Lauren Creedon === [00:00:00] Lauren: I call this whole framework GM playbook for product managers because it forces you to think about the operating plan. The earlier you can think like a GM, think about those market segments, think about how you can position those customer facing teams. To have a differentiated message and to win then you're going to be a revenue driven product manager. Jeff: Welcome to LaunchPod, the show from LogRocket, where we sit down with top product and digital leaders. Today, we're talking with Lauren VP of product at Goldcast, who formerly led product at Huddle and Drift. In this episode, we talk about how to be a PM who thinks like a GM, her 1. 5. 50 product launch process, going from Friendly Alpha to Open Beta, the real life lesson of what happens when you launch a product that no one's ready to sell or buy. So here's our conversation with Lauren Creedon. Jeff: Hey, Lauren, good to have you on the show. Thanks for joining today. Lauren: Thanks so much. Good to be here, Jeff. This is like a conversation I'd have with my marketing counterpart. I love it. Jeff: Exactly. We try and make it as [00:01:00] easy going as we can. But also, I feel like you and I have talked on LinkedIn a bunch. I've met most of the executive team over there just because Boston is not that big of a town, it turns out, but glad we can finally connect and like talk product a little bit. I'm looking forward to this. Lauren: Yeah, we should have done it in person. How about Jeff: I know, right next time we'll do it in person. And I'll bring a couple of cups of coffee. Cause I think you, you mentioned right before this, you were between coffee and tea, I think 99 percent of the time I'm going coffee on that one. Lauren: I can't have coffee after a certain time of day. Um, But if this were in the morning, I'm with you. Jeff: that's fair. I think we talked earlier about, you've basically had three eras in your career, I guess, in this third era, we can also call it \ the less coffee era, but, uh, Back when you had founder mode and, as everyone knows I like to joke about you indelibly got the founder mode dust on you that you now bring everywhere. You had your growth stage and now you're back to early stage startups. And I don't know, maybe you [00:02:00] need coffee again. But you guys are doing great over at Goldcast. I guess whatever you're doing, keep doing it, Lauren: thank you. Yeah, we've all been through our highly caffeinated and then no caffeine era. But when you have that founder dust on you, you always make your way back to the caffeine era. So, Yeah, as you said, I have experience In startups, the first five years of my career were in startups that actually failed really didn't even make money. And that's where I learned a lot about resilience, a lot about wearing many hats. And then, as you mentioned, moved to a growth stage era, growing huddle from 50 to 200 million ARR, growing drift to that billion dollar valuation. And now I'm bringing that founder dust back to GoldCast, back to early stage. We've taken ourselves From the ground up to 10 million and going to scale it again from here. Jeff: Love to hear it. . I think, a few companies in there, people might have heard of drift. I think one or two people have probably used and heard of, and that was a fun, another fun Boston story there. That came out and just, huge success. Lauren: Yeah, I love the A. I. T. M. A. Drift and I've actually across three of these companies. [00:03:00] Now I've taken a I products from conception to scale also sat in both go to market and product roles. It's been a really unique experience across a couple different markets. A couple different eras of A. I. Even Jeff: yeah, as well as fun ones where. It just is so prevalent. I think I saw a toothbrush that said it used a, my, my washer has AI. It tells me for some reason, which I don't know why in the world I have, but it's just so much everywhere. And just in so many kind of like AI washed ways, it's always nice to be able to talk about, actual practical applications. I've seen some of the stuff you guys are doing over at Goldcast. And that definitely falls squarely into the like real use cases of AI. So it's always exciting to see that. Lauren: We are in the era where AI sells. So some people take that to the extreme with those marketing messages. But one of my hot takes in three eras of working in AI now is always that it's not the best. Or the most evolved tech that will win. It's not, It shouldn't be technology looking for a problem to solve.[00:04:00] It is back to basics a little bit with really understanding the range of potential solutions for problems. Sometimes good old fashioned automation or workflow automation will work just as well. And the more we can democratize. What AI is solving and which specific problems it's best suited to solve. The better go to market and product teams can help, the business and customers make decisions about where AI is best suited to be part of the product roadmap. Jeff: So I think you have this kind of focus on revenue. It's about telling market stories. It's about, like you said, it's about the solution and the problem. It's versus kind of the shoehorning keywords. And I've gotten to really appreciate people who can do the basics really well and. Not get distracted by all the bells and whistles and shiny stuff. That's available to us is just do the core thing. How do you make a product that makes money and drives your business forward? And that's the problem we're here to solve, by solving real human problems. But you actually have a thesis around this. You've taken away from, all your experience of founding, your own startup all the way up [00:05:00] to, drift to a billion dollar company and back to Goldcast pay around again. Can you walk us through that a little bit? Lauren: Yeah, absolutely. We're all here trying to learn our craft and do product better. But what it comes down to is the human story and the numbers that