Andrew Tokeley
Creating the Conditions for Great Product Leadership
In this episode of Brave UX, Andrew Tokeley (or Tokes, as he prefers) shares the importance of a clear strategy, a collaborative culture and outstanding leadership in enabling product success.
Highlights include:
- What does a healthy product culture look like?
- How does the org. structure either enable or disable product success?
- What does saying no without saying 'no' sound like?
- Why is Product Management the art of managing disappointment?
- How do you build great relationships without doing everything you're asked?
Who is Andrew Tokeley?
Tokes is one of New Zealand’s most respected independent product leadership coaches, advisors, and community builders.
Back in 2009 he joined cloud-based accounting platform Xero as their first product manager. Over the following six years he went on to scale the product team from 20 people in a single office, to over 400 people across six offices in 4 countries.
Tokes is the founder of New Zealand's first Product Tank meetup, which now has over 2,000 members. He also recently he become the operating partner responsible for Product at Movac, one of New Zealand’s most successful venture capital firms.
Transcript
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Hello and welcome to another episode of Brave UX. I'm Brendan Jarvis, Managing Founder of The Space InBetween and it's my job to help you to put the pieces of the product puzzle together. I do that by unpacking the stories, learnings and expert advice of world class UX, design and product management professionals. My guest today is Andrew Tokeley or Tokes, as he prefers to be called as one of New Zealand's most respected independent product leadership coaches, advisors, and community builders. Tokes is on a mission to raise the awareness and practice of product leadership throughout the country through his coaching and advisory practice. Tokes helps successful established businesses and those that have more recently found product market fit to build high performance product leadership teams. And he's got the track record to deliver on that promise. Back in 2009, Tokes joined Xero, the cloud-based accounting platform as their first product manager.
- Over the next six years, he went on to scale the product team from 20 people in a single office to over 400 people across six offices in four countries before starting his coaching practice in 2017. And after leaving, leaving Xero Tokes took on the roles of VP of engineering and then global head of product at eight I a promising New Zealand startup that is building hologram technologies for the emerging AR and VR markets. Tokes is a generous pioneer of and contributor to product culture in New Zealand. He is the founder of the country's first product tank meetup, which he still coordinates and that now has over 1000 members. Recently he became the operating partner responsible for product at moak, one of New Zealand's most successful venture capital firms and he's the moderator of the product stream of kiss My SaaS, a forum for senior leaders of SaaS companies to improve their knowledge and capabilities through peer-to-peer learning described by his clients as refreshing, strategic, and someone who really makes a difference. I'm very much looking forward to today's conversation. Tokes welcome to the show.
- Andrew Tokeley:
- Thanks very much Brendan. It's good to be here. I'm super proud of the product tank that I started in Wellington and I just have to call you out that it's actually 2000 over 2000 members now. Not 1000. So twice as good [laugh]. Yes. And that's really proud of where we've taken that.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I love it. Even better than I had thought that I know. That's amazing.
- Andrew Tokeley:
- [laugh]. And we're Auckland, so I always compare the number to Auckland, right? They've, and I don't know what the population difference between Wellington and Auckland is. It's gotta be six times bigger or something say that. But they're only twice as big as us in numbers, so there's a little silent sort of competition going on there, which is fun.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well, I make sure that Anthony Martin knows about the competition if he doesn't already
- Andrew Tokeley:
- [laugh]. Hell no.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Hey, it's great to have you here. And as my listeners know, I often like to kick these conversations off on a serious note. Your Twitter bio says that you are a travel loving tree hugger and a one time banana picker. Please explain.
- Andrew Tokeley:
- Yeah, I don't use Twitter very often, but that's still accurate and true. I guess I do have a bit of a tree hugger in me. I love the outdoors I like to protect it by doing some trapping for a local group of possums and all the other predators around there. The banana picking thing is really, I left New Zealand after university to go on out what we call our OE overseas experience. I don't know if mm-hmm [affirmative] as much anymore, but certainly when I was going through university it was the expected thing to do. So I was imagining taking a year off doing a bit of traveling and it took me six months before I even got to London. I went through Asia and just loved it. And then I was away for three years and during that time I did lots of different jobs and one of them was working on a kibbutz in Israel and I picked bananas.
- I got to Tel Aviv and I asked the lady at this office, where's there kibbutz I can go? And she said, well if do you love bananas? And I said, yeah, I love bananas. And she said, well I've got the perfect place for you. So we ended up on [inaudible], which was one of the older kibbutz in Israel in the north and loved it. It was amazing. And it was a group of 20 year old 30 year olds there. And we just got on really well, made some good friends and in fact met my life partner who I'm still with now the ideas later. So it was banana picking was a pivotal moment in my life.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, certainly sounds like it. Do you still love bananas?
- Andrew Tokeley:
- [laugh] I still love bananas and I would recommend that lifestyle for anyone in terms of just traveling around, just picking up work here and there. We didn't earn anything but we didn't spend anything great connections I made with people there and kind of a nice tie back, the ultimate community working on [affirmative]. So who knew that 20 years later I'd be so deeply into community still.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, it's obviously something that you've consistently felt quite passionate about and I also get the sense from talking to you before we started recording, that the sense of adventure hasn't left you either. You mentioned to me that you were considering or in the final stages of planning for a walk that's gonna take you quite some distance. What is that walk and why are you doing it?
- Andrew Tokeley:
- Well, I can tell you what the walk is Walk, which is from Cape Grand's Bluff takes four or five months why I'm doing it. I haven't quite worked out yet. I'm sure it'll become clearer to me when I started. But I do, the way I frame it at the moment I think is that, and this is very off topic with product, but I love it anyway, you're on this planet for a short amount of time. When I think about the things that I've done in my life, you kind of look back in this kind of these chapters or these moments that are created and they often just happen to you. And when I had traveled for three years that had many chapters in it, there were lots of things that I still remember and enjoy and look back on. And I think I felt over the last few years in particular, I haven't created as many of those moments as I would've liked, you know, work a lot family, there's family moments but those sort of really throwing yourself into something new and being very deliberate about creating this new chapter really appeals to me.
- And so I can't imagine that I would embark on that and it not being a really pivotal moment in my life when I look back on the future. So I just can't wait to see what happens.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Oh no doubt. With that much time to yourself alone in your own thoughts that there will be some great things that come out of it. I had actually wondered whether it was something similar to the reason why people might walk the Camino or the Caminos in Europe and just so people get a sense for just how far that is. Cuz a lot of people listening aren't from New Zealand. It's the entire length of the country. So is it 1200 miles or more?
