#49 - Innovating Legal Ops with Andrew Krug from Twitch

Hello everyone. I'm Mary o', Carroll, Chief Community Officer at Ironclad, and you're listening to Pearls on Gloves All. Today I'm joined by Andrew Krug, head of legal operations at Twitch, the video live streaming service that is a subsidiary of Amazon and focuses on video game live streaming, including broadcasts of esports competitions in addition to offering music broadcasts, creative content and in real life, streams. It is great to have Andrew on the podcast today because he has a true entrepreneurial spirit at heart. Having started multiple independent ventures throughout his career, he has also held strategic roles across diverse mature industries spanning technology, healthcare, defense and gaming. At Twitch, he uses his eclectic experience to drive innovation and streamline legal operations by bridging the legal domain with the business and product worlds. As someone who has held so many unique roles, including project management, program management and product management, Andrew and I had a great initial conversation about how program management skills are so needed in the world of legal operations, but likely the skill set that is also the most lacking or least developed in our field. We dive into that a bit today on the podcast and talk through what it means to what it can do for your organization and why it is so critical if you want to become a truly impactful and strategic differentiator to your leadership team. We wrap up with a great conversation about leadership and people management, during which Andrew shares great nuggets of wisdom about how to lead and motivate your team by giving them a sense of purpose. Hey Andrew. Hello. Welcome. Yeah, welcome to the show. You and I, we had the very good fortune of meeting and connecting one separate time from this and I have to say, you were one of those people who I met with and I immediately said you've got to be on the podcast. So excited to have you here. I found you to be someone with a really unique background and I think that background lends itself to a successful role in legal operations. And I also thought that you had really strong perspective on what it takes to make an impact. Plus plus, unusually, you had a stint as a community manager, which I think makes you and I the only two people possibly on this planet who have had roles both in legal ops and community management. So, really excited to be chatting with you today. Let's just start with some background on like, who you are and what you do.

Yeah, you're right. I've had a very eclectic professional career. Somehow, weirdly, all merging to legal operations is perfect.

That's how it works.

Yeah, I started in the early days the Internet with AOL was considered the Internet and taught myself how to do web programming front end and back end and parlayed that into like a IT career. I was a director of IT for a nonprofit healthcare association, did that for a few years and then decided I wanted to lean more into program management and had an opportunity to go work for the army of all as a defense contractor doing research and development for RDECOM down in Fort Belvoir, Virginia. And that was, that was a blast. I mean, talk about. At one point I had my own sort of sole proprietorship. So learning contract law from a fire hose is the best way to explain that. And the RFP RFI process and being parts of red teams, green teams, blue teams, purple teams, all that sort of stuff, that was a blast. Again, we got to research new stuff. A lot of what we did was simulation based, so using kind of video game technology, but also seeing how that played out in the real world with developing real things and at some point I've been a video gamer my entire life and, and I was really into this video game and this company spun out from Google and they had a position for community manager. And so I talked to my wife and I was like, look, I've got a great career here, but I really am a gamer at heart. Should I pivot my entire career and everything that I've built up to this point to chase this? And she said, what's the worst that happens? You don't get it and you've got a great career. So I applied and I did get it and it was a startup. I was employee number 36. As a startup, you wear all sorts of hats, you do all sorts of things. So leveraging my data background, yes, community management was my focus, but creating data models to figure out how many people are going to attend our events, doing game mastering, placing the actual things in the game for people to enjoy, working with our product managers to determine what new in game items we should sell or create and what those prices should be and creating policies and I mean as a startup you just wear many hats. That was a blast. Did that for four years, but then had the itch to get back into product management and create things myself. Found a role right down the road for me. I'm in Washington D.C. with Bethesda at Bethesda Softworks, their publishing company. Took that role as a product manager, senior product manager of their monetization vertical. And this opportunity to go into legal operations just fell in my lap. I had a friend that worked at Twitch and they said they're creating this new role. I know you like challenges. And this is new. Would you be interested in it? It seems like a. All the skills you've learned throughout your entire career would apply to this. And you could bridge the legal world with the business and product management world. And so again, I went back to my wife and I was like, I really like where I'm at. What should I do? And again, her sage advice was apply and what's the worst that happens? So I should get that tattooed or written up somewhere. So I did and it worked out and now I'm at Twitch as the head of legal operations.

