Justin Anovick === Jeff: [00:00:00] All right. Justin, thank you so much for joining us today, man. . You've been at a whole host of companies across your career. I love the sales background, but I gotta be honest. I'm going to start us off on something that has nothing to do with career. The suits. I love them. What's the story and where do you get them? For background, I did a ton of research, watched a ton of your vid. You have a lot of video where you talk. So I watched a lot of that. And in every one of these events Justin has on some great custom blazer or full suit, just company logo all over it and names. Yeah Justin: great to be here. Thanks. Thanks for having me. I started out about 10, 12 years ago, so I think it was 2014 where a couple of buddies and I showed up to a sales one of our sales kickoffs and we were all wearing the same suit. At the time they were Oppo suit brands and they were hard to get. It was in Vegas. So we all had card suits. And then when I moved over to Episerver, I thought, you know what? I could custom brand these. And basically every user conference or [00:01:00] every big event since then I've had various suits. I got them from this place in the UK takes about two and a half months, any custom design. I did one for my son's graduation with his face all over it. He loved it. My daughters would have killed me. But yeah, it's fun. It's funny because. I'm actually like one of the extrovert introvert type so, to me, I'm okay with the attention for a short period, but I think that most of what I do is really about self deprecation and trying not to take things too serious or myself too serious. And I think. Those suits articulate that. Jeff: I was, I'm disappointed you don't have one on, and the most recent one over at Ellucian live, , it was purple. Which I think LogRocket and Ellucian share the color of this. I was really stoked about the, Justin: Yeah, one year. I did a it was customer logos as a pinstripe suit and customers that come up to me and be like, I want to be on that suit next year. And then one guy came up to me and he's I don't want to be where I am this year. And I'm like, what are you talking about? And the company's name was [00:02:00] actually was Asus and it was right on my butt. And I was like, sorry, that was not planned that way. Jeff: That's, upgrade your contract and you can get a better place. Justin: Exactly. Jeff: That's it. Turns out that might be the best demand gen strategy yet. Like you want to be on the Justin: I thought so. Jeff: Yeah, I love it. Let's dive into something a little producty at this point. I read through, a ton of your LinkedIn. I've watched a ton of interviews with you. I find you can tell a lot about someone's strategy and how they look at things. Luckily you're a bit of an open book. There's a post from Melissa Perry and she just put out her book, Product Operations, and you reference you were actually reading the page that she showed an image from. Now, this might be, just be me I feel like I have a bit of a bone to pick with product ops, or the idea of product ops. I feel like I've seen a lot about it. It's been around for years and years at this point. Like the topic I, I still don't have a great grasp on exactly what the role is and like, how is it different from a data analytics team? Cause we, we have a similar team in house that does a lot of what she talks about, but they serve across the company. [00:03:00] How do you view product ops fitting in kind of in across the order within the product org and how does that differ? Justin: Yeah. First of all, I think it's a great book. I was just seeing somebody post over the weekend that they're a CRO and they actually felt it was valuable too, because it talks about a lot of different things like from experimentation to. How you roll out something, how you gauge the metrics. Yeah, the way that they describe it, Melissa Perry and Denise tills business data and insights, market intelligence, and then process and practices. And so as the product guy, , you need to know why you're building something. And so to your point, like if there's sales operations or data and insight, okay, we know. What the Tam Sam, Sam is for instance, but how do you apply that to then make decisions as to which products you build? So how do we know that we want to build an AI data oriented versus something that's workflows versus something that's preventing them from doing their work today? That input really helps. And then the market Intel, of course, like what are your competitors doing? [00:04:00] What are analysts saying? How are things resonating out on the market? And then most importantly, how do you actually put that into process? What's the release process look like? And all of those things, product operations really brings it all together of how you release something and then how you measure the success and the adoption. And I definitely subscribe to the methodology or mentality that go to market. Is not just about what you release in product. And I have been a part of organizations where it's like, Hey, we're just waiting on that thing for product. And then Holy cow, things are going to be the best ever, but it's the relationship to the rest of the organization. What is marketing doing? What is pre sales? What is sales, how to support handle it? What are partners? And so that combination of things is really what applies. And without somebody that's really, rigorously helping you adhere to the process and the practices to align. The data and the market Intel, it's pointless, right? What is the telemetry telling you? We might have the data, but what does it really mean for you as a product manager? What does it [00:05:00] really