welcome to the product Experience podcast on the Pod this week we chat to Brian Walsh SVP of product at pendo about why and how your company values play an important part in creating the right environment for successful product teams welcome to the product Experience Podcast Brian it's so great to meet you thank you I'm really excited to be here I absolutely love Amsterdam and to do it and this clock room is really cool I know and probably lots of people are just listening to this and not watching it so then you're going to have to watch it on YouTube guys you got to take it all you have to see the clocks behind a little spooky a little Eerie I'm expecting a mouse to run out of one of these yeah I'm just very grateful that they're not all oning behind behind us right at the hour it'll let us know when we're done yeah so before we get stuck into our topic it'd be great if you could give us a quick intro to who you are what you're doing in product and how you got into this crazy world wow okay so uh brine wash on SVP product at pendo so I lead analytics inapp guidance uh NPS and then the underlying technology platform that supports all five of our product lines I've been with pendo now for about two and a half years prior to this I was CEO of a consulting company but a consulting company that focused 100% on product so we built product for customers on an outsourc basis and partnered with those companies and brought them to Market and learned with them prior to that I was founder and CEO of company in Silicon Valley that was an audio video content management system prior to that that I ran product and Engineering for a startup that was fully funded by diio that was about Inventory management for bars restaurants and nightclubs so that's a a very long way to say I'm fairly old the wrinkles really start showing it in fact my favorite thing is if you always look at my my image there on on any of the the presentations we do we're at conferences that's a that's a head shot that I had taken in my 30s oh and so now I look at I go I used to always have a perfect skin yeah no longer well you look exactly the same a thanks and that must have been really interesting kind of being the CEO and founder of two companies and then going back into you know being an employee and answering to someone else it was it was a very interesting transition of going through there and in fact I was really honest about that in the entire interview process of like hey I don't know what it's like anymore I'd been 18 years yeah so I didn't know what it was like to actually have a direct manager um and that's actually been something I've worked with trer price our chief product officer a lot of like hey what am I supposed to respond to as uh because I'm not used to having that relationship it was also free I think my my experience as CEO is could be incredibly lonely that by the time decisions finally get to your desk there's an entire room of smart people who couldn't make that decision and at times it feels as of the biggest decisions the hardest decisions make it to you and that could feel isolating and lonely and you would have passionate Executives on both sides of a of an issue both of who are are correct and you've got to navigate that and so there was a side of when I first joined that was freeing like I didn't feel like that final responsibility was fine now that's not to say I didn't have accountability and responsibility for where we're going as a business but more of I recognize that there are decisions that are for Trisha there are decisions that are for Todd and that I was not the decision maker I could influence and I could inform and be consulted so that portion was good I think the other interesting part of it is I went through just walking into a room where I realized that I'm surrounded by people who are much smarter than me and and so I definitely suffered impostor syndrome as I first joined because you had brilliant voices across each of the domains coming together to work in a spot where they've been working for eight years and that was intimidating and that was a place where I had to find my own voice and Center myself my own confidence feel confident to fail again um and it had always been you know the Silicon Valley Mantra of fail fast and when I got in I was like but I can't feel these people are relying on me yeah um and so that that overcoming that and I'll credit actually Eric Tron one of our co-founders really shot me down one day and said look I just I want to know what you're thinking like I actually want to know your thought process getting that Insight is so valuable for me and it really helps me do my job and I was a a game changer that moment sitting at at our cafeteria we having a coffee together and it helped break down that impostor syndrome and it gave me a voice and allowed me to take more bold actions which is really one of our core values is be bold and I wasn't bringing my full self or being fully bold until I started unlocking that yeah it's so interesting to hear you talk so openly about you know feeling imposter syndrome when you've been doing product for such a long time and you've even had your own business Consulting in this I think it's something we all feel you know pretty much constantly but it's nice to know you're feeling you know better and and being you know you've been unlocked and you've been able to be bolder yeah I mean I I think everyone feels it I know I talked to other leaders other people at pendo other people in the industry who will walk into that environment where they're humbled yeah and you stand back and go wow why am I even in this room the reality is you're in that room for a reason and there's nothing somebody going to discover about you there's no failure you're bringing to the market and you do have a unique point of view and that humbling is a chance to grow faster and learn more and be open to change be open to being challenged we're not always supposed to be right in fact the majority of the time in our life we're not praying yeah and so I think that that is a healthy process to constantly be reminded and if we're not in situations where we're not actually be feeling that way I think that there's portion of us not pushing ourselves hard enough of not actually extending ourselves into this new environment where it's going to challenge us and then like when we look at everything going on right now with AI we're walking in with some people who are just crushing it and the majority of the world is still trying to learn the basics and so you're you're in this constant state of like who am I speaking with I was with one group a couple weeks back and we were talking and I realized halfway through the the talk I was probably missing the mark and so I finally asked how many people have done anything with AI and no hand went up and I was like wow just created massive impostor syndrome for