ROBIN DANIELS Reveals the Secret to Sparking Joy in the Workplace

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Product Thinking Podcast. Joining us today is Robin Daniels, the Chief Business and Product Officer at zensci, a leading human success platform dedicated to empowering employees through continuous learning, performance management and engagement. Robin brings a wealth of experience to the table with a career that spans executive leadership roles at some of the most influential tech companies including Salesforce, LinkedIn, Box and Matterport. Robin is widely recognized for his expertise in growth, marketing and product innovation and has played a pivotal role in driving companies through hypergrowth phases leading to successful IPOs and acquisitions. Beyond these executive roles, Robin is also a seasoned advisor and investor helping shape the future of numerous tech startups across the globe. Today, Robin will share his insights on product management, the power of product led growth, and his approach to building high impact teams that deliver exceptional results. But before we talk to Robin, it's time for Dear Melissa. That's the segment of the show where I answer all of your burning product management questions. If you have a question for me, go to dearMelissa.com and let me know what it is. I'll answer it on an upcoming episode. Here's this week's question Dear Melissa, I was hired a few years ago by the CEO of a company to build a suite of software offerings at a company that historically built custom whatever the customer asked for. Since then, a new CTO that only has experience leading engineering teams has been hired and product management has been moved. Under this role, I built the team from the ground up to have a product strategy leader for each offering and product managers with various levels of skill sets reporting to a group lead for each offering. We also have pure user experience and technical communications product documentation teams under Product Management. My goal was to remove the stigma of the product owner mentality of only focusing on current or next Sprint designs and and to promote constant market research before making decisions on what to build leading to faster career progression opportunities for all product managers. I recently found out that the CTO has decided the product management team will be split between strategy under Product Management, me and product owners and user experience under Software engineering. I'm afraid the product managers will be reprioritized to only focus on internal work and not support broader customer or market needs leading to an output focused organization bent on building product for product's sake and not for our customers. How can I turn this into good for the product managers now product owners and how would you suggest I try to convince my leadership that this will drive an output mentality rather than an outcome mentality considering I don't have any Data about how the future will play out regarding the future team and product outcomes. Are there other opportunities that you can see come from this sudden change in organizational structure? So, so this one kind of reeks of a little bit of agile methodologies coming over good product management. I think one of the questions to ask is why did the CTO get buy in to make this shift? Right? A lot of times organizational change doesn't come just because a new CTO walks in. It's because they're telling some kind of narrative to the CEO to get buy in, to move everybody around. So here's where I would ask what made them think that they needed to shift this all under engineering and then leave you with just product management? What's been the trend? What's been the outcomes in the organization? What have you been observing? Is it a political play? What are they saying about you? That's really what I would dig into now on the change in general, this feels a lot like a land grab to get more ownership by the CTO. A lot of CTOs who have experience only with agile development would make the shift and try to move product owners underneath them. They see product owners usually as more of an engineering function. Right. What do the engineers work on? Which is just order taking, right? That's just backlog management. That's not putting all the market research that you talked about in there. Now I don't believe you should have split the product strategy and the product management out to begin with. And that's where there's some struggle there. They're now saying, hey, do the product strategy stuff and ship it off to the product owners and then they'll go build it. That's a little strange, right? That's getting us into waterfall. That's not really being very agile. That's also saying that the product owners won't have a lot of experience doing strategic work and that's going to be a lack of a career path for them to get better at their career. Right? This is why I always advocate that no matter what level product manager you are, if you're working on teams, whether you're a cpo, you need to have some kind of strategic role, right? In your, in your role in your day to day things. So that means that a lower level product manager working with a team is understanding strategy and vision for a smaller scope, like a feature or an area of the product. When you go up, you're doing strategy for something bigger. You go up, you're doing more strategy, less tactical work. That's how we See it in most Silicon Valley companies. That's how we see it out there in any company that's really, really good at building software. So when you do this shift and start to move things around and put them on under technology, I don't think it's going to end up well because you're not going to be connecting that market side back to the software side unless the CTO is extremely commercially minded. But the fact that they didn't want to move product strategy over makes me wonder if they are commercially minded now. For the product owners, the best thing that you could do is still involve them in strategic decisions. Consult them, bring them along for the ride, make sure they're still involved in customer research, make sure they really have a deep understanding of why they're building, what they're building so that they don't get locked into waiter mode. On your end, though, I think you're going to have to try to figure out how do you plug back into the delivery side so that you can see the outcomes go all the way through. You're going to be assessing and figuring out where to go from a product strategy perspective, but you want to make sure they get built and prioritized. And it sounds like the CTO is taking that prioritization away from you. So all you can do really is supply now the product owners with research, but they're going to be making the strategic decisions. Where does the roadmap live? Who makes the priorities there? These are all questions that I would have. One thing that you could do here, I think, is turn to other companies and see what they're doing. There's a lot of literature out there about how to actually structure product management teams. And you want to show that this is not actually the way that most teams are structured. They're usually structured under product management function. And there's a lot of reasons why we do that. Career pathing, job descriptions, keeping strategy aligned. If you separate out what we're building from how we think about what should be built, then you're going to get a disconnect in there and it's going to be many waterfalls. You're going to have a lot of documentation. It won't go as fast. There'll be no ownership over what you build. So I'd really try to clarify those roles and responsibilities and try to show how inefficient and how ineffective this might be. And I would draw on experiences from other companies like go out there, find some literature on it to show why this, this shift really wouldn't be working. So that's what I would look at there. I would point to companies that the company feels like, the leaders of the company feel like are good, that they're doing it well, and then show them how they do product management. Can you talk to some PMs there? Can you find literature about how they do it and show that you're not really aligned to that? But again, go back to my first question and ask why, why did this change happen in the first place? Because when you start to understand those reasons, a lot of times they're political. But maybe, maybe they're looking at this and saying, hey, I don't think they're performing or this is not happening, or I'm not seeing the results that I actually expected from this product management team. You need to be able to figure out what battles to fight before you go to make your case. And you have to figure out why this was made in the first place. Once you figure that out, then you can figure out how to fight it. Some of it may have been untruthful what was told, or there may have been reasons around that. But I'd really work on communicating up here, understanding the lay of the land and really understanding what were the reasons behind this. And hopefully that helps set you in the right direction. I hope that helps. And again, if anybody has questions for me out there, go to dear melissa.com let me know what they are. Now let's go talk to Robin. Hi Robin, welcome to the podcast.