- Andrew Tokeley:
- Yeah, and the miles is 3000 kilometers. Yeah,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- 1600 mile. Yeah,
- Andrew Tokeley:
- Yeah, roughly split between the north and the south island. And yeah, it connects up, it tries to connect up a whole lot of trails without touching on the great walks. There's the logistical issues about trying to do that and trying to reduce the amount of road walking in between, but it's not like the Aian or the pt, it's not like total wilderness all the time, which I get the sense of those trails are a lot more like that. Whereas we have pockets of wilderness, pockets of urban bits of sand walking. There's a whole mixture. It's quite a different experience to some of the other world trails.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Oh, good to know you, you'll be able to get your green tea or your flat white on your way down the country.
- Andrew Tokeley:
- Absolutely. Every few days you can have a proper meal and a cafe. So yeah, it'd be good.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So Andrew, something that stood out to me when I was checking out your LinkedIn profile, preparing for today's conversation, and this isn't something that's entirely uncommon, but I noticed that you didn't study product management or start your professional life as a product manager. How did you get into product?
- Andrew Tokeley:
- Yeah, it's pretty common. It's a bit of a trope now that most people in product didn't come from a product background largely because, well what do you do? There is no product background, right? [laugh]
- Brendan Jarvis:
- A trick question, you
- Andrew Tokeley:
- Can't study it. So everyone's kinda in that, although less people now maybe there are starting to become more formal trainings for it. But my path was really from I, I'd studied mathematics and statistics at university, so I had a real love of numbers and symmetry and patterns and that really appealed to my brain and thought it was gonna be like this statistician. And then I went overseas for three years, came back with some tree hugging hippie ideas of what I was gonna do in my life. [laugh] pan out to be fair. But it certainly didn't have statistics in my path at that time. But I had grown a real interest in computers and software and building and creating stuff that was really interesting to me. And so I started tinkering around in the sort of statistics field but building the software for statistics. And then start was again, I didn't get the travel bug out of me for a long time.
- And so I was traveling back and forth to Europe with my partner [affirmative] and we would travel a lot and stuff. And so the computing and stuff was good to do contract contracting. But then I had my first real job, I was actually 30 before I got my first full time job and at a company called Ingen in Wellington. And they sort of brought me into their wing and of taught me a whole lot about technology. But very quickly I gravitated towards leadership roles working with clients to understand the needs of what we could build for them. They were a service company understanding the business context and being close to the business. And I look back now and it's kind of like a no brainer, that intersection of technology, customer and business was where I enjoyed playing and increasingly and so the opportunity to work at Xero I was really looking for a development management role.
- I wanted to work and help grow development teams and they said, well we don't have that but we've got this thing that we're calling product development manager. And I thought, okay, I have no idea what that means, but I love what you're doing as a company. And very grateful that I jumped on that train when I did and started to take what I thought was everything about software was all agile, this agile that capital away you and it turned out to be a lot bigger than Agile in terms of trying to get value through to customers and all the good things that we talk about in product. And so that was my journey into it. And we didn't even talk about product management back then in 2009, but over from that time on I started to grow and read more and grow my understanding of what it was all about and I'd found my place.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And I understand there's a connection between Intergen and Xero through Rod Drury, is that true?
- Andrew Tokeley:
- Yeah, so he was a founder at Intergen, but he was there in the early days with Tony Stewart the ceo, and left before I had had started actually. So I knew of him, I hadn't met him at the time. He went off and did after mail and a few other things, [affirmative] before he came and started Xero. And so yeah, there was a lot of people I knew there, so it was kind of a nice place to work as well. I knew some of the people who used to be at Ingen even and had moved to Xero over the years. So mean that's a good thing about Wellington, whereas more smallish city, very connected, you can walk from one end to the other. It's a great place if you're into community networking, everyone.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, that's I'm always surprised every time I go home and walk up Cuba Street, I'm bound to run into one or two people that I haven't seen in a few years. It's a great place.
- Andrew Tokeley:
- And I feel sorry to be in Auckland, right? Cause I go up there and I try and I'm used to going finding someone or hearing someone online who's in maybe in product or something and reaching out them and say, Hey, I'd love to talk to you and have coffee. You try and do that in Auckland and they're over in TA or something or I don't know, a different part of the city. And it's like, well actually they can't easily come and have a coffee with you cuz they can't meet you. And I suspect it's like that in a lot of big cities around the world. So I love the fact that we can easily connect
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And thank God for the internet, so to speak. Well
- Andrew Tokeley:
- That makes it easier. Yeah.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Hey, one of the things that Xero, as I mentioned in your introduction that you are really well known for is building out that product organization. Although it didn't sound like that was the way it was framed, at least when you first joined. And I imagine that in doing that you learn many, many things and no doubt we'll hear about some of those today. But one of the things that caught my attention when I was preparing for today's talk was I heard you say that you learned to say no without saying no. What does that look like and how did you come to learn that?
- Andrew Tokeley:
- I don't know. Yeah, I only reflected on that a couple years ago maybe. I was thinking more about that as more and more people that I would coach as product leaders would come to me and say, I'm just getting all this pressure to do shit. And it's like, on this thing, you can edit that out.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- We'll leave it in all good. It's an adult's only podcast.
- Andrew Tokeley:
- So it's a really common problem that people have. They don't know, don't how to say no to people. And I feel like I've never said no to anybody, but I also have never just capitulated to everything that's asked of me [affirmative]. And so I think there's a really important skill as an effective influencer of direction when you are in the difficult position of being a product leader where you have a lot of people wanting something from you or from their own corners, you have to build really strong relationships with all those stakeholders. And you don't do that by being the no person. You don't, don't be that guy. I'm just too busy, you sing, seen my roadmap, I showed you last week, I'm just not doing it. Okay, just stop asking me. That's not how you build bridges and build connections with people. But it's not to say that the opposite is what you do.
- It's not like, yes, whatever you want, I'll change direction right now. So there's this area in the middle which is not saying no, but no might be the result. And [affirmative] need to, people need to feel heard. And I learned this, I learned a lot with Rod because he was an ideas person thinking a million miles an hour five years ahead of everybody, amazing person to be around and to be inspired by. I really enjoyed the time I had working with Rod, but I could imagine, and I know some people found it really frustrating because every day you'd have a different idea or different, sometimes you'd stretch it. Whereas I like to hear those ideas and he never made me feel that I was letting him down by not doing all the things he was asking off me. [affirmative] that was his, I don't know if he knew it was a magic source of his, but he, I'm sure he was frustrated that things didn't happen faster.
