Charles Battle, Senior Vice President of Product @ Ibotta
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Jeff: [00:00:00] All right, Charles, thanks so much for joining. This one has been a little bit of time in the works. You guys are, what, two months out now from the IPO? How are you feeling? How's that going?

Charles: Yeah. Yeah. I appreciate your patience. It's been a heck of a past few months now. It's been fun. It's been a lot of fun. It's it's been a journey. I think I've been with the, I bought it for two and a half years. So even in that time, it's felt like a journey, but we've got many folks on the team who've been there since the very beginning.

So it was just wonderful to just go through this big milestone with all of these folks who've worked so hard to make this a reality. So it's been a blast, been a lot of work, but it's been a blast.

Jeff: Congrats. It's it's always a big step. There's a lot, I've been through a couple and it, there's always a lot that goes into it. It's a marathon.

Charles: definitely is. Definitely is.

Jeff: You mentioned the team and you've had people who've been there, from the beginning up to, you've been there, you said, two, two and a half years.

, team wise, like what's been the impact there? How did that look, to the process of maybe how you're planning or how the team operates? This is something that not everyone gets to go to through that often. How'd that impact on how you run product 

Charles: I [00:01:00] think, first and foremost, throughout the process, and as we start to started to see this become a reality, and we knew that, hey, we've got our eyes set on a date. This is going to happen. Certainly we had a lot of work to do, right?

We had just work across the organization that needed to get done. And so we rallied behind that and figured out what absolutely needed to get done before we went through the IPO process. You know, in many ways, that was just a continuation of what we try and do all the time as a product team, which is ruthless prioritization, making sure that we're putting the things at the top of the list that really absolutely have to get done.

And so in a way it provided just a great level of focus for me and for the team. And really the whole organization about like, all right let's really agree on what we're going to do and what we're not going to do leading up into this. I'll also say that we had to remind people along the way to like, Stop and take a look around enjoy this enjoy some of the chaos, enjoy this fever pitch leading up to this big moment because as you said, not everybody gets to go through this, , you know, I think we all feel very fortunate that we had the opportunity to do this and that, We [00:02:00] know it may not come again.

So it's enjoy the ride while we're here. Especially that day, I think being on the floor of the stock exchange, it was really emotional. Like you'd look around and especially folks who've put so much time and there were family members there. And it's just like this, it was the beautiful moment that you got to experience this and people who work so hard to make this happen.

And so I think, look for product, I think it gave us a, just a chance to focus really rally and work on what needed to get get You know, I think just also try and enjoy the ride. Like it was a fun ride.

Jeff: It's almost I remember on my wedding day, people tell me to stop and look around. It's the same thing on, on, bell day, right? Where just take it in because it's not, even if you do it again, it's not like you're going to do this every year, so it's a special occasion.

Charles: It's funny that you say that. I had the same advice given to me on my wedding day and I even had a friend of mine come over and be like, I'm going to pretend to talk to you right now, but I'm not going to say anything. What I want you to do is just look around the room and notice all of these people who are here for you.

And I was like it's funny. It felt very much like a [00:03:00] wedding, actually, because, there are all these family members there, all these employees for the company, investors for the company, all there together sharing in this moment. And it's, it had that kind of big ceremonial feeling to it.

It was, wild, 

Jeff: a that's a good friend. 

Charles: Right? It

Jeff: for you two and a half years is not a short amount of time , we had a g a buzzy, on the other day and he talked about you know It's so important to pick the startup you go after Because it's going to be a huge swath of your life and even two and a half years is a significant portion you know again congrats on that.

I do want to get into a little bit. I've always You I feel like early on in my career, I got good advice on this. I'm always curious to get other people's takes. Someone said to me early on a person who went on to be a mentor for years and years, an IPO is just a financial event, right? It's another liquidity event that happens.

It's not an end game. How do you look at it, strategically . In that sense, is it, a good end game, is it a good checkpoint, a good celebration point, a good validation of the work you've done, or like, how do you [00:04:00] tell your team or think about it with your team on how to think about that?

Charles: I think it's a milestone, right? It's not the end by any stretch of the imagination. In many ways, it's the start in so many ways. It's like a new start as this new entity. It's like we've emerged from, the cocoon and now we've become this other thing as a public company, Which I mean, look, I think it's important to stop and to celebrate.

I think that's a part of our culture. Like we want to make sure that we do celebrate the wins and it's a win because it is a moment in time where. You get to look back at what we've built as a company and be proud of that. And it's nice to see the validation in the public market. I think that's always wonderful, but in many ways a few of us were talking internally about this.