Hey Melissa, how's it going?

Good. It's great to talk to you. You've had such an extraordinary career that spans leadership roles at some point of the most influential tech companies, From Salesforce to LinkedIn to Box Matterport. Can you tell us a little bit about what led you into product management and marketing and what keeps you excited about these roles?

Yeah, yeah. I mean it really comes back, goes back a long time. I kind of grew up as a nerd. I always loved like tinkering with technology and I had a really good role model when I was a teenager who taught me everything he knew about computers. And it really kind of inspired me to go the direction of becoming, I would say a technologist because I love how technology can influence the way we work or the way we live. And so I started coding at a pretty early age. I'm a self taught programmer, started building websites in the 90s, like really early days, coding in HTML, JavaScript, Java and so on. But I actually studied marketing in college. And so when I went into the professional world, my Work ended up centering around really coding kind of websites, front end stuff like that. But I ended up having a boss very early on in my career who kind of said to me, you know what, what you're doing, based on your personality and your skillset, you'd be better kind of suited for product marketing and product management. You should go that direction. And I'm like, I have no idea what that really is. And she kind of took me under her wing and she kind of pushed me in that direction, gave me the confidence, the skills to go and pursue a career that way. And since then, when you look at my kind of trajectory through life at Salesforce and Box and LinkedIn and Matterport and all these different companies, I've been more on the go to market side. But I think what has made me an effective leader is because I've come from a deep technology background, I understand exactly what's going on with technology, how it's built, how do you kind of translate the features, the functionality, everything else that the product team is trying to do or the engineering team is trying to do into something that makes sense in the market. Because at the end of the day, I think nowadays, if you look at any modern organization, it's really impossible to separate go to market that the three kind of components of go to market, just product, sales and marketing, those three are. So if you don't understand all three, it's very hard, I think, to be an effective leader. And so. So my success has really been about been more on the commercial side. But I've always deeply dabbled in product, you know, helping guide the roadmap and what should be built for customers, how we can beat the competitors and all this kind of stuff. So super passionate about product and I continue to be so in my new role here at Sensei, I'm the chief Business officer and chief Product officer. So I run go to market and also the product team as well. Because again, this is kind of the. One of the discussions I had with our CEO when we were talking about me joining last year is that in a modern organization you really should have all these aligned product marketing and sales into one organization. Doesn't mean everything falls under me. But it's a big team and lots of great leaders and so on. But having somebody who can kind of have that purview is really important I think nowadays.

It's funny, I just did a podcast episode too with Mercedes Chatfield Taylor and she's a recruiter. We're talking about, oh yeah, chief product officers and she said Something that was resonating with me as you were talking about that if you're a chief product officer and you don't know how your product is sold, that's a problem. Right. And I think that's the important marketing and go to market.

Well also, especially now with PLG and freemium and everything else. Right. It's more important than ever that you're so aligned. First of all, I think Mercedes is great. She's one of my favorite people, but she's absolutely right. I think a chief party also really has to understand the commercials and because if you understand how to take the friction out of the go to market, then of course the stickiness with customers will be much higher. The initial onboarding, the love of the product, ultimately. I mean, I always think if you want to create a super brand and every CEO I talk to, and I spend a lot of my time as an advisor, companies around the world and CEOs and VCs, and they always say everybody wants two things. They want a. Create a super brand that stands the test of time. Well, okay, well, here's how you do that. And they want to create repeatable and scalable kind of revenue that's also a playbook for doing that. Doesn't mean that it's not. It's exactly replicable for every single scenario. But those two things, there is a formula for how to do that. And for the first one, if you want to create a product and a brand that stands the test of time, you have to first, of course, make people aware of who you are and what you do. Then you have to make people use your stuff. And then finally you have to make people fall in love with your stuff. And that's where product really comes in. Right. That's not something that sales and marketing alone can do. At the end of the day, there has to be a product that people ultimately love and use and find utility and value and ultimately want to tell everybody else about.

Yeah, I think that's so important for product people to know. And you've been part of a lot of successful companies too. You've seen companies through IPOs. You've done high growth phases. When you look back on your career, what are some of your proudest accomplishments?