mean for you as an engineering team? And I feel like the way that they, I mean, it's literally the book that I have, like one of the two books that I have sitting next to me all the time. And it really is about like, how do you coalesce this together to sell more and adopt more? And I think that they have really been able to articulate it and product operations, I think is very relatively new. I do think that most organizations think what you're saying is that it is like, what's the difference with sales operations or data and insights. It's really about how do you. Release something more effectively to sell more and get greater adoption. Jeff: So is it right to think of it as a layer that is coordinating the kickoff maybe, or the launch and how do you measure it? Or like, where does it fit in the product? Maybe can you give an example of where in your past it's fit in and where the handoff is? Because a lot of companies I've been at, a lot of that sounds like something either a product team would own or maybe product marketing would own. And by the way, I want to be clear, nothing against Melissa [00:06:00] or the authors of the book or anything like that. I think, Melissa has super wise in product management in general. It's more, I've just been trying to lock down exactly where product ops fits in general here. Justin: Yeah. So as the product guy having direct ownership of that to be able to help understand the totality. So here's an example. So the input, how do we decide on what we're building? Obvious question. Product operations helps to develop the business case. You can't do a business case for a feature, but you can do a business case for something that's measurable. How do you know that the business case is using the right metrics? Your OKRs, revenue, market Intel, potential win rate, the alignment to the vision of the business is critical. And so that first business case layer of even what you decide to build is really harmonized. By product operations. If you rely on each product manager or groups there's no consistency. And I have had product [00:07:00] organizations where it is just everybody up for themselves, but then it creates this layer of inconsistency and it creates too much subjectivity. At the management level to decide what you build. So product operations first helps to harmonize it. Now we're going through when we're saying, how do we measure Dora metrics and other metrics to ensure that we're, you know, defect rates, throughput all of those things, they're helping to visualize that during that process. Cause let's say it might take six to 12 months to release those new things. How are we ensuring that we're aligning to. Our goals. And if we're not delivering on time or we might be accelerating, then there's a release plan and the release plan, my, like it's hundreds of lines and to have the product managers responsible for that. It just creates this. Lack of harmony across that entire business. So who does sales, who does marketing work with? Who does operations work with, who does support work with and to bring it into product operations to say, this is what we're doing. And then [00:08:00] finally, when you release it, , there's not just a check box, but then there's the measurement of the telemetry and what's happening. And it's really, to me, it's about dashboards. It's about the view. It's about the. Analysis of that data to see if what we're doing is actually accurate. And I have I've asked that same question. Why can't it just be all these different folks? Where it got complicated was when, like optimizely we acquired a business for a CDP, customer data platform, and it needed to integrate into all the other products, CMS, commerce, experimentation. That can't be up to that one product manager because there's different processes across those other teams. And when we had to bring it all together, product operations really had to drive that full view of what was going on. Jeff: That's fair. So is it safe that kind of likely at smaller companies. It's a role fulfilled by probably PMs or maybe product marketing, but as maybe companies grow and you get a larger and larger scale, you need that kind of quarterback role or coordinator Justin: From my experience. Yes. [00:09:00] And multi product. Especially my background where, I've been a part of 20 acquisitions , and it's a, consolidator of sorts to provide a broader platform, it gets complicated to align those processes and adhere and, there's lots of work that has to go on. So yeah, definitely. Bigger companies, more products, more complexity more regions. Just think about Oh, we might have it in the U S but we now need to launch it in Australia. It has to go through the whole thing. And it's not just about the release process. It's about all of those different pieces along the way. Jeff: That's fair. I guess if you have, if that encompasses teams geographically dispersed and like you said, maybe multi product or the wider the set gets, the more work it takes to harness, it goes from smoothly done to herding cats, if you're not careful in that, that you need that person to do that. Justin: Exactly. Jeff: Okay, thank you. That I feel like that's the first time I've really understood where exactly that fits and the real benefit there because I think maybe company size was the linchpin I was missing. But so that's my kind of soapbox occasionally on [00:10:00] product, although it's gone now. But I feel like One of my favorite things about this show is it seems like everyone has their own kind of unpopular or contra to the, wider group wisdom on, on product. Do you have an opinion anywhere about, product that maybe isn't popular right now? Or where do you think