this room because of the way I was approaching and so I think it's really healthy to always keep that in check we all have these human feelings yeah we are all human to begin with and if we don't address that first and foremost it's hard to have empathy for others it's hard to have compassion it's hard to build great products yeah so one of the things you mentioned there was that one of the values at pendo is be bold and I know that you mentioned as well before that you've had the fortitude of working in lots of companies where they really strong sort of mission Le culture and values Le culture yeah what does that kind of like look like for you like what does a really strong Mission and values L culture look like well I think that at its base to to deliver outsides results we have to create an environment where humans can Thrive because we are technology companies or we are services companies or we are I mean they're companies but every company is just a group of humans working together and the mission is are we going the same direction are we all working towards that same goal but I think that that is such that's just the thinnest step that you can take and I like to visualize I'm a very visual person and I visualize that we're all standing out in a field together and the values are these tent poles that go around the circle of humans and how we choose to live is inside of those values and that's the tent that goes over us and that's space that we fill between all those values is actually our culture and that when we're very intentional about that and when we go back and check that that gets back to again like defining who we are enabling an environment where we can Thrive and so I know through my process multiple times now of having set values for an organization or change them over time as your organization changes and as I came to pendo spent a lot of time through the interview process actually asking questions about the culture and the values because so important for me and I think it's beyond the Tam and the vision and the people it really was the culture and the values that I took a bet on and you know there's seven different values they've actually changed over time and there things like be bold mancal focus on the customer uh win as a team win together and I just find that they're they're the cipher for the decisions we make and part of our job as leaders is to build an organization that can make decisions when you're not in the room and our values are one of the ways that we can do that and do you find that the same values come up again and again because I've also been through a few exercises where we've like tried to distill the values of a company but I'm curious in your experience you said you've been through that process as well so how do you really uncover like what really matters to the the business that you're working in so I think part of it is is your executive team and your founding team there's a magic sauce of that group coming together and what has powered their decision and their achievements in the past in my previous company I had a COO who brought a value of assume Noble intent and assume Noble intent for me really changed how I I embraced one-on-one conversations like as we went into conflict whether it was with a customer whether it was with an employee whether with a competitor if I were able to ground myself in assuming Noble intent it changed my demeanor and it changed my conversation and I found that it actually disarmed a lot of tension that doesn't work in all organizations in some organizations actually that tension is what they're looking for and that's how they operate so I do believe that values are very personal for an organization you know Salesforce I think has four or five um trust being one of them customer success being another I don't think that works for every while I fully agree with trust being critical I don't think that that would work for every organization to say that's their core value yeah so I do find that it's personal to the organization and that comes again about their humans and so who is that executive team what are the history of how they've worked together what is their secret sauce for achieving success and you codify that into values and how do you encourage your product teams to really embrace the values that you have so I do not just I I think the entire organization recognizes and acknowledges when we actually are living by our values and when we do it so we have a system called pank pendo pank and we pink people and that panking is recognizing when someone's really showing off about you but not will'll focus on a customer or respecting our time away from work you know somebody stepped up to cover for me while I was on vacation and that not only goes on on a ongoing basis where we pink each other within slack but then on a quarterly basis hey who got the most and we recognize that we celebrate that um we also do it through our our promotion process like it's very easy to see your culture and your values and how your decisions to promote your decisions to give pay raises your decisions to let people go and so how does that show up for us and so it is clear criteria of how does this employee who's up for promotion live our values and where have they shown that we also talk it in big product decisions be bold I'll never forget one of the first um product invest Ms I was part of what's now our data sync product and we had gone through and we proved out here's the market and the Target and price points and it was great we lined everyone up and we were in the meeting and at the very end a co-founder and CTO said I know that everybody's a yes but I just have to check in is this bold enough because it was way too easy to get to a yes and it was this awesome reminder that a pendo we always go back to the value even when we're aligned and so I think that those are the constant both as leaders is an organization you have to drive back to if those are our temp polls then how do we make sure that everyone sees them we don't just run past them and so we bring it back into con day-to-day conversation and process I think it's really interesting and one of the values in one of the old companies that I worked for which was quite a small business and I I don't think we'd even documented our values like we were quite early stage and and quite small but one of the founders would always say bias for action and that I think was like you know a value which we lived by and then also helped us make product decisions as well of like you know let's just do it let's just do it and see what happens well that's funny it is one of ours bias to act and and I do find that values as an organization can be a bit Shakespearean as well because we can go back to that tool set so often that at times we do it even in unhealthy way so bisack is a perfect example for me of what just everyone's taking