So amazing. And just as a side note, I love a supportive spouse. That. That is been great. Awesome. Just to let you do what you need to do is great. So you've done. There's a bunch of different directions we can take this, but you've done three of the P Management. So product management, program management, project management, which are really important hires in a legal operations function. They are distinct and they come with different skills, but I think they're often conflated, confused. We interchange those terms, but you and I have had a conversation about how we think those are actually pretty different. I would love to get into that and what your views are on that, but very first, quickly tell me, what is the Twitch legal department look like? How big is it? What does the legal ops team look like? And what are you guys all responsible for?

Yeah, so I can't give specific numbers. We have our own internal policies about that, but yes, what are we responsible for? It's just standard stuff. We have our outside counsel spend our opex or legal opex, the support to the lawyers, making sure that they can do their job both in terms of tools and frameworks. We have a IP enforcement group that works under me as well for copyright and trademark and all that as well. It's knowledge management. It's. I think if you went on clock and saw there. I forget if it's 12, but it's all of those things.

It's 12 because it's a clock. No one seems.

Oh, yeah, there you go. That's why it's easy for me to remember. Thank you.

Yeah, yeah. So all those things, a standard legal Ops function.

Exactly. Yep.

Okay. And what were you the first hire? What did it look like when you got there?

No, so we had a paralegal who smartly said, hey, Mr. General Counsel, I think that we need to look into this. I like the tech stuff, but, you know, I'm not as mature as somebody as we probably need for this. But I think that you should consider creating a legal ops org. And our general counsel, who is a visionary and brilliant person, said, yes, that makes sense. They hired him to really focus on the contract management system first and create some efficiencies. There's. And then I got brought in about a year or two later and then we've just expanded and grown the org since then to fill all the roles that a true legal operations team needs.

And you expanded the scope and the size of the team. I know you don't want to get into the size, but I guess how did. What was. What did it look like when you started and what have you grown into today?

Yeah, a lot of it was focused on compliance, regulatory compliance work initially. The social media space in general, there's a lot of regulations out there. Social media, I think behind finance is maybe the second most regulated industry at the moment. It's hot topic. I just saw a tweet on X with Elon Musk going back and forth with DSA regulators. That was one of the primary focuses at first because in my experience as a product manager and program manager, legal teams and lawyers in general, they go to school to practice law and they don't go to school to be product managers, they don't go to business school. There are some overlapping things that are taught. But how do you communicate to, especially in the tech world, a tech product team, this very complex legislation that has occurred where we need to do something. And so that was my main focus when I came in, was putting in place a framework, we call it initiative framework. It's scaled agile methodology, if you're familiar with that. Where we start early in terms of communicating, there's a whole series of events that goes along with it to drive an outcome that the business teams can make a decision on what they want to do based off of their own limited resources and everything. We made legal recommendations along the way. And so instead of just saying, hey, this thing happened and you need to do something, which kind of has been again, in my experience, how a lot of legal teams operate. Knock on the door and your head lawyer is like, hey, this thing called COPPA just happened and we need to be compliant. And you're like, oh, what? And engineers drop everything in panic when the lawyers walk in the room. And so just formalizing that, more dovetailing things into the natural company's cadence, having some predictability. Again, we communicate early. There's times where things haven't even passed Congress or a commission or whatever, but just giving awareness when we think that there's. It's materially relevant and over communicating along the way so that we've got a Runway that used to be that big and now our Runway is that big to plan what we need to do. So.

Yeah. Okay. And just to rewind for a moment in time. When you first started, you did not come from legal. You had no background working in legal and you had a lot of different industries and roles and perspectives. I am always curious when people come in to this world, the reaction. What did you. What were your initial observations as an outsider coming into a legal department?