people are maybe going 180 degrees wrong? And we're going to see a turnaround. Justin: I have 17. No. Jeff: We're in for a long, all right, guys, it's good. Shows can be only three hours today. Have fun. Buckle up Justin: exactly. So the one that I get the most feedback and creates the most tension is when I say we need to run product like sales run sales. And Jeff: Okay let's do it. Cause I've never heard this one before. I'm stoked. Justin: yeah, I know, you alluded, I think, to I spent my first half of my career in pre sales and pre sales, but mostly pre sales, the visibility the [00:11:00] commitment, the forecasting all of that is what runs the business. And if you are a quarterly run business and you're expecting a deal by the end of the quarter, the last day, and it slips. Usually it's probably slipping 10, 15 days. Usually it very rarely is the next day. More importantly, though, you budgeted for that quarter. The whole business is based off of those bookings expectations, those renewals, and even one or two or three day slips has a compounding effect usually on the business. Not like if you miss one or two deals, but like imagine, , let's say a million dollars in bookings expectation. You miss two deals, that's 500k. You miss by half. That's a pretty significant amount. Even if it was 10 million and you miss by half a million, That's still a lot, and that has a compounding effect on the business that then you need to readjust forecasting or you need to catch up. And at a certain point, you either need to catch up in the business or right, like you have to [00:12:00] reduce the sales headcount or something like that. Conversely, on the product side, the whole conversation about we're either agile or waterfall, and I don't think that's the conversation. It's not just about, hey, we need the flexibility of learning what we need to learn and then release it when we need to release. To me, there always has to be one factor. Either I'm giving you all of the requirements that you need. I'm telling you the date that I need it by for a variety of reasons, a user conference, a deal, something, or I say, here's my minimum viable product. You tell me, let's say there's a conversation between product and engineering. You tell me when I'm going to get it to miss by a week, two weeks, three weeks. What if those were needed in order to close that deal, right? You now have rev rec issues because you didn't release the product, but the lack of visibility into all of these metrics, from my perspective. It makes it very difficult to decide what you're landing on. We're doing [00:13:00] roadmaps three, four or five months out. Let's say, what if we missed by 15 percent in the first quarter and the first half or quarter, what does that mean now for my rest of the roadmap? And so it just becomes this compounding problem. And so like sales run sales is really about the visibility is about the ownership and accountability of releasing things in the time period that you're saying you're going to release. And really, having that visibility is key and believe me, I get so much pushback and, venomous comments about that stuff when I post those feelings on LinkedIn and others. But I feel strongly about it that you can't Go without having visibility. And then if you don't have the visibility, it's just a guessing game. And that's really what I mean by that. Jeff: I absolutely love that. I think that's spot on. So I'm the VP of marketing and we run marketing. I like to say a lot like we like product where we have a confined sprint times. We do a lot of planning on what we're going to accomplish. We'll get a capacity planning. And we work [00:14:00] closely with sales and it helps us work with sales in that front and it helps us hold, product accountable as well, because if we're doing a launch and time planning time for that but I've never heard of thinking about running product in a sales fashion, but that's so incredibly vital as you bring up, how do you possibly do all these other pieces and hold others accountable , if you can't deliver the product on the timeframe you say so that Justin: And here's a good example, right? I'm huge on data, been through lots of ICP exercises where you define, the TAM, SAM, SOM target addressable market and service obtainable market, and the rep win percentage based on vertical versus based on, based on vertical, based on situation plays into it. And what if we start to see in sales that this group or these individuals, these cohorts are selling less for a particular vertical, either we choose to move them to something where they are more successful. Same thing holds true with, developing. What if we constantly see that these teams are missing a certain thing? They don't have the experience in [00:15:00] building out the data pay pipelines or integrations or whatever. We either take that into account in the forecasting and buffer it, or you now have data to say, and this takes 12, 18 months, right? Six quarters takes, I'm good at math. So it takes a while to, to get this right, but then it's not about reprimanding them. It's about having that data to then make a better decision to say, This team, we have to give it to, but they're historically in this genre topic, they're going to miss by 20%. So instead of just pretending that we're going to hit it because of various other factors, let's just plan that into it. And people say they're sandbagging. You can't sandbag if you don't actually know the actual data and you're just using gut. So how do you use some of that data? And that's really to me, the perfect example is. Yeah. We know this group is going to miss in sales. We accommodate for it in the forecast and we reduce it. Why