Yeah, there's been a few. I mean, not everything I've done has turned to gold, but there's been some good wins in there. One of my first early experiences was really. That was really formative for me, I would say. The place where my career really saw hyper growth was when I joined Salesforce in 2007, you know, we had a great leader. Marc Benioff is one of, I think, the best leaders of all time. And I was surrounded by just incredible people in all parts of the organization. And I led one of these products called Chatter. I first came in running product marketing for Europe, Middle east and Africa. And then I moved to headquarters with Salesforce at the end of 2009. And I ended up taking over the kind of go to market for one of their products called Chatter. And it was really kind of meant as a, at that point in time, an internal slack for, you know, companies to kind of better communicate and collaborate. And the gating factor was that you had to have a Salesforce license in order to do so. And so we said, well, what if we kind of ungate that? What if we just give everybody in an organization a license to use Chatter? Communication and collaboration will become much smoother across the entire organization. Let's say you have an organization with 100,000 people, but maybe only 10,000 of those are in sales. What about the 90,000 other people who can also benefit from communication and collaboration? Kind of like what you see with Slack nowadays and so on. But back then, I think it was a more radical idea. There was a couple of other companies, Yammer and Jive, who were kind of glomming onto this, but they never had the core benefit of having like a stickiness of a CRM system. So we said, if that's the core, how do we end people's communicate around the issues that really matter and break down the barriers that exist to really great companies to form? So we ungated that. But then we said, well, how about we take this even further and we release a freemium version of this to the whole world? And we said, well, in order to do so, we actually want to get as many companies to sign up really, really quickly. And we said, what's the biggest stage where we can go and talk about an enterprise kind of collaboration tool like this? So we sponsored maybe the first ever enterprise ad at the Super bowl in 2011 with the Black Eyed Peas. And we ran a Super bowl commercial for Chatter because they were playing the halftime show the Black Eyed Peace. And so we did a Super bowl ad with them. We actually did two. One before halftime and one after halftime, showcasing the benefits of what Chatter was with. Of course, the call to action that you should go sign up right now. And it's such a proud moment for me because in 24 hours, we got over 20,000 unique companies signing up for Chatter. But it was so many challenges. Sounds simple. Like, oh, you just promoted that, the Super Bowl. Right. And so on. Yes, it's expensive, but the logistics in actually making that happen, because back then, you know, mobile phones weren't really as powerful as they are today. Tablets weren't really as big a thing as they are today. But we also knew that people are not going to sit watching the super bowl with their laptops ready for signing up for something. So how do you make this experience optimized for kind of janky old phones or a really weak tablet or something that people can do without little friction as possible? And this comes back to, like, one of the big, like, insights in my career on PLG and freemis. Like, the whole goal is really to take out the friction at every step of the way. That's all the way from first awareness, then to sign up, then to the information you gather, then once you're in the product itself, what do you do? The first touch that you have and so on. We had to optimize that whole kind of chain of things that were happening in order for it to go smoothly. And so we did this thing and we announced Chatter Freemium at the Super Bowl.

Yeah.

And we got over 20,000 unique customers signing up. And of course, for us as a company, we were not in the business of just having freemium users. So we can now go and of course, upsell the page Chatter or even the full CRM product to these customers. But it was a great experience. And then from there, Aaron Levy over at Box and the team over there came to me and said, hey, whatever you did at Salesforce and for Chatter, come do it for us. Because they also were struggling with figuring out how do they. How they figure out the premium at the freemium kind of side of things as well and getting into the enterprise. So. But that, that. That formative experience of Salesforce really, really kind of changed my outlook on what was needed for products to be successful.

What's interesting about that story to me, too, is that a lot of people would think of super bowl ads as something that's very B2C. Right. And you went after it for the enterprise.

Yes, that's what I'm saying. I don't know for a fact, but I think maybe it might have been the first enterprise ad at the Super Bo, because we're not interested in individuals signing up for Chatter. There's no benefit in that for us. We wanted companies signing up with as many users as possible. So it was really interesting challenge. I think nowadays you see quite a few B2B ads. I think you've seen Slack actually have been there and I think many other companies as well, ServiceNow and whatever. But I think we were one of the first ones. And it's just, I mean, I would say so from. Here's my lesson also, honestly, from an awareness perspective, it was amazing. Over 20,000 customers signing up. People were talking about it. I don't know if it was the best ad error, but that's not the point. But in terms of actually turning into revenue, that's still a little bit more up in the air. How much of it actually turned into revenue. And I think companies nowadays have gotten a lot smarter around PLG and like, hey, getting people to sign up. How do you actually get people on an onboarding ramp just to then course become paying customers? Back then, we were very early days with this. I don't think our strategy was sound enough. Like we just wanted people to get in and sign it, sign up and get in. But from there it wasn't as clear as, like, what did you actually do when you were in the product? Nowadays, I think companies are way better at doing this stuff.

What do you think is that key moment after you capture their attention? They sign up for freemium. That helps product managers think about what to do next to get people to convert.