. We were ready to get beyond it. Let's, this is awesome. It's really exciting that we're going through this, but now let's focus on being a great public company and see where we can take this now. And I think we all feel really great about what we're doing and we're just looking forward to the future.

Yeah.

Jeff: I think that's a great way of looking at I remember early on in pay I've been an investor but I think it was luckily a teammate who brought up every [00:05:00] round of funding is just a reason to work even harder. And then you hit an IPO and it's like you said, it's a new beginning, but another reason to go revalidate.

What you're doing with a great backing of, there's certain things. I feel like that it gives you the legitimacy where you're going to enter a whole new tier of customers possibly. Moving on the IPO is great. It could talk about it forever, but moving on to that. I don't know if, I don't know if the audience would love, the deep financial dissection of an IPO.

When you were thinking about building product, and like you said, you joined two and a half years ago. An IPO, especially post, Sarbanes Oxley is not a short process. Were you brought on with the idea that this is where it was going and you were helping to steer the ship there, or were you brought on and building it and it got to that point and that's where you guys went?

Charles: We knew and I, joined the company thinking that it was A possibility for sure. And something that we were exploring very seriously. I don't know that I was brought on to, prepare the company for IPO. I certainly wouldn't characterize it like that. And no, I think it [00:06:00] was , more important than the IPO.

Honestly, we were pivoting our business in many ways. We were. This consumer focused mobile application for the most part, our core business, and, still is a huge part of our business, but we were moving more to being a true kind of performance marketing SAS company and doing more B2B product development.

And so I think it was. Honestly, the reason I joined Ibotta was because I was excited by that story, that narrative that we were creating. And I think you touched on this a little bit earlier, like you do have to pick your companies very carefully when you're in product. I felt really great about this company for a variety of reasons not the least of which is just the leadership team being incredibly strong, but also I felt very strongly and still to this day feel incredibly strongly about our strategy.

Like our company strategy is great. I believe it. I believe in the pivot. This is a company that is not afraid to make hard choices when we have to. And I'm just really proud to work at Ibotta. , I it's kind of tell people a lot of times it's like the classic innovators dilemma.

I bought a hat, a cash cow, and [00:07:00] we. I think appropriately and strategically siphoned off the proceeds from the cash cow to build , the new business internally, which became the I bought a performance network. And it's rare to actually see that work out, right? A lot of companies try to do that.

, they understand the challenge inherent in the innovators dilemma, but you know, it's just hard to turn off the cash cow and to stop investing so much in that cash cow. But yeah, I think we've done a really nice job of doing that.

Jeff: No, it's it's a prescient move if you can align the company behind it, because someone's going to innovate there. It's either going to be you or someone else innovating on you. So better to innovate on yourself, I do want to get into that pivot because it's super, obviously my background's in marketing.

I come to this because we do run most of the functions in the company like a product team, especially we run marketing, I think very much like a product team. But before we jump into the pivot there and that move, I do want to talk a little bit about the career it kind of brought you here. Because I was laughing when I looked through your LinkedIn and this came to me, but.

You have found a [00:08:00] remarkably wide breadth of ways in the companies you've been at to, to get money into the hands of consumers.

Charles: Yes. 

Jeff: Was that planned? Was that, something you kind of looked at and said, this is like , personal finance or something like that.

Charles: That's a fascinating observation that honestly, like it takes almost someone looking outside in to notice those things. I think way leads on to way and I actually started my product career, not in fintech, but at a company called touch tunes, which is a music technology company. And so I built a karaoke application , you know, I'm a musician.

So I loved that job. It was such a great job, especially a good place to start because it was a small company. I learned so much about how to do product there. I'm so grateful for the time there but from there I went to American Express. And honestly, I think from there, it just became like, Loyalty, fintech, rewards, I just played in that space for a while.

And I think, I just saw the next opportunity adjacent to wherever I was and it happened to also be in this realm. And so it's, it is interesting. I do think [00:09:00] I like personal finance a lot and I like rewards a lot because. I think there's a high overlap between say like loyalty and product, right?

Like it's basically, engagement is one of our key metrics is product people. And so loyalty is a tactic for engagement. And so I think there is an interesting overlap in the product space. When you think about cash back, rewards, loyalty systems.

Jeff: Looking at your past about 10 years I'm going to have to keep an eye on your career because I think about 50 percent of the companies you've been at, I'm a customer of, so maybe I'll start trying to predict what I'm going to buy based on where

you work. 