don't we do the same thing in engineering to say they're actually going to accept, not just miss it, but they're going to make it by three X so we can [00:16:00] put, we can count on them more for other things potentially. So it's not always the negative. Jeff: Yeah, it goes, it works both ways, right? Like when you have a rep, consistently over delivers and you go into the quarter and the pipeline is way over what you need. We plan on that and we hold them to that too. So I love it. Run product like sales, run marketing, like product. Now we just got to figure out how to run sales. We got a whole go to market set to go. Justin: That's right. Yes. Yes. Jeff: cool. So on the, on that tip, that's an unpopular opinion you have I guess looking at where we are in product right now, is there anything going on that you just think we're going to look back in, 18 months or five years and just. really go God, we had that wrong. Justin: I, Jeff: I guess that's a tough question, right? Can you see the future? Justin: yeah. Oh, I totally can. Or just the past. Yeah. So I believe in AI. Of course, everybody has to, I do not understand how we're going to get from here to a sustainable, cost effective. [00:17:00] Business driven decision making. Not forget just the cost to run this stuff in these call centers. And I don't know if you've read the CPUs and the cooling and the microchips are heating up, like the data centers are running, it costs more than full cities to run. Okay. So let's say we solve that. But now the barrier to entry, somehow it's going to have to be monetized more effectively. So I know that these are general conversations out there. I think that five years from now is going to be considerably different because I don't know how we monetize it and I don't know how we get to a sustainable situation where it's not going to be literally half of the world's energy to run it. And I think that we're looking at all the benefits as I think we should, but. I feel like I've been through this journey twice before where something new comes in, virtual assistants, all that stuff. I think the second part of it is how do we help answer the question of stealing property and all of that stuff on these large language models. I definitely think that we're going to go to small language models where it's just on the corpus [00:18:00] of the data within that organization. Not only will it reduce the compute power, but it will also reduce the, Potential risk for, getting sued for copying this photo or whatever. I think that, there's so much hype there and all investors and others that I talk about, are you guys going to be a net contributor or benefactor to AI? I think so. But I think it's going to look at how, I don't see how it can't look considerably different five years from now, Jeff: Yeah. it's been interesting, right? Because everything was introduced where this was going to reduce developer time, make them 10x more productive. And it was going to content, near and dear to our heart, content marketers were all going to be out of a job is what we were told. And to date it seems like , I haven't seen developers that are 10x more productive yet. And we still have content folks here. And AI still writes basically trained on, the average of the internet, which is maybe slightly below average writer. But what it has been good at, I feel is. It's good at interpreting huge data sets, right? That's the unlock [00:19:00] we've found is we got it to do that really well. You can have a giant data set and it can help you condense it or understand anomalies or certain patterns or behavioral issues that otherwise right now, that's really the only other, only way to do it other than having a human just sit there and go through it by hand. So that's been handy, but yeah, I know what you mean. We got to figure Justin: but then how do you monetize that? And I wish I saw the stats. So I'm just going to totally make one up, but it sounds right. Like every 25 prompts is like the equivalent of like you driving from Charlotte, North Carolina to California back like there has like, where is that offset? And, innovation comes through the cooling of that to then reduce the, load. But again, I think that there's. It's obviously everybody agrees. Like we're in the very early, we're in the third, second inning, maybe the top of the second inning, and there's a long way to go, but I still don't understand the monetization , of it as well as I'm so worried about the large language models, like you said, being trained on the. General corp content and everything, like until you get to an organization that needs it on their own. I think that we're not even [00:20:00] close to seeing what this really is. Jeff: Exciting years to come fingers crossed. Justin: Yeah, Jeff: And then it doesn't turn into, the beginning of just Terminator in real life. Justin: Skynet. Exactly. Jeff: More on the product side, you spent quite a bit of time at Optimizely. It didn't start out as optimizely, but that's where it ended up. But regardless of naming conventions, one thing I feel like that has been going back and forth in the product world right now is this idea of do you measure everything? Do you go off of customer research and intuition and taste? Is there something in the middle? How do you think about this dichotomy, right? Of the digital world being where you can measure everything. At some level, you just need to understand your user. Somewhere in the middle is probably the truth, but how do you examine this? Justin: Yeah. So yeah, I was at Epic server. We acquired Optimizely and that was A great situation to really understand experimentation because it applies to almost everything. That we should be