Vidya Dinamani
The Rebel's Guide to Making Great Products
In this episode of Brave UX, Vidya Dinamani shares important strategies for building belief 💡, healthy product cultures 🍎, and positive cross-functional relationships 🤝.
Highlights include:
- How have you increased your chances of your initiatives being supported?
- How do you determine what is needed for a product org to improve?
- What do you do when a leader is preventing the product org’s success?
- How do the best leaders manage the demands on their team’s time?
- What advice do you have for teams being crushed by their backlog?
Who is Vidya Dinamani?
Vidya is the co-founder of Product Rebels, a company that has provided world-class and hands-on product management coaching ✊, by tenured product management executives, to over 1,200 product leaders and founders.
She is also a founding partner of Ad Astra Ventures, a specialist early-stage venture investment firm and accelerator that helps female founders to get funded 🚀.
Before founding Product Rebels, Vidya was the VP of Innovation and Design at Mitchell International, where she established and grew a team that was focused on new growth products and the development of an innovation framework, metrics and process 📈.
Vidya also spent a little over a decade at Intuit, where her last role was as the Director of Product & Customer Experience Development for TurboTax 💸.
She holds 9 US software patents. Is a member of both GroupSolver’s and Sash Group’s board of directors. A limited partner of the Neythri Futures Fund 🌱. A mentor for Techstars and GrowthMentor. And the founder and lead organiser of Product Tank San Diego.
Transcript
- Vidya Dinamani:
- We tend to want to answer the question. We've done our research, we've done our homework, we know what we're talking about, and we end up explaining, and you've got to resist the urge to share what you know. You've got to resist the urge to be like, look, believe me, I am credible. It's like, no, just sit in the confidence that you are. You're there for a reason. Go back to the outcome that you want, address the question, and then bring it back to what you're looking for.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Hello and welcome to another episode of Brave UX. I'm Brendan Jarvis, managing founder of The Space InBetween, the behavior-based UX research partner for enterprise leaders who need an independent perspective to align hearts and minds and also the home of New Zealand's first and only world-class, human-centered research and innovation lab. You can find out more about me and what we do at thespaceinbetween.co.nz.
- Here on Brave UX, though it's my job to help you to keep on top of the latest thinking and important issues affecting the field of design. I do that by unpacking the stories, learnings, and expert advice of a diverse range of world-class leaders.
- My guest today is Vidya Dinamani. Vidya is the co-founder of Product Rebels, a company that has provided world-class and hands-on product management coaching by tenured product management executives to over 1,200 product leaders and founders. She's also the founding partner of Ad Astra Ventures, a specialist early stage venture investment firm and accelerator that helps female founders to get funded.
- Before founding Product Rebels, Vidya was the VP of Innovation and Design at Mitchell International where she established and grew a team that was focused on new growth products and the development of an innovation framework, metrics and processes.
- Vidya also spent a little over a decade at Intuit, where her last role was as the director of product and customer experience development for TurboTax.
- She holds nine US software patents as a member of both group solvers and SASH groups, board of directors, a limited partner of the Neythri Futures Fund, a mentor for Techstars and Growth Mentor and the founder and lead organiser of Product Tank San Diego.
- Vidya is also a fellow podcast host where alongside her product, rebel Co-founder Heather Samin, she talks to battle hardened product leaders about building phenomenal products on Wait for it, the Product Rebels podcast.
- And now she's here with me for this conversation on Brave UX Vidya, a very warm welcome to the show.
- Vidya Dinamani:
- Gosh, what a lovely welcome. Thank you so much for having me, Brendan.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It's lovely to have you here and it was so lovely when I was preparing for today to listen to your Kiwi accent and feel completely at home with all the things that I watched of yours in the past. And we were talking a little earlier before we hit record, how we're both from Wellington and how you'd left Wellington some time ago. Now, you've lived in the States for quite a while, but I was curious to take your mind back to your time in Wellington growing up and ask you what is one of the memories, the main memory that stands out the most for you from your time in New Zealand? In Wellington?
- Vidya Dinamani:
- You mean apart from being blown over every single day?
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yes. It is a very windy city, isn't it?
- Vidya Dinamani:
- No, I love Wellington and you're right, we were just trading some nostalgic memories. It's so beautiful. Best little city in the entire world. Can't wait to get back there. I think formative memory, because I went to Victoria University and I also had my first jobs, my first two jobs in Wellington, and I think of it now, can I go back often as just being this really innovative city. I feel like New Zealand as a whole and this Brendan, it's very much a we can do this. You roll your sleeves up and you just get to it. And I've been doing a little bit of work, a little bit of help with some early stage companies and I see that same attitude and I feel like that's what I remember and that sense of, we know we may be really small, we may be really far away from everything, but when I moved from Wellington to the States, I never felt like I really just was right there, had all the tools and tips because we really are. And I really felt that sense of we could do anything. And that is something that I think is absolutely true many, many decades later. And I am not going to talk about how many decades later.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I won't ask you about that either, but you have gone on to do many, many wonderful things. I mean a few of them I highlighted there in your introduction and I imagine none of those would've happened if you hadn't have left New Zealand. What was it though that prompted you to leave? You mentioned you spent your first couple of jobs here, you studied here, but what was it that you felt I need to go somewhere else in the States is possibly the place for me?
- Vidya Dinamani:
- Yeah, actually this is a big admission, but it wasn't actually the states, it was the traditional oe. It's a couple of years out of doing a degree and much like everybody else was on my way to England and my partner ended up doing a PhD here and so I ended up in Pittsburgh of all places on a tourist visa and saying if I can get a job within the three months that I have, I will stay and here we are. So I got that job
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And that job was a pretty interesting job. If I'm correct in my research is accurate, you got a job in which sounded like a software engineer type role. You were officially a distributed file systems architect and this was at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Centre. And when I was reading that, I mean that sounds like a phenomenal, or at least a very interesting place to have started work in the states. Was it as interesting as it sounded to me?
- Vidya Dinamani:
- Yeah, absolutely. I mean it was really exciting projects. I think for someone who was very young who I have a physics degree, and so coming into it, put some coding. This is why I went into distributed file systems. It was a lot of security. Being able to understand systems was really what I was hired to do. And coming in, I got to support some really incredible scientists from all around the country. They would be doing things like trying to figure out more algorithmically, scientifically how to think about half lives of nuclear bombs, so they weren't exploding them in our beautiful South Pacific.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- We appreciate that.