Well, there has to be some kind of utility that you get. I mean, if it's some products, there's utility in it just for you as an individual. Right? If I sign up for, let's say, a Dropbox account, there's instant utility in me just signing up. Whether I use it myself or with other people, there's instant utility because I can, of course, keep all my stuff in the cloud with other products. I think it's a lot harder because you have to spark those instant moments when you start sharing with other people. If you sign up for a free Zoom account as an example, there's no benefit for zooming with yourself. You have to instantly figure out, how do you get other people to use that with you? So it's really about figuring out what to do. I mean, another example, in my experience, experiences when I was over at Matterport, the previous company I was at. So we basically had. We created this 3D camera. This is a piece of hardware, and people could go around, they could do these recordings of their residential space or the commercial space, and we'd put it together and to become a beautiful kind of virtual walkthrough of these spaces. And on top of that, we built a software as a service platform, a cloud platform. And it was kind of very advanced, a lot of IP around that you needed one in order for the other to work. And we said, well, one of the gating factors that we had, one of the limiting factors is that in order for us to really scale further, we need to unbundle the idea of having to buy a camera first at fairly expensive camera, $3,000 first, in order to actually use Matterport. We could see how every human being in the world occupies a space and that space can become more interesting. You can share it with people, all this kind of stuff, if we can figure out a way for people to actually capture that space in some way. And so we said, well, what if we can figure out a way to put the technology that we've now created for this proprietary camera on a smartphone, on an Android or an iPhone, that would be a huge unlock, because then suddenly every person on the planet could suddenly record the home they're in their apartment. So if you're trying to rent out your home for an Airbnb or you're trying to buy a new place, it's much better to actually be able to walk through that than just seeing a static picture. But we also knew the gating factor was that camera. So there was a lot of engineering effort that went into how can we put that technology and make it adaptable for, for a phone that you have in your hand, where the quality is maybe not as good, your hand is not as steady because you're not on a tripod. You know, you don't really know because it's not just about you. It's not a recording you're doing. You're actually standing in a spot and you're, you're kind of turning in a 360 degree motion around that spot in some interesting way. And then it's recording that, and then you're moving to another spot, you know, four, five, six feet away. And then you're doing the same thing again over and over again until you have a full kind of map of that space. But we knew if we could figure out a way to do that in a way that got people to understand exactly what to do when they signed up on their smartphone. And they could then do it really simply without many as without, without as many steps as the full camera. And then once they've taken a full scan of their space, their apartment, their home and so on, and they can then what are you going to do with it? Do you share with a friend? Do you share with the interior designer? Do you Share with a real estate agent. Do you want to put it on Airbnb or something to rent it out? Lots of different use cases for. And so we finally figured out the engineering behind this. You know, there's some really smart people who worked on that. And we released the first version during COVID And in the first week of us releasing this smartphone version, which was pretty, honestly, rough at the time of release, it was kind of an early beta version where we said. We said, let's get it out there. We don't want to wait a year from now because we're in this moment of time where everyone's stuck in their home. Let's release an early version of this, a beta version. But in the first week of us releasing that, we got more signups in the first week than within the first eight years of being in business by selling the real, the big camera and the cloud plan. And we got about 80,000 signups or so in the first week. And about, I think 12% of those ended up turning into paying customers over that first year. And many of them stayed on the freemium plan, and they could just, like, you got one space for free. But many of them turned out to be paying customers like Starbucks and Walgreens. And all of these kind of, like, cool companies were signed up, ended up using it for brand management, inventory management, all kinds of cool things. And it was. Some of them ended up buying the bigger camera, and some of them just kept using the smartphone cameras. Like, one of the customers was this retail store, and they had all these retail stores around the world, and they wanted to use their employees in the different retail stores to record how the layout was so they could optimize and make it uniform across all their stores instead of sending around people to kind of check on that, which is very time consuming, costly, and so on.

And.

But it was really around. Well, it's coming back to the original question. Can you make it a utility and useful from the initial? Because if you land in a product and you're just like, what do I do now? Then you're dead on arrival, basically. So the goal for me has always been with freemium is like, how do you make it useful from the initial interaction with that product? I don't know if you were seeing the same thing in your world, but I'll be curious because I always feel I can learn more as well.

No, I agree with you. I think a lot of products get people in there, and then they get stuck, right? It's like, how do you keep them coming back how do you do that? And a lot of tactics that people would use are more like, hey, let's notify them or let's email them. Let's do that. And that's not sticky enough, right? That's not enough to get them to remember to come back. So what I loved about your story was how it integrated into their lives to solve their problems. From that, though, I'm so curious. You now have these companies doing all these things you didn't expected. How did you go back and think about the future of your product and the vision and reshape it based on all these different use cases that you were finding out about?

Yeah, it's a great question. I would say suddenly that takes center stage because you realize what an unlock it could be. I think beforehand, I would say if I rewind the clock. Ten years ago, I probably thought of freemium and maybe didn't use the word PLG really, because I think it's more of a modern term. But this idea of in product upgrades and growth is kind of more of an afterthought in some ways. And I think nowadays, I think it takes center stage. I think any company that wants to be successful nowadays has to put that front and center. So meaning, for me, it's all about the moment you land the product. Can you find utility in it instantly? Can you find some use for it? And not just that. Do you then end up figuring out how do you use it enough that you end up falling in love with it, that it becomes such an inescapable part of your daily life that you can't imagine a world without it? And so this company I'm working at now, for example, we sell a. A learning product. We sell a performance management product and an employee engagement product. And what's interesting is a learning product is something that a lot of people use because they have to, if we're honest about it in the past, right, Your company is saying you have to take this training. You have to take this cyber security course, the sexual harassment, this training on whatever it is. People kind of like go through the training, and sometimes they have another screen going while the training is going and so on. But we also know at the same time that people are hungry for knowledge and skills and growth in their careers and all these kind of things. What if we turn training into something that people seek out and want to do, kind of like you do in your personal life? And so my goal is. But it's not enough to just say that, right? You have to, of course, have a product that can foster that and be where you are when you need it. But in order for the product to understand who you are, what you need in the moment you need it, we need to know more about you. That's where I think performance management employee engagement comes in. So if you think about the reason you are where you are in your life, I assume it's probably because you've had a lot of great teachers and mentors and parents and siblings and coaches and bosses and so on who've kind of nudged you, seen something in you, and nudge you in a certain direction. And I want to be that platform that understands enough about you that we can then, say, use all these data signals and to figure out, well, what would be the best skill for you to learn, what would be the best course for you to take? Who would be the best person for you to connect with so you can grow your life and your career in a direction that you find joyful and hopeful and exciting for your life? And when I look at these statistics that say that 70% of people are disengaged or they want to quit their job, and you dig deep into the data why that is, it pretty much always says the same thing. Because people are stuck in their careers. They don't feel like there's anybody looking out for them or investing in them. And it's not an easy thing to solve. But I think a lot of it comes down to, are you giving people the opportunity to learn the skills that they need, not that you think they need? So there's a difference. And so I'm hoping that the future can look something like, where we know enough about people and their dreams and aspirations and everything that they want to become to nudge them in a direction where they, on a daily basis, seek improvement. It's not that you overnight, from one day to another, become the best at something. If you want to run a marathon or you want to become great at playing piano, it's a lifetime of daily improvements, micro improvements. And it's the same with kind of your career or your skills that you have in a certain area. And I want to be down at that platform that hopefully gets people to learn something new and connect with the right people every single day to make that progress. But coming back to the question around how I think about it now, I mean, it's a lot about, how do you institute joy into a product that makes people want to come and use this and want to share that with other people and connect with other people? If you can figure that out, And I've got some of it figured out, but there's sort of still to kind of go. That's how you, I think, create products that kind of stand the test of time is that you can't imagine a world without it. There's a lot of products I love, but if they went away, I'd find a replacement, honestly. Right. And I don't want to be that product. I want to be that product that you can't imagine living without.