I've worked with legal departments closely, in fact, through a lot of my careers and different roles. And so it wasn't. I don't think I was. I don't think it was surprised by anything. I went in with eyes wide open and knew that there would be opportunities to improve, especially communication on product development side, but also bringing best practices around program management and tooling and reporting and bringing my data skillset so that we can leverage the data reporting tools for our budgets more accurately. And just. It's again, from my experience, these aren't things that traditionally in house teams that primarily are filled with lawyers or JDs have. And so I knew that there would just be a lot of opportunities. And really the challenge was like, where do I pick to start?

Yeah.

And that's similar to most of the places I've worked at.

Yeah, you're saying it in such a much more polite and diplomatic way than most people say, hey, I got in there and it was a hot mess. What the heck has this department been doing? I'm so glad I'm here to fix.

Well, I mean, to credit to my colleagues, it wasn't. We had some really strong deputy general counsels. We have some really strong product counsels, contract lawyers. And so it wasn't a hot mess. There was just opportunities to improve. And so going in there, the first thing I did was I did a listening tour, your standard thing. Right. And talked to both our side of the house and the other side of the house about what are the pain points and identified that and figured out what we should focus on first. So there were a lot of things, A lot of things that actually worked well. But there are also opportunities too.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Absolutely. All right, so let's dive into these. The P roles. As I mentioned earlier, you've had three of them. How would you describe the difference between program, project and product management?

Yeah, the classical definition, I think, is that project management has a defined end. There. There's a start, there's a finish. Things can be like you're backfilling your contract management system with some metadata or something like that. It's here's the requirements and here's what it looks like when it's done. Things are pretty known. There's not a lot of unknown unknowns. To me, that's project management.

Yep.

Program management. If you took the PMP course, it's supposed to be made up of multiple projects. But it, to me, it. There's a little bit more unknown, like you're either managing a series of things, corporate compliance, program management, for example, there's pci, there's socks, that sort of stuff. And some of that's defined, but maybe it's not defined as to how you are going to do it and how you need to do it internally, who you're going to reach out to. It's ongoing, it will never stop. Even if that individual report ends, there'll be another one coming next week. And so owning that area of the business basically is in my mind what program management is. Compliance program managers on legal teams. In the tech world, again, if it's external regulatory, they're going to work with the lawyers to figure out what the requirements are to pass on to the engineering teams. And then product managers, really, they own the business. They're the ones who are going to be held responsible for the decisions of what we make, what we don't make and why. They're the ones who are assessing what the value is and trying to figure out what the higher priorities are to do, to actually put something in place. A lot of legal teams don't have product managers because a lot of legal teams don't have. They don't produce much in terms of software features or widgets or whatever it happens to be. Those exist on product teams usually. And so that's one of the big gaps I see because it's just you may have compliance program managers, you may have other program managers on a legal team, but being able to speak the product world when you're asking a product team to build something is a skill that I think a lot of legal teams don't necessarily have, that I've seen so far.

Even in all the skill sets required to be successful in legal operations, program slash, product management is the one that is most missing. Is that probably the right way to say it?

Yeah, I mean, I think the goal of the legal team when you need to build something, should be to empower the product teams to make an informed decision based off of the resources and the company priorities. Right. You can't just walk in there and say, we got to do this thing and everything's a high priority. If you have all high priorities, you have no high priorities. But it goes beyond that. Let's take. We're just talking about the dsa. Take the dsa, for example. That's a really complex, large piece of legislation, along with its companion, the dma. And so where do you start? Go through, chunk it out. What are the things that are materially relevant for the company? Prioritize those high, medium, low. Use the Moscow approach, whatever it is, but prioritize those. And then within that bucket of priority, go through and do a risk assessment and set a score to it. So you can have all must dos or highs. Right. But you're gonna have various ranks within those highs. And that really provides a roadmap to any product team. You hand that off to them and they're gonna be like, wow, now I know where to focus, I know where to start, I know what the trailhead is. And how do you do that? What do you base your scores off of? How do you do the risk assessment? There's a lot of different things and different teams should have different assessments. But that's the stuff that a product manager does on a daily basis, figures out the value and the impact. Right. That I don't think a lot of legal teams have or experience.