- Vidya Dinamani:
- Exactly, which is meaningful work, really extraordinary projects and doing my sort of small part to be able to support the kind of systems that you needed to do these incredible scientific calculations. That's what the supercomputing centres were all built for. So yes, it was fascinating work. I got to work with some really incredible brilliant people bottom the totem pole, but just got exposed to some really amazing thinkers.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I want to come back to your time studying physics. This is something else that really stood out to me about you and obviously one of the things about you is that you are a woman and physics in the hard sciences aren't particularly known for their gender diversity, if you like. They're particularly bent, I suppose STEM is as well towards men and males. What was it like as a female in those lecture theatres back in Victoria University and Wellington studying physics
- Vidya Dinamani:
- Lonely? There was three of us that did physics. My best friend who is now back in Wellington actually from back then, she and I with one other were pretty much the only ones doing physics back then. And so there were small classes to begin with. When you get to your third year, there's about 12 to 15 people anyway, so the early stages of hundreds of people in your math 1 0 1 and so forth quickly narrows down so the ratio isn't as extraordinary. But we all been taught do very, very different things and I think one of the things I did that's probably quite formative and maybe doesn't come out in the research was I went into student politics. And again, this was with my friend who is now back in Wellington. And so being a voice, I think if I had just done physics and had just done stem, I think it would've been quite difficult.
- I think you really are not trained to have sort of a strong voice, you're not trained. I think this is probably one of the things I think is the hardest about the education that I experienced and I think New Zealand has experienced is we're not really taught to question, we're not really taught to challenge. And having had children and seeing them growing up in the American system, I think that's quite different. It's the biggest, I think, contrast to the way that we were taught. I believe that's very different now, but if I think about the way that I was brought up, and so to your question about being in STEM and being a woman in physics without having the voice outside in student politics and wanting to change the world, I think it would've been very, very difficult. But I had this voice elsewhere, which allowed me to be able to speak up for myself back then. I think that really was quite formative for the rest of my career.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It's interesting to hear that you were a student politician, I'm imagining that was on er, the student association?
- Vidya Dinamani:
- It was student association, yep. We were nominated to be the education officers.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Right. Well, I was the activities officer on ER at some point as well. So we share that in common. And thinking about your decision to, I don't know if this is quite the right framing to find or perhaps express your voice through student politics, was this in retrospect a conscious decision that you made because you weren't able to find that in physics in the way that you were being educated? Or was this something that I suppose was just a happy coincidence that you kind of fell into, gosh,
- Vidya Dinamani:
- You are really going deep here, Brendan? I think it goes back to being probably a woman of colour. Growing up in Wellington where there weren't a lot of people who look like me kind of going through university. I went to Wellington Girls and again, great high school but was probably not as vocal still trying to find my voice. And I think going into causes that I believed in was probably a way to be able to speak up and it was not necessarily speaking up for me, but speaking up for things I believed in, which is a way to get to be vocal. And so I think that was really the path, not so much putting my hand up. Again, we weren't really trained to do that, but there were things that I really were very strongly believed in. There were things around, I'm totally ageing myself now, but back then it was anti-apartheid and there was lots and lots of movements around and just fair trade and New Zealand's place in that and things that I strongly believed in which allowed me to become more vocal and being education officers and speaking up for our ability to have a voice, to have a student voice was the things that you felt like you were representing for other people
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And that voice and representing for other people is something that you've continued to do in your career. And one of the things that I touched on in your introduction was at Astra Ventures, and I understand that back in 2017 or thereabouts, you had a conversation with one of your soon to be co-founders and you both realised something about your personal investment portfolios. What was that?
- Vidya Dinamani:
- It's really interesting, and I'm going to go back a little bit to answer that question because I think that investing doesn't necessarily, it's not sort of a normal next action for a lot of folks who are grown up in corporate. And it certainly wasn't the way that I was brought up. It's not my appearance. So I found myself in my last job running innovation in running innovation. I got connected to the local ecosystem and as part of that was put on a steering committee for one of the biggest incubators that we have in San Diego, which is where I live. And I got to learn how to look at early stage companies. And in doing that, because I've got a product background, I've got a engineering background, I work with a lot of great designers thinking about experience. And so immediately I suddenly realised, well gosh, I know a lot about how to think about solving really important customer problems and I know a lot more than I realised about being able to evaluate what good strong products were and what product market fit meant.
- And so in doing due diligence, I had to learn the financials, I had to learn some of the other pieces, but I got to learn what good products were. And in this incubator, in the steering committee, we were finding that we weren't putting women through and the person who became, we became co-founders. She and I would push and these were really strong businesses with strong product market fit who weren't making it to even the due diligence stage. And so fundamentally something was broken. And so she and I decided that we wanted to do something about this because with a good investment thesis, when you've got a clarity around what you're looking for and the business has good fundamentals and you believe in the founder and that really is the key. When you believe in the founder and the other fundamentals are right, then you take a risk and every early stage investment is a risk, but got to believe in that person and they weren't getting to due diligence because the rest of the committee wasn't believing in the person even though the rest of the information and the data looked right. And so that's what we discovered. And so that's the reason we focused for the first three or four years on funding women only.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So from that experience, it would be unfair. I imagine, and this is intentionally unfair, but it would be unfair to say that female founders are just not as believable as their male counterparts.
- Vidya Dinamani:
- I'll take you through a little bit sort of our journey, which is we are trained as women often and especially as I say, founders and early stage founders to emulate what works. And a lot of the voices now, a lot of what companies, especially with hire VC funding, there are certain patterns that work and every good person who tries to emulate patterns, if you see something that is working, you try to behave that way and it's not necessarily as authentic as, and if you don't see enough other people that look like that, people aren't necessarily going to take the risk. So this is sort of self perpetuating. There's not that many women who are funded, therefore there's not enough of patent, therefore they don't get funded, therefore there's not that many people. It just keeps kind of going in a circular fashion. And so one of the things that we realised is, is it the voice?
- Is it how they represent themselves? And we looked at both. There's obviously various explicit biases. There's a bunch of them implicit biases as well. And these include the way that people look at you. There's just some assumptions that are made in terms of being a female leader. There's some ways that people talk to you. There's some really famous studies, there's one in particular that talks about ways that you have promotion and prevention biases, which I think is one of the fundamental studies that gets talked about very often and that really is the way that people ask you questions. And boiling it down to sort of one sentence, men tend to get more promotion focused questions, which means they tend to get asked how big their businesses are going to get grown. Women tend to, and I'm generalising here, get asked, how are you going to prevent your business from failing?
