growth was very, very huge. It was significant for sure, like from 20 engineers, as you mentioned, to like hundreds. Yeah, that's insane. So
00:15:57
Speaker
Let's discuss how business can prioritize and allocate resources to address both short-term demands and long-term necessities. Is there any approach for the resource allocation?
Resource Prioritization Strategies
00:16:11
Speaker
Yeah, I think certainly on the engineering side, I hate to say it's relatively straightforward, but it comes down to a level of effort, which you quantify with story points. And to me, at least, one of the successes of a product organization is that predictability. If you say, we can have this done by September,
00:16:38
Speaker
you know, it's then six months after that date, it finally arrives, the business doesn't believe you anymore, right? So salespeople are hedging, you know, customers are getting frustrated, these things. So that that level of estimation, what's it going to take to help me deliver and building the process so that you've got that level of predictability, I think is
00:17:01
Speaker
kind of key to success, so you know quantifying how much it's going to take to get the thing done. I think organizations typically are engineered to do the thing. The thing that's harder is what's the reward.
00:17:16
Speaker
And that's the bit that makes, in my view, makes prioritization hard, right? Because if you're a sales guy, you want to close as many sales as you can. And if the customer says, I want it blue versus red, they can offer it for blue, right? But in the overall scheme of things, was that really where you should have been, kind of putting your engineering effort?
00:17:45
Speaker
other things like scaling or delivering eventual strategic imperatives, they're really about unlocking future potential, right? And the problem is, you know, if you did a strict kind of business plan,
00:18:02
Speaker
The long term stuff always wins, right? Because I can grow my business by tenfold, whether you can or not, it's just a business assumption that you kind of build in. OK, well, tenfold really kind of makes it worthwhile. So, you know, my view is you have to have kind of a softer approach to
00:18:21
Speaker
business value that it's unlocking than a hard business plan. But on the flip side, you should have a strong conversation of why you're doing it. Okay, this is about scaling. Okay, this is heading off a regulatory change. My business is too dependent on one partner and they're going to put their prices up if I don't kind of diversify the base. Or this is my first customer, assuming it's a kind of business to business
00:18:48
Speaker
kind of enterprise. The first business was a small or medium business because they make decisions faster, but the real prize is large businesses and they need these 20 other things. So you're kind of trading off long-term growth against that near-term need. So to me, that's why the prioritization conversation
00:19:11
Speaker
is so hard. Sales guy, I need it now. I can get your sound out versus, okay, I'm going to open up my market opportunity tenfold if I kind of do these things. And it's that kind of tension that it always has.
00:19:28
Speaker
But in my view, the process is you start with your product vision. What am I trying to do? How am I trying to get there? From that vision, it's OK. What can I do this year? And then kind of break back into it.
00:19:44
Speaker
And you just need to make sure you've got enough cycles against those longer term gross things to help you move along in the direction. That's not to say that as you do the quarterly review, OK, crap, we just don't have happy customers. We need to focus more on some of the hygiene factors.
00:20:04
Speaker
But that's generally the approach. Articulate, this is for growth. This is helping me align with my strategic vision. This is going to grow my opportunity tenfold versus this is going to help me land the sales pipeline, and then have the conversation going through. There's always horse trading as you go through that process.
00:20:22
Speaker
And the better, the more open that process is internally in an organization, in my view, the better. The bigger you get, it's harder because everyone wants to be a stakeholder. Everybody wants to have a voice at the table. So you have to be quite disciplined how large you make the room. But you do need to be quite inclusive in that conversation. Otherwise, you have the product team going off.
00:20:48
Speaker
wanting to deliver this, the sales team selling something else, the account folk having problems. Well, if we just fix this one issue, 90% of the inbound calls to customer service would disappear. So it's always a bit of a horse rape, but the wider the conversation, the better. Don't get too precise because you're just, you know,
00:21:10
Speaker
The assumptions are never perfect, but have the conversation and make sure people understand why you're doing it and make sure you're listening to their objections to it.
00:21:21
Speaker
Yeah, I like the idea of balance and balancing that in the proper extent, not go to the age one or another, but still maintain something that would lead us to our ultimate success.
Cultivating Innovation and Adaptability
00:21:41
Speaker
And also speaking of balance,
00:21:45
Speaker
How important do you think is the culture and fostering the culture of innovation and adaptability and achieving this right balance between customer needs and long-term requirements? Yeah, I mean, I think culture, your right to break it culture and then one of the components of culture is innovation and adaptability. You know,
00:22:13
Speaker
It's very easy when you do a culture. The culture inside a startup is whatever it takes, right? So whatever it takes to get it over the line, to make the customer happy or this, that, the other. And this may be more of a factor of my startups versus anybody else's, but maybe the documentation isn't quite there. Maybe you're burning out your staff players. They just can't sustain the kind of level of work.