doing, not just in product, but, almost everywhere else. I think that, um, for me, it, my [00:21:00] learnings have been have your hypothesis and then you go and test. And that was a lot different than how I grew up learning where , the data will tell you the answer. And, and it became very apparent that you need to have a hypothesis and then you go and check to that you could have, 120th hypothesis and 118 are wrong. And you just found the two that are right. So I do believe that, there is a absolute place to measure. There's an absolute place to do the testing and then to make sure that the variables are consistent, that then you don't get false positives. But there is also a value in , there's an argument against hippos, the highest paid . Person's opinion, but at the same time, like experience helps you figure out the, the differences I'm not big on last meeting anecdotes. That's where I think one of my triggers is that we come out of a meeting and we're like, we just heard from sky that we want to build X, Y, Z. And it's like, okay, let's compare it to all the other things that we think are also valuable, not just what happened yesterday. and so I think it's a combination of [00:22:00] them, but. It clearly is from a testing perspective and understanding the data sets, like you need some baseline to understand what works and what doesn't work, with experimentation started with what color is right, what's the right headline, what's the right image. It's way more complex than that. And it can be across just about everything, including what pricing do you release to your Salesforce? How do you go about, testing that you pilot it and then you release it. It's so valid, but you got to start with some hypothesis. Which I think does start with the hippo or your personal view to have some background as to why that hypothesis could be valuable. Jeff: I remember recently I was listening to the marketing against the grain podcast and they talked about AB testing. If you were just going in and trying different colors on buttons or, randomly throwing against the wall, whatever, and seeing what works, that's not really super effective, but what you should be doing is, What behavior do I think I can change or what am I trying to accomplish and then test the things you think will drive that. And Justin: Yeah. Like a commerce site, like we think that this [00:23:00] is going to convert more customers away from their shopping cart. Okay. What are the 12 different things that we think are valuable as a part of that process? Is it a one step process? Is it a three step process? Is it filling out less in the form? Is it having the buy now button at the top versus the bottom and then making sure that you go through that? And yeah, there's something there that does prove to be for those users. A winner essentially. And that's digital, I think is a little easier than saying, how do you roll out pricing and do it objectively just because you roll it out to three people, how do you make sure those weren't the three best reps who would have closed them anyhow to the content that you release okay, cool. They clicked on it, but it was actually amazing. It just, it didn't matter. It had the title so there's other variables that have to be put into play. And so quantity starts the matter at a certain point, but. You can't have, 2 million views on the content to decide one piece. Like you'd start out to making some gut calls, I would say, based off of the early views of data. Jeff: Do you have any like fun times where [00:24:00] you've run into, you, all the hippo in the room or even if you were the hippo in the room everyone felt it was going to be this thing. You finally ran it through the test and just found, far different outcome than everyone expected. Justin: Yeah, it's always fun to be like, Oh, the hippo there. Oh my gosh. Who would, why would we ever listen to hippo? Oh my God. And then you're the hippo that they were talking about. That realization is is always amazing. I think, I spent a lot of my career we've acquired a business. We said that we want to put it together with this and we say, okay, this is going to be the greatest thing since sliced bread. We went through a few different iterations. At optimizely after we acquired optimizely CDP and welcome, which was a content marketing platform and saying, what are those combinations look like? And we released something or talk about it and it didn't resonate or adopt the way that we thought. And it, I think they've since launched it, which is great. And, they've gotten some good feedback, but it was like, in the due diligence phase, we're like, Oh my gosh, these things are going to resonate so well. And it was like, how do we [00:25:00] take our CMP and apply it to up, up experimentation to then track the tests and different things. And it took a while to really land something that was effective from a messaging perspective that people were interested in. And we thought it was like a home run from day one. Kevin Lee, who I worked with a lot and going through all the different acquisitions, and we would have some great, amazing times coming up with these amazing stories and all these things. And then We realized that like 10 percent of them landed, but it was fun doing it. We come up with some great names and we were like, this is going to be the greatest thing ever. And it was a lot of those during those due diligence where you have six minutes to make your decision as to will this resonate? And a lot of those things. Didn't hit the first time, just at least from a messaging perspective. Jeff: that's fair. So let's jump to a little bit of a different part of your career here. I think you alluded to this a