- What founder isn't right [laugh], I think he knew intrinsically that it was his job to inspire and throw ideas around that formed the story of our strategy actually, and maybe we talk about that later, but this whole idea that the whole company understood where we were going and what was important because of his brain bouncing around the domain, the space that he wanted to influence created this sort of clarity that you absorbed. Well I did at least. And it didn't mean that I, I'd had to do all the things, but it created this understanding of the opportunities that were ahead of us. And so the approach was less, no, we can't do all those things right now, which was the fact, but I'd love to hear more about that and tell me more about why that's a great opportunity [affirmative] and what could we do with that? And so it became more of a conversation starter about what we might do in the future rather than what we had to change right now. And I remember that
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It sounds like you would take those requests and then try and dig in deeper to them with the people that were giving them to you so you could understand more about where they were coming from and why they felt it was important.
- Andrew Tokeley:
- Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And it's like it's a fundamental premise of product. You gotta understand where those typically solution requests are coming from to be able to prioritize them and see if they have substance to, maybe you should change you direction. But there's a lot of emphasis put on prioritization when it comes to products and there's always too many things to do. But this ability to build those relationships so that people don't stop coming to you with ideas and that they feel heard, they, cuz they're all every single request Xero just had hundreds of smart people working in there and it didn't matter where in the organization you had a good idea and it made sense to you and to the pain you might have been feeling on support or in testing or in finance or sales and marketing. Those requests were really important to you.
- And so to dismiss them with a no I'm too busy is just not right. It's just not on. You can't do it. They have to feel heard and they have to understand why their thing might not happen right now. That's okay [affirmative] it's not a dismissive thing that you should be doing with those people. And in fact later on it became you. You're assisted in that ability to say no by a clear strategy, by having a direction that you've all bought into, which means that certain things don't happen as quick as you might like them to
- Brendan Jarvis:
- [affirmative]. Well seeing as we are talking about strategy, let's go into that now. It's a term that often gets bandi around and it seems to have many different meanings depending on who you talk to from your way of looking at it. TOCs, what is product strategy?
- Andrew Tokeley:
- I typically don't preface it with product because I think strategy is the same whether it's a product strategy, a sales strategy or marketing strategy. So I think [affirmative], you tied up a little bit about whether you're talking about product or the business strategy but to me a strategy is and it's easier to say a strategy is the path to a vision. That's the kind of top level description of what strategy is I wanna be here and this is how, this is the path I'm gonna take to get there. But it's actually more than that because if you just literally looked at that, you go, well tell me what I have to do and I'll do it along the path. They've just become a list of things that you wanna do. And in fact many people will describe their strategy as a list of things they wanna do to achieve the vision [affirmative], which is not their strategy, they're the punchline of a strategy potentially, but they're not the strategy.
- And so what I like to think of with the strategy is the meat and the sandwich between your goals and the things you're gonna do. And you can't just say our strategy is to be 20 times bigger. You can't just say our strategy is to do these 20 things. It's what sits in between and you know, don't have a strategy when you can't critique the things you're doing in any reasonable way. So put two things in front of me, which one should I do? Well it depends what our strategy is and if I can't and they both look really good, then maybe the strategy's not tight enough or not been articulated well enough to help you make some of those bigger decisions. But really describing those that meet in the middle there. And I got a lot of that framing from the work of Richard Good strategy strategy to book that gets referred to a lot.
- And I read it and it was really a business strategy book and it missed some framing for me in terms of bringing it back into product land. And so this is when I start thinking of that, he talks about a kernel, right? Which is this diagnosis, which is what I think of as the opportunity. And he has a policy, which is what I think of as the hypothesis to addressing that. So he frames it slightly differently, but in its essence it's trying to say the same thing. But then the tricky bit for people in product who look at strategy might have a really well formed strategy but there still should be work for you to to discover that value in the product. So the strategy doesn't just tell you what to do and you go off and build it. The strategy might have an action of improving onboarding or creating a mobile experience for a certain type of customer. [affirmative].
- It still requires you to do some more discovery of the opportunities within those actions and to obviously do solution discovery to find out the best way to solve those opportunities that are ahead of you. But it's in the context of those strategic actions and the strategic themes that might have appeared there so that now everything you do as a product person is not just delivering some cool stuff and then somebody else in the businesses measures revenue and retention and doesn't attribute anything to what you've done necessarily. And you're kind of like in this sort of doing, you might be doing great delivery work but you don't really know if you're making an impact. And so there's a lot of stuff to think about connecting the dots between what you and your teams do and create and linking that back up to the strategic framing of a well defined strategy [affirmative], then your value will be much more clear to people like Serg who doesn't know what worth.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So it sounds like product strategy when applied, sorry, strategy when applied to product helps you frame what you should be building. But the role of product is still to decide how that should be built and manage the trade offs that exist within the context of what you should be building to achieve the strategy.
- Andrew Tokeley:
- I think there's the strategy indicates some of the what, but there's more work to do, but at importantly frames the why to qualify that what is the right thing to do that it was the best, what to do for the why you came up with [affirmative] and not aligned, then you can build the wrong thing or build too much of a thing. And so strategy should inform the why. So what is in the right sort of context
- Brendan Jarvis:
- [affirmative], something else that interests me is the way in which organizational structure impacts the role that product plays and therefore their ability to achieve a particular product strategy. What has been your experience of organizational structure and how it's either enabled or disabled the organization to achieve that strategy?
- Andrew Tokeley:
- It's a really big topic because the first dynamic is that most companies form as a big team, like one big cohesive team. I often think startups, despite all the attention they they actually have it quite easy in terms of communications generally not a problem. They don't have customers screaming at them cuz they don't have any and they've really just got often quite a singular goal that they're trying to achieve to try and create some market fit. But this sort of single team concept evolves into often evolves into a CEO running half of this ball and hiring more sales people and marketing people and other people in the organization to help keeping it going. Maybe the cto, probably the CTO is building up the capability to deliver and to continue to deliver on all the things and opportunities that exist. And you tend to have these two halves where this half thinks about strategy and this half thinks about delivering really well and that can work and does work because it's exactly how most companies evolve while the often the CEO maintains that product leadership role.
- So they're still connecting with this part of the business, communicating intent and strategy and why we're doing it. This joint celebration that happens but at a certain point can't off raising money, they're doing other things, they're building it, they're getting office space and they call me and say, can you make that other half of my organization go faster solve that problem for me because I don't think they know what's important anymore. Do they know that we've only got a runway of six months and they're still mucking around with tech debt? Can you just solve that problem? And they think it's the role of product to be able to do that. There's a whole other conversation about whose responsibility that is. But the problem is that how do you transition from this single cohesive group to an increasingly separated delivery and the rest part of the business.