Yeah. It kind of reminds me of when I teach people about like the Kano model. And you've got that delay on there, right? That feature, that thing that's going to make you go, oh wow. This is drastically different than something else. When you think about that in your setting, especially with Zen site, what do you find? Are your delighters? Like what's sparking joy for something that seems so mundane for people in a corporate setting?

Great. It's a great question. I think the. One of the things I really found so we, we. We have this notion of a weekly check in. And in the weekly check in, everybody who uses this product gets asked four questions. You can modify however it is, but the standard is four questions and, and it's really. They're really kind of well thought out to be lightweight, but gives a ton of information but also be easy for whoever engages with it to. To respond to. Number one is what have you achieved this past week? And it's a good moment of self reflection to just think back on what have I achieved this week? And if you realize that you haven't achieved the things you set out to achieve, you can course direct from next week. Right. So many times in my career I've come to Friday night and I'm like with friends or family and I'm like talking about what I did and I'm like, I realized how busy I was, but I didn't really achieve anything of worth. Have you ever had that moment? It's like, it sucks, right? It's like, oh, I'm so busy working nonstop. But I didn't really move the ball forward on any of the big things I wanted to. So the first question is really meant this kind of notion of self reflection. What did I achieve this week? That's number one. Number two is what blockers do. I have. So this is also a way for you to be very high, open and mindful around it. So you can of course share with your manager, but also share with the team around you. And it becomes a great way of actually collaborating and communicating much more Succinctly to the people that matter and having this much close relationship. So I do this with the CEO who I work for, but also my whole team. I can see their blockers. And instead of this becoming this big thing at the end of the quarter where I'm like why didn't you do this? Or what was why? I can instantly become much more in the mindset of being a servant to my team and say, what can I help you to unblock this? What, what resource do you not have? What skills do you not have? What's stopping you from achieving this? How can I help you? So it's a great moment of like self reflection, both for the individual but also for the team itself and for the manager. So that's number two. Number three. It asks a question of on a scale of 1 to 10, how are you doing? And it's I can see over time like who's trending in the right direction, who's trending down and what can I do as again as a manager to kind of solve it. It's not a big question where you have to fill out 20 different questions that I've seen in some other, other settings. This is meant to just be like a quick pulse check. How are you doing? Scale of 1 to 10 and then the fourth question is who do you want to call out? Who do you want to give kudos to or give a high five to? And you can then ention people. And this is probably one of the biggest moments of joy when you suddenly at the end of the week, both me as a manager, I see all the kudos flying back and forth between team members and the people who are calling me out because of course I get a notification that hey, Freddie mentioned you or Kathy mentioned you in this call out. And it just makes you feel like you belong. It makes you feel like you're part of something, something bigger than yourself. It makes you feel like you matter suddenly. It's like I think in this world where everyone's kind of working remotely, it's a great thing because you a lot of freedom. But sometimes it can feel isolating and a little lonely. And I think this, this notion because we also globally distributed team, 250 people in seven different countries, most people work remotely. Suddenly you see all these kind of kudos flying around. The first week of us implementing this about a year ago, we had over 1500 kudos flying between team members. And I can just tell now because I see it on a daily, on a weekly basis, this sense of belonging which is really Irreplaceable. That even though I don't see these people on a daily basis, we're not in the same room. I can tell I matter to their life and they matter to me. And there's this sense of being in it together. Because one of the things I noticed as Covid kind of swept through the world and everybody started working remotely, people were more productive and more efficient than ever. So that went way up. But the joy of oftentimes being in a company and the loneliness and isolation oftentimes went up as well, unfortunately. And this is a way of kind of solving that a little bit. And it provides such a sense of joy, of delight when you see those call outs and you're like, wow, people care about me. I matter. You know, it can't be underplayed. So it's not. It's not the same as getting a promotion or getting more of a salary or whatever it is, but it's just this sense of I'm in it with people who care about me that's irreplaceable.

And they feel appreciated too. It sounds like.

Yeah, completely.

Yeah, I like that. Fostering a sense of community. Because you're right. Like, I think in a lot of remote teams, we're missing that. People aren't really feeling that. So this sounds like it's bringing people back to your product specifically for the community aspects too, but helping it hook into things that you would find otherwise just boring or, you know, of course I have to do this. I don't really want to do this.

