Execution at Scale: Why Thought Leadership Drives Results at Mozilla | Suba Vasudevan | 660

And welcome, welcome, welcome. This is Peter Winick. I'm the founder and CEO at Thought Leadership Leverage, and you're joining us on the podcast today, which is Leveraging Thought Leadership. I'm excited about today. My guest is Subbu Vasudevan. She is the COO of Mozilla. She's on the board of Mozilla AI, and from a thought leadership perspective, Her goal is to transform more to an execution culture, this behemoth of Mozilla that we all know and love. So anyway, welcome aboard. How are you?

Thank you, Peter. Thank you for having me. I'm a fan of your podcast and I'm excited to be talking on it.

Oh, thank you. So you're busy, right? You're a COO. You've got an organization to run. There's lots of things going on. You're moving 100 miles an hour, right? And the, and, and there's so much change going on. AI, et cetera. Why is it that you've found the time or creating the time to invest in the thought leadership?

Yeah, I think that's super important, right? When I think about leadership itself, it's 2 or 3 things, but one of the most important things is you can be the hero all day long or you can scale through other people. That's where thought leadership comes in, in my mind. Because the heart of the matter is you're only here on Earth for a certain portion of time, but who is going to carry forward what you have learned and what you are paying forward, what you are teaching others as a leader, right? That's why it's important to create time in general. And then coming and talking on this podcast is a means to doing that. It's talking about how you take a mission of Mozilla, a company like Mozilla, and do it at speed like other tech, big tech companies.

So say more about that because I think that a lot of C-level executives have a couple of different potential use cases for thought leadership. Use case one, to the public, elevating the brand, telling the story, you know, whatever. And a lot of that is professional services, high tech. So it's not necessarily the monetization, but it's, it's, it's getting recalibrating the way people might think about Mozilla, people in that context being users, the public, investors, et cetera. Second piece of that is internal. I need the, the, the team here, the employees here, the folks here to come on this journey for me, and they need to know how I think and where I'm taking them and why we're doing what I'm doing. I'm sensing it's— you're straddling both of those. Is that a fair guess?

That's fair. And I see the two intertwined, right? And that's what happens when you join a company. So I spent 11 years at Meta. You know, I learned how to execute. Be disciplined, apply rigor, et cetera. When you come to apply that execution muscle to a 25-year-old mission, the two become intertwined. Suddenly you're not beholden to Wall Street. You're actually doing this because all of the internal employees want to further that mission that the company has of a better, open, healthy internet. How do you do that? You have to bring the two together. On the one hand, you're transforming the company. But the reason is what all of the employees genuinely believe in and the values that we lead with. And that's why I'm here talking to you.

So how do you gauge Mozilla? Like every tech company, like every company has KPIs and we need to measure things and we need to make sure. How do you know it's working? What are the things that you look at from a, I don't wanna say ROI necessarily, but what are the KPIs? What are the metrics you look like to say this is worth me spending X hours a month on versus even just from an opportunity cost perspective.

Got it. I'll just explain this really quick. So I straddle two roles. Yeah. CEO of Mozilla.org, which is the holding company at the top. And then I have the role that I mentioned earlier within our corporation where the Firefox browser and a number of other products sit. It's different for both. That's where I'm going in response to your question. So at the holding company level, we think about it actually for both the portfolio companies and the holding company, we have to think about double bottom line. So when you mentioned KPIs, that's very unique to Mozilla. Double bottom line is when you start thinking about how are you ensuring your profits are going back into a healthy internet, right? And at the same time, how are you profitable? So that's an interesting, always an interesting conundrum for anyone with a double bottom line type of set of goals. In a more tactical way, because you asked me the question on KPIs, You take the case of the corporation. We have the Firefox browser, we have advertising products, we have a number of other things. We follow, like any other tech company, a very rigorous model to set those KPIs, share it with the board, all of that stuff. That's table stakes, right? But before you even get there, what's the direction you're headed in? Like, how do you know that you're executing well against it? And then how do you know those KPIs are the ones that matter? That's the question we tend to ask ourselves. That's where it takes you all the way from strategy to annual planning to excellent road mapping, and that's when your KPIs will start to make sense, right? That's the second set of philosophy. So double bottom line was one. The whole end-to-end process is the second thing. The third thing is buy-in and culture. That is so important. You can sit there in a corner and set strategy and do annual plans and set KPIs all day.

But that's the hard one, right? So buying in culture, we can't put it on a scale and measure it. We can't plot it on a graph. I mean, we could, but, but like, how do you know it's working, right? 'Cause part of what you're doing is trying to change the culture to transform the business. They're not two separate things. They have to go hand in hand.

Yeah. The easy answer, I'm gonna tell you the easy answer that probably most people will tell you is engagement survey. I think that's an important tool, and I think it gives us a lot of insights into how employees are feeling, especially if you as a company take it seriously, read everything they're saying, and take active actions to work against it. Also know, in the industry, we've been told, in tech in general, in the world, all engagement surveys have dropped across the board. So there was a little bit of the macro factor.