- And what happens is that there's this awkward teenage period where maybe 15 engineers that sort of size 10 to 15 engineers where you almost could start specializing their activities based off probably or ideally those strategic themes. Mm-hmm [affirmative] fall out of a well thought through strategy. You'll have some themes that come out of it and it's nice to align. We all know that we wanna align teams with purpose to something that matters to the business that's persistent. It's not just feature teams building features, but it's actually, well I'm the team that looks after this type of customer or this product [affirmative]. And you can do that by looking at a strategy and seeing what falls out. And so there's this awkward period as companies evolve and product organizations evolve where they'll solve this problem by putting a junior product owner over here, first time they've been in a product role, didn't realize it was a leadership position, just thought they were gonna make them go fast or do it whip cracking and do some roadmaps.
- And what it actually needs is someone a lot more senior and influential to bring these parts of the business together and start forming a plan for how you're gonna scale the product organization. And what typically happens is that, I know someone wrote recently or someone pointed me to an article written about the first product hire is often a bit of a sacrificial lamb because they brought in the wrong reasons and just get flamed and they were never gonna work for them. So you need to bring on somebody if you are looking to specialize your product organization who has seen this evolution happen before and can be hands on in those early days. Because if you're the first product person who is still quite seen, you're gonna have to touch all parts of the business, including the delivery side of the business [affirmative]. So you can't just go in there and just jazz hands, you've gotta actually practice what you preach as well.
- And so it takes a certain type of person to be that first product leader to then also be able to stand back and let others take over when you start to hire them. I think it, I keep going on about strategy but it does underpin a lot of things and don't like, in fact I almost like to rebrand it and give it a different name, but the idea of describing what's most important to a business right now is critical to every other part of the business. So they know where to put their energy and it impacts a product organization even more because their value is in creating value through the software that aligns with what's most important to the business. And so a lot of problems come when that's not clear or the strategy changes a lot or it's really just whatever the CEO heard at the latest career fair or market fair that they went to. It's really hard when those things are changing or if you don't have any influence over it.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It reminds me of that saying, make a decision that removes a thousand other decisions. It sounds like when that product strategy is clear, whether it's right or wrong or will prove to be effective in the marketplace is another matter. But it's almost like you remove that load of teams and executives within the organization that when they're presented with alternatives of things that they could be doing that it's more obvious what they should be doing.
- Andrew Tokeley:
- And the other key point I reckon is sometimes because I think strategy needs to rebrand people think it's like a six month, 12 monthly offsite. So they put a lot of emphasis on, oh you I'm doing strategy right now. And they get the PowerPoint out and they start sort of creating slides. So this fundamentally strategy is hard to create and define, but it should be easy to express [affirmative]. And so easy to express is not a 20 point a 20 page PowerPoint that's hard to express. So certainly at Xero. And I think one of the reasons why initially we were successful is that the strategies that we followed, I almost didn't even know there were a strategy. I certainly didn't use the S word, but they were very clear what they were and probably well, and I dunno if it was only in hindsight, I only really analyzed it in hindsight because it was just what we lived and breathed.
- We just knew why we existed and who we were trying to help and what our approach was to enter the market and how we were measuring that and success. Everybody felt it and that broad was a big part of that. But also the fact that he had people around him that echoed some of the genesises of ideas that he seeded and it helped conversations, it helped us say to your first point, it helped us say no when the inevitable happened, when we just had too much to do and not enough time with people. So we had to say no and ultimately not do things that some people wanted us to. That was aided by a relatively clear strategy around how we were gonna enter the markets that we did and what order and what the relative importance of those markets was at any point in time.
- And some of them were. UK had to wait a long time in the early days for us to build UK specific features and our meetings where we had to tell Gary who was the GM up there, that we couldn't do those things that he wanted despite the fact that his customers were screaming for it. He was losing sales because of it hurt, right? Hurt big time. He's feeling a lot better about it now I suspect. But at the time it was hard roughed and that only really came about cuz we were very aligned on strategy without using that word and that alignment. If there was one thing I had to would have to put my finger on in terms of why as a product organization we've succeeded, it was that alignment stayed there for a long time. And I don't know what it's like now whether people are all over the place.
- I suspect not. But it was really clear we didn't have nis, we didn't ever talk about the business. [affirmative], [affirmative], my clients end up talking and that the business is when you're like this right? And you're over here getting screened at and the business is telling you what to do that I never felt that in my whole time at Xero. And that's a real ultimate, and maybe I was in had blinkers on or something, I'm sure some people felt it, but in my role I never felt that. I always felt that product had a role at the table was valued. Rod would say, probably said it's every person in the organization, you know guys are the most valuable people in the business. And he put us on stage at Xero Cons. He made sure that we had a presence. He gave us a lot of freedom. There's a lot of freedom at Xero to do what you need to do as a product leader. And so I try not to always refer back to Xero because I've worked with 40 companies since I worked left Xero in the business that I run now. And so perspective of how other companies are running. But there was something special about Xero that it just has some really good reminders in there about how to run successful product companies.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And there's a few things in there that you've touched on. You've touched on the use of language, how the business as a whole thinks about itself and talks about itself that it sounded like it didn't intentionally create silos, it didn't pitch people against each other. It felt like it was a very inclusive company where everybody was working and aligned to a strategy and a clear mission. Now that reminds me of the term culture. Product culture is often talked about almost as much as product strategy. But you mentioned that you've worked with big companies like Xero, you also had some experience before that at Intergen and after that at eight I and since you've started your coaching business with 40 other organizations, what does a great product culture look like to you and why is it important?
- Andrew Tokeley:
- So it's kind of a nice umbrella term for how product is perceived and valued within an organization. And so when I think of a healthy product culture, I think of people in the organization who are working, have some ideals and principles around how products should operate within the context of a business and are in a healthy way promoting those practices and principles and behaviors through the way in which they communicate throughout the business, the way in which they talk to each other, the way in which they value insights the way they value connection with customer and how they want to bring value to customers through the products that they create. I don't think can be doing agile really well. You can doing Scrum really well, you can be doing standups every day on time for the right length of time with the right, but that's not product culture like things you do.