give offer some quantitative data to backup that we're providing that value at scale. So numbers and stories and revenue outcomes are the numbers that matter. And your customer case studies are the stories that matter. And when you think about it, revenue really is the best weeding indicator and lagging indicator. Of that customer value people pay for things that they're getting true value from and that's why the best investors look for revenue outcomes to help Give a higher valuation or help you raise the next round. And why as product leaders, we do have to be thinking about revenue. And that does mean linking up with sales and marketing and go to market teams and customer success teams to help hit those outcomes. And when you're thinking about revenue and understanding that is the only [00:06:00] number that matters. And you think about the customer stories too, because those case studies that you can deliver to those go to market teams are the things that help. Make that revenue more repeatable. So it's really, it's a whole system designed to help you hit numbers and stories, the playbook I teach helping founders and their leadership teams pick the revenue numbers that matter, the customer stories that matter, and then de risk working backwards from the seasonal operating cadence of. Hitting those stories in time to enable teams to go in and hit that outcome during a purchasing cycle or usage cycle. So that's a little bit about the thesis and playbook I use, but it applies to any stage, whether you're early stage, trying to raise your first round or growth stage, trying to take it to an exit. Jeff: Yeah. I think that's such an important point is, and even to boil it down between those two, right? Like customer stories and prospect stories are just so vital to how this all works. I can't even begin to explain how many times I, we had a thought of how we're going to [00:07:00] message something we put out at LogRocker, a new feature, a new capability or how we're going to position something and we went out and luckily we, everyone up to Matt, our founder down to our product team and the marketing org, we all share this push similar. I think it sounds like to what you've talked about. It's like, go actually talk to people. What are the problems they're having? How do they frame it? And I think we've definitely saved ourselves from a few I won't say catastrophes, but probably suboptimal outcomes because we looked at. How do people talk about this? What's the value they're actually getting? Let's focus and double down on those things. And it's allowed, I think a lot better outcomes, but again, because we look at revenue and what a customers care about but you actually have some kind of like. Specifics around how you look at like the operating plan and driving that go to market seasonality or driving that play. Lauren: Yeah, I do. I'm happy to get into the nuts and bolts of it, but first I wanna, I think about a picture that's coming to mind when you're talking about the numbers that matter. I want us to all picture a slide for a second, and I wanna think about the slides that pop, or the stories that pop. They [00:08:00] usually either have a big 72 point font number on them. or somebody's face. And that's when I'm saying numbers and stories, it sounds like, I'm getting into the nitpicky, but as humans, those numbers pop and the faces, right? Like we're thinking about , whose face can we put on a slide that we can arm an account executive who like just worked their ass off to get some meeting. , work their butt off to get some meeting with a prospect and they're sitting there and that prospect just wants to know who else has experienced value from this, that face, the big number of what that outcome has been for them. And that same thing applies no matter what your audience is. It applies for prospect, but also applies for investors. They want to see who like put a face to the name of what value. And what story and what pain point and how are they measuring success? So if you can do that and enable your team to do that, then you're picturing that outcomes improving through the whole funnel. So when I talk about learning the operating [00:09:00] plan and the go to market seasonality, it really is all working backward from that slide. How do you get a slide with a customer's face on it and numbers of what they achieved? Early enough so that in the season where you're trying to collect revenue on that product, you've already run a beta, you've already had people getting value from that product, and then you can enable your marketing team with the material to go out with a campaign ahead of when sales quotas are due. And so in that sense, it's like product has to be thinking about the markets. That we need to be selling into early enough to understand usage, seasonality, budgeting, seasonality, marketing campaigns, seasonality, so that we can run betas early enough to get you that slide with that customer face and that number on it. Then the end of the year, you'll have the slides with the revenue numbers on it based on how much momentum you can fuel from your sales team. Jeff: Then you have that nice slide with all the sales reps and all their names are highlighted in green and [00:10:00] everyone's happy from the board down to all the players in the product team and all the go to Lauren: then, and then you have your podcast bio intro one day about how the company went from X to Y million in revenue, right? It's just stacks year on year. Jeff: I guess that's the thing, right? If you think about, I love that framework though of, how do you reduce it to the most simple? outcome that defines success, right? And yes, revenue is a great one, but at some level you can say okay, we want this product to do, I don't know, 20, 30, a hundred million, whatever depends on the size of your company, right? But if you don't you're looking so much farther past the launch at that point, but for the launch, it's, to get