Sure.

Set that aside. Set that as a measure of how employees are feeling. If you're not on the ground with your employees, understanding how they're feeling on a day-to-day basis, and if every leader is not there on the ground talking to customers, for example, you are going to miss some of the biggest signals. You take all of those signals in, you apply them to your KPIs. By the way, you can get KPIs wrong. I'm sure you've seen cases of it. You know, you can easily game the system. That's not how we do it. We make sure that it's not set up to be gamed. Uh, but that, all of that leads to knowing, are we actually getting this right? Are employees buying into this? Are we doing it for the right reasons? Right? That's it.

So I want, I wanna switch to somewhat, you know, pragmatic tactical. So I get the big picture on this totally, and I, you don't have to sell me, I get it. Right. What does it look like for you tactically? Like what percentage of your time are you spending on this and what are the types of things that you're doing? That are representative of that? And I would imagine on the second piece, some are killing two birds with one stone. When you're doing X, you're adding Y, so it's not additive, but what are the things that might be additive and what percentage of your total time do you wind up spending in this area?

I'm gonna say it's my whole job. You know, yeah, it's my, it's my whole job, but also that of several of my peers to be very clear. Like one of my peers who leads Firefox, end-to-end, it's also his job to think about how Firefox is growing, right? It's my job to think about how we're growing revenue. I also work with several other leaders, my peers, to say, how are we improving employee productivity? Let me give you this example. AI at work. Have you read what the Duolingo and Shopify CEOs have put out there?

Yes.

That's the kind of thing everybody's leaning into. It's not just those two companies, right? You take AI, Forget just using a model at a high level to research things or write things. How do you completely transform an employee base and how they work at work on a day-to-day basis? Those are the kinds of long-term things I work with other people to think about. It's a large part of my job, and that is going to lead to more creativity, more innovation, more productivity. And by the way, Peter Winick, if someone tells you it's an efficiency play, push back on them. It's not an efficiency play only.

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Yeah. You know, when I think about it, like, I don't know how, do you use a lot of LLMs or AI tools for your day?

Well, in the last 4 or 5 months, yes. Yeah. So prior to that, sort of just curious. And I wouldn't say, I mean, my level of proficiency or expertise is pretty light.

Yeah.

But I'm a convert. Like, I've seen the, I'm like, wow. And I've seen other people that are doing it far more than I am based on their roles. And I keep telling myself on the one hand, wow, this is like the dial-up days of the internet with AOL, and simultaneously, it's mind-blowing. So—

It is, you know, it's a great analogy. It's also equal to what automation did for various industries way back when, as we all know it. It can be scary. So part of it is how do you bring an employee base along? So Mozilla has been doing that into acceptance and leaning in. And then right now we're entering the phase of how do you actually set the tone on is it okay to use it for performance reviews? So for example, you asked me to say more. I've been telling my team, "Hey, I wrote up this whole thing on ChatGPT. You should as well." I've said this for 6 months now because I've been using it for at least a year and a half, 2 years. I've been using various tools. I now openly stand there and say it, shout out from the rooftops when I'm using any tool, so that it's empowering the teams and giving them permission to do the same, right? You don't want it to be a stigma. And every time I see something that's clearly, say, written by a tool like ChatGPT or researched by a tool, and it makes sense to me, I'm providing positive reinforcement. So we're asking—

Well, I think also culturally, if you're modeling, it's any other behavior. This is an adoption of a tool. But there's a cultural implication here, and if Subha's doing it, geez, how am I not, right? Like—

That's it. You want a leader to be the one who's saying, move the stigma. I sat down with someone last week actually, and showed them how to create their own LLM to make business reviews for the KPI, OKR process easier. And it was mind-blowing, right? And I asked this person to record her own experiences as she does it for herself. And then I wanna scale that training out to everybody cuz you want people who can do this everywhere and become the little allies or focal point for their peers and friends in the company.

Love it. Love it. So let's, let's go down a little bit of a different path. A lot of thought leadership, particularly when we're trying to resonate, you know, get a message to resonate with, with our team and our employees, is trial and error. Like when you're making, when you're doing a presentation to the board, You've gotta have your ducks in a row, right? Like you've gotta have your spreadsheet, you gotta have everything. This is our, like, that's not a place to be squishy. But with this, you can try things out, see how they land, modify it, adjust it. How do you iterate in a way that doesn't have people thinking, uh-oh, this is flavor of the month and every, you know, like you, you gotta stay on point, but you gotta iterate. How do you, how do you manage that? Yeah.