But it's also so. And this is where then coming back to the earlier point, if a person does this every week, if, say, you, Melissa, you fill out this every week. Imagine if for you doing that for 10 weeks in a row, the amount of information I know about you and your trajectory, then I can say, I can recommend you should go take this course. You should go learn this skill. If I see you're constantly struggling with some interpersonal communication with some other people in a different department, say, hey, maybe you should go take a communication skills course, or maybe you should go learn how to be better at analytics and data science, whatever effort is. But it gives me so much information, so I can guide you as a. As a coach, as a mentor, in the right direction for your life and where you need to be. And so this is where this kind of daily habit, weekly habit. Right now, I think we at Sensai, we have a product that gets used mostly on a weekly basis. I would love to see this being used much More on a daily or maybe every two day basis and so on. Because I think the more we can push you in that direction of greatness and understanding of what you need in your life, the happier you will be. The more you will turn that 70% of people who are unhappy into maybe something less. Because people feel like they have momentum and trajectory in their lives.

What's interesting to me too about what you're doing is that we think of performance management as that like once or twice a year, moment in time. But it's also giving you the record of here's all the accomplishments I did do over the year. And you're not just sitting there racking your brain about what do I write down to see if I get my bonus or not. Right? It actually can tell if you're growing over time or if exactly achieving things.

What's interesting is you're hitting on something super interesting. Because many of our customers, they still want of course, the annual performance review. But here's what we do. We make it so simple. When you go and you click on that button that says show me the annual performance of somebody on the team, we take all the weekly check ins and we use AI to highlight the key accomplishment. Because how many times have you done it? I've done it so many times in my career where I'm like, oh, it's time for my annual performance review. What do I do? And then you sit down, you rack your brain, you go through your calendar, you go through all your PowerPoint decks and Excel files and whatever to see what you actually accomplished. This here we just make it super easy for you. Like basically with a click of a button you can see, oh, here are all the highlights from your year. And then you can just send it on to your manager. Of course you can modify it however you want, but it's, it's still, oftentimes most people, honestly, the individual hates the annual performance review, the manager hates the annual performance. For you, it's not a joy for anybody. How can we make that a little bit less onerous? I know if there's still a value for it somehow could you get like a record? But if you also ask the current generation. So I did this on my LinkedIn. I have enough, I think, followers that it's statistically viable, maybe not completely scientifically viable, but enough to give you direction. I asked how often would you like to have performance insights about you from your manager? Weekly, monthly, quarterly or yearly. And most people by far say weekly or monthly. Nobody said really quarterly or yearly. So this Notion of a yearly performance view is also super antiquated. It's not how the current generation want think. What if there's something I'm not doing right, fucking tell me so I can go fix it.

Yeah, course. Correct in real time.

Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. I would want to know.

Yeah. With this stuff that we're talking about, like I said, it's something that's kind of been entrenched. Like performance reviews have been entrenched for a while. Learning management's been out there for a while. How did you go back and start to think about what would delight our customers? Like what was your process for trying to figure out that these check ins were going to be the thing that helps you?

Well, it's because. So we had this thinking around, we have to evolve from employees, people, human resources being something that is about managing people, which is really what it's been about to really have something about to be much more on how do you empower people to be the best that they can be? I think any manager or any leader worth their weight really thinks constantly about how do I empower my people to have the right skills, resources and knowledge to be successful every day. It's not my job to be the best at everything. It's my job to provide an environment where they can be the best. And I think so often HR gets conflated to be something that's really taking care of the kind of the basic needs of people, making sure they get paid on time, they take their vacation, they take their compliance training and all this kind of stuff. And that's not going away. It's been around for a long time, it's not going to go away anytime soon. But it's certainly not enough to provide an environment where people do the best work of their life or where they're happy and motivated and successful. And so we ultimately, before I joined the company, I had lots of discussions with our CEO about, you know, I don't want to join a learning management company. Honestly. I want to join a company that really stands for human empowerment about how do we get the best out of people. I can get a little philosophical. But a company, all a company really is is a collection of people trying to solve challenges together. Sometimes those challenges are really small, like on a daily basis. And sometimes a really big existential challenge is competitors are coming into the market, there's turbulence in the market, whatever, it could be a global pandemic and so on. But all a company is is a group of people coming together to solve challenges. And if you Want to solve the challenges the best way you got to provide an environment for those people to do the best work of their lives, giving them the knowledge and skills and motivation to be successful. And so many companies are so bad at this, they're really, really terrible at it. They ended up thinking that just because we pay people, they will show up to do the best work of their life. That's just not true. Those 70% of people who are deeply unhappy in their work, are they showing up every day doing the best work of their life? I doubt it. So that's on a micro scale, the company scale, but then if you extract it out at the global scale, societal scale, if you want to solve some of these big challenges that we have in the world, whether that's climate change or inequality or whatever it is, we need every single person, I think, on the planet to be able to show up every day and kind of give it their all, the best ideas possible, the most energy, the most excitement towards solving some of these challenges that we have. And so I think it's so important that we unlock this and we have to. And I'm not naive enough to think that technology alone will do this. It's about culture, it's about leadership, it's about the right environment. But at some point, Melissa, you also have to have the right tools to foster this kind of thinking. And that's where we come in. As a company sensei, I want to be one of those platforms that people can rely on to get a little bit better, a little bit more motivated, a little bit more in line with the company mission every single day. So you can do great work. But I know it's going to be a lot of things, but that's kind of the mission that I'm on because I really do think that we are faced with a lot of challenges. I mean, I'm an eternal optimist. I'm always hyper positive. But I also think that I want to leave the world a better place than where I was from it. And we need everybody then to show up and do really awesome things in the world and be motivated to do so. And I want to be able to catalyst in that direction.