ready, we want to have that slide ready. What do we do to have the slide ready? I love the simplicity of it the same way. I think amazon talks about they write the press release first because you have to distill down the story. I think this is a new framework here. I think there's a book deal somewhere in here, Lauren of preparing for the slide or something. Lauren: I call this whole framework like the [00:11:00] GM playbook for product managers because it's really taking more of a general manager mindset to the role of being a PM. Because it forces you to think about the operating plan. Think about what market segments. You need to go secure. Think about who has quotas to sell into those market segments. If you talk to them about what's hardest about moving opportunities through the funnel, if there's ever a top of funnel metric that can't convert through that. Lead conversion stage from lead to opportunity or even qualified or target account to opportunity or opportunity to close one. It's usually a value thing. It's usually a positioning thing or, that could be pricing thing, but that's all that all comes back to the ultimate product value and differentiation. The earlier you can think like a GM, think about those market segments, think about how you can position those customer facing teams. To have a differentiated message and to win then you're going to be a revenue driven product manager. [00:12:00] Yeah. Jeff: going to be able to drive a hundred customers to do that or a thousand customers to get value if you can't have one who can tell you a specific thing they got out of it? So also just a good gut check of like, did we build the right thing before you go do the whole launch? Lauren: It also forces you to start thinking in really thin slices as a product manager, because I'm not talking about knowing a year in advance what you're going to build, and then working a whole year on something up until that launch. I'm talking about working in a fast paced startup environment where you might Understand that operating plan, a couple quarters before you're planning the next year, or you might have to force the conversation. Even they might be the leadership might be, I should say, I say they leadership, like [00:13:00] whether you're in leadership or in middle management or I see your team is coming up with the operating plan, usually somewhere in H two, some locking it in somewhere in Q four. And I've seen the what happens if product. Yeah. Is not aligned with that operating plan by the time the fiscal year kicks off because it's locked in. If you have time to influence that. What I mean by shipping in thinner slices is if you even have a quarter before some of these outcomes need to hit. You can think about the thinnest slice it might take to get something into a proof of concept, or an alpha, or a beta, and get those friendly five customers in there using it. And you might be able to land that slide. In under a quarter if you really get people influencing that and then, willing to work with you on that early product. So I'm not talking about way lengthening these product development cycles. I'm talking about being really wise about getting those customers on the phone with you, getting them actively participating in building the product and identifying the [00:14:00] thinnest possible slice. You could take it high quality into somebody's workflow rather than building out things they don't need. Jeff: You don't need 20, 30 beta customers here. It's a couple, if you're doing it right, can get it done for you. Lauren: Yeah, I like to call it the 1 5 50 model. So the way I think about beta is depending on whether your product is going to a tier one launch or not. But in the cases that it is, you need the 1 5 50 model. Sometimes you can take something straight to general availability. You've tested it internally. It works. You've tested it with a couple customers, but the 1 5 50 model helps you test something that's going to get. Really beat up when you take it to market. So the one stands for your internal customers never skip this step. You can take a proof of concept to your internal team users in a really scrappy kind of way within a couple days within a week within a sprint you can learn about solution alternatives by developing a couple POCs and testing the technical feasibility of something Your five stands for your friendly five. You might [00:15:00] have, it's essentially the capped beta phase or as many customers as you can manage in a manually tracked beta where you're handholding a little bit or measuring or getting on calls. In this stage , you want real customer data flowing through a product. So a little bit more than an alpha or a POC, maybe your first value increment or end to end workflow you could ship. But what you'll be surprised to find in this phase is that customers will tell you they don't need much more than that, or they might point you to different. Functionality that , you didn't account for between beta and GA. And so why I think that's really important is so often we bloat initial product requirements based on our assumptions of what we think will make a product complete. But when you get real customers using it, you'll find that out and. Stress test that. So that can be one, five 10, 15, 20. Once you start getting past that it's time for a scaled beta or an open beta. And this is when you test your support documentation, your go to market messaging, your sales [00:16:00] enablement. At this point, , it's an optional phase before you take something to GA, but I highly recommend it to make sure you have that whole customer journey. Part of the equation and the release plan figured out because customer success using that product or adopting the product in the first place is so much more than , the product experience itself. So with that 50 stage, you get to test at scale and learn more about that. Go to market messaging. Jeff: Yeah. And it's so important to hit on those because