Yeah. And as we were chatting about it, and as I think about it, it does seem to me there's been so much talk, even on this podcast in the last year to the transformation of this role, the maturity of the legal ops function, the becoming more strategic, being less of just an executor and more of big picture thinking and solving all these big problems that you just mentioned. And that's why we started with we need project managers. We need. We know in the early days we got to get from point A to point B. And we just need people to execute and do it well and make sure it gets done. And there's still an absolute need for that on the team. But where we've evolved into is a much bigger scope of role where there are sometimes areas where the problem is not even identified. Right. It's just like this needs to be solved. I don't know what the main issue is. I don't know what the goal is yet. What do we need to do here? What does it need to look like? How do we get started? Weather, priorities. All the things that you mapped out as a program manager that can eventually be then handed off to the project manager to execute on piece parts of that.

Yep. Yeah. And I think another key component, the next evolution of those things is the strategic vision role of. Okay, it's really not effective to do things whack a mole. So looking big picture to your point, like, are there common themes that we should be organizing around independent of what's happening externally? What is our position on X issue, Y issue, and how do we as a legal team think that we should. The company should address that, make recommendations, work with our business partners to come up with a plan of attack for those sort of things so that you can either get ahead of or. Or be informed of those issues that come. You'll be totally prepared. And so that, that is what I think the, the true benefit, the next evolution of these roles. You see a lot of people with strategic or strategy, operations and strategy. That's what the strategy piece is.

Yes.

Being able to withdraw yourself, think bigger picture, not just focus on individual legislation or an individual need or whatever the case might be. And understand like, okay, let's try to figure out how we can game plan for this area of that's evolving or coming.

And is that something that you do? Is that your role part of it?

Yeah. We have a team, we have a working group that we usually set up. And so we'll have a working group that's comprised of lawyers and paralegals and myself and others. And we'll figure out what the position should be, what our recommendation should be through the legal lens, and then work with our business partners to figure out what the solution might be for that. And it might be something that they don't even implement. They just put it on their backlog or they have it on their roadmap or whatever the case might be, but is being prepared. And it's using some of those engineering best methods where you can add something to your backlog, you've got it mostly scoped or you have a good idea of what the level of effort is and when it comes time to pull it out, you just pull it out and go off and run. It's this area of work is a marathon. It's not about sprinting to the finish line on anything.

Yeah. And so what you're describing, I think is the structure, the outcome, the responsibilities that most people in legal operations strive, want to have. That's that we keep talking about how to become more strategic, how to be a right hand to general counsel. These are the things that I think make the role much more impactful, much more valuable, much more strategic. Can you talk about how you Got there. Did it just happen that way? Did you have to prove yourself? Like how does it. And I ask that because it is often if a new regulation happens, let's say, and it affects your company, it's often a lawyer that is tapped with figure out what needs to be done. But in my view, in my experience, things move a lot better when you put someone from the legal operations team to program manage that with the lawyer who knows what the regulations are, what needs to be done. But the program manager can actually bring it to life across cross functionally different parts of the company, bring in the right people, like you said, prioritize figuring out what the steps that need to take place and so on and so forth.

Yeah, I mean there's no magic sauce. I mean I think it, it's experience, it, it's. That's really what it boils down to.

Well, you had that background, right?

Yeah, I mean I had a conversation with a general counsel. I drew from the experiences of being on the product side in my interactions with our lawyer team, being at the startup and our interactions with the legal team to understand what we have to do for compliance for those products and then having a conversation with the general counsel of these are the benefits. Here's a plan, here's what we would get out of it. Here are the pros and cons. This is how we can measure success. And it wasn't a really hard sell. You saw the writing, he saw the metrics and said, yeah, like do it.

So and so how does it work practically? Are there actual people with the program manager title on your team? Are there product managers on your team?

We don't have product managers, but we do. We have people with yes, we do have program managers with programs program management title. And we do have people that support the program management role. And so yeah, new regulation would come in and there's a series of steps that gets to that point. We have a public policy team and they flag things. If it's international, there might be some translation that has to occur. And then our product lawyers will usually look at something and assess it and then it gets to a point where it's materially relevant. They'll bring me or whoever is in the role of the program manager in. We capture it as an initiative and then we'll work with them to create the set of documents to inform our business team and then have a series of conversations with the business team again. It's never a surprise. We're not waiting to the end.