- So you get asked failure prevention questions. Now if you think about this, if someone asks you a whole bunch of how big is your business going to be? And someone else gets asked, how are you going to stop all these terrible things from happening? Clearly the person who talks about how wonderful and how much of a unicorn their business is going to be tends to be the one that gets funded more. And that's how the math plays out. So there's those pieces and then there's in terms of implicit biases too, which is again sort of right from the social impact and so forth. So we put all of that together in some research and we've taken about 150 women through various types of bootcamps, helping them understand what these different implicit biases are and then really helping them think through how do they want to respond to it because there isn't a set playbook. It really is being able to recognise behaviour and then being able to respond to it. So that's really the work that we've been doing for a while. Now,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- If there was some lesson or applicable practical advice or suggestion that you could give to, perhaps it's people, females, for example, working in product leadership roles or design leadership roles that may be experiencing something similar to that lack of promotion focus on say the initiatives that they're trying to lead at work, whether it's just to get some internal buy-in to go down a certain direction. I know there's a lot of nuance and you can't speak to every aspect of what everyone listening could possibly experience, but what is there that you've seen that can make a big difference in the way that these female leaders can increase their chances of being successful in achieving the objective that they're seeking?
- Vidya Dinamani:
- Yeah. Gosh, we could talk about this for hours, but I'll try to boil it down to one thing that I think can work for pretty much everybody as a way to start. And that is if you are clear on what outcome you want, I think a lot of the time when you come into a session, a meeting, whether it's a one-on-one or whether it's a presentation, sometimes it can feel like the error is taken out and things are done to you, whether it's the questions that are being asked of you, whether it's a direction that you're being pulled in, and if you can send to yourself a little bit more on the outcome that you want out of this. Is it a decision that you want made? Is it some sort of direction? What is it? What is it that you are looking for? And then to bring it back to that direction because if you can sort of send to yourself in the core or what is it that you're looking for, you can answer the question, but then you can turn it back.
- And this is often what we talk about with prevention and promotion. If you are asked a risk prevention question instead of responding to it for 3, 4, 5 minutes, you could answer it in sort of 10 to 20 seconds and then you can turn it around and talk about what it is that you want to talk about. And so just being able to take a little bit more control, but it requires really paying attention, being able to address it. But we are very much, and I put myself in this theme boat, I think so many of us women are, we tend to want to answer the question, we've done our research, we've done our homework, we know what we're talking about, and we end up sort of explaining. And you've got to resist the urge to share what you've got, to resist the urge to be like, look, believe me, I am credible. It's like, no, just sit in the confidence that you are. You're there for a reason. Go back to the outcome that you want, address the question and then bring it back to what you're looking for.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- That's such a key piece of advice. Lots of light bulbs going off for me there even as a man, just thinking about having that presence of mind to be able to realise the velocity or the direction that a questions travel to you at and then be able to respond to it, but then pivot in your response to something that's more outcome focused. It's a really nice nugget have shared. I want to ask you something quickly about before we move on to product about your studies. I didn't mention this in your introduction and I feel it's really relevant. So obviously we've heard that you studied physics, which in itself is really interesting, but you also studied in America, right? You did an MBA at Carnegie Mellon, which is a fairly prestigious university, so it's very well thought of and highly regarded. What was it that prompted you to go from what you were doing at that point in your career to feel like you wanted to add those three letters after your name?
- Vidya Dinamani:
- Yeah, so actually while I was at the Supercomputing Centre, we got together with a few other Kiwis and we created a startup called nz.com, and this is going back a long, long way. That
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Was you?
- Vidya Dinamani:
- It was us.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Wow. Yeah. Yep, I'm familiar with that. Are
- Vidya Dinamani:
- You? That's so cool. And so it grew very quickly. We were doing this at nights because we were young and didn't need to sleep, and we were for a while there, one of the fastest growing travel sites and some really fun stuff, but none of us were business people and I was the closest they got to a business person, which was a little scary. And so I decided I needed to figure out what I was doing. And so I started my MBA and was able to then take on that role and really do a little bit more of the leadership around where do we want to go strategically. I just needed that skillset. I also wanted to be able to shift out of what was a very technical role into something that I was ready to move on. And it's a small group, it's a very research centred group, not a tonne of opportunity to grow. And so that was also a way for me to move on. And I knew that I wanted to be able to balance both business and technology. That's where my career was heading. That's what I wanted to do. And an MBA at that time was the fastest way to get there. So it was the combination of those things. Well,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Tell me about a product, right? Product management because this is large part of what you are currently doing with Product Rebels, which is helping product leaders and founders to build better product organisations. But I just want to, before we get into the depths of that, just ask you about this because looking at your career history, it seemed to me that based on LinkedIn that your first role in product, you kind of leapfrogged the whole standard, well these days, standard product manager, senior product manager, group product manager, that kind of part of the ladder. And you went straight into working as at a director level. And is this something that was as unusual as it seems or is this something that was quite normal and was quite well suited to your previous experience?
- Vidya Dinamani:
- I guess it is unusual. When I finished my MBA, I went to work for Deloitte Consulting and in doing so was working with a lot of different product groups. And so I had the product experience. There wasn't a.com era. We were working again in Adobe dating myself.com era. We were working in lots of different places. I got to work in the really cool companies across the world actually. And so when I came to Intuit, I joined the strategy group and from there went into a short stint as an architecture, went into operations, but the whole time was understanding product. And so moving then into the TurboTax role, the customer experience role, I hadn't been for the first four years of Intuit five years, I hadn't been in a product role, but I'd been around it. And so I knew a lot of people there. I was connected, understood like the back office systems, all the things that operations work that I'd done were supportive of the products.
- So it wasn't completely out of left field, although it looks a little bit like that. And I had the background and this experience from earlier. And I think also the technology, the pieces all came together to allow me, because the customer experience role, the GM at that time, what he wanted to do, which I think was extraordinary, and I think it was so perfect for the time, was to stop thinking about experiences being almost separate but start to actually talk about end-to-end and put people and resources behind end-to-end thinking. So he gave us everyone that we needed in order to create an end-to-end experience. So when I was in customer experience, we had product, but we also had some tax experts, we had design, we had research, and we had front end developers. So you control the entire customer experience. And that allowed us some measure of control that I think a lot of the time product managers don't have.
- We have so much of the time you have to lead through influence, whereas this was really, it was direct control. And when I left the TurboTax experience, there was a large part of the TurboTax experience and the skews with all the connective tissue to be able to create these amazing experiences. So just a wonderful way of thinking about it. And then once you've done that, you see the power of end to end and that really allowed me to go down the path of the way that I think about product now. But yes, although it looks like it came out of left field not quite as much as that,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- That GM that you mentioned when you're at TurboTax and the way in which they sounded like paved a path for you to actualize the end-to-end view of the experience, just how important is that generally speaking for product organisations, product leaders to have an executive or a senior leader that does that to enable them to realise the full potential of what they have heard they can achieve?