Charles: I love a strong brand, right? I look for strong leaders and a strong brand. I almost think like a BC in many ways, right? , when I'm deciding where to invest myself I look for people that I can really get behind that.

I respect leaders that I want to work with and collaborate with. And I look for a company that has a strong strategy and a brand to back it up. And yeah, so I, I think I'm proud to have worked at many of the companies I've worked for. I think that they're great [00:10:00] companies.

Jeff: it's a night, you know, between American express Lunding tree guaranteed rate, a Bata, it's a list that, I think you walk around downtown or any, town at all. You'll find people who know most of those. So yeah, it's a cool little feather in the cap.

, I noticed that MX, you worked on some of the loyalty products.

Jeff: Right now, going through some of the roles You hit I bought a and there's a big component out there. Did you, were you able to carry over any of those lessons or anything that worked? Or, is it you have to reinvent, that kind of strategy every time anyway, because different company, different persona, different, grouping.

Charles: Yeah, a little bit of different company, but so much of product, I think, is transferable. I think that's the beautiful thing about the job is that ultimately, you're I mentioned an earlier engagement. You're either going after kind of acquisition, engagement, monetization, like

yeah, they're all different products. Sometimes you're building different features or solving different customer problems. But at the end of the day I think the skillset is really transferable. Now that said, yes, I absolutely think that there are [00:11:00] pieces of, working at membership on membership awards at American express and thinking about how loyalty ties in to customer engagement, all of those things I think certainly helped me in the job at Ivana.

They helped me at a guaranteed rate for sure too, as we were thinking about ways to You know, move beyond transactional, right? So many companies have technology where it's a transactional relationship with the customer. And it's funny. I never really thought about this until now, but so much of my career has been moving from transactional day zero interactions with the user to lifetime value and.

Really thinking about a retained user over a certain period of time. And that was the story at LendingTree because it was very much a lead gen company and, you see a customer come in, you connect them with lenders and you are as LendingTree back out as the entity and say, all right, I've connected you with lenders, our job is done here and we were like, wait, why do we want to remarket to customers all the time?

Why don't we create a relationship with this customer and make it easier for them to have. All kinds of different relationships with different [00:12:00] financial partners and financial services companies. And yeah, I think that those things have been a big part of my career, I think just moving from transactional to more of an engaged relationship between the company and the user.

Jeff: It's fine. I mentioned already once we had OG on the podcast. A little bit ago, but he actually has his framework in his book coming out talking about kind of, you know, it's a four square and it's low frequency, high frequency kind of niche use case, widespread use case. And that's one of the things he talks about is moving up into high frequency.

So interesting to see that kind of outplay across those financial institutions. 

Charles: FinTech is fun for that way too. I think, going back to that, but FinTech is really fun because the, especially at a lending tree or guaranteed rate Yeah. There's just a, such a breadth of interesting offerings to give users, right? And financial, and as we think about AI and data and everything that's happening there, there's so much fodder there, creative fodder with financial data.

We did a lot of work with credit file information at LendingTree. If you look at an actual credit file, the JSON of a credit file, it's [00:13:00] incredible how much is in there. And you take all of that rich data and you combine it with other data that you may have, your own first party data, and you can do such cool, interesting things.

And the modeling opportunities are just enormous. And so that's why I think FinTech is really interesting too. I often think this way about baseball too. Like I, MD product people who get to work in sports. Because there's so much data in sports, if you think about , the data exhaust from like a baseball game, just one baseball game.

It's incredible, right? It's incredible what they do with it.

Jeff: And their ability now to capture it and actually auto, you know, it used to be, I played baseball growing up and you'd have to have a kid sitting there writing down every pitch and

Charles: I used to do 

Jeff: the strike zone. Yeah. And now it's all automated. It's wonderful.

The data geeks are speaking as one myself, loving it. Like it's so much easier now.

Charles: Yeah, no, I am constantly in awe of the UX around watching and consuming sports these days. Cause it's a wonderful experience. They've done so much with it. Like I watch a lot of tennis, golf, like what the way that they bring you into the sport through data, [00:14:00] through the user experience of, analyzing different shots and it's just, it's very cool.

It's amazing what, what they can do.

Jeff: I was at, um. I think it was AWS reinvent last year. And they had a whole section set up, or it might've been Google next. It was one of those two. I forget now it's probably Google next, but they had a setup where they were talking about how their cloud was powering the analytics of the NFL.

And it was showing all the stuff from like helmet acceleration and deacceleration to ball tracking, to catching, uncatching, people stepping outside of bounds. It was wild. The stuff they were capturing on me.