Yeah.

Starts off with what we call an Awareness meeting where it's just, hey, this is coming. It might be 12 months down the road, it might be six months down the road. Things are in the regulatory world and compliance space, things can happen any moment or they can take years to develop. Right. But just giving them that awareness so that when they're planning for things, they're aware of it and they know of it. And then we go through a series of like refining and understanding. Once things pass, we'll do, we'll try to do a gap analysis when things get close. And then when things are formalized and written and passed, then we'll do a gap analysis on that. Figure out what our legal recommendations are, write up that document I talked about with the priorities and the scores and everything. And then we have a series of meetings with all of our internal stakeholders. What's best for the business. What does this actually mean? Dig into this question, that question. And then the outcome is we have a solution. Or maybe the solution is not a solution because we're already compliant or whatever the case might be. But you know, there's an outcome that's documented. And then we also use jira. So I'm a big proponent of meeting your clients where they're at. And if the team that we're going to be interacting with, at least in this area of the business is using a specific tool, predominantly we track and do all of that in jira so that we have an entire chain of custody. We go from the public policy to the legal side and link it directly to the individual stories that the engineers are working on. And so it provides a sort of holistic view of what's going on.

Awesome. And so the programs that you've mentioned are mostly regulatory compliance. Are there other types of programs that you leverage your program managers for?

Oh, definitely, yeah. I mean anything you can think of internally. So if we want to improve our contract management system, we have somebody that'll look at that. If we're spinning up IP ops enforcement, we have people that will assess and look at that. Anything you can think of, anything that there might warrant looking at to see if there's any efficiencies or opportunities, budgeting tools, that sort of thing. Reporting. Yeah, literally it's an endless list of things that could be applied.

Yeah, so very similar to our team, we had a program management team as well. And it was a lot of the cross functional challenges. It was anything that was on our GC or CLOs, we called them OKRs. But like here are the big goals for the department this year and it could be anything from work life balance or figuring out how to do professional development or technology tools or regulatory. Any of those things would fall into the responsibility of figure out what the issue is, figure out what the goal is and make it happen.

Yeah. Do cost benefit figure if it's worthwhile. Yeah, absolutely.

Okay, great. As you're thinking about building out your team and the functions and again, the skill sets that you and I have just talked about are pretty different from I think, what traditional legal operations people have done in the past, which we have a lot of project managers, we have a lot of outside counsel specialists, we have a lot of technology project managers, data specialists. But for program management, where are you hiring for this? What are you looking for in terms of background?

Yeah, that's a really good question. It depends on the role. There are some roles where we will look for someone that may have a project management background and understands and has some experience with some of the best practices in terms of how to do risk management or that sort of thing. And then I'll just train them how to basically think like a program manager or how to act like the program manager and what the tools are. There is, there's a bunch of overlap. So it's not as if they'd be starting from scratch and then depending on the other role aptitude. If I am interviewing someone and they just knock everything out of the park, answer everything right and demonstrate that they've got the passion and the aptitude to do a job, my team and I will train them as to how to do program management. So it's a lot of in house, it's just a lot of knowledge sharing as well. I do, I mean we do training, we will send them again, I'm a big proponent of meeting the clients where they're at, sending folks to get some, some of the SCRUM training and SCRUM certificates for example, so they at least know the language of the product teams that they're interacting with is something that we definitely do. And just educating folks internally as to what we're doing and what we're trying to accomplish.

Okay, so you mentioned scrum. Are there any other external like trainings, courses, books, online things? What people are always asking, how do I get better? What would you recommend?