action and it's not coordinated in a line right and you turn around and you're like wait a a minute there's seven people working on this one problem and nobody's talking to each other that's a great problem to have yeah right I'm not saying that we shouldn't do that because B stack no it's that's a great problem but then we should be aware of that that these can be very Shakespeare and and the best quality of us can be our doubtful and so we have to keep chabs on this and is this the way that we intended it to be used and and check in on that if you're looking at changing jobs and you're assessing other companies for whether they're are fit for you Y how do you assess the values of that company and whether they really do live by them because I imagine some of it is a bit of theater um yeah I mean look we all have the the stories in the 80s and 90s with the motivational poster yeah right uh and you know living in in a cubicle and doing that we definitely don't want that I'll first say I haven't had a lot of jobs in the last 20s something years this is my third job in the last 20 something years so I'm not a great example of how to do this but I will tell you my experience that I try to express during interview process when I'm interviewing others and also what I went through on this last one which was if I imagine that value at scale what are the behaviors that I think that we would see from that so if it's being maniacally focused on company or on a customer or if it's respecting our lives outside of work then there may be carry on behaviors that I would expect to see in that organization and so my questions may be about that behavior behavior and not the value and it's essentially a test to say hey I'm just pressure testing to see if that's actually you're a your interpretation of that value and B does it actually show up for you dayto day and know it's sort of like when I'm when I'm coaching people on who are interviewing for us here that I encourage them to really triangulate between all of the opinions they've heard from everyone who's interviewing like the truth sits in the middle and I think that our job in many things that we know not just interviewing is to pull this dat it together and find that middle point and that's the truth and to ground yourself in there and so everything's going to be a new know personal match for an organization and getting the opinion of the four or five people that are interviewing you what is it like to work here how did you react to this you can triangulate what that truth is and maybe get down to are these fake values or truly core to you yeah this episode is brought to you by pendo the only all-in-one product experience platform do you find yourself bouncing around multiple tools to uncover what happening inside your product in one simple platform pendo makes it easy to both answer critical questions about how users engage with your product and take action first Pender is built around product analytics enabling you to deeply understand user Behavior so you can make strategic optimizations next pendo lets you deploy inapp guides that lead users through the actions that matter most then pendo integrates user feedback so you can capture and analyze how people feel and what people want and a new thing in nendo session replays a very cool way to experience your users actual experiences there's a good reason over 10,000 companies use it today visit pendo.io podcast to create your free pendo account today and try it yourself want to take your product l knowhow a step further check out pendo and mind the products lineup of free certification courses led by product experts and designed to help you grow and advance in your career learn more today at pendo.io SL [Music] podcast I think it's such a great thing to really dig into when you're talking to a a company so great advice well I wrot out to that we are all incredibly talented and this is a job market where we still have choice in the marketplace I mean there are definitely Pockets where it's hard to get a job and getting product can be difficult but you know when you're in that product seat and you're developing outcomes and and you're making wins happen like you have a lot of choice and so you should find a place that you're going to thrive because you're thriving is going to be just as much as your success and your and your business outcomes and what you achieve on your CD as anything else that you do in this it's not just about the skills you bring or the thought process you have it's also about the environment you're walking in so you should care about that and you mentioned earlier about Mission as well and um I think you described it as a thin layer at the at the top but I guess it at the same time quite critical to have a mission to align everyone in the same direction yeah that was a very leading statement to save then because in the end it does set it and I think you know missions the most classic missions have been the ones that really set the scope of the vision right to put a computer on every kitchen table or every desk um that is a brilliant bold statement where at that point it was mini frames and to say well what would be all of the levels of infrastr structure and we're only a software company and we're going to affect all of that and you know for pendo it's it's to improve the world's experience with software that is so Broad and brings us into so many places it brought us in from working on the Direct Customer use case you know working with how you build better products for your customers into now working in the employee workspace because what you buy as software is just as much of a software experience is what you build and I think that the mission not only gave us permission to do that but also challenged us to do that what are all of the ways we interact with software and it continues from that standpoint to push us we look at these new innovations that are coming out we say hey it's moving to conversational interfac it's moving to AI driven it's going to be voice at some point and it's driving all this and is that the space we play that's not the B2B space we have played but yes if our if our role is to improve everyone's experience with software we haven't defined software a certain way we said software and so that is a daily challenge as an organization of what are the ways that software is changing and how do we be part of that how do we power that how do we make sure it's going to be even better than it is today so I I don't really think it's a thin layer it was sort of the lead into why I think values and culture are really important but I think they all work in harmony yeah and I guess one of the other layers that works in harmony with all of that which is probably more in control of a a product team is the principles like the product principles yeah like how do you use product principles within your