moment ago, but you didn't start in product. You actually started out in sales. And I've even talked to people who came up and [00:26:00] started in sales, moved over, but you were a sales executive and then moved over to product and became a product executive. You skipped the whole thing and just went right to the top. A, what the hell man? And then b how does that change how you look at the job? Justin: Yeah. So I was a sales rep and I was okay. And I kept getting in trouble because I liked helping out everybody else. And the CEO was always like, you've got to hit your number. I'm like, I'm close to hitting my number, but isn't this better if like we help everybody on the team? He's like, no. And so I was like, okay, move me into pre sales. So then I ran the pre sales teams. And It was easier because then you can judge the sales guys without actually being the sales guy. But it was Jeff: right? Justin: exactly, but it was it was, enlightening, I think that the the one thing I miss, you didn't ask this, but it's still on my brain and I say it every time product, sales, there's a definitive beginning and end. Product there's no end, right? Like it's like we're on version 7, 000, 012 of something [00:27:00] and there's no end. Whereas you win a deal or you start a deal and you win or lose it. Right. so I was involved in the biggest deals and really seeing how we're going help with the messaging helped with, due diligence and different things. And it was, really interesting. And then I moved to product. And I was like, this is easy. Like before I went in, I was like, this is going to be super easy. I know what customers want, Jeff: Famous last words. Justin: like, why don't we just build that? I don't understand why we spend time on all this other stuff. And I got in and I was like, whoa, this is a rude awakening. There's like a process that you follow, and you can't build everything at whim. This is bonkers. And it was a interesting transition. Luckily I had a good mentor that was like, the commercial side, I'll help teach you the product side. And, that was like 10 years or so ago, but it was, I think that's my other opinion that gets a lot of feedback is that as the product guy, I always say. What if we didn't build another thing? Can you still sell? And as a sale [00:28:00] pre sales guy, I knew the answer mostly was yes. It's easier if we didn't have to answer around X, Y, Z, or talk them into. Doing it a different way, but as a product guy, I'm like, what if we did nothing? Meaning Why are we relying on this new feature to close this 22 million dollars in business, right? And so it's like that to me I think that it's still I still have it in my pre sales days because I know if someone said that to me i'd be like I'll work with the product and in the confines And I will make sure that we're building. And I think that tension just between my own brain is good because I answer do we really truly need to do this? And do we need to wait to recognize anything or can we just change the way that we message or do a process or do change management or, and I think that tension of being on both sides of that I think is, I try to remind myself of that every day. Jeff: That's fair. I can't remember for the life of me now who it was, but recently I remember reading [00:29:00] someone talking about the greatest product people are choosing also what not to build, or how do you build less and still accomplish more? So it sounds like sales set you up really well. There Justin: I'm reading this new book Trust Based Leadership. Jeff: You need a lot Yeah, Justin: like some of the stuff is interesting, not everything. But here's the thing. The number one thing is setting priorities. And it sounds so obvious, but exactly to what you just said, articulating and deciding on what you not do is actually, I think, N times, 10 times more important than deciding what you do. Not only clearly states to folks that like. We're not doing this and here's why, but it also helps to focus. And it's always a hard decision. There's always, no matter how big a company it is, there's always things that you can't do. And that decision on what not that's to me, that's my entire job. That's my responsibility. I feel. And if I fail at that, I think I failed on everything else, deciding and communicating and [00:30:00] articulating what we're not doing, and it's so hard. Like setting priorities is really hard. Jeff: Then you always get people who want to do the thing and wonder why you're not doing the other thing so I talked about we run marketing very much like product here and i'd say prioritization is probably the best Biggest thing we do that, that we take from product where, we set the things we're going to do. And I tell people you're going to come in, , we have a new person who's joined the team. And he brought up why aren't we doing this? We should do this. We should do this. And we went for a walk and talked it through. And what I talked about is everyone who comes on has the same thing, especially in marketing, suffers from shiny objects from worse than, you know, bad. bad. Any function I've ever seen in my career. We always want to do this, that, this, that, shiny thing over here, and you have 17 things in progress right now. And the problem is not, it all gets done half assed or not at all. You just continuously add. And so what I, what we talked about is We're going to go through and we're going to pick the few things we're going to do. And nothing is allowed to be half assed here. I always tell them I want a whole ass on every project which always elicits a little [00:31:00] bit of a laugh, but but I mean it like we need, the full attention and after a year you're going, I