Yeah, I mean Coursera is a great platform that has a lot of stuff in there. I do believe that even again there's overlap. So even though one of the courses that I recommend taking is, I think it's the Google Project management course which is focused on project management. But I would Say, last time I looked at the curriculum, half of it is definitely applicable to program management and the skills that you need for that. It's a really high quality course. There's a lot of great podcasts out there too. If you ask me, off the top of my head, I'm terrible at pulling things off the top of my head, but I can send you a list afterwards that delves into some of the best practices and things to do. This isn't reinventing the wheel. This is one of the things that, you know, both frustrates me and I love about this area of business is that so many people have solved this problem. So many people have written books about this problem and how to operate as a program manager and operate as a project manager that the information is out there to soak up and to read and to learn. And so there's no shortage of opportunities. But yeah, Coursera is a great platform. The Scrum stuff is a great platform. Just try to focus on what you want to do better at, where your focus is. If you're going to be. If you're going to lean into corporate compliance, you're not going to need the Scrum stuff, right? But if you're going to go work for a tech company that builds products and you want to help them in the regulatory world, that probably might help you out. I don't know that there's a universal, but there are some things that transfer between. I don't believe there's, you know, there's the program manager certification from pmi, but I believe the criteria for that is you have to have your PMP first because again, they view it as a hierarchy. That is, that's an opportunity. That's another path. They have a lot of great documentation. I hesitate to call them out, but there's a person on my staff who doesn't have experience as being a program manager, who has an amazing attitude, tons of aptitude, wicked smart, and I think they're going to go places in this world that I will be able to look up from and go, amazing. Of course that makes sense that they've achieved this success because years from now, and so it's those intangibles that kind of really matter. And I. It's like anything a doctor doesn't become a doctor just by picking up a scalpel, they learn and try to educate themselves. They're not going to inherently have the skills. I don't know if that's a good analogy or not, but no, we can teach this stuff. But, you know, it's the intangibles that really are a predictor of success, I think.

Yeah, I have the same philosophy as you. So need I even ask how you feel about legal background then to any of the roles on your team?

I wrote a very pseudo viral post on LinkedIn for the legal operations world at least a few months ago saying that stop requiring legal backgrounds for legal operation roles. Again, because I believe that people that practice law go to school to practice law.

Yeah.

People that are in operations and business either go to school or seek certifications or knowledge in that area. That's not to say that they're not complimentary, but they're definitely not one to one there. It is not a one to one exchange. I view the role of legal operations to be the application of business process to the practice of law. And so let the legal experts who paid all that money to go to law school practice law while we enable them to do that. And I don't need a legal degree to be able to write SQL for reporting budgetary reasons. I don't need a legal degree to do program management. I don't need a legal degree for providing support for tooling. It's actually better to have some technical fluency.

Yeah.

Because in your support of these legal professionals, they're going to be asking you like, how do I know what my outside counsel spend is? I need a report for this. Or what is this tool? AI is a big topic topic. You just, in fact today you just had a whole roundtable on it. And so making sure that you understand that and having some technical fluency is, in my opinion more important than having a legal background. I can't practice law anyway. I can't give legal advice. I'm not a lawyer. Nobody's asking you for legal advice though. They're asking for business advice.

Yeah, yeah, I mean, obviously I absolutely agree. How hard was it to learn the process of what lawyers do to be able to add value?

So again, for my current role, I had the benefit of working with legal teams in many different areas. For my current role, it wasn't that difficult. I mean, I can definitely remember 8 years ago or even 12 years ago trying to understand contract law or some of the nuances in the regulatory world and how those things worked. And yeah, I mean, it took a while. I also have adhd. Repetition is important for me. And having those things come up and then learning from it. And even when I had my sole proprietorship, just understanding regulations and just getting my hands dirty. Yeah, there was, there was a learning curve. But again, just over Time you build up that experience, as with anything.

Exactly. It's just, it's not that hard. Which is what the message that I want to hammer home to any of the attorneys and general counsel that are listening, it's not that hard. We're not trying to interpret the regulation, we're not trying to interpret the laws and the contracts and to actually do the negotiations. So it's okay. We just need to understand what you do and how we can help you. Right?

Yeah, exactly, exactly. I mean, I've had conversations with our own in house counsel where they said something I've said, I don't understand what that means. And they explained to me and I was like, great. That's why you got your jd.

Yeah.

Because that's the role of what you do. They're amazing, they're amazing colleagues to have and I want to empower them to do their job to the best of my ability and. But what we do isn't practicing law.