Charles: That's amazing. And when you think of just like, again, product optimization is a huge part of the job. And you think about If everything's a product, a sports team is a product, right? And there's a group of product managers in the back office that manage that product.

And they're taking their data, their analytics in and saying, Oh gosh, this receiver can't catch this kind of ball, or they're really bad in this kind of scenario. And like the more that. You have that, that data rich environment to operate within , the more decisions you can make and the higher [00:15:00] quality those decisions are going to be.

So it's just anyway, really cool. But yeah, I could geek out on this stuff too. I love all that.

Jeff: No, I guess to leave the topic, but do you think we could start calling normalize calling football head coaches chief product officers?

Charles: Sure. Absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. Was it Jack Dorsey who said that there were, product managers are like book editors or editors and I used to work in book publishing. So I always found that to be really real. That was my first career before I hit reset and got into product.

But I always thought that to be a really apt metaphor for it because I think it's absolutely right. Like we're not the ones making the stuff we're editing and guiding and framing the making,

Jeff: And hopefully making it

better. 

Charles: and making it better, making and understanding what the audience wants.

A book editor in many ways is saying the audience needs this kind of book, but it needs to be shaped in this kind of a way. So it's like very

Jeff: Yeah. I mean, it's a, It's a noble profession when even Stephen King needs an editor. 

Charles: That's right. That's right. That's right. Some of the greatest authors had [00:16:00] fantastic editors who did a lot behind the scenes, 

Jeff: Oh, you need the whole chain. It's, I don't think, I was at log rocket when we were very early on. Our product team was our engineering team, but it was very early people who thought about the entire thing through.

And it's interesting to see, I've worked with engineers who maybe don't think about the whole thing. They just want to, we've, and we've had guests on the podcast who've talked about, they were very like, talk about a feature, build feature, ship feature kind of organization. And when they moved to a more wholly integrated looking at the big picture.

What they found is the work was better and everyone's worried was going to slow them down. Actually ended up, they were able to increase velocity because you didn't get to the end and realize you forgot stuff. You didn't hit the next step, ship it and realize, Oh, we didn't do 50 percent of what people needed.

You had a more complete vision. You did the work the first time a little bit better. 

Charles: That's right. Yeah, absolutely.

Jeff: now going. Back product attendance at this point a Bata, right? You came on and during that time, you and the team and the company switched from being a very DTC direct to consumer cashback app [00:17:00] to really performance marketing.

And you talked about this very briefly and I said, we'd come back to it. You kind of milk to the cash cow while, building the next thing, or I've talked to the team about, we've had initiatives before. I've said, we need to like Sully Sullenberg this thing down into the Hudson while we stitch the wingsuit and glide out victoriously. Not saying nothing about a body being a plane going down to the Hudson, by the way, I don't want to make

Charles: right, right, 

Jeff: But I guess what drove can you get more into what kind of drove the analysis and conclusion that you needed to pivot? And how did you look at the next thing to do? Like, how'd that come about?

Charles: I think some of this predates my time at the company, but I think, um, I think it was really not so much that we need to find a new thing as much as it was. There's this big opportunity that's emerging that we need to explore and we need to figure out how to invest in it. And so I think it was very much an, and not an, or there's this concept in entrepreneurship called your burden hand, right?

It's a lot of it's about around entrepreneurial, like [00:18:00] effectuation and burden hand is like what do we already have? Either as a person, as an organization, whatever what do we already have that we could leverage more of? And we looked around organizationally and said we've got all this great content from brands and.

Why limit that content to just being published in our own consumer mobile application? That doesn't make a lot of sense. Couldn't we reach more people if we found them where they already are? If we distributed that content through retailer websites, through retailer mobile applications, and not just the I bought a branded experiences.

And I think that was just a huge unlock for the company to say. Wait a second. Like we're already setting this stuff up. Why not just instead of publishing one place, publish multiple places. And and I would say we have these incredible relationships with brands already. And so we're getting the content in.

And so it just made a lot of sense. I think when we took a step back, I think it just made a lot of sense. And then from there. It was, okay can we line someone up to do this with us? And then when we got the agreement with Walmart, it [00:19:00] just became this is fantastic. Like now we got to run and make this thing really work.

And that was a huge, huge momentum boost for us.

Jeff: Was there a process you guys went through to validate the idea or figure out what You know, it's one thing to have concept and then another thing to figure out what does this actually look like? What do we build? What do we build first? What does success look like? Can you walk us through that process a little bit, maybe?