if you jump right into the 50, you're going to probably uncover some gnarly things with a wider swath of your customers than you, then you would really like to. But everyone has, if you don't have the five friendlies who can, maybe see how the sausage is made once in a while you got bigger issues than beta releasing this product. Um, Lauren: This is why I said you could do it in a quarter is month one can be, one customer feasibility testing, getting ready for your friendly five month two is figuring out with your friendly five, what else you might need to build. And month three is stress testing it in an open [00:17:00] beta potentially. And then in the next quarter, you're taking something GA with everyone enabled ready to sell with those case studies. Jeff: yeah, exactly. The right, the person won the one there. You can just like manual it. We've had people talk about they were secretly behind a curtain manually entering data because that's just about are we building the right thing? But I love the kind of focus on getting it right, but also a really practical way of doing it quickly. And I'm gonna be honest here. I'm gonna, ask the uncomfortable question, but I've usually found that When someone has this tight of an operating procedure and like something that really hits on just the core threads and just really seems to dive in and be this kind of able to accomplish and get things done. It usually doesn't come because everything went really smooth on the way up. You usually have the bruises and , the scars to prove that you know what you're talking about when you come in and, bring in operating principles like this. I would wager you're no different. Can we talk about some of that? Like you just have this such a [00:18:00] tight focus on go to market compared to a lot of product people. What's the foundation for that? What, what happened that drove this like great insight? Lauren: Thanks. One of the biggest insights has come from, or. The biggest pain has come when the operating plan or some assumptions in the operating plan are not aligned with what we hold dear in product or what our roadmap anticipated. And so at huddle we sold to sports teams we serve sports teams we helped sports teams from the EPL to the NBA to 99 percent of high school football teams. Analyze their video and capture video. And in that company, when a certain sport was under product development, say a new sport, like we, we went into the club basketball market because some of our PMs had mapped out what a big market opportunity there was there and we developed some product enhancements. We spent hours, like I went to AAU games with an iPad and learned the players names and captured, like I was at [00:19:00] the sidelines. I was like. There are NBA players today that I saw playing at AAU games because I was there and I was like, in the culture, I was learning and we built this product. And then I was sitting down next to the VP of sales being like, okay time to make some money. And he goes nobody has club basketball in their quota for this year. Jeff: Ah! Lauren: You know, And I'm like, wait Jeff: the product. Lauren: where did we miss this? How would you mean? And no one was sold on the revenue opportunity yet. Why would you give someone a quota? But then if it's not in your quota and you're not going to sell it. And so that was. where I realized, Oh, this starts way earlier than me going out and doing product research. Jeff: Yeah. And that's where, you can wind up either building something great that doesn't go anywhere, or, maybe it's a great functionality, but like you said, if the revenue opportunity isn't there, why'd you just spent engineering time on it. Yeah. Lauren: And the revenue opportunity was, you have to work hand in hand. So in the flip side, it's usually more urgent in reverse when there's something in quota, [00:20:00] not in roadmap. So, you know, At drift, there were new verticals in the quota at one point when our whole product org looked at it in Q4 and realized like. Do we have the product functionality to go into financial or healthcare? That's a whole different set of product requirements you might hire up a go to market team and give them that market. There's a delicate balance there Same with gold cast we had a big expansion number this past year and we thought we could finagle our pricing and packaging To hit that expansion number, but we didn't really have expansion products to sell so there's been a big push for net retention to Think about adjacent products that we could get into that are part of that video workflow. We've also done a complete pivot to, to Product led with a free trial product because of market dynamics. So you got to be really In tune with where that operating urgency to hit a particular number is coming from and what are the potential levers? product might have to help with and product so many things can be done with creative go to market [00:21:00] and sales plans, but when something depends on product for unlocking a new market segment and adjacent or expansion product or entering a new vertical, you do need to be working hand in hand to de risk that. Jeff: Yeah. So for the folks who are coming through and either saying like a, Oh no, I know to look out for that now. Like I think I'm walking into that or be, that makes a lot of sense. What's the next step? How do you build the right. Operating culture where, is it just to talk to your CRO a lot, talk to, the market or how do you build a structured way to make sure that all this is happening? Lauren: There's a couple plays from this GM playbook I speak about. The first is really understanding the market map. You can do this and if your company doesn't already have this culture, you can. Try to do this within the product org or go across the aisle. And yes, it with the Sierra. So with the sales team really understand your market map and that starts with the market markets you're in, but really the segments of that market to who's