I, you know, we live in a world where I genuinely believe people value authenticity. Like, let's take the case of this podcast. You and I are just doing this on the fly. We're having a conversation, right? That's what people value is, are you overprepared? Are you telling me something that's off of a playbook? Or how are you coming across in a way that's truly real and that's truly you? The minute you do that, I think it's a huge unlock. Along with it, and I'll share what I think I've shared this with you when we had our intro call, which you are, when you're vulnerable, you know, take the case of open source, which is Mozilla, but also take the case of vulnerability in a leader. There is a parallel. You're putting your ego on the line, just like you're putting your code on the line for it to receive feedback and be poked at. You're putting yourself on the line for feedback, and you need to be, as a leader, open to it. That's the thing. And I have employees Slack me all the time saying, hey, I like this, or maybe less of that. And I'm like, great, tell me more. What can I do better? Or what's working for you?

Stay there a minute because in many organizations today and in most organizations 20, 25 years ago, A, we didn't have Slack, but give it, having a, a means to communicate directly to a C-level exec and saying, Hey, I don't agree with you. That would be a career-killing moment.

Yeah.

Right. That would not be wise. But you've actually created, you know, an environment, a culture that says this is not only is she open to this, she encourages this, she wants this, and there would never be a negative ramification, right? Because sometimes companies say, oh, give us the feedback. And it's like, oh, you're a whiner, or you get labeled, or you get like whatever. So that in and of itself, I think is transformative right there.

It is, it's the going back to your question on culture, how do you transform cultures? It's the macro stuff I laid out earlier, but it's also these micro types of moments, right? Just on that point you mentioned earlier, something occurred to me. There's a cultural element here. Look, I come from India. I know what Indian culture is like, right? Growing up there. I moved here 20-something years ago and I've, I think, learned a lot of this culture as well and assimilated both. But when I was at Meta, I had a massively global team all over the world, and I didn't always get the feedback that I needed from people sitting in Singapore or Hyderabad or some of these other countries, right?

Sure.

And I had to actually wear the hat, my old growing-up hat, and say, why am I not getting that feedback? It's probably because it's a little bit still taboo in Asian cultures. I'm not generalizing, but it's not that easy for someone to give your boss or a skip-skip-level boss feedback That's, you know, an opportunity for growth for the boss.

Well, I, what I would add to that, yeah, there's a cultural piece, but I think it's compounded today in that many of us have work colleagues that we've never had a meal with, right? If someone's in different cities and we don't see each other, so there's the trust piece, there's the collaborative piece, there's, you know, it's easier to say to a colleague that you sit next to, have lunch with, go, go hiking with, whatever. Hey, when you said that in the meeting, you kind of look like an idiot. But if there's a cultural piece and you're halfway around the world and there's time differences and we've never broken breath, ugh, it's like, uh-oh. And by the way, sometimes things come across poorly in a Slack or a text or whatever. They don't know where it's coming from, you know, and they read it 17 times and they're freaked out. So I think there's a lot of variables there.

Oh, words on a screen are very different from words in person. Yeah. Right. And so I made it a point, this was pre-COVID for many, many years. To visit my offices, like where people were, and actually sit down, whether it was small group lunches. I had something called office hours. Those were things that really helped connect with people one-on-one. Even 15 minutes, if you have a large, large group, makes a difference. We had a leadership summit here at Mozilla a couple months ago where we had all of the directors and above meet in person. It was game changer. I had so many long-term Mozillians Engineers from Europe who maybe had a different stance than me on various different topics for the first time and having lunch with folks or working in breakout groups completely changed the tone. Now when they ping me or email me or say something in a group Slack, I'm like, "Yeah, I met you. I know what you mean. I got this." It's very different, and I hope everybody feels the same after moments like these. It's important.

Yeah, and again, that's a cultural piece in this remote work, you know, in bi— you know, we, we are not living in an age of everybody's in the same office and, you know, whatever, management by walking around kind of thing. It's, well, exactly. How do you, what's the digital equivalent of walking around?

You know, or management by appointment. I hear that was a—

yeah. Well, I think that's, that's, that's true. All right. As we start to wrap, what I would ask is, let's assume listening today, cuz typically there are there's a handful, maybe more, of C-level executives that have been toying with, thinking about, pondering, delaying the investment of time, energy, and effort into thought leadership to drive their business results and outcomes. How would you convince them or assure them that it's a wise thing to do?

Yeah, I, you know, for me, it's table stakes as a leader to invest in thought leadership. Like, let's just go there. If you're not doing that, you're never going to be that successful as a leader in today's day and age, right? It is a tool for alignment, like we just talked about. It is a tool for building trust, and it's not a weakness. Like, that is the one thing I could not underline enough. The importance of your thought leadership as a human being, the importance of having these conversations is what's going to give employee bases, it's what's gonna give your work the clarity and the execution focus that people need to succeed. So, I would say every leader needs to invest in it.

I love it. Thank you for that. Great to talk to you. I appreciate your candor and your transparency and, uh, big fan. Thank you so much, Subba.

Thank you, Peter. It was good to talk to you.

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