It's such a good, inspiring vision too. When you think about, you know, setting these visions and leading teams around product management and marketing, how has your past experience here and in, you know, other companies, Salesforce, LinkedIn, all these places, how has it helped you shape how you think about building product teams? Like what are, what are the building blocks you need to make sure you're going to be successful.

I mean, there's a couple of different things. Number one, for me, everything starts with clarity around what is you're trying to achieve. And that's that clarity. Clarity can be a lot of different things. It's clarity in the overall mission of the company, it's clarity in the product that you're trying to build, and it's clarity in the milestones that the team have to build towards. I think that the main thing is providing clarity around those different things, but then giving teams the freedom to figure out how to get there. I mean, it's like, it's not like you don't tell smart people exactly how to do their job. It doesn't make any sense. People are smart enough to figure that out, but they oftentimes need a direction to go towards. And I think the job as a leader. What I've learned is the best leaders I've worked for have been super great at providing inspiring and motivating vision for me to work towards. And then I'll figure out how to get there and execute on that and provide even maybe something beyond what they expected. But it really starts with clarity around what are we trying to be? Who do we want to become one day and what do we not want to become? Or who do we not want to be? Because those are equally good, good questions. And once you have that, then you just kind of set the team free. So that's number one. It's like clarity to me is everything. And I've noticed this trend oftentimes that people, they really thrive in clarity and hyper clarity. They even sometimes actually thrive when the clarity is super bad because then they can go and solve for it. The worst is when there's like non clarity uncertainty. That's like, like what do we do? Who's responsible for what? So. So as a leader, it's your job to really kind of get to that point of clarity. I think very quickly. Number two is then assembling a super diverse team around solving this. Because in my experience, people are so much better. Outcomes are so much better when you have the right kind of mental models, the right skill sets coming together. And there's a lot of different ways of assembling great teams where it's really around assembling a diverse set of skills and diverse set of backgrounds in order to solve this, depending on what it is. Because I can't think of many things in a company that's solved just by individuals. Most big projects are usually solved by teams coming together. And as a leader My job is to assemble the right ingredients for that to happen and then provide the right frameworks and guidelines in order for that team to thrive. But giving them then the freedom and focus within a certain framework to do so. It can't be too loose, but it can't be too restrictive either. It's kind of like a fine balance, depending on what it is. And of course, I'm sure you've seen in your life and career, some projects are super well defined. We know exactly, we just need the team to kind of go figure out how to execute. And some, some are like a little like vague, you know, it's like, for example, we want to become this ish platform in five years. I don't really know how we're going to do that. We're going to build, buy, partner with. What are we going to build? When are we going to build? Like, those are like. But anyway, but it's. To me, the second step is really around assembling just a great team around something. I mean, I'm hyper and I'm obsessed with. I write about this a lot on my LinkedIn as well. Just the power of great teams coming together. I am 100% been successful in my life because of the teams I've assembled and I've failed every time. I've not been able to kind of assemble the right team or motivate the team in the direction that I want to because it may be political or toxic behavior or something. So it's something I try to be very mindful of, kind of stamping out. But, but team dynamics is everything. I spend a lot of time on team dynamics and I spend a lot of time also on individual motivation, trying to understand what a person really wants out of this journey that they're on. Because unless you understand that, it's very hard to motivate a people to a person towards that, that, that goal. And sometimes a person wants more money, sometimes they want a bigger title, sometimes they want to learn a new skill, sometimes they just want to be proud of the work they're doing. There's a gazillion different ways to motivate people. But unless you understand that you just treat everybody the same, I think you're going to miss a trick or two in terms of guiding people towards better outcome. And then I think number number three is really around accountability as a leader, figuring out how do you hold the team accountable to progress towards that. And sometimes you know that on the individual level, sometimes it's on the team level, sometimes it's daily Sometimes it's weekly, sometimes it's monthly, depending on the s of the project you're working on. But I think there's also been a trend where it's hard sometimes for managers to hold people accountable because they feel like they're being too aggressive or too confrontational. I think there's just a way of learning how to have a fun motivating environment but also be accountable for results. But that also comes from actually being clear on what the results you want them to be and how you're going to reward the outcomes of those results if you get there, like what are you going to do if you reach this goal? What's going to be in it for the team or the individual and so on. And if you're not clear, then it's very hard to know. I mean, there's been many times in my career, honestly I've worked really hard on something, but I wasn't really sure of the outcome of what I was doing. How was I going to be held accountable? I released this feature or this thing to market and then I just move on to the next thing. There's no accountability. And I think nowadays when I talk to again CEOs and, and kind of business leaders, they all want to know like, how do I hold, how do I create high performing teams that are accountable for results? So you have to figure out how to do that in the best way for you.

What's your secret sauce for saying this is how I figure out how to motivate my team. What are you doing? How are you checking in with them? And then what is that translating to in the way that you communicate with them during the weeks?