00:22:37
Speaker
So as you mature, it's about getting more control, more process, making sure the load is shared outside the hands or heads of your smartest, best people. And that can take a culture shift. So, you know, people who join the startup as you grow and get more processes, you know, maybe
00:23:00
Speaker
They're not quite the fit. So that can be tough for an organization. But again, having that open dialogue about what is the culture we want, how do we need to adapt the culture so that we can thrive as we grow, I think is key. And the good news is with Agile, it really is about iteration, right? It is like try new stuff, fail fast, did it work, did it not, okay, learn the lesson and kind of move on.
00:23:28
Speaker
So I think that fail fast, get stuff out there is important and I think it is part of agile. However, it does have a little bit of an Achilles heel and that Achilles heel is it's not very good with disconnects, right? If AI machine learning is going to completely disrupt your rules-based engine, okay, you need to have a separate team worrying about AI and ML and issue of data granular enough to let machines do
00:23:57
Speaker
the optimization. So I think as you scale and your business gets bigger, ideally you do want a separate R&D team whose sole job is to look at the disruptors, what are the new ideas we want to try. And if you're really lucky, a core dev, okay, who's playing in the startup space, should we be making investments so we can get closer to this particular
00:24:21
Speaker
pool of talent. But those are the things that kind of come with scale. When you start off as a startup, it all has the pump to deliver against the vision as you get bigger and bigger and bigger. If you're not careful, you get into the trap of just making a better mousetrap than a different mousetrap or getting disrupted by somebody else's different mousetrap. So yeah, it's very important. But as you grow, how you go about it will change.
00:24:48
Speaker
Yeah, the culture is really significant. And I would also add the engagement of people. And in the trial, it's like getting the feedback from the customers is very important for the people who actually do the work and the engineers, the developers, if they will see the impact of whatever they do and they will see happy customers at the end of the day, it is really empowering, like for me personally, for sure. And they've seen that.
00:25:15
Speaker
place well with the different other people as well.
00:25:21
Speaker
When we are talking about bigger organization and we are talking about different departments or different teams that are inside the same organization, how we can ensure that the collaboration between them are going well and all of them on the same page and moving in the same direction and prioritize the same initiatives and things that we think is relevant and important.
00:25:51
Speaker
Yeah, I think I mentioned earlier, it's so easy to get it wrong, right? You know, as I say, if you haven't got internal alignment about what you're trying to achieve, how you're trying to achieve it, what's important, what's not important, as I say, you know, you can have the sales guy going off just
00:26:07
Speaker
you know, sign here to the customer, we can do anything that you want, you know, completely everything's a snowflake, and then just lob it over to the fans, the product and engineering folk, okay, go, go fix that. So, you know, obviously, you know, on the account management side, you know, it may be completely obvious to them,
00:26:29
Speaker
the three things that the client always complains about. But if the product and engineering org is too remote from that feedback, they're too busy working on their roadmap that they locked in three months, six months ago.
00:26:42
Speaker
So getting everybody aligned is key. Actually, particularly when you deal with large customers, your customer isn't actually aligned either. It's the head of the analytics shop, the media buyer, everybody can be kind of fragmented in their police set as well. So again, it's getting, in my view, get alignment around the vision. This is what we're trying to do.
00:27:08
Speaker
Okay, is this ask from this particular client helping me get to where I need to get to or is it a distraction and you know Because you have to pay the bills you have a wage bill sometimes you Take on some of those distractions because it's what the customer wants and at the end of the day that they're paying the bills on the flip side You do need to be taking care of your growth in future direction. It's just sales. Okay, great
00:27:35
Speaker
Sorry, we can't do everything that you're asking for these customers because we're looking to grow the business 10X. So making sure you're having that conversation, making sure you're having the dialogue across the business. And unfortunately, not everybody can have a voice at the table because
00:27:56
Speaker
you just have endless meetings to kind of go forever, but you do need to find those key stakeholders who really has their finger on the pulse of kind of what's going on and you know is happy with the kind of the prioritization process and make sure that you escalate, right? If the problem stays in product and engineering and the business side of the house isn't involved, well you know this
00:28:22
Speaker
grow 10x maybe immaterial if you can't pay the wage bill and everybody walks out the door because you can't pay. So yeah, I think it's the collaboration is key. Everyone aligned around a key vision. Getting culture working I think is key. And then that open dialogue I think is important with the proviso that not everybody can have a seat at the table for the conversation.
Evolving Customer Needs with Technology
00:28:47
Speaker
Yeah, definitely collaboration is the essence and having the right vision and for everyone to share that vision is even more important for everyone to make the most efficient decision based on that vision in their local area, in their area of responsibilities. Yeah, it is really vital and I like that idea always for collaboration, always for
00:29:13
Speaker
getting as more feedback and opinion as possible. And as we continue our discussion, and I'd like to hear your thoughts on the future, on how the relationship between customer desires and long-term requirements might evolve. Maybe there are some something ahead of us, maybe some new technology or some new methodology, maybe AI will play some role in there. What is your opinion?