your ICP, you know this, there's typically some. [00:22:00] SMB segment, a mid market segment in an enterprise or a, high value customer, even at a company like huddle, you had your club or youth teams for that SMB, you had your high school and college teams in that mid market, and then you have your professional teams in the enterprise. So there's always some sort of a market map like that, where you have to understand how much of that market is serviceable with your current set of products, what the average contract value is within those markets. How, it's. It's surprising how much more revenue you can drive by serving up market, no matter what your construct is. And so if you really understand how to unlock more value within those markets or higher price points. You drive a lot of revenue opportunity for the business and customer value. Then the next step is understanding the seasonality of your market. So by seasonality, there's two types of seasonality that really matter to work backward from for both your customers and your counterparts, like in marketing. One is budgeting seasonality and the other is usage seasonality. So I always love coming back to Huddle because there's clear seasons to something like sports. If you didn't have a [00:23:00] product ready for the first football game of football season, Oftentimes in the South, that's in August, like they weren't using your product. But then we learned as we started selling to higher budget owners, the athletic director instead of the football coach, they were setting budgets in the spring. So if you didn't have in lockstep your campaign, your marketing campaign. Targeting those athletic directors in the spring, then you missed it. And so this is relatable with Martech products as well, or anything in the tech or software space that there's budgeting seasons. You know, you're, , we're doing it in this very conversation, referencing how budgets get set in the operating plan in Q4. So if you can hit people when those, with a campaign, when those budgets get unlocked in Q1 often the spring and fall, if you think about event season, That's when there's a tension in the market. There's a lulls in the summer and winter and holiday season. So you've got to understand the seasonal timeline to tell a good story to that market. And then your seasonal timeline of usage when people might be using your products. If you do have a seasonal business, work backward from [00:24:00] that to pick the right thing to release when, and then get that beta scheduled with that to provide that enablement case study in time to, tell a good story to the market. Jeff: It makes sense. You try and go and try and sell anything to an e commerce company right now. And good luck to you. Cause they're all on, they're all on freeze right now. They're not risking anything. They've got their stuff locked. They're set. You go in and end of Q1 and you're gonna have a good time and go look at when they're doing their budgets. God, that reminds me I have to do my budget still. , but beyond that there's an element of measuring the right thing, it seems to be as well. That's really important here, right? Like how do you ensure that. Not just , you're giving the right quota, the right people you've planned with your CRO that this is launching. So we have to make sure a quota, it takes this new account in each to how are you looking at are we actually moving the needle forward for the company? Are we doing the right things that are going to benefit the customer and move the needle forward? And I think that's an element of this too, right? It's not just seasonality. It's not just that kind of operating plan, but it's, how do you do the right things or how do you goal the [00:25:00] right way? It seems like there's probably some lessons we can learn from you here, too. Lauren: Absolutely. And this advice is not just for leaders. It's for any stage of your career. I encourage you to measure bigger outcomes. Really think about outcomes, revenue outcomes that you might think someone else is on the line for but to take an extreme ownership mindset and see how you could influence that outcome. And I say this to younger professionals too, or product crafts people too, because so often we get myopic about a metric that we think matters in our particular product surface area. I'm not saying it doesn't matter, I'm just saying if that's the only thing you're measuring and you're moving the needle on it, there might be and then you have a whole business behind you who does not see as much value from moving that, or a whole set of customers who doesn't. So I encourage you to measure bigger outcomes and specifically to do that, you have to not be shy or afraid [00:26:00] of learning that you are off pace. Because if you're going to measure something bigger, you are going to fail. But if you measure it and you can see where you're off pace, that is the best Number one way to go actually figure out what you might be able to do about it. A lesson around this comes from when I led the AI team at drift drift took a big swing before the age of GPT and native AI by acquiring a company that built their own proprietary. Contextual understanding models for all the chats that would come in on across their customer base. And so across 75 billion messages, they knew how to identify what customers asked on websites and how to respond. But. When I joined the team, we were measuring, increasing the quality and accuracy of those AI responses. And we took it from 60 to 75 percent at one point, and we were celebrating, and. Then when we [00:27:00] opened up our Aperture and got mixed results or mixed feedback from the rest of the company, we realized, Oh my God, under 10 percent of our customer base is using this thing. And like under 50 percent of them were happy with it. And we thought, Oh, if we could make more of them happy with it, then more people would use it. But that was myopic because what was really happening was