That's right. That's right. Okay. And the other topic I wanted to touch on, because I did see one of your other viral LinkedIn posts, was about being a good manager. Give me your perspective on what it takes to be a leader and a good manager in this space.

Yeah, being a people manager is actually super, super close to me and I love it probably more than any aspect of what I do. What is it? So your question, what does it take to be a good manager in this space? I actually have a. I think it's a 23 point management series of topics that I use to coach my folks through. And I also have a management or manager contract with them. And it starts out with things and I read it to them as a new employee. Starts out with just the simple things of like, I'm not going to put a meeting on your calendar without letting you know what it is first or providing you some context because I don't want them to be surprised by anything. So the first thing is creating that culture of trust. Being humble, being human, letting people see that you screw up sometimes or you say the wrong thing sometimes or I make, I crack stupid dad jokes a lot. And so just creating that sort of culture of trust is hugely important. You have to walk the walk right? So you have to actively solicit feedback. You have to not bristle when you get feedback that might be uncomfortable and really keep an open mind. And so that's key. And that dovetails into communication, making sure that you communicate, particularly expectations. Expectations are a two way street for me. All of my directs have A growth and development plan, no matter what level they're at. And we set it out at when they're first hired. We set some milestones. It's based off of our leveling guidelines. Here's what the expectation is to achieve the next. It's written down, it's immutable. We can change it and do things whenever we need to. But, you know, there's something that they can point to. There's clarity. I had a. I had a executive coach once who, I love this phrase. He said clarity is kindness. And so the clarity to let someone know, this is what I expect from you, if you want to achieve this thing is hugely important. And so being able to grow and develop them and they know what is expected of them is massive. And that this all dovetails together. I mean, that also creates a circle of trust. Hey, you said I accomplished. If I accomplish these things and did it in a consistent manner over a consistent period of time, that I would be eligible and ready. And again, just being candid, we had a conversation just recently about career opportunities and not speaking specifically at the company, but in general and what they're. What some of the constraints and limitations might be and some of the things that people may not think about. I mean, weird to say they don't think about it, but there's not always an opportunity, especially if somebody's in the role already. Right. You may not need to general counsels, but making sure that they understand that, but also supporting them in their growth, knowing that their next step might not be with you. I actually just had somebody turn in their resignation earlier this week. And I think the hardest thing as a people manager to do is know that you are setting these people up for success. But that means it might not be with you in the future.

Yeah.

And so it's almost like a parent. It's almost like, I hate to say that it's reductiveness, but you know, you're going to invest time and effort into growing and developing people in an area that they want because you've agreed to it. You have these mutual expectations. Knowing in the back of your mind that means that they're more than likely going to be seeking the next opportunity somewhere else at some point in time. It's just the way the world works. Communication, managing expectations, culture of trust, accountability. Two ways. Not just me saying if you do this, you achieve it, but them also calling me out too, on things. And so accountability is a big piece as well. Gosh, I could. I could go on and on. There's no Greater feeling than seeing somebody achieve the success they want and knowing that you had a part, you saw in them the ability to do that and was part of their journey for them to achieve it.

I totally agree. I love that feeling. You mentioned earlier in the conversation. When you interview someone and you're just like this, this person is just so sharp, has just great skills, the intangibles and that one day we'll all be working for that person. And I love the feeling of hiring that person, knowing, hey, if I can get two years out of this person before they. They're definitely going to go move on to the next great thing. It's a win. Right. And you get to see them flourish and support them on to grow and be a leader somewhere else.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, people. Management is about people and making sure that those people that you manage are set up for success. And there's just. Yeah, there's just no greater feeling than seeing them achieve that success.

Yeah. And the communication piece that you mentioned, I mean, so much of communications, being transparent, being open, being honest. It sounds so easy. It's not though, right? It sounds like such common sense. It sounds so obvious. We had a guest on the podcast, I don't even know how many episodes ago, but very recently, Misha Globerman, who's a communications expert. And as we were talking through things, he's like, just say it. And a lot of it, you're like, well, I don't know how to deliver this because it may not land well. And he's like, just say what you said to me.