- Vidya Dinamani:
- I want to answer this probably slightly differently, which is I think what he did was so important because he recognised what was needed for the organisation. And so we had an organisation that had grown up a very specific way and had done things in a very similar way year after year after year. And for the tax business, you don't have much of a choice. It's not like a product that fundamentally you have multiple releases, you have one shot once a year and that's what you build towards and it's intense and it's unrelenting and it's crazy. And so what he wanted was for us to be able to shake things up that gave us much more of a customer focus and that was his response to doing that. And so what I think is critical is that you don't just bring in a perspective or a point of view of how you've done things before or the latest thinking it really is.
- You spend time to diagnose what do you have in front of you, what is it that you want to change? And then you apply a technique against it. Now in this case that end-to-end perspective changing the organisation shook things up dramatically and it fundamentally changed things I think forever, but just as much. So because we work with so many different types of organisations, I would say that would've been completely the wrong thing to do for other organisations that we work with. And so for us partnering with product leaders and being able to say, what is it? What's going on, where are the issues? And then how do we empower our product teams to be able to do the right thing? And that can come through multiple different ways.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- There's a lot on what you've just said there. I want to tie back where my head's going to the intuit example that you gave, it seems like the GM enabled you to take the right kind of risks talking about one single release, right per year. You're talking about a line of software tax where there's zero room for getting things wrong. It has huge consequences if you do that way of framing. I think you used the word diagnosis. How is that something that you can bring in as an external to an existing product org? How do you bring to bear that kind of perspective? What sorts of approach or tools or things do you use to help them to decide where is best to focus their efforts on designing or redesigning their product org?
- Vidya Dinamani:
- Yeah, I love that question partly because we have a really specific point of view on this and one of them is a lot of the time we take a look at competencies and we take a look at what's the skillset, what do people actually, what do they know? Do they understand the tools and what they have to do? And so much of training and so much of the way forward is focused on actual people skillset. But I think there's two more aspects that we bring in that I think are as critical. And the first one is mindset, which is what's your approach, what's your perspective? How do you think about this? Are you thinking end to end? I mean that's not a tool that is. What does that look like? What does that mean to think end 10, what does it mean to think customer centric?
- What does that look like? How does those practises show up? How does the leadership team talk about that? And then the third aspect is resources and is the team actually set up for success? So what I mean by this is you can talk about customer centricity, but then you don't have any research methodology, you don't have teams. And I'm sure from a design perspective you see this all the time. It's one thing to talk the talk, but it's like what are you doing to actually support this? Do you have customer advisory boards in place? Does the team actually fund this work? So we take a look at those three lenses, we look at mindsets, we look at competencies, and we look at resources. And it might be you've got an excellent product team and an excellent design team, excellent research team, but you actually don't have these other two pieces in place, which is actually then a change management or it's simply sort of funding specific things to be able to enable the goodness that's already there.
- Now, a lot of the time you can also say these pieces are competencies. So we come up with a heat map and we start to see where is it? And every organisation is different and it's that unique pattern and then it's a matter of focus, where do you want to start because you can't do everything all at once. So where is it that you believe you can get the biggest bang for the buck? And so that really is what we try and partner with our product leaders and the leadership teams to say, here's how we can start. A lot of the time, one of our clients right now, wonderful client, we did a pilot, we took one of their most important initiatives and we actually started working a little bit of a different way and now we're onto their fourth team. And I think that's the way, because what you want to do is you want to be able to start small, you want to experiment, you want to try, you want to be able to tweak based on the culture and how things fit. And then you want to be able to move and then start actually spreading across the rest of the organisation. And so that's the way that we like to work. So the diagnosis, the prioritisation, the focus, and then start small. I think a lot of these huge transformations and we're involved with many of them as well. They're painful, they're hard, they take a really long time. So we prefer to start small and incrementally work our way through the organisation.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Speaking of painful and hard, some of the things that at least to me it seems like you might run into some of the closely or tightly held assumptions, perhaps limiting beliefs, things like that, and the current way of working, the comfort that comes along with that and the change that you represent as in product rebels represents how do you deal with the tricky stuff? So for example, when a senior leader is holding so tightly onto something that it becomes a real blocker in the way of you actually being able to actualize the thing that you were paid to go and do for the organisation, what do you do in those sorts of situations?
- Vidya Dinamani:
- Yeah, two things. One is the way that I hope this doesn't sound like you can stop me sounding like an advertisement, right? Because I don't mean this to be marketing, but one of the things that the way that we work is it's over 10 weeks and because you have to work on the product, it is not use cases. You have to apply and you have to iterate as all of us have to do all the time. And so part of that sort of incremental learning, we start to learn the culture. The very last piece of this, and this is from an individual team, this is from the product team and often it's a cross-functional team that's working on an offering. It's about being able to influence and it's about being able to not try to influence as an individual because we're not trying to say now you've suddenly become sort of way more charismatic and you're going to start influencing and there's all this, it's like how do you actually use what you've learned from the customer?
- How do you build this to build a case? So now, and it goes right back and I love the fact that you started Brendan right back with I think about standing up for someone else. Everything about product rebels is standing up for your customer. And so when you then stand up for your customer and you talk about what it is that they need, you speak with a very different type of authority and you speak with evidence and data and you paint a picture, you tell a story. And so that's what we end with. We built, installed all these skills to allow you to do that. That's one piece of it. The other half is you're right, you could do all of that and you could still have someone who's quite entrenched. And when we recognise that, we actually ask for a leadership workshop because leaders need a way to speak differently to their teams.
- They actually have to be trained to be like, how do you ask the right questions? How do you respond? How do you as a leader actually meet them halfway meet your teams? And when we recognise that that's not happening, we have to ask for that. And so the way that we go through there is we talk about leaders, we say, this is your new role, your we've trained your teams to think and work differently. We need you to think and work differently. Here's what we want you to do. Then we get the teams to come in and present, they do their presentation and then we come and critique the leaders. So we're like the teams can. So it is just a nice little sort of reversal of roles there. And our leaders are often quite nervous. They're like, okay, now we're on the spot, but we have to expect them to show up differently as well.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- How are you expecting them to show up? What sorts of behaviour are you encouraging them to exhibit in those situations?