we had built a product that was priced so high and was so cumbersome to use. That it wasn't even giving customers the type of value that they would pay for or that would unlock value for the business. So we ended up flipping it and instead of measuring the quality and accuracy of responses as our primary metric, like that was a leading indicator, it was something, a quality metric, it was something we had to move the needle on. But instead of going every sprint review or company presentation and being like, Look, we improved from 72 to 75 this week which. Is great. We were able to then say a couple quarters later, now [00:28:00] every single drift customer will have access. To hybrid AI conversation playbooks and if they want to pay more, they can have, they can pay for like human in the loop, custom modeling, and those types of things that we were developing to begin with. But we flipped it and the way we flipped it was by having a customer journey team where we had weekly, we met with a representative from sales, from marketing, from customer success, from support, from product, from design. And we sat around the table and We measured the acquisition funnel and the adoption funnel. So not just the quality metrics. That was a leading indicator of renewal, but we measured how many people we were, going to be bringing into the top of this funnel. And when we were off pace to that revenue outcome, we had to ask ourselves. That's why the value wasn't there to begin with. So going back to that thing I said earlier about not being afraid, you have to not be afraid to measure that at the very top of the funnel from qualified lead to opportunity to [00:29:00] close one. If you're off pace, then your entire roadmap might have to change to something more differentiated that you can get in the mix in the sales process. Jeff: A couple of takeaways I just want to highlight from all of this is a, I hope people are listening and taking notes because this is fantastic. But like we had Akash Gupta on who is a, well known person in the product world and has a , big podcast really intelligent guy was led product behind. Apollo IO, Lauren: Yeah, I listened to that episode. I loved his takeaway about tactician, politician, and craftsman. That was great. Yeah. Jeff: but what this lays out here is right. We've seen, like it or not, we've seen a reduction in force on, on a lot of product teams, right? Like it's definitely an area that has seen a lot higher scrutiny than maybe some other areas. But what you're laying out is how do you future proof your career as a product person? It's how do you look at. Coming into a company and making a difference in being unassailably vital to the [00:30:00] success. And , I just took two minutes to say it. You said it like three words, but it's, take a GM mindset. It's look at the go to market, look at all the pieces. It doesn't matter. If you went from seven and a half percent or what, 65 percent accurate answers to 72 percent accurate answers, it's how you driving the business forward. And, I look across a lot of things in marketing. Whenever we onboard someone in the engineering or product side, we do a session with marketing we do is across all functions where everyone gets to learn everything does. And one of the primary things I talk there about is no one in marketing who has bonus. Is bonused on like MQLs or any kind of like BS lead number or something like that, we'll have goals there for sure. The same way you guys had goals around accurate answers, but the point is what's the outcome. So we go people on pipeline generated. We go people on, bonuses are actually paid on revenue. And we're setting MBOs that match up to what's driving that big. Revenue goal. But I think if everyone took that view, um. The product [00:31:00] would, it's a good roadmap to how do you drive an effective propertization. Like you said, whether you're an IC or, the CPO or the VP of product. Lauren: Absolutely. I encourage everyone to think about that slide we were talking about for your own career and thinking about your resume of, even if you plan on staying at your company for years, thinking about the couple bullet points you'd put over that could span a couple of years of your career. What would those couple bullet points be? They will be more eye catching if they include revenue and some customer logos and stories. And so, I encourage even people on my team to think about that throughout my career, interviewing. PMs and hiring PMs and managing PMs. I always encourage you to think about the revenue outcome you're going to hit and map out your promotion and advance tied to those revenue outcomes. And not like I'm holding you to a number, but thinking about what it would take to work backward from bigger rocks as we call them. So often. You might fill the jar [00:32:00] with sand or pebbles first before those big rocks. I don't know if you've ever heard that analogy, but if you put the big rocks in the jar first, then there will be room for medium rocks and sand, which could be your enhancements to your existing products or your tech debt even and you need to have room for those things. But if you pull in the big rocks first, you can de risk those bigger revenue outcomes that will be. Um, and, you know, qualify for management and leadership roles, too. Jeff: I love it. It's the operating guide to thinking like a GM for product. I was not joking when I feel like there's a book there. Lauren: All right. I'll, you get part credit when we publish it. Jeff: I, I'll be there. All right, Lauren, I could go on about this, for a lot longer, but you got to get back to, shipping and ensuring that you guys are hitting those big goals and GoldCast is, using that, funding that you guys raised to keep growing. Appreciate the time. It was great. Catch up with you. We really do got to do this again and hopefully next time we'll do it in person, but thank you so much for joining.[00:33:00] Lauren: Thank you so much, Jeff.