Charles: It's fascinating because we have on one hand this very mature business in our consumer application where we we know very well, like what to do, how to optimize. We've really optimized it to the nth degree. And then on our B2B side, I'd say we're still a, very much a startup we are figuring things out.

, it's so early in the product life cycle that I think we're discovering. There are moments where we don't quite have product market fit yet. We know writ large, we do that. There is a need for this and a need for this thing that we've provided, but. We'll talk with a potential partner and they'll say, Oh have you thought about this?

And we're like, Oh no, we haven't, but I'm glad we're [00:20:00] talking we're doing that kind of. It's to sound so funny to say, but in many ways like Walmart was almost an MVP when we brought them on the IPN, we were not to say that, it was minimal, but we did what we needed to do.

And then I think what we've been discovering since then is that there's more that we can and should go do to build out the network and in the right way. And that has been. A lot of fun. It's been, there are times where Oh gosh, like we, we don't even know what we don't know sometimes, but I think for the most part, it's been wonderful to go through this and be a startup again in many ways and like, all right, this, we got to have this and we're out there, learning so much as we talk to new retailers and as we talk to new brands at times.

And yeah, it's just been, it's been fun to do that.

Jeff: yeah, no, it's incredible to see the, mid journey awareness and move and restrategize. I got to ask this is one thing I've always found really interesting is. the narrative of a startup, whether it be an internal startup that grows additionally to the core business or, a brand new startup, you always externally get the [00:21:00] Airbnb, right?

Like story of they saw the future and it was up into the right victory. But everyone knows, There's, the line actually looks pretty chunky and up and down and wavy. What friction did you guys hit? Can you I know it might be with the IPO recently, it might be a little bit tricky, but is there any stories you can tell us about where you guys ran into a problem and had to figure out your way through it and maybe success did not look inevitable with this new kind of, with the new marketing performance marketing setup? 

Charles: I think we always had conviction that it was going to work out. I don't think we ever hit a moment in time where we felt this was a bad idea. I think we were always like, this is going to work. We firmly believe in that. That said, I think, in terms of the product we built, I think there were many times where we're like, Oh, like maybe this was the wrong thing to build first and we need to revisit that.

And so I think. What we did well, or what we had to do, I think, in many ways, is just Be an incredibly adaptable organization for, even now, but I [00:22:00] would say, especially for the span of about a year, 18 months, I think where it was like, we don't know what we don't know.

So,, there might be times where roadmaps get disrupted and an emerging opportunity. Some new feature or new API that needs to be built. Like we, we discovered that in real time and it means that we're going to deprioritize a few things. And so I think just. As a company, we rallied behind that and just got into that same mindset that like we, we need to be agile here.

It's that's why agility exists. It's why this, this way of building software exists is so that we can respond to change because change was coming left and right at times. And so I, I think. Probably like the things we had to overcome were mostly just like not knowing the full landscape, and figuring it out as we were going, we're charting our course as we were like exploring this new terrain.

Which was a challenge, but again, also really fun. You just have to have the right mindset. I think people have to be on board for that kind of a journey because it's not for everybody, right? I think that's the other thing this period of kind of zero to one product development [00:23:00] does require a certain.

Mindset, a certain kind of interest and skillset at times too. And it's not for everybody, but I think it's a lot of fun yeah,

Jeff: What I guess when you're looking at changing a roadmap, what does it take, to interrupt that? Because a lot of work goes into planning and say, when you, like you said, you want to be agile, but you also don't want to be just scattershot changing all the time. How do you, how does the team over at Abada, look at it and go, here's our roadmap, but this is an opportunity, we need to deviate for, or, you know what, we're going to stay the course.

We know it's important. This is going to go on the list and we'll get to it next quarter. Maybe like what differentiates the two? How do you tell?

Charles: Yeah, it's a great question. I think in many ways it is the question and 

the job, right? Like, um, I think the only way to really, for me to answer this is to say that what we do is we just try and have good conversations about this as frequently as possible. I think most people get upset about their roadmap being blown up when they don't have the context and they don't see it coming, right? I think the [00:24:00] connotation blow up is like, Oh, I didn't know if that was coming.

So what we try and do is share as much information up and down the organization about what's coming and what may emerge. And I think in that way, people are mentally prepared for it. And they start to come along the journey too. So we may say, Hey, we're really just, we're really discovering in some conversations that this is an emerging need.

And I want you, and I say this to my team, I want you to be thinking about like how you might fit that into the roadmap. What would the trade offs be? We have so many conversations where I'm like, just help me understand what the trade offs would be if we went this way versus that way. And I think that goes a really long way.