Yeah, there's. Yeah. Today's day and age. I think you see a couple of different versions of that. You see the people who can do that. Right. The people who try, maybe because they took a class or a course, you can tell. There's. I think the analogy is like the light behind the eyes isn't there? The intent is. I don't, There's. You can't put a finger on it. But you know that 100 doesn't feel genuine. Even if they say is the right thing.

Yeah. Saying the right things is. Yeah, doesn't.

Which is good. I mean, that's progress. It's better than nothing. And then what really frost me is communicating like your audience. As a 12 year old, you tend to see that a lot. If you read a press release or internal communications that got released and you can see from executives or like, it's like, I've been in the business world for a couple decades. My peers have been in the business world for A couple decades or a decade or even like six years is enough to understand that what you're saying is corporate speak and don't do that. Just tell us like it is. And I understand there are times you can't. And there are some information for business reasons that can't be divulged. I get that. But I think the leaders that are authentically themselves are the ones that get the most reward and the most loyalty and the most out of their staff. In fact, now I'm going to change gears for just a second. Is misinform. Strategy statements, I think are hugely important. I'm very passionate about that. Because if your team doesn't understand what they're doing, then they're rudderless. And even for a legal team to be able to establish those so that you have an identity and can point back to that identity, I think is critically important and making sure that supports the overall company identity. But there's studies that show when a team has those and they're good, they're understandable or achievable that the effectiveness of that team is. I'm going to quote something, it's probably going to be wrong. Somebody can fact check me. But it's like 70% better than teams that don't.

Yeah.

Because wake up in the morning and you can understand at least the final destination or at least the direction that you're going, as opposed to the feeling of just being at a deli counter and taking a ticket and just doing work, or the I Love Lucy chocolate thing. Just having that sense of purpose and understanding. Again, clarity is kindness. Right. Just be clear in what you're trying to say.

Yeah, well, and also it gives them independence, initiative. If they know what the end goal is. If they all are rowing in the same direction, we've got a purpose. You don't go into your job every day thinking, I've just got to produce widgets. You're thinking, ooh, maybe there's other ways for me to get there or to help us get there, or I see something that can get us there faster and it allows them to see themselves, I think, as a different role in the organization.

And you know what, talking about teams, that's another important thing. Giving your employees agency, empowering and enabling your teams to do things is hugely important. I'm sure we have all worked at places where somebody might be categorized as a micromanager and just how suffocating and how toxic that can be, encouraging people like, you're going to fail, you're going to make mistakes that's okay. There aren't many of us in this world that actually have a role where a life is dependent upon us and the actions that we do. And so give your teams the agency to explore. Let them come to you with ideas, enable them and empower them. It's unrealistic to think that you will be able to indulge every whim of theirs and everything they want to chase. But you can whittle it down. You can figure out what is actually possible, what are the opportunities to go into whatever area or the thing that they're thinking about. It's. You don't want to have to suffocate them with reviewing every work output, editing their narrative style, as opposed to editing the actual facts, the content. Right.

That.

That's a big thing. That's a morale killer. There's just a lot of those things. Give your people the agency to be themselves. You want we speak about having our authentic voice? Let them have their own authentic voice, too.

Totally true. So as you look back in your career and where you are now, are you happy that you fell into legal operations? Are you enjoying this?

Oh, I love it. Yeah. I mean, if you can't tell, it's truly, in such a weird way, it is truly the merge of all of my experiences in a. In a perfect way that I never would have foresaw years and years ago now. Yeah.

Yeah.

It's crazy. I love it.

I love that. The magic of looking back on your career and saying that it all led me to this is such a good feeling. Right? That is just like.

Oh, definitely.

It worked out. It's perfect. It uses all my skill sets and experiences. It's awesome. Good. Andrew, such a pleasure. Thank you so much for your time for sharing such a great perspective. I was right that I needed to have you on the podcast. I'm so glad that you were having.

This before we could sit talk about this all day.

I know we could. I know. But I am looking at the o' clock and it is time to say goodbye. So thank you again. I so appreciate it.

Thank you. Take care.

Thanks everyone for listening. We'll see you next time.