Yeah, I try to be there for them nonstop and I try to, to be available to answer questions and guide them in the right direction, especially in the beginning of big projects. But then I try to kind of get out of the way. I don't micromanage in any way. I think it's super demotivating when you have micromanagers or you micromanage people. I think you're basically implying that people are not smart enough to figure it out for themselves. And I think that doesn't motivate anybody. But my style is very much try to inspire and provide kind of the guidelines and frameworks for where we need to go, but let people figure it out themselves. But have lots of conversations both with the team and the individuals to make sure that progress happens. And so not being afraid to ask. Okay, so, but this is also where again, coming back to the platform, I Mentioned earlier, when you have that insight every single week, then the conversation becomes so much more natural because instead of me going into a meeting with that, you know, with Linda being like, linda, what's the status on this thing? I know because I saw in her update, you know, what's working and what's not working. So I can come in and say, hey, I saw we weren't making progress here. How can I help you? What is it that you're not getting from me? Or what is it that that's stopping you? Is it some team member? Is it not enough resources? Is it, Are you not clear on the goal? What this is? The conversation is a hundred times better because I instantly know how I can lean in versus me coming into a meeting blind and being like, like, tell me the status. And then I figure out that things aren't going well. And you kind of. We've all been in those meetings where then the magic blows up and like, and it's just not motivating for anybody. It's horrible. So that, that's never been my style. And now with the, this kind of platform, I'm much more aligned with actually what the team needs before they even before, before they even have to ask.

When you think about giving the teams just the right amount of direction so that you can let them go figure it out and you're not micromanaging, what does that look like? How do you know you gave sufficient direction and they can get what they need done?

I think usually to me it happens when we do kind of a first review of something when they come back and they say here a week later, a month later, whatever it is, and say, here's the plan and here's maybe some early mockups of something. Maybe it's something in FIGMA that they're showing me, or maybe it's just a plan or whatever it is. It could be a lot of things. That's usually when you start course correcting, I think, and seeing whether or not you're on the right track or something. For example, we at Sensei, we have a learning product and it's really meant for corporate learning. We don't do the content, we just sell the platform for learning. One of the things our customers have been asking for a lot is that they want to offer learning for their frontline workers, meaning workers who are not sitting in front of a desk all day, but who might be in a retail store or in a fast food chain on a factory floor or a nurse somewhere. Right. And so customers have been asking for it because so many of our customers, they have these kind of users, but they're not, they're sitting on a mobile device. That's all they have in their pocket, maybe a tablet. And I said to team, so we need to solve this because our customers are asking for it and it's obviously a huge market opportunity for us. But the requirements of those workers, we can't just take our core platform and extend it out into kind of the mobile device and give them a different kind of license, maybe because they're infrequent users. We have to treat this more like a consumer product because these users are not as savvy, maybe, and they're not on a device all day because they're maybe dealing with customers in a retail store or something. So we have to take much more of a consumer mindset to this. Even though we sell a B2B product, let's take a consumer mindset to this and make it super. Like all the stuff that we see in the normal mobile app that we had, that kind of gives you a lot of options and all this kind of stuff to do, let's get rid of that. So it becomes so simple. The moment a, a frontline worker logs into the, the, the training platform on their mobile device. There's just one thing they can do. Kind of like Instagram really or TikTok or something. Like I said, I want that level of simplicity. And so that's, you know, they came back first, right? And the reason I say is because the first version they came back with the team was way too complicated, like way too many buttons and like too much of a version of like the corporate platform. Like, like, is this really right for a frontline worker? And then they came back with an. We, we had a lot of like, iterations on this after like the first figma review and they ended up reiterating again and again and finally getting to something. But it really came like first in the first review that we had. I think it was probably a month, month and a half into our going down the route of this project where we really kind of course corrected where, where we aligned, right? And it wasn't that it was a totally positive meeting, but they came back with something and then I gave the feedback and of course did some research around this and so on and kind of aligned on that as well. But that's how it's very quickly, very collaborative process. But it also mean I could have probably been more clear maybe from the start myself and saying this is all about having a consumer like experience that first came really to light when they started showing the first version of this. I'm like, this is just too clunky for what we're really trying to do. And now they've delivered something that's awesome, beautiful, simple, and so on. But that's why I said clarity number first. Right. And then you give them the freedom to kind of like go. If it had been. If I'd been a little bit more clear, maybe from the beginning, maybe we would have saved a couple of weeks of development work on this. But that's how it goes, I think too.

Like, you don't really know until people try it out. Right. Like it's like a test. You give them direction. Oh, that didn't work. Let's course. Correct. But the fact that you can actually check in, especially with their direction and the products like you're building or your weekly meetings, I think that's a good way to think about how do I come back and course correct.

Yeah, I mean, I learned so much from my salesforce days when we did the whole chatter thing that we talked about. Or box, which was a great example of a freemium product kind of. Or matterport. This whole notion of that's a very complicated product trying to get. And I really have just this mindset of for freemium or for end users, it just has to be so simple because I download a ton of apps on my own phone and there's so many of them I never use more than once because they're way too complicated. And I just think, like, if we want this to be a delightful, joyful, surprising experience, make it drop that simple. Even the whole thing. I said our engagement platform where we ask four questions. I would venture to say that that's not the right format for a mobile device or a frontline worker either. It should be like, how you doing this week? Thumbs up or thumbs down? That's probably the level of like insight, you know? And is there anybody you want to high five? Maybe there's a drop down list of people you want to give a kudos to versus writing out a long sentence of hey, Melissa did great this week. She did a great podcast interview on a high fiverr. You just got to rethink the whole experience based on kind of the modality of how you deliver this to people.

I think that's really good advice for product people out there listening to this. Thanks so much, Robin, for being on the podcast. If people want to learn more about you, where can they go?

Well, the best place to find me is definitely LinkedIn Robin Daniels. I'm the Chief Business Officer over at Sensei. I think you'll probably find me pretty easily. That's the best place by far.

Okay, great. And we will put those links on our show notes@productthinkingpodcast.com thanks so much for listening to the Product Thinking podcast. Be back next Wednesday with another fabulous guest. And in the meantime, if you have questions for me, go to dear melissa.com and let me know what they are. See you next time.