And we have many we have a monthly meeting that we have for all of our kind of key areas of the product portfolio called a business impact report. And we all get together my leaders the tech leaders And then cross functional leaders as well, cross functional teams. And we just talk through here's what's going on.

Here's how we're measuring against our, or here's how we're doing against our OKRs here are some emerging [00:25:00] things. We also, at that time we'll say, here's some emerging things that we're not doing, like we, we've heard this, but we're not going to do this right now. And here's the rationale behind that decision.

And so, a fast moving environment, I think it just comes down to making space and time for. Good conversations cross functionally, so everybody's on the same page, for

Jeff: to have just work in progress, pile up and pile up and it's never too much because you start to be like, okay this can take a little longer.

This cannot, but I do think often work in progress when it gets. To a certain level is just the death of a lot of things. And that's the conversation we have a lot when we're looking at changes. Okay. We can do that. Here's what it costs and how we're going to change it. And we're not going to do this thing.

That means, or this will be off a month. So

Charles: what we've really had to get crisp on that [00:26:00] one internally and just say in my all hands with the whole product team, I will say here are the top five, top 10 company priorities right now. We have a company priority list that has senior leaders we've agreed upon. And for listening.

And this is not build a feature or whatever, but it's these are big problem areas, the strategic areas that we need to go attack and just having that up there helps guide the team like, okay, when I have a micro decision about this versus this, I can map that to the company's global priorities and say, okay, I see that this is actually a higher priority for the company.

Therefore, I'm going to do this thing. I'm going to work on this. And that helps to create asynchronous alignment because it's, it's hard to stay aligned as an organization, a growing organization. So we definitely work on that but certainly, everybody in product, it's our job to say, I hear you stakeholder.

I hear you CEO, whoever, what would you remove from these five things that group is working on right now? And let's just have that [00:27:00] conversation together so that you understand the trade offs and so that we're level setting on expectations that we're not going to deliver number five now because we've got a new number two, or whatever it is.

Jeff: And how big is the product org over there at Abada?

Charles: We are a little over 50 people right now.

Jeff: Yeah. You're hitting a level where you need to enable them to have that kind of self actualized understanding of what the priorities are. Cause at, I remember when we were, I joined log rocket really early, we were like 10 people. We were in a tiny little room in Cambridge mass alignment there.

I always tell people it's super easy, right? Cause engineering was here, our CEO and head of proc was here, sales was here and everyone knew it was going on everywhere, but as we grew, how do you Enable, the leaders under you to make those smart decisions and understand, like you said, this is number two, this is number five.

So we're going to do this one. So I love that you're going through that with the team regularly and ensuring that there is that understanding.

Charles: We have this published, for the company to see our we do a strategy board every year, and then we map that to a prioritized list for the things that really impact [00:28:00] technology, where we know we're going to have to build things. And I'll have that at that tab open all the time.

I always have that tab open and I'll look in there and you'll just see a variety of product folks and engineers and everything like popping in there, popping in and out. And you can tell that they're just coming into kind of just sense check. I just need to sanity check. All right. Where is that on the global priorities list for the company?

Which I think is really useful because, yes, you're absolutely right. You get to a point where, our technology organization is, gosh, I think we're close to four or 500 people now, just the technology organization. So my team is actually a very small part of the technology organization.

But you get to that size and you've got to figure out ways for people to stay on the same page. Cause it's just, it's hard. It's hard otherwise. Silence.

Jeff: No, it's great too, because also in product, I feel like we talk a lot about kind of what are your Northstar metrics, what's the definition of success. And it's always been hard for me to conceptualize. How do you. Define success for people being aligned or understanding that. I feel like what you just said, maybe not the perfect North star metric, but a good KPI is you have this prioritization [00:29:00] doc, are people referencing it regularly?

Are they in there? Are they using it in a ongoing process to run how they're thinking about prioritization? And if the answer is yes, that's probably a pretty good traction right there, right? If people are in there regularly, that's like that, I would say that's a good sign.

Charles: Yeah. Yeah. I think so. It's, definitely a strong indicator, but yeah, I certainly keep an ear out to is this working? Is it helpful? Is it not helpful? We're very open to feedback and just, iteratively improving how we operate as a team too. 

Jeff: So to stay on the team topic a bit, you've talked about falling in love with the problem and not the solution. I reread uh, Amped Up by Frank Slootman over at Snowflake recently. And he talks a lot about, he thinks people kind of over, focus on the solution and under think about, What is the thing they're trying to solve, right?