- Whereas product culture is Rod at Xero. I'm gonna use another Xero example is Rod at Xero is saying our product managers are some of the most valuable people in this company. That's him creating a culture of acceptance of these roles and the value that they hold and the importance that they have. It's not just the people who are in the product team creating that culture, it's how it's perceived across the entire organization and the value and it's meaning so that Serge could never say, I don't know what you're worth, it said, and most companies they don't know. And it's not like you can go, well I've got five engineers and they're worth $120,000 each and so half a million dollars or so is what the value they need to create each year. So I'm gonna work at each release and put a dollar figure on it. It's not as simplistic as sales and marketing, sorry, I mean marketing people, but
- Brendan Jarvis:
- They don't listen to this podcast anyway so
- Andrew Tokeley:
- Down on them. But they have a lot easier job to measure their value. And so this idea of how of constantly refining how you reflect your value or how you reflect the value of the people, it's not you as a product leader either. It's how you reflect the value of those people that are building stuff that has inherent value and how that maps to what the company cares about is a big part of your role. And so product culture is a lot about how you express, how you express and how others express the value of that product organization and the values that you operate within.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Now I understand that after Xero you went to work at another organization as I mentioned in your introduction eight and that you've spoken quite openly about your time and departure from ai. And I believe it's related to what we've just been discussing around product culture. I just wanna quote you now.
- Andrew Tokeley:
- No worries.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You said my naive thought was that I could go in there and make a difference in terms of helping them to define what this product is for. It was probably, to be fair, my biggest failure in my career. I didn't make the impact I wanted to there. How does that statement and reflecting back on what we've just talked about, product culture, how do those two things relate?
- Andrew Tokeley:
- So my role there was interesting. It was a huge learning for me. So I went in there believing one of my superpowers was my ability to empathize with a range of people from low level data engineers right through to the ceo. Like I could engage with any part of business and create those relationships that we talked about being really important as part of product culture. [affirmative], I found I didn't engage in the right way at the right time or the right, I don't fully analyzed what I could have done differently, but there were certain parts of the organization that felt threatened by my presence, by my influence. And it was a relationship that I couldn't improve [affirmative] and felt like I was missing a trick somewhere. And I don't know. So that was difficult for me in a company that was driven by that part. The part of the organization I found hard to engage with were, and they probably didn't even realize it, were in the driver's seat for a lot of product decisions.
- They were actually creating the value. They were technical people, researchers, they were creating a lot of the value that was the value of the company. And so it was hard for me to then express and to influence the direction and value that we should create to be a viable business. And that was hard. And that ultimately ran outta money and a lot of people had to leave and they're still going. But that was difficult to reconcile as a product leader. That was my job to find value for the efforts of, so my definition of a product leader's value is to maximize the return on investment of the efforts of the people with whom you're working with. And I was working with those researchers and the web people and there was a whole lot of people creating the value, but I didn't feel like I could maximize that return or it would not at least. So it was hard to take you. I hadn't really felt that I hadn't succeeded in other parts of my career so that it was a good reckoning of what would I have done differently if I'd had my time over there.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So that definition that you just gave of being a product leader, that sounds like at least a lot to take on your shoulders. And then when you run into a situation like that and aren't able to execute on your own intrinsic definition of your worth in the organization, I mean I can't imagine that must have been super difficult. But thinking about your experience at AI and then contrasting it against potentially Xero or forward against some of the great product organizations that you've subsequently worked with, what would you say the key difference or differences are that enabled you in the past and have enabled you in the future to really live up to that definition of product leadership?
- Andrew Tokeley:
- For me personally? Well one of the interesting things is I, as a coach I don't need to because [laugh], it sounds like a comment. The way I see it is that I have been through a number of experiences in my career, [affirmative] and working through others in my business and in a way that I could never do when I was in the business. In the role I've gained clarity of thought around how to be influential, how to be a good leader, the things that matter, the things that don't matter so much. And I sometimes feel guilty that I didn't do half the things I talk about now I don't decompose strategy I just described before when I was at Xero, I didn't know what a product manager was. There was a lot of things I didn't do deep discovery, I didn't talk to enough customers at times.
- And so there's a lot of things that I have. I, I've only really dawned on me at a much deeper level cause I'm not doing the job anymore. And so I might feel guilty about not having done it and not practicing what I preach, but I try and help those people who were me and blind to the potential impact they could have and try and help them to see what I didn't see at the time. And it's not like I hate that meme where people said, oh, I'm gonna tell you not to do all the mistakes that I did. There's not big mistakes that I'm gonna say, well you see what that happened to me, you just don't do that. Right? It's not, that doesn't not true [affirmative], but there's awareness you have of how to be an effective leader, an appreciation that it is a leadership role, which half of the product people I meet don't appreciated. Yet they think they're a get the shit done person. But that's not a leader. A leader enables others to get stuff done and make sure the stuff done is the right stuff to be done influences people who don't wanna be influenced the role of a leader. So I don't know if I've answered your question, but to me it's the impact I have now is quite different, but through the lens of an awareness of the things that I think are much more important than I realized at the time.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- [affirmative], no, I wanna come back to this definition of what a product leader is in a second. But I just want to chat briefly about what I heard when you were talking about the difference in experience between Xero and eight. And it sounded to me that the ability of the senior product leader or leaders and the evolution of the product culture relied heavily on the leadership that the CEO exhibited and the language and the overall strategy and culture that they embodied in the organization, which then enabled the product culture to be successful. What are your thoughts on that?
- Andrew Tokeley:
- When I said there was perfect alignment at Xero at all times, that was not the case at a, it's not that we weren't didn't like each other, we really enjoyed working together. I really respected and valued all the people I worked with at ai, but I don't think we were super aligned on how to execute the business and how to realize the value at the right time. There was a fundamental tension between doing the best research and applying that research to solving this deeply technical problem of holographic representation. That the imperatives there were quite different to achieving some revenue goals and driving the business forward to give it time to realize the potential of those amazing holograms. And I don't think we quite worked out the best path. We ran outta time, essentially. And so the classic example to me is was we proven we had some traction on mobile showcasing possibly the lowest fidelity holograms we could through a mobile phone.
- And it was really hard to get the rest of the organization to invest in mobile first because their principle was highest quality first. And then we'll make it work in mobile obviously takes a lot longer to get value to customers because most customers couldn't see the highest value stuff because it required expensive headgear that not everybody had. And so those were questions that we talked about. We talked about this tension, but I don't think we ever resolved it enough to align the entire company on a strategy that would've created some value in market earlier than it happened to.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I mean this is a really, I think, critical point for people listening to take away is just how important it is to be aligned, to have a clear view on what you're all working to in order that you don't have friction amongst different departments or functional areas. And the decisions that you're making on a daily basis from the small ones up to the very big ones, become clear when you've got alternate options in front of you. I think it's, yeah, it's a really valuable point that you've made Andrew,
- Andrew Tokeley:
- But it's not, but also it is good to point out perfect alignment would've been great. We could have aligned on maybe someone else in the organization would've disagree and say, well, we did align, we said that quality was the most important thing. And that's where we went. And I guess we did, we might not have all thought it was the right thing, but we did do it. So maybe that buy in, but we probably could have been more honest about the time that might take and the opportunities that presented. And so it's not only about alignment, it's also about being honest. I personally was under the drug of VR a r. Right? It was amazing. I loved talking about, I loved her and we had this great line, this narrative where you just say about people used to draw humans on caves on the walls of caves.