00:29:42
Speaker
Yeah, and I think, you know, obviously, we're not necessarily obviously the depending on the customer, you know, business to consumer is different to business to business. And, you know, a lot of kind of what I've done is kind of more on the business to business side. And the customers typically have questions about the future versus okay, this then means I want to find and the
00:30:08
Speaker
The thing is how do you keep them engaged in terms of how you see the industry going? How do you get their feedback on how it's evolving? As you go through the third party cookie deprecation and privacy regulation kind of flexes across the industry. The number of questions that we got and how we ended up dealing with it was basically have
00:30:35
Speaker
101 class, we then had master classes to kind of really help educate our base of customers about how we were thinking about it and how we're trying to evolve things. Again, with size comes the opportunity to put in structure. So, you know, having a client success team
00:30:54
Speaker
is really dedicated to your larger customers and really understanding the thought leaders on their side of the fence so you can really benefit from how they're seeing their business evolve and where they're going to. And have that honest feedback about, well, this is how we're going to see the world without the cookie, this is what we think it needs, this is how we're doing it.
00:31:17
Speaker
And the best partners will challenge you. They will offer you perspectives that you haven't thought of. So that is the customer advisory board with the key partners, with the best thinkers from your key customers, is the way to surface a lot of those directional, am I right or wrong? The flip side
00:31:45
Speaker
for the small companies as you're doing your start-up, you've got to be careful with those sacred accounts, right? You've got funding on a belief and halfway through it's like, holy crap, they really don't worry about it, or really they're not going to pay a premium for this particular solution.
00:32:04
Speaker
So that always kind of question, you know, those kind of sacred cows, you know, okay, I need a new North Star. How do I kind of pivot? And again, that acid test of signing up new customers is the acid test. You got it right or you got it wrong. So, yeah, I think it's, as I say, depending on where you are in your life cycle, there are different things. But as you scale, customer advisory boards,
00:32:28
Speaker
strong client success team, I think is key. Smaller, it's just make sure you're tapping in with the sacred cows and are you winning new business or not, right? Are you on your plan or not?
00:32:42
Speaker
Okay, yeah, that's insightful and there is a lot of wisdom in all of this and we're approaching the end of today's interview and I have the last question for you Ian.
Career Advice for Aspiring Leaders
00:32:57
Speaker
Is there anything you can recommend for the aspiring leaders or maybe
00:33:02
Speaker
product managers or engineers who want to progress in their career and maybe become a CEO or maybe start their own company at the end of the day. Any piece of advice that you might think might be essential?
00:33:18
Speaker
Well, let me, the rules that I provide, so I read everything, you know, so try not to pre-filter out and, you know, if people recommend selling to you, I mean, I struggle with some of the Harvard business reviews, you know, they're meaty and a lot of the benefit is kind of halfway through. But, you know, read everything, don't try to pre-filter. The second advice is
00:33:45
Speaker
be brave. As I went through my career, as you said at the start, I started in telephony, I moved into mobile, I became a radio specialist. It's just if I wanted to be CTO, I couldn't just know about
00:34:01
Speaker
mobile propagation and how it works, you know, there's a whole raft of things. So that made me, forced me to kind of change job a number of times, not for more money, not for more people reporting to me or whatever, just learning new skills so I could be considered for bigger and bigger roles. And it then got to the point where I was, you know, a C level exec on the engineering side, and I had to take the sideways move into kind of more commercial.
00:34:30
Speaker
if I ever had a hope of becoming a CEO or COO, and it's hard, right? You know, you kind of move sideways, you've got all your peer groups suddenly, you're not a peer anymore, you're potentially kind of more junior, but it's that kind of bravery that you kind of need and you're going to get it wrong.
00:34:50
Speaker
sometimes. So, you know, be kind to yourself, forgive yourself, but try new stuff, expand your horizons. And, you know, a technique that I use even to this day is, you know, where do I want to be five years from now? Okay, do I have the skills to get there or am I missing something? And so that kind of regular
00:35:13
Speaker
annual check where I'm. It can be depressing. I used to do it on my birthdays and I used to get really depressed on my birthdays because it wasn't where I was thinking I wanted to be. And some birthdays, even when I did the review, it was like, holy crap, why did I want to do that? That was the stupidest thing.
00:35:33
Speaker
But putting that structure in really helped me. Lewis Carroll, if you don't know where you're going, Eddie Road will take you there. Well, I want to know where I'm going. And then, OK, great. These are things that are holding me back. OK, how do I get those skills? So just be brave with your career, and hopefully we'll pay dividends for you. It's something different.
00:35:55
Speaker
Awesome, awesome. Yeah, having this long-term plan and conducting the retrospective, I believe is very important and will definitely lead to success. And so thank you so much, Ian, for joining us today. It was very insightful and interesting conversation. And for everyone who watched the podcast, please press like and subscribe to the channel. Thank you, Ian. All right, I appreciate it. You take care. Thank you.