What's the problem versus just solving it right away? What's the core thing you got? And I think that's what you're saying there too, right? Fall in love with the problem follow up with what you're solving. Understand it before. What does that look like in practice? So like, how do [00:30:00] you kind of set up a team and build maybe a set of what were they called rituals in product sometimes?

Or how do you set up a cadence where that's incentivized, where you want to really understand it before you go?

Charles: Yeah, I think one of the things we've done is many of the groups within technology We'll look at kind of an idea backlog together. And in terms of just like ceremonies to help foster this kind of culture, that's where the cross functional leaders, engineering, design, product analytics, whomever, they all get together and they're like, the product manager pulls together this list of ideas that are just floating out there.

I call this kind of always on product management. Like you're just, Hey, I had a conversation with our CMO yesterday and then I was looking at data this morning and then I, was reading through customer feedback and like you start to have ideas coalesce and you go, all right, I think that there's this thing here.

And so this group will get together and look at these just like rough ideas and all of those are sort of. Um, must have a problem statement with them. So we do a product brief around these [00:31:00] things when they start to get a little bit of traction. It's like, all right, what's the key problem that we're trying to solve here?

How do we know that we will have successfully solved it? We talk a lot about UX outcomes too. So it's absolutely, there are business metrics and KPIs that we want to move, but there are also these UX metrics around, how will we know that we've improved a user's life if we do this the right way? So it starts there at the very beginning, where it's like, as this thing is starting to take shape, we really want to make sure that we have the problem statement really well defined, and then that way we can, if we move it to the next phase in the product life cycle, if you will, of, We really need to do some discovery here.

We've been listening here, but now we've really got to learn. We're going to maybe put some UX research on it. We're going to really pull some, ad hoc data analysis to see if this is truly a problem we're solving. Maybe we'll put together a business case. Like when we go into that phase, I think we want to really make sure that we've dialed in on the problem.

And that we're not just hey, build this because, build this, you can [00:32:00] do it. And then you'll anchor to this one way of doing it. And then suddenly that doesn't work and you try, bend over backwards, trying to make it work. And it's like, no, no, no. Just go back to the problem you wanted to solve.

Forget about what you. Built to solve the problem, but let's make sure we focus there first. So that's one way I think that we do it. And then I think it just comes from having a really empowered cross functional team where we hold each other accountable. I think I love when I hear our UX team push back on what problem is that solved?

Like our engineers will push back. Is that really solving the right problem? So I hear this in the conversations we have, and I think it just comes from everybody. Embracing that culture where we work collaboratively on these things together. And we yeah, we make sure that we're doing it the right way.

Jeff: Yeah, and I think that's a good healthy culture is one where you can ask that question and people don't get defensive, but they back it up with data. They talk about the reasoning that got them there. And often, here we say done is not shipped the first time for, if you're writing a plan doc or kind of business justification, but done [00:33:00] is you've gotten feedback.

You've incorporated it. And, it doesn't make you weaker to take an outside. Influence or outside feedback actually makes you, you know, being humble enough to go seek that out, makes you stronger and make sure ideas stronger, makes the whole company stronger. So,

Charles: Agree more. 

Jeff: Now to go on here, and I think part of this is you talk about also, you've talked about in the past, like the team that experiments the fastest and has the quickest, fastest discovery is probably going to win. A, what do you mean by that? Can you elaborate a little bit? And B, how do you drive your team to have that velocity and ensure that you're driving that while still keeping with the solve the problem,

Charles: is. It's not about having one person or one group of people who have this, flash of insight and suddenly know exactly what to go do. It's having the mechanism in place to figure out what it is that's going to work. That is more important than, having the one [00:34:00] idea or the one sort of, the one person, the visionary, if you will .

Who has the idea and says, just go do this doesn't matter. I know that this is right. I think it's, it's important to have a process to get to figure out. Okay. We think we're on to something now. We have to quickly validate that and see if we're actually correct about that. So, and I think maybe I arrived at that just because. There aren't many visionaries out there, like true visionaries who get it right. I can count them all in one hand, maybe, but like, the real kind of work of it is the process to get us there and to say, we've got a kernel of an idea. We think this solves this kind of a problem.

Now let's quickly. Come up with multiple solutions that we think would solve the problem and which one does that best. So I think it's really about that. I mean, and yeah, in terms of how do you foster that? I think part of it is having the right people who want to work really quickly biased action is one of our product team operating principles.