- Vidya Dinamani:
- Asking the right questions, asking versus telling, being able to talk about where the hypothesis was, ask about insight, talk about different interpretation versus my opinion. So it really is much more sort of probably a Socratic method. It is trying to pull out insight. It's trying to be additive because a lot of the time they do have additional information, they have context, they have competitive information, they have strategic information that the team may not have, and it's really easy to just stomp on a team. And so it's much more about how do I connect the insight that you have with this additional information and then be additive and accretive to this conversation. And so that's how we try and work it.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- There's so much challenge and specific ways that we can approach the communication and collaboration that we have with others. Obviously there we are just talking about the relationship between a leader and a team, but there's also the cross-functional dance that goes on and making products between leaders, between teams. And specifically something that I was curious about is the advice or the things that you would encourage or coach product managers to, or it could be any manager to be honest, because whether you're in design or product or research, there's going to be demands for your time and your resource coming at you from left and centre. And you have to come to some sort of way of making sense as to what to do. And people don't generally like to be told that they can't have what they're asking for. And you're obviously someone who has LED teams, now you coach and advise teams, you have your own team. How do the best product managers, or perhaps speaking more broadly the best managers or leaders, how do they handle those demands? How do they make sense of them and how do they, probably most importantly, how do they ensure that the person who's requesting the thing that they can't give them, how do they ensure that they leave without their noses being out of joint?
- Vidya Dinamani:
- Yeah, that's such a great question. You're right. It's absolutely the most common because whether it comes from a really, I am absolutely also trying to make this right thing happen for my customer all the way to they're angry, they're frustrated, they are not being able to do what they need to do because this particular work that you are responsible for, you are getting in the way of that. I mean it's coming most of the time. Our product teams have every flavour of all of that. And how you prioritise and how you communicate that is critical. And a lot of the time we see it's saying no is the most often used word. I really want to turn that into. It's how do you partner to say yes to the right things. And so one of the things that we talk about is how to prioritise effectively and the conversation around being aligned.
- And again, this is going to sound so obvious, but I think it's the way that you do this, which is aligning on let's make sure strategically we're aligned to the business outcomes. There's so many times we've come into product teams and they're trying to create a product strategy and there isn't a clear business strategy. And so it's really hard to say anything to a product strategy and a set of product objectives when you don't have a good business strategy and a good business objective. And a lot of time that's just missing a sort of flavour of the month. So you are not set up for success. So in that case, you have to then take the step of putting together what you believe is the best or the most, put a stake in the ground for what you believe the business strategy to be and then align it.
- So you're constantly connecting dots when you are being asked to do. The first step then is the business objectives and business strategy, then it's customer strategy and customer objectives. What are we trying to do? We have a prioritisation matrix. We have sort of five to seven areas. We work with our teams to establish what those could be. We work with our leadership teams to weight them based on what's most important. They revisit all the time. It might be retention, it might be growth, it might be revenue, whatever that looks like for this quarter. Even going back to what we've all said is the most important then allows us to speak the same language, otherwise we're arguing, right? It's opinions, it's being able to say, and it's just then defending your choices or constantly overturning your choices because a louder voice or a more senior voice or a customer who you absolutely have to save is taking precedence over everything else.
- So going back to trying to put some of these stakes in the ground, trying to get alignment on what we think are the parameters first, that's where we start. Because anytime you start with the actual data or you start with the offerings or the features or the products, you are in a losing game. You will never ever win that game. You have to pull it back to what the structure is, what those parameters are, get alignment there and then it's like the answer spits out. It's not you sort of saying, which am I going to trade off? Even a trade off question is really difficult. So we always go back to, hey, let's talk about what's important. Can we agree on the four to five things? Let's weight them and let's just now spin these through what we've just said is important. And I know that sounds pretty straightforward, but it is worked for us every single time.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It sounds like doing that would allow you to take some of the emotion out of the conversation. It's almost like if you say, oh, we've got a policy that deals with this, it kind of depersonalises it. In this case you're pointing it. I dunno something, I'm assuming something like OKRs that have been agreed or even business strategy if you don't have anything as tightly and you can kind of sit down with that in the middle and look at it together. Yeah,
- Vidya Dinamani:
- That's exactly right. And if you don't agree on what those OKRs or the strategy of the objectives are, then that's a different conversation. What are we trying to achieve? Conversation. That's a much easier conversation because it's you as business together trying to say, what are we trying to do? What's our customer trying to do? Not what's this feature? What should we do A or B? Because we could argue till the cows come home, it's not going to change anything.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- In that case where there is a disconnect between, I dunno say engineering and product at that high level when you've got conflicting and competing OKRs and you've got someone that's in the middle to senior product leadership role, but isn't the executive, is this symptomatic of a failure of executive leadership when they're in that situation and they have to kind of fight their way through the fog? I
- Vidya Dinamani:
- Think it's hard a lot of time. I think our leaders get into these positions where I find they're not given clarity and line of sight to their own OKRs that they're laddering up to. And so a lot of the time they're put into these really impossible situations and they are trying to direct their teams against metrics that they're being held accountable for. They're trying to then work with a team that's got their own metrics and we haven't connected the dots at the next layer up. And so without that, you absolutely are trying to get two leaders who are trying to do what they believe is the right thing to do. And so how do you get to that next layer up? You've got to stop thinking about your objectives and you've got to make up, if you don't have them, you've got to try and make up those objectives together and then get alignment.
- And it does take putting aside your team and your objectives and putting that together. And I find that sometimes the product leader is in a better position to do that because they tend to be a little closer to the business and the customer versus our engineering leader who is much more focused, they have different expectations of them and not always have, they have as much exposure to the business and the customer information that the product leader has. So I feel like, okay, product leader, you've got more information, you've got more data, step up and do the extra work,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Have the hard conversations. And you actually, you gave a really interesting and insightful talk a few years ago to a group of senior IT executives and it was called, I dunno if this rings a bell for you, making the product and engineering marriage thrive. Does it ring any bells?
- Vidya Dinamani:
- It does. It was through seven CTOs with a really good friend of mine who leads that organisation.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And you talked about a number of what I'm framing as maxims in there for making that relationship work. And I feel like for the people that are listening to this, I feel like this has a wider applicability. And so I'm to put on the thread that we've been going down, that's a mixed metaphor, but I'm keen to continue going down this road that we've been travelling and ask you about this because one of them makes a lot of sense, probably doesn't need a lot of explanation, which is to argue behind closed doors. So when you're going to have those hard conversations about what actually matters between our two functions, do it behind a closed door so your team doesn't see it. That one's really straightforward. But the next one, which is perhaps where I was a little less clear on how to bring it about, which was this maxim that you had of no fences. So what does no fences mean to you? And just how do people enact that? How do they bring that to bear?
