Interview
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Dane: [00:00:00] If you exist in a company that is trying to fundamentally disrupt something, you're always going to need subject matter experts that know the old world, and they're going to tell you and your teams You can't do it like that. This is how it's always worked what your job is as a product manager is to come in and say let's do it together we're going to deliver something fundamentally different than what the market has seen before And you're going to fail but that's our job to challenge and push 

Jeff: welcome to LaunchPod, the show from LogRocket where we sit down with top product and digital leaders.

Today we're talking with Dane Malter, VP of Product and Strategy at Nvo, an all-in-one travel and expense app for corporate travelers. In this episode, Dane talks about his framework for driving product teams to be brave, ship faster, and attain huge goals. Why perfect is actually the enemy of progress, and when good enough is actually good enough. Plus, how