organization and and how did you decide what product principles you were going to have well I think principles overall are sort of this interesting concept because the again similar to values these are those guide posts for us as we go around I think one of the things that's changed for us or I see us constantly leaning into is that we're learning and those principles are a basis but never forever and so we begin to modify and so the way that you know I refer to it with our team are these are really strong opinions Loosely H and that data that we get or that learning that we have will change this and so the principles shouldn't change every single day over time but they also are not things that should last forever we've recently been really looking at this concept of bringing B to C to B2B has been what we've been talking about for the last decade and yet what I think that we've lost in this process is a focus on true outcomes we've been so focused on what that experience is and making it playful or easy or delightful that we lose that hey this is to achieve an outcome an outcome for our user an outcome for our company an outcome for their company and so that principle begins to shift over time as we learned more and so with still a very strong opinion now that we've shifted to outcomes but that doesn't mean the last one was wrong it's based off of what we've learned or where we've gotten as an industry or a product team and do you find bringing different experience like product people into the team also shifts your principles as well because I feel like people you know you get the characters of different product people bringing how they approach things into the mix or well I think that that has been the most interesting change in our industry is for the past 20 years everyone was on high growth High hiring there was free dollars out there and so we were hiring and you were constantly infusing new blood into your culture there was new people coming in new approaches new insights and in fact as Leaders we would often say hey we we need to infuse something new into our organization our next hire should be and in this world now running with efficiency and money is not for free and we need to get free cash flow we need to be in profitability that's forced us to really look at how do we Infuse some of those new ideas in there as well and so I fully agree that one of the tools to do this is through bringing in outside people and bringing in New Perspective and in fact I think a diverse team builds the best products period no question asked so what do we do in this world I think things like mind the product are one way to do that where it's about creating a community where even if that Community isn't one where they work with you every single day it's one you're sharing with each other you're learning from each other providing insights from each other and you can incorporate that into your team and so I think that there what we're discovering over time is there's many ways to provide that sort of influence and change so that we can continue to improve us an organization so for any product managers out there who find themselves in a situation where they are trying to live by the values trying to be Mission driven defining their principles and working to those and struggling with that across the rest of the organization you know maybe they don't find that everyone else knows how to do this yeah or is understanding of why it's important what kind of advice would you give that person I'm going to start with building your team building your first Circle building those groups that give you energy give you support give you affirmation help you grow because if you're truly feeling isolated and alone it's never going to change with God level and so I would reach out to those around you and build build a group that were working towards a similar goal that and I would caution not to be a session let's all get together and just about what's going on of that one leader it should be something that we become more powerful for right and it's I used to have an executive coach who used to tell me you need to find in your calendar things that give you energy right our calendar is one of the biggest tools we have and many times it just zaps us he was like find those things and this is when I was CEO you need to put in your calendar every week things that give you energy now often as we go down the organization you may not have as much control with your calendar and you're just filling meetings with Executives but then what are the other methods that you can do to find the things that give you energy that give you passion that give you mission that help you find success and then double down on that and double down and that becomes infectious and that I think helps us get through those tough moments to the next side none of what we do is easy the whole time uh being a human is not easy um but building the network to help us get through the tough times and then continue investing in the network to act as your karma bank that's that's the the golden ticket for me amazing thank you what advice did you have like working in product that really shifted your perspective on how to approach product management in a you know either in a very general sense or in a very specific sense I think it it was Michael sippy who said it when it was like get in the van go to your customers fall in love with their problems like you just have to be so in love with your customer's problem and not your own solution and that continually comes back to me it's this bias to love what we're building and to be so excited for what we're building that we lose sight of what the actual customer problem was and and I bring that back to our teams constantly of like what was our customer problem how much do you know about how has that customer problem changed over the last six months U we were just going through a roadmap review with Trisha she said go back to the original spreadsheet and tell me how much of you you're actually solving and that's that same concept right like you have to solve their pain not the nice to have not the easy win they're pain and and that is a constant reminder for me if go back to customer pain fall in love with it fall in love with the customer their problem their pain and then solve the problem brilliant I love it Brian it's been such a pleasure talking to you thank you so much for joining us today thank you this is awesome it was a lot of [Music] fun the product experience hosts are me Lily Smith host by night and chief product officer by day and me Randy silver also host by night and I spend my days working with product and leadership team teams helping their teams to do amazing work Lon Pratt is our producer and Luke Smith is our editor and our theme music is from product Community Legend Arie Ker's band pow thanks to them for letting us use their track [Music]