- And then we did what was after caves? I don't know, I wanna go tv, but I feel like something in between caves and the tv. But then we started doing silent movies and then movies with sound and then we [affirmative]. So this progression of representing ourselves in different media is a really compelling story. Who doesn't wanna, you know, put on a headset and walk into a room with yourself? Mm-hmm. [affirmative] a moving version of yourself that you can walk around and look at. It's deeply moving. There was a lot of really powerful messages that the technology AI could do. So I fell in love with that and that whole world of VR and ar and I think I probably lost sight of the business realities around achieving the impact we needed at the right time with the right people to give us the time to realize the potential. And there's still going, I just saw a post recently, there's still a small part of the organization running and they're still creating stuff and there's still fighting and so who knows where it might go. But for me the timing, this wasn't quite right and for a lot of other people who went through the business at that time.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So just coming back to the definition that you gave of product leadership, and I'll just recount that for people listening. So you said you're accountable for the return on investment of the collective efforts and outcomes created through the teams you work with. Now there are a few key words in there, and one that I want to focus on specifically is the word with, because it implies that as the product manager or the product leader that you don't have direct control necessarily over the people that you are responsible for managing in order to achieve the outcome. Is that a fair interpretation of what you meant with that description?
- Andrew Tokeley:
- Yeah, absolutely. So I hadn't picked up on that subtlety of the use of the word with, but you're right. It's not a matter of, well I'm gonna defi decide what the value is and what we're gonna build and I'm gonna work, I'm gonna get these people to make it right that that's not the role, the word. It is a hugely collaborative exercise. And if you think, I mean you gonna design background if think of the double diamonds, you've got this sort of exploring the opportunities out there, refining your understanding which opportunities you wanna address first. Then you look at solutions and then you come back down to one solution that has the value [affirmative]. And so as a product leader, you're spending much more time in that first diamond of exploring the opportunities and really articulating and validating that they're worth going for. And then I, I've done this visualization, I haven't quite nailed it yet but then in terms of your involvement, you're involved in the, people need to have the double diamond in front of them.
- You're involved in the first little piece of the second diamond in that your role there is the really explaining to the team the opportunity in front of them and why it matters. And you're, you are, you're gonna be involved in that looking around for solutions and exploring it. But your team, especially designer, really set up for doing that solution discovery to the problem that you've identified is worth solving and enabling the team to come up with things that you on your own couldn't possibly have come up with is a big part of your role is to step back as much as you can so that they can then own the impact of the solutions that they're coming up with. Now even as I'm saying that I'm criticizing myself because I've just given you the textbook answer of how product people are supposed to work. In many businesses that I've been involved in, the solution is potentially some aspect of the solution is actually pretty obvious. If you take I can't do a non-Xero example I'm just gonna do it. So if you take Xero, right? You're running a small business, I need to create an invoice
- Brendan Jarvis:
- [affirmative].
- Andrew Tokeley:
- So at some point we knew we had to build an invoice, the ability to generate an invoice, it's a legal document, has certain requirements. And so you could argue that that actually is not the team decide doing any solution discovery. They're actually doing design discovery, which is arguably another diamond in this thing. There's a whole lot of work that has to go to go, well, I know the fundamentals of what this framework of the solution is, but there's lots of, potentially lots of way I could manifest that in the product. So you're not finding solution, you're finding design. And so I think enabling your team to do that discovery of solution and design is really important. And for them to understand how you're gonna measure success or how as a group you're gonna measure success. And then your role of storyteller is saying, well, if we solve this problem or this opportunity then this is gonna happen.
- And maybe with the invoicing example, maybe the success is that maybe there's certain speed of creation might be an maybe that's important. You wanna be able to have it so easy that someone could create an invoice on the fly or maybe that you want to create an invoice and mobile first. Maybe there's some aspects of who's gonna use this invoicing that's more important than other types of customers. So there's still refinement of the opportunity that can happen beyond just build invoices. And in fact, super interesting with Xero is they've evolved from an invoicing team to a group of people who are focused on helping customers get paid faster. And that framing is really beautiful because now I have a thing that might be working on invoicing and might be solving that problem, but then they could also just, I could come to 'em and say, well the biggest problem with getting paid faster is that it's really hard for people to your invoice. And so they might do a whole lot of work on payments or different wording within the invoice templates, different ways of following up on payments not made. There's lots of things they might do there to come up with really with solutions to that problem rather than just building a feature
- Brendan Jarvis:
- [affirmative]. I mean that's the key thing that stood out for me there in that example is that one team is building a feature, the other is focused on a customer outcome. And even of itself, that's a microcosm of clarity of strategy because it gives you the question to sense check multiple options against, which is how does this help customers get paid faster?
- Andrew Tokeley:
- Yeah, it's a very fundamental understanding of small business from day one. We used to say cash flow is king, it's kinda like the accountants catch cry. And so we knew that that was really important. And so there's a lot of work that's gone into that product to actually enable people to get paid faster, to make that value in their marketing in terms of if you turn on this feature, you'll get paid 10 times faster. [affirmative], those sorts of things all come back to a potentially unwritten down strategy of helping small business do what they care about the most. [affirmative]. And yeah, I think that role of the product leader to elicit that thread of logic and causality and hypothesis into a reason for doing a certain piece of work or exploring types of work is where the role of a product leader can make a huge difference in connecting those dots.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It sort of speaks to me of framing what it is that we need to achieve without directing the hands in the way in which it is achieved. You mentioned storytelling as a keyword and something you said just a second ago, and I know that one of your workshops increasing your impact where you work with product leaders to take their skills to the next level. One of the key topics you cover is telling a good story in less than 30 seconds. Why is that so important for product managers or leaders? And how does one tell a good story in 30 seconds or less?
- Andrew Tokeley:
- So it's important because nobody reads what you write down [laugh]. And so you can write down a strategy, you can do whatever you like, you can put it up on confluence, you can force it down their throat. People don't read what you write. So if you think communicating stuff by documenting it gonna work, it might work for an engineer who needs a specification of some logic in your program, I don't know. But if they really need, cause people are busy, they don't read stuff. And so if you can suspend belief and think that that's vaguely true, then well how else are you gonna communicate and intent? How else are you gonna communicate why you're doing something? And so storytelling is an aspect of it. And I'm not an expert in storytelling other than that. The structure of it needs to mirror somewhat that strategic framing of goal, opportunity, hypothesis, action.
- There's that. And what I find fascinating is that decomposition that I've come up with is exactly the same as understanding the problem. Who benefits from solving that problem? What solution are you? What's your hypothesis solution? How you gonna measure it worked, right? What mean that we all talk about Don't fall in lovely solution, understand the problem. Well, you can map that almost one to one to a strategic decomposition. So we've taken strategic theory and almost bypass strategy and come to this sort of understand the problem before you go to the solution thing, which is closer to the metal of building stuff, [affirmative]. And so a lot of what we think about in product, I think is really interesting because we think we're creating a new discipline but would actually just repurposing a discipline that's existed forever, which is just running a business. A business operates on solving problems for a customer and understanding that problem really well and finding value.
- So this is why product leaders have such a tough time because, so their reason for being is the same as the CEOs or the founder. The founder started the whole business, especially a software business on this premise of knowing the problem, solving it, measuring, it worked [affirmative], and they bring someone else in who has the same motivat motivation. So how do they work together? So how does a CPO and a CEO work together without doing the same job? And so I think there's lots of really interesting stuff in there about how you, yeah, so tell these stories is part of that role you have because nobody reads it. So being inspirational is really important and most inspirational people can spin a good yarn. And maybe it's not Barack Obama, maybe you don't have amazing gift together. So I don't wanna make it feel like you all have to be super extroverted to be a product leader, but you can tell a story in your actions as well, in your behavior, in the small comments you make to direct a narrative, the correction of some incorrect assumption. There's a lot of things you have control over and can influence hearts and minds without standing up on a podium and telling a really riveting story. So I think we sometimes think storytelling is like this. You almost have to write a small novel, but it
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Being and Anthony Robbins kind of standing up on the chair yelling from the rafters, we're going this way.
- Andrew Tokeley:
- And so what I try and do is like, yes, that the 32nd thing was me, a little bit of a gimmicky thing in that course where we decompose a thing that they've worked on in the past to its problem, who benefits from solving it, the solution, the outcome. And that analysis takes a bit of thinking, even for something you've already built, they kind of have to go, well, how do we do it again? Who actually used it? And so they go through that exercise and can they then give me the punchy version of that, which is kind of like what you might do if a new member joins your team. How would you quickly get 'em up to speed with why this thing is important and how does it relate to something higher up the chain? And you should be able to say that reasonably simply.
- Shouldn't have to go, well sit down, grab a coffee, let me explain to you. It should be a little bit more punchy. And sure, eventually you'll unravel more of the backstory, but there should be an easy entry point to understand the value of the thing that you're working on. But interestingly, that storytelling, so I say you can, the way in which you engage with everyone around you, the way you communicate is part of the story that you're creating. So even these functional aspects of your role, like creating a roadmap, a dashboard, both those two artifacts are perfect examples of where you can integrate your story into those typically poorly done artifacts. So your roadmap could be streamed by strategic theme now, not by the team working on it or the technology stream. You frame it in terms of to win in the us, which is a strategic theme, has a number of strategies.
- We're doing these things right now and then the second two quarters will do nothing because we're gonna work on this other strategic theme which is winning in Australia or whatever the improved conversion or whatever the other themes might be that you uncover. And so it's a perfect way to illustrate the alignment of your efforts to what matters across the entire business. And to try and get people when they do a demo, which people generally do demos to say, is this okay? Is this what you want? Whereas the demo should be, should start, it's like doing a pitch. It's, I tell people to watch a, there's a podcast called Startup right by the Gimlet crew, probably your podcast person, you probably know them. Really good show to listen to how people pitch a business. This is where we've take product. People have taken a business concept of doing a pitch [affirmative] and now we have to do it internally when we're demoing a feature or pitching an idea.
- And you've gotta do the same thing. You've gotta lay out this is what happens in the world, this is the context that we're operating in and why it sucks. I think these people are under a lot of pain and are doing things really poorly right now. It's costing them time and money. I've got this idea that I think I can solve that by doing this and I'll know I've done it and I know it's a good idea because here's some outcomes that have happened as a result of my initial forays into the market. That framing is a story framing, but it's the same as your strategy framing. It's the same as your problem statement. And it's as good as sitting down with a really pithy story that you might be telling your team at some point in time. So I think there's lots of things, it's about communicating intent and that might be a good story, but there's also lots of other things you do day to day. And it goes back to your product culture. It's product culture is, culture is pervasive. It's not just a offsite, it's like a in everything you do and say, I think the way you communicate and intent and purpose and reason for being and value is a big part of your role.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- That makes a lot of sense. And not to sort knock us off our positive high that we've just been on there with the importance of storytelling. But I've also heard you describe product leadership as the art of managing disappointment. And that doesn't sound like much fun. What did you mean by that?
- Andrew Tokeley:
- I think I was, it was a bit of a reality check to people who thought it might have been, there's two schools, right, of people who are attracted to product. We don't have this as much. I think it might be an American problem. I hear a lot of it from American commentary. Whereas some people think product managers meant is the ability to be in a position to control what gets built. So I'm a really deep domain expert in this area and you often find internal hires have this perspective to go, well, I've been in this business for ages, I know what these customers want. I'm just gonna be in that driver's seat to tell the team what to build. And so they see it more as a direction rather than anything. Brokering hearts conversations or you come from a perspective of I'm really organized, I've worked in engineering teams before.
- I know how to spell Jira and I think I could be really effective in this and coordinating the activities of this team [affirmative]. So neither of those two things think you are mastering the art of managing disappointment until they get into the role and realize that they've got 65 different opinions flying at them. And how many customers all thinking you're doing the wrong thing at the wrong time and not for me. And you have to find some way of brokering a path through there and still feel good about yourself at the end of the day, [affirmative], because it's brutal. Nobody likes to not satisfy. It's a human nature to want to make other people around you happy with your efforts and the problem in this job or not problem, but the reality is that you never give anybody exactly what they want. If
- Brendan Jarvis:
- That is a huge point. And if you're listening to this and you're a product manager or leader, just take a moment to think about that and to feel a little better about yourself because everybody that's in a similar role to you will be feeling the same way. And it's probably a wise thing for your own mental wellbeing to come to terms with exactly what Tokes has just said.