was telling him you're going to come back and you're going to tell me that you've accomplished more in this year than you did in the last three years of your career, because this has happened every time we've onboarded a market. Consistently they get worried that they're not doing enough things and then they come back a year later and go, this is amazing. We did it and we accomplished more. And that comes straight from learning from our product team here. Justin: I could not agree more. And it's hard though. Cause then the moment that you lock something in, then there's another thing that comes in and then you got to like constantly. Go against that and try to figure out, are these three things that we decided on the most important. Now we have Jeff: Are they right? Jeff: it's easier to say yes to everything because then, you're always safe. You did the thing. Justin: Exactly. And then I agree. Do we want to be, what do we want to be excellent at? We can't half ass it, like you said, right? Like we just can't. And, if you're spreading that peanut butter thin and there's nothing that's going to be good, you're check a box. But what does that mean? At the end of the day, you're going to be like, we did 10 things and none of them drove the outcomes that we thought they were going to [00:32:00] drive. Jeff: that's the goal there, right? We're not here to ship functions or ship features. We're not here to, produce an email campaign. We're here to drive revenue in the end. So, I guess revenue is a great kind of tipping point onto this, but back to you came up through sales. And I've always heard there's this rivalry between sales and product. It's the same as there's always the rivalry between sales and marketing and do you really buy this? I feel like this is something I've heard talked about more than I have actually seen. Have you witnessed this rivalry between sales and product or how have you seen that play out? Justin: Oh, 100%. And both sides are at fault. It's not right. So like sales is I can't sell anything until I get these things and products like you didn't prove that you could sell before, right? So my, I think having been on, both sides of the equation, , the ones that. Are clearly our sales that are clearly articulated and communicated to is what we're doing, what we're not doing, why all that stuff I think is important. Having that input that sales feels heard. Is really important. I think [00:33:00] that's where the tension is that that salesperson just has two customers and they want this one thing and did we tell them we weren't going to do it or where is it on the board and how do they know if we're doing it or not? No, because I have too many things. Okay. If you were them. You would be frustrated too, because they never got an answer. And when you don't get an answer, you assume something is happening, right? Or you assume the worst. And that conflict has existed everywhere. And to me, the only thing. Is constant communication. I know I've said that multiple times, constantly. I've communicated that multiple times in this one, literally like over and over. I subscribed to the seven by seven. You have to say 49 times in order for it to get through. It's maybe more than that, but. Like it's just, they might not hear it in one way. They might not listen or whatever, both parts of it. And it's just that constant communication, but it's 100 percent real. And I also think that there's from a sales perspective, there's usually not the appreciation of how it, the [00:34:00] effort to actually just get something released. And scalable for multiple customers, as opposed to this one customer needs this thing. Why can't we just do it? We professional services built it. Why can't we do it? Here's the whole thing. Here's what happens. Here's why we can't, we release it. The amount of cost and maintenance on that is just going to far outweigh anything that we have limited resources. I think that just being open in that situation is helpful. I don't know of anything else that really solves it other than just, being empathetic and appreciative that, there's issues on both sides. Jeff: Yeah it's tough, right? Cause you don't want to fully get rid of that tension though. I think done well or healthy tension between sales product marketing and that kind of, either triangle that goes every way is healthy. And I think that breeds better outcomes. If they're all pushing on each other in a, team oriented productive way to make everyone better. But where it comes down is that people start to feel they're not heard or left out or Justin: Or they have to do it regardless of if they push back. That's a tough [00:35:00] one, certainly from the product. But then the sales guy, I'm like, this person. At 20 percent of their quota, they're literally comp. They could be out of a job if we don't help them, right? Like, how do you gauge that knowing that it's not just that one person? It could be a bunch appreciate that other people , have a job to do, and it's different than yours. At a good company, those coalesce and come together when it's communicated properly. Jeff: Yeah. That's fair. I guess communication is the name of the game we've Justin: You said it. I agree. Yes. Jeff: It's a, I joke with people, who, when I talk to people about career and they bring up, they want to go into leadership, be it marketing or product or sales or anything. The first thing I tell them is if you really like doing marketing. You probably should not go into marketing leadership. If you really like doing sales, maybe don't go into sales leadership because you don't actually do the thing anymore. It's just, it's communication is people. Those are the two things, nothing