- Vidya Dinamani:
- I love that. I love the fact that you actually watched that as well. One of my favourite CTOs, he and I were working together and I remember I had an idea about the architecture. Do I have any say in how he puts this architecture together? No, I don't. Right? It's his territory. This is his domain. But you know what? He gave me the pen and he let me draw what I thought would be an interesting way of putting these two or three different solutions together, pulling in a security like a new security company, API that I'd heard about and I wanted to show him how I thought this would work. And that's what I mean by no offences because a lot of the time we draw these lines that's saying, this is my area and this is your area. And so we keep ourselves out and it would've been really easy for him to say, no, I don't want to hear it.
- I got it mean. He could have done it very nicely. He didn't have to be butt out. He could have just been like, I understand, I've got it. I'm hearing you. You are responsible. And so much of the time, even when we're coaching, we talk about we're responsible for the what and our development teams are responsible the how. And that's fine at a very high level, but when it comes down to it, we all have points of view. We're all listening and reading and hearing. And so letting me do that was allowing me to break through that fence in the same way. This was months later, he had a point of view on a marketing campaign, which I thought was really funny, had a completely different perspective on how we could do this. And it's something that honestly I and none of my team would ever have thought about. And again, I want to hear from him. I want that completely different perspective. So if you let down your guard and you don't get territorial and you let people in, you just drop those fences. I think you learn a lot and you build that trust and am I expected now being part of every architecture conversation? Absolutely not. But that sense of connection and making that partnership thrive, that's how it happens when you allow people to have those kinds of conversations together.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You mentioned expectation there. And I suspect that for no offences to work, there's an expectation that everyone needs to hold that we have no fences. So therefore anyone can contribute some thinking even if it's outside of their particular specialist domain. But there's also a flip side, and I'm keen to hear if this is the case in reality or has been for you. There's also another expectation, which is if you offer a perspective that's outside of your area, you have no expectation that that will be enacted. So it's not a contract, it's not an agreement to act, it's a space to share, but there's no expectation. Yeah,
- Vidya Dinamani:
- That's exactly right. There's no expectation that you are now suddenly an expert. You happen to read an article. And I especially think that's true these days with large scale data models and AI that we're all now sort of like, well, I just played with this latest chat bot, this chat gt, and so now I have a point of view. No, but I think being able to sort listen and to your point, doesn't make you an expert, doesn't even give you a seat at the table. What it does is it builds that connection and that relationship and it expands your thinking as you as a subject matter expert in your field. You start to see where other points of view are coming from. And often that different lens is exactly what you need to help shift your thinking.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- The maxims that you came up with in that talk, one of them no offences, another one was tied into the story you told there, which was share the pen. Those are quite pithy, right? They're quite easy to recall As a result, how explicit when you've been working with other senior leaders at your level of the organisation or perhaps when you're engaging with clients, how explicit are you with these sorts of ways of working? Is this something that you are like, Hey, here's how we really like to work. This is kind of essential to success, or is it a little softer than that? And it kind of emerges naturally?
- Vidya Dinamani:
- When we pull teams together, we tend to work with groups. So between 15 and 20, like 16 ish is sort of our sweet spot. We always prefer it to be cross-functional. So we come in saying, who else are you bringing in? So if you've got nine product managers who, we always have design leaders in there, we always want to a dev leader in there. Sometimes we have customer success, we've had marketing, we've had sales, but we deliberately choose a cross-functional team so that all those maxims that you just talked about are happening. Because again, we are teaching product management, we are teaching customer centricity, but cross-functional peers are there watching and learning and understanding that this is the new way that the product team is working. And so now they know to ask the right questions. They know that this is what will be asked of them. And so for us, ideally it starts with a makeup of the coaching session to begin with. So almost every coaching session we have is so it's built in right to the way that we work.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And thinking back to when you were a corporate leader within the larger organisation, how explicit were you with your peers about, Hey, we've got a job to do together. It was this stuff that you left unsaid or were you really candid with people about how you could work to achieve the company's objectives more effectively?
- Vidya Dinamani:
- Yeah, very candid. I remember my first job out of Intuit, I came into a company that they wanted me to establish really a core product function and really wanted me to bring a lot of the product practises. And it was a wonderful CEO had a wonderful general manager. And I remember saying one of the things that I want is a product advisory group. That's the first mechanism that I'm going to put together. And that is a group of my peers was all VPs with the general manager. And we as a product advisory group would meet and I would lead it, but they would see everything that we were doing. So there were no surprises. It wasn't like the quarterly strategy meetings where they would understand what was happening. I needed their help. I needed the sales person to get me. None of my product team that I inherited had ever been to a customer, not one never.
- But I needed that to happen. I needed my product manager to sit with the customer success. They would plug in and listen to customer calls. There were compliance people that I needed to be embedded. And so all of this happened because right from the beginning I was like, I can't do this alone. And so that group, which hadn't existed before was the first time. And then they all saw what the product strategy was going to be before it was ever presented outside to customers, presented to the CEO. And so it just created the sense of trust. So no, I had to be really explicit about
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It. Speaking of No Offences a little earlier, there's something that you've previously said about the role of product managers, and I've got what might be quite a long quote here of yours. So bear with me as I go through this. So you previously said, if you think about what a product leader is responsible for, what we care about is bringing customer insight into the organisation. We are, and we take this really seriously. We have a voice of customer. So what does that mean? It means that we go and talk to customers, we listen to them, we watch them, we follow them home, and then we bring back that learning and that insight into our organisation. I promise this is nearly over. And what we want is for people to communicate that effectively so everyone gets it. So what you were talking about there, the situation of turning up and no one in your product org had access to customers can clearly see why you would do what you did in order to enable that to happen. But just thinking and reflecting on the way in which you describe the role there of the product leader and what they're responsible for, that sounded to me very much like how some designers and most likely UX researchers would see as their role. And I was curious to ask you about whether or not there's any conflict or tension that exists between the identity of how product as a vocation is evolving and how other vocations that are tangential, like design and UX R, for example, have evolved.
- Vidya Dinamani:
- Wow. So it's interesting because I actually had a really long conversation with someone I think is quite extraordinary in the research field, and he has this whole concept of UX. He leads UX and thinking like a detective, like interrogating the data, finding the insight. It's just fascinating.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Is this Dr. Ari? It?