And I think we would much rather just start to work on something, define the problem, yes, spend a little bit of time doing that as a product manager. [00:35:00] And then, all right, let's just get started. That's just have this instinct. A lot of times I'll be thinking about something. I'll be in a conversation and I'm just like, I just want to draw this out.

Can I just start to draw how I think this might come to life? it's like I almost have to exercise that or something. But but yeah, I think it's finding the right people who want to do that, who work well together and , who aren't defensive about what they create.

They have an egolessness about them, which is really important, I think, and in creativity and especially in product development.

Jeff: Yeah. I love the whiteboard for what you just talked about and it can be virtual or in person, but right. The idea, I feel like there's so many meetings we've been in, we're trying to talk through what's this problem and then how do we solve it and how do we look at it and frame the problem where finally someone just goes Oh, I'm just give me the marker.

I got to, let me just put this up there and you, a picture can conceptualize such a complex thing so easily if you do it

Charles: Totally. And we've had to push on people to do that at times. Like I, sometimes I'll just say, just prototype it real quick. Let's just get a prototype put together really quickly and we'll poke holes in it, like I'm not getting, let's just [00:36:00] poke holes in something. Like it just gets the conversation going.

Jeff: As long, if you start moving, . So much of starting a business is just go, start it, get the first customer, get going same with the idea, right? It's once you get moving, it's a lot easier to keep it moving and optimize if you get going.

So

Charles: totally right. I equate it sometimes to working out. It's like the minute I get my gym clothes on, I'm like, all right, I'm committed. Like I did this. And then you go and you are, I'm here now. So I might as well keep going. And so it's like the minute you start to work on something, you're like we're already doing it.

Let's get, let's just keep going.

Jeff: Exactly. I'm a 5 a. m. guy, 5 a. m. guy for the gym. For that reason, once I'm up at five, I'm like all right, let's go. I'm up already. Might as well go. Now we're running short time. I don't want to take too much of your day here, but I do want to hit on this. I feel like we're on the topic. So maybe we just fly through the thought here, right?

You probably have talked about Reid Hoffman has it right with the whole, if you're not embarrassed by your first version of your product, you've waited too long. We've had some people in the show who have said, maybe given the elevated expectation of digital experiences nowadays minimal is not that minimal [00:37:00] anymore, and now, you talked about earlier too, that you guys launched performance marketing with Walmart, who I know from experience or not, minimal for them is not that minimal.

Jeff: So how do you balance this idea of. Minimal product and good enough for expectations. We've called it for lack of a better word, like minimal experience, but the middle experience is still pretty high.

Charles: Yeah, I think it depends on what you're doing. Context is so important here. I think. Yeah, absolutely. Look, there are times where. We're not going to go to market, especially with a partner with something that they're not comfortable with and we're not comfortable with. However, I would say, even in that situation, I think you may not put a product into production, but you could.

Get a version out early in staging or even a prototype early to get the kind of feedback that I'm talking about, because what you don't want to do is go in a hole, come out, put something in prod, and then suddenly it's the wrong thing. And you could have gotten all of that great [00:38:00] learning, in that time that you spent in the whole thinking that you're going to figure it out.

So it's really just about getting feedback as quickly as you possibly can. That's really all it is, and, certain things, I think, certain experiences, users may have a higher tolerance for knowing that it's a beta, which is fine. And so you can do it there. There are other cases where if you set the context, I think that they can get behind it and go, I'm willing to.

Kind of look beyond this because I know that this is a, brand new feature and it's got the beta tag on it or whatever but yeah, it's really just by getting quick feedback.

Jeff: yeah, no, I love that ties right back. Like you said, to get out there, start poking holes. Also, if it's a big, like you said, a partner, maybe it's just, you don't have every feature, but the experience of the core feature is great. So it's always minimal is relative, right?

Charles: That's right.

Jeff: On that note, Charles, I could, I feel like I could talk to you all day.

I mean, We have a good conversation on drums to still have, I feel like, but you got a day to get back to and I'm not going to keep you from it. Abada has a lot of performance marketing to do, and I'm sure you got a long roadmap to help drive there. So I want to get you back to it.

[00:39:00] I appreciate you taking the time, man. This was a great conversation. I had a blast. Where can people find you if they want to follow up and maybe ask you a question or anything like that, where, LinkedIn, anything like that, where people can find

Charles: Yeah, definitely hit me up on LinkedIn. Happy to connect with folks there. And yeah, I love talking shops, so thank you for the invitation to speak with you today 

Jeff: sounds good, Charles. I appreciate you come on, man. It was a blast.