- Andrew Tokeley:
- Yeah. And so how do you feel good about a job that you're always disappointing people? And there's a lot of stuff that's connected here. So your sense of value and how you're projecting the value of the things you're doing needs to be somewhat of a, well this is why I did it. This is why I didn't do exactly what you asked for and this is why I didn't do what you asked for at all. Because what I'm trying to do is impact this thing over here and this is how we have decided we're going to approach it. And even better if you can then demonstrate that with real analytics and data that support the value of the stuff you've done that nobody was actually asking you for. They just wanted you to know the thing. Cause no one wanted to sell it or market it or not support it. But there's value in everything. There's still value in everything you do, even if you don't do what anyone wants you to do.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Is this tied into something else I've heard you talk about, which is the need to take emotion out of prioritization by having this strong story that is clearly able to articulate the why behind the decisions that were made and also what the approach was that was taken to deliver on that decision and then how we're gonna measure it. Is that tied into that?
- Andrew Tokeley:
- I think so in that, I can't remember ever saying, well, maybe have, you've probably done some great research. I probably did say take the emotion out of it. But if you get too caught up in the, I've gotta please people, I feel like that might be the wrong decision. Very easy to be paralyzed by the decisions you're asked to make or to influence. And so I think it's more important to make a decision than to make the best decision, right? Because you don't wanna be trying to get it perfect, right? Because that's never gonna work. And so I think you've gotta find this balance between having data driven. All the books tell you, well, you have a strategy and the strategy will tell you what's important. Measure the opportunity is that opportunity worth more than another opportunity is a greater than B do a right, which is kind of bullshit in that it's literal meaning, but it's aspirational.
- So because it's aspirational, you're you generally a fair way away from having this perfect, well obviously this is the right thing to do. And so most of the time there's not an obvious clear winner in the candidates that have met the grade. So there's lot of things that you can go, well, we're not gonna work on the UK right now, we're gonna work on New Zealand, Australia. That's just a big thing. But within New Zealand and Australia, there's probably quite a few thi things. So you need to refine your thinking a little bit more. So it's better to have an opinion that's not 100% backed by science, but you've got a great story about it, [affirmative], you've got a great hypothesis and I could almost guarantee if you approach a piece of work that you're doing that is a bit of a punt, but you explain in your narrative and your explanation and all the things, what your theory is, that'll solve most people's doubts.
- They're not looking for a scientific equation that proves this thing's the best thing to do. What they're actually looking for is, have you thought about it enough? Have you given us enough consideration for us to believe that you believe that this is the right thing to do right now given the vagaries of all the decision making that's going on? And so yes, that can be helped by Moscow, can be helped by all these frameworks, the rice score, all these things. But they're really just tools to help you get a sense of what will ultimately be somewhat of a gut decision based off all that stuff that you've done in the past. It's not gonna be A equals B, therefore C.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- That sounds like to that you're saying that there's no perfect answer.
- Andrew Tokeley:
- No, well, yeah, no, I mean there's not, right? I mean there's all shades of gray in this game. And I guess that's why this sort of being in the middle of the managing disappointment is that you are never gonna feel really good about nailing what somebody, if your satisfaction is coming from the acceptance of others, you're not gonna be very happy in this job. Your satisfaction needs to be in the impact you create with the customers and how that aligns with what the business cares about rather than being a people pleaser
- Brendan Jarvis:
- [affirmative]. I understand. Just be mindful of time, you have a boat to catch shortly. So I'm, I'm gonna bring us down to the close. Thinking about what you've seen in your product career to date, what is the biggest challenge or opportunity that people and product face in New Zealand
- Andrew Tokeley:
- The biggest opportunity that people face in New Zealand? In New Zealand? I think the biggest challenge we have across the product space is that we don't have the right level of senior executive level leadership [affirmative]. And what that means is that it's very hard to influence the product culture within an organization because that needs to influence from the CEO right through to the graduate. And so if you are just a PM on a team within a machine, it's very hard for that to happen. And that pattern happens a lot. And I get that there's economic constraints around hiring a senior CPO as your first product hire but I think if that's an option to have somebody who can be more senior than junior, I think that is a problem for businesses in general across New Zealand who are exploring how do they bring in products thinking into their organization, I think a little bit higher, think a little bit longer term about how you want this practice to evolve over time.
- I think that's probably the biggest thing for a company thinking about product. For individuals, thinking about product, I think the biggest challenge that they face is misreading extent to which it's a leadership role. [affirmative], there's a lot of people I talk to who haven't yet worked out that and play the victim card a little bit too much. You can't be a victim to someone else in the business in this role. You've got to engage with that other part of the business, come to an agreement and buy into some approach. And then it's your decision. You're not doing it because somebody told you to that leaders don't do that. Leaders lead, right? And they don't let you know all the stuff that's happened before. They just present a united front and so that you're not confused about who's leading what. And so to to both those points, what I wanna encourage people to think about when they're thinking about product as a career is don't think you have to come from technology or from the domain of the product, but I do think you have to come from leadership or have some natural inclination for leading and influencing others because that is the thing that will stand you above the crowd and help you be successful beyond any sort of scrum training or PM course or all the mechanics of the role can be learned really hard to learn to be leader.
- And if you've already proven that in marketing or sales or in support or in any other or technology, you might have become a leader through those ranks like I did. That leadership quality is critical for anyone coming into this discipline.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- That's a great point to leave people with. Thank you. This has been a wonderful conversation. Really appreciate you being so generous with sharing plenty of practical and hard fought knowledge and insight and thank you also for your continued contribution to the New Zealand product community.
- Andrew Tokeley:
- Thanks, Bre, and likewise, thanks for the chance to share some thoughts and have a good conversation. I can talk about this stuff forever, so it was great. Thank you.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You're most welcome. I've learned a lot today and I have no doubt that people listening will have also talks of people wanna find out more about you and what you're up to. What is the best way for them to do that?
- Andrew Tokeley:
- I mean, I'm pretty old school. LinkedIn is the best way to ping me. If you're in business and wanna connect with me you can find out what I do on andrewtokeley.com. The Twitter handle's still there, but I very rarely go into Twitter these days. So it's good to see that the bio's still up there though.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- [laugh] thanks Tokes and to everyone that's tuned in, it's great to have you here too. Everything that we've covered in today's show will be in the show notes on YouTube, including where you can find Tokes plus all the resources that we've mentioned. If you enjoy the show and you want to hear more great conversations like this with world class leaders and UX and product, don't forget to leave us a review and subscribe. And until next time, keep being brave.