- Vidya Dinamani:
- It's Dr. Ari. And we had this really interesting conversation and then ended up talking about the, so-called tension, because I've heard this before and I've had people ask me about this before. So I have worked in organisations where there, there's been UX functions and I think UX functions where they go after really big important questions, which are often longitudinal, often take time, often take significant resources. There's big questions. I mean, it's a discipline. You've got to learn how to do that. You've got to skill set associated with knowing how to do this. There is a place for that from a product perspective, being close to your customer. And we call it from product rebels. We call it scrappy research. And it really is it to distinguish it from probably true UX research because scrappy research means you've got something, you've got to identify a hypothesis, something that is stopping you to move forward with confidence in a product decision.
- So how do you learn quickly? How do you get in front of that customer? How do you make that decision? How do you learn and how do you go forward? You don't want to bring in someone who's deeply trained to be able to, they don't, don't need that skillset. It's kind of like, I mean, gosh, mean this is probably a terrible analogy. I've never used it before, so it fails. Brendan, please don't ever quote me on this again, but it's like you'd never get a mechanic to fill your car with gas because you should do that. You know how to do that. Just go do it and move on that your car is empty, go and do it. Whereas if something is broken and you've got to go have someone who actually understands how to do this. So it's kind of like product managers should understand how a car works.
- I'm going to stop this analogy here. I know nothing about how cars work. It's going to fail, but you need to know enough about research to be able to, to understand what am I trying to do? What am I trying to learn? And you should be able to then go forward and be able to learn that if you are trying to create a new product discovery, if you need to do a specific quant study and you need to be able to do or you need eye tracking sort of studies, again, there are trained experts who know how to do that small fast research where you stay close to your customer should be in the realm of product managers. So I think they coexist. I think there's a place and time for both of them. A lot of the time in smaller product teams and smaller organisations, especially in startups, you don't have those wonderful resources. You've got to do things yourself and then you engage usually agencies to do some big work. So any product manager should be well-versed in a plethora of fast learning techniques. They should not pretend that they are a researcher. Would that sort of answer the question?
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yes. And let's go further. So thinking about that, you used that analogy of the filling up of the gas tank or the fixing of the car and No, don't worry, don't worry. I've got you. I've got the various levels of, I suppose there's proficiency or expertise, whatever it is that you want to call it, that is required to solve particular types of problems and you don't need a sledgehammer for a nail type of thing. Right. That's what's going on for me. There is when it comes to research though, and if we were to get specific, just how well versed is the minimum that you would expect a product manager to be in? Are there specific techniques that scrappy research is made up of? There are certain ways of reflection, for example, that you encourage product managers to go through. How do you know as a product manager if you are tasked with doing research that you have what it takes to bring to bear as much rigour that is required to have a useful outcome to make a decision on.
- Vidya Dinamani:
- Good. Well, I think the most common technique, the two techniques I think every product manager should be able to really have under their belt is being able to conduct a great interview and to be able to do observational research. And so for an interview and for both of those, you need to be able to identify who it is that you want to learn from. So there's an element of understanding your persona, being able to screen so that you're very clear that you're not just learning from anybody. It's got to be learning from exactly the right person that allows you to get the information that you need. So there's an element of being able to put a screener together and being able to identify exactly who it is. Then creating a really clear interview that has a set of open-ended questions that start with a hypothesis that allow you to get a result that you can interpret and you conduct the interview in a way consistently that allows you to form a pattern and create an insight.
- So to me, the steps are start with a hypothesis of what you believe to be true. Create a specific interview that allows you to learn from that hypothesis and then look at the data and form an insight that creates an action that you can take that is the core of what a product manager should be able to do, and you should be able to do that through either an interview or through observation. Both start with the hypothesis, both end with insight and action. That is the basic. There's lots of other smaller techniques, lots of different studies and so forth that you can add on, but that's the core.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- How bright or bleak from the perspective of a product leadership coaching leader of your own company, that's what you do. How bleak or bright do you feel the future is for UX research in its current state or its current way of what you imagine it believes itself to be?
- Vidya Dinamani:
- I think that it's mixed, partly because I think there is some really interesting pieces of research. There's some really good people out there doing research, but I don't know, and this is something that, gosh, this has been right back to corporate days. The focus was you've got to learn the business and you've got to understand what the business is trying to learn. And I think a lot of the time when I had issues with UX and research teams, the clarity and I talked about a clear hypothesis. The hypothesis is business hypothesis. Often when you're doing big research projects, the insight leads you to action. And I felt like instead of it being to me it's a third, a third, a third, there's really strong clarity on what you're trying to do. There's the actual meat of the research itself and then there's discipline around what does this mean and what should we do?
- The recommendation is action to be taken out of it. And it felt like it was sort of more like 10 80 10 in terms of where the research teams were spending their time and that was just off. And that's where the credibility fell off. And that's why research teams I think weren't as used or weren't seen as useful. That is something that can change with the right guidance and with the right focus for whatever reason. I felt like that was always a miss Brendan, and that's why I say it's mixed when you get it right and when it's an integral part of the business and what you learn, I can't see how you could do without it because then you've got a core group of people who are moving the company forward. Unfortunately, a lot of teams don't work that way.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I'm really pleased that you brought some of that candour that you spoke about earlier there so that people could hear that perspective. And I think this is my assumption, most listening to that will know in their bones for most of what you said to be true about the way in which UX research or UX is seen, and therefore the self-imposed limitations. Perhaps not always, but sometimes that is imposed on its ability to exert the type of impact that it would like to have on the products and the experiences that our customers and our users are using. So I really appreciate you being so clear and candid there. I want to come back to just quickly before we wrap things up, I want to come back to a statement that's on the Product Rebels website, which is, and I'll find it. Here it is. We coach, we don't train because it doesn't work. Now that's quite definitive, right? That's like a line in the sand. It's an underlying sentence. It's emphasised. What is it about traditional training that doesn't work for product management?
- Vidya Dinamani:
- Yeah, and I think we say that because I have sent so many people to training. When you go to training, you kind of go off usually away from your desk and your work. You go learn some really beautiful case studies. You get inspired, you get excited, you come back after usually a nice weekend somewhere good. You come back to your desk and you get all enthusiastic about making this impact in your business. You just went on this training and you can't, and then you get slammed into a wall and then you get slammed into another wall and it's like death by a thousand cuts. And then you just get depressed and it's like it's gone and you are in a worse state than when you have the training. So we hate training for that reason. Coaching is we meet you where you are, you're not going anywhere.
- This is in your job with your work and your product and all the painful people that you have to work with and that customer that is in your ear day after day. And it's like what do you do? How do you deal with what you have right now and the reality that you have? Not some pretend one, not some fantasy one, but today and how do you then practise? Because the other thing about coaching is kind of like any game. You've kind of got to do the fundamentals over and over and over and you've got to practise them and you can't do those amazing moves unless you get the fundamentals. So if we coach you on the fundamentals and you get good at them and you practise and you get hurt, you come back, you talk about it and you're like, okay, I'm going to try this differently.
- You go back out there, we keep sending you back out there and you keep trying. And then for our experience, after about 10 weeks, things change that transformation because now you've got the skills, you've tried it, you've got coached, you've got the feedback. Are you all the way to bright? No, but you've got the fundamental skills. And so that's why I think coaching is so different because people, it's like you talked about the candour right now you kind of need someone to just tell you, no, that's just wrong. Or let's talk through what you just did and let's maybe think about this a different way. And someone that is just all there for you wants you to succeed. And it's not about me just sending you content, it's about really wanting you to be successful. So for us, that's why it's underlined. That's why we think about it. So fundamentally different because we've been there, we've done it and we've sent people there and we want this to work.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- One of the aspects of product management and product teams more broadly that can lead to people within those teams feeling a bit battered and bruised, and I'm sure you have a bit of feedback on this comeback from the people that you're coaching to is the backlog and just the relentlessness of the backlog. And I suppose in a poorly managed organisation, the ineffective prioritisation that goes on with regards to the backlog. Now, I was speaking with a CEO of a, I'd say they're a small size US market SaaS company that makes software for our industry last year, and they've got a couple of hundred people, so it's not tiny, but he said to me that what they realised is that their backlog was years long, I dunno how many years, but it was years long. And the effort that would be required to actually deliver what was involved on it was just never going to happen. And so what they decided to do was just to delete it. I love it. And start again. Yeah. So I was wondering, have you heard of similar situations? Do you have any sort of therapy that you can offer people listening if they're being crushed by their backlog?
- Vidya Dinamani:
- That's a wonderful drastic step. I think that's very brave and not many people would do that. I would say what you could do is realistically, if your throughput is, say it is 10 to 20 in terms of your backlog and you've got a backlog of a thousand, just delete 900. You don't delete all of it, but just delete 900 things will find their way back if they need to be because they will, because people will want them. It's painful trying to go through this. I have been in teams where we have gone through everything so people have felt heard. I've pulled a team together and we just sit there and it's like for a week you just go through this. But with a goal to say this is the number, it's not going to be any more than a hundred because a hundred represents a year's worth of work and we are never going to have more than a hundred things on here or whatever your number is.
- But you could to meet your team and your example halfway, just get rid of everything that is anything more than two thirds of it and just remove it. But then what you need to do is look up front, we talked about prioritisation. The criteria beforehand is really, really focus on what gets to go in control, the input. So many organisations, let anyone put anything into the backlog. It literally is sort of like an open field that anyone can write into and it's like, no, you have to control that. It's precious. It's like your roadmap. It is precious.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- There's these set of questions, and I can only recall one of them that sometimes I've asked myself in separate circumstances, whether it's like a personal circumstance that I'm not happy with or a business circumstance. And one of these questions is, how have I been complicit in contributing to the circumstances that I'm currently experiencing? And I kind of feel like those kind of reflective questions if you find yourself in a drowning situation with a backlog are probably key questions also to be asking yourself as a leader.
- Vidya Dinamani:
- That's a great question. It's like, what am I doing to make the situation? Absolutely.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It didn't just happen. It
- Vidya Dinamani:
- Didn't just happen. And it's not just continuing to happen either. Yeah.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Vidya, just be mindful of time as we bring the show down to a close. I have one final question for you, and that is if people have listened to this episode, they've listened to your introduction, the types of things that you've been saying, there will be those that are inspired by your story, by the things that you've managed to achieve, the things that you're still doing, and they may be wondering whether they have what it takes to do something similar. I'm curious for you to share with me and everyone listening, how have you engaged with those types of thoughts, perhaps some self-doubt? What things have you told yourself when you've not been sure that you'd be successful, that have served you particularly well in your career? I
- Vidya Dinamani:
- Think I've always relied on working with people who I can learn from. And so I'll just give you the one example, but this has been true for everything is whether it was going to an MBA and learning. I fundamentally love learning. I want to be always learning. And when I went into what I see my future in is continuing to be an advisor, continuing to focus on product market fit. And when I went into trying to understand early stage companies is being surrounded by everyone who knew every single person in that room knew more than I did. And it's often a scary position to be in because you feel like you do know nothing, and so it's really hard to beat yourself up. You literally don't know anything. So if you can put yourself in those situations where you can go and just surround yourself by everyone who knows the thing that you want to be able to learn and put yourself that place of vulnerability and just soak it up and learn. That's always what's worked for me. And I think I just don't ever pretend I know anything because it's really easy when you get into that situation where it's something new. And to be surrounded by experts, people love helping. People love telling you what they know. So just go, listen,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- That's an excellent place for us to end today's conversation. Vidya, what a wonderful conversation to have had with you. Thank you for so generously sharing your stories and insights with me today.
- Vidya Dinamani:
- This was just such a fantastic conversation everywhere we went, the research you did, Brendan, I am just blown away. Thank you for taking me to places and memories that I haven't visited for a long time. I really appreciate
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It. It's my pleasure. My pleasure. Vidya, if people want to follow you want to find out more about Product Rebels and what you offer, what's the best way for them to do that?
- Vidya Dinamani:
- LinkedIn is probably the best way. We have a group on LinkedIn and you can certainly connect and I would love to, everything I do tends to show up on LinkedIn in some way.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Great. Thanks Vidya. And to everyone that's tuned in, it's been great having you here with us as well. Everything that we've covered will be in the show notes and in particular on YouTube. Those are chaptered, so you can hop around to the parts of the conversation that you found most interesting.
- If you enjoyed the show and you want to hear more great conversations like this with world-class leaders in UX research, product management and design, don't forget to subscribe to the podcast, so it turns up every two weeks. Leave a review if you've really enjoyed what you've heard and share that with other people that may be considering listening and also pass the podcast along, perhaps just one other person who you feel would get value from these conversations at depth.
- If you want to reach out to me, you can find me on LinkedIn, just search for Brendan Jarvis. Or you can find a link to my profile at the bottom of the show notes, or head on over to my website, which is thespaceinbetween.co.nz. That's thespaceinbetween.co.nz. And until next time, keep being brave.