else really. Justin: I, yeah, I, yeah, the people [00:36:00] side. Yes, exactly. Jeff: Now, that said your background between sales and product, I think has put you in a really good position where you've seen a lot and you've also probably understood. a lot of why it's happening. Do you have anything where something just went totally sideways or, what's the cringiest kind of nightmare experience that you went through throughout your career here that you've seen? Justin: Yeah. Without being explicit, what we talked about before, it just, and try to be explicit I don't want to call people out. But at one point in my career, we were building a product and selling from a demo perspective, all we could do is literally log in and we had to create every single screen. Because the work being done was on the architecture and the background and all this stuff and some great stuff. But like getting in front of a customer, it was, when I say every screen, imagine whatever screen you're using word to, that web, it was literally, there's, you could log in and as pre sales, we had to build everything and it was a pretty [00:37:00] complex environment every single time. And so that I felt was the most stress from a pre sales perspective. And how do you know how to answer a question based on what the product does when the product can literally do anything is very complex. Usually, you have to have rails to say, here's what the box is. One, because two people don't believe you if every answer is yes. And so that was very complicated, very complex. And we happen to be involved in a bunch of different. Proof of concepts where we had to build it on site with them over weeks and weeks of time And it was difficult and I would say I knew I think the business knew early on that it wasn't going to Be fast enough for us to get to a point of having A actual product versus a platform. And we needed a product. And there was lots of very difficult conversations as to what do we do with it? Do we kill it? There's a lot of investment in it. Do we go and buy something else? It was [00:38:00] problematic and being on the tip of the spear in many ways of the ones who had to show it to the customers it made it stressful every day. Like we are building our box and I have to, as the pre sales leader say no to certain things. Even though engineering might say yes, because I personally don't have the confidence that we will get there by the time the customer would implement. I think that's the critical of product and pre sales is it's not just about the deal. It's about the reference ability. It's about their usage. It's about their adoption. And if you just want to get the deal, you can do one thing. That was never me where you're just like, Hey, whatever, we'll do whatever. You have to make sure that they adopt and that they actually, get to be referenceable. And that was without, I know that I was like, that was so generic. And obviously I see it in my brain and the trips to different places in Texas to do these proof of concepts, but it was it was not cool on the business for my pre sales team, because. We had to define the box and I've never been in that situation before. Jeff: Now, , did the customer know or the prospect know that it wasn't built yet? Or were you trying to [00:39:00] kind of, get around this? Justin: yeah they, they knew maybe not at the beginning because we didn't really know if that makes sense. Nobody was like, I don't think anybody was maliciously doing anything, but like it took longer to get to a point of saying, Oh, here's the screens. So yeah, in those proof of concepts that we would do. Literally would just build it in front of them, like basic screens. And we would just be like, Hey, this is where we're at. Like the architecture is great. So they, they ended up knowing and , it would be impossible to do what happened during the. com where people were literally like, Photoshopping, whatever, before Photoshop was screens that didn't exist. And then waited for the CEO to press a button to then go to the next slide where there was no application whatsoever. It wasn't that bad. There was a case where, I was, Involved at the very end of a situation like that. Like I envision that's what startups have to do and different things like that, but not an established business. So we got through it. We got through it on the high end of making sure that it was on the up and up. And as the pre sales guy, [00:40:00] I never wanted to lie about it because again, it wasn't gonna help make them referenceable, which was the most important thing, even beyond booking the initial deal, I think. Jeff: That's what I mean. And if we look at it you went from Sales to pre sales to a product executive. Maybe that experience of basically being a de facto, you got a field promotion to product for a while there. And maybe that's what got you on the track to to where you are now. Justin: Yep. Jeff: all take our lumps on the way, but No, Justin, I appreciate you coming on, man. This has been a blast. I feel like there's just so much we didn't get a chance to go through. We'll have to have you back again sometime, but thank you so much for coming on. Thanks for chatting and answering all the questions and yeah, anywhere people can find you if they want to follow up with you after this. Justin: Yeah, sure. My house, my address. Oh, no, wait, that's not a good idea. Yeah, on LinkedIn I deleted Twitter many years ago. But, certainly on LinkedIn and as the extrovert introvert, I'm going to have to go take a nap for an hour after this. Jeff: Have a good nap. Thanks for jumping on. It was great getting to know you, man. And yeah, hope to chat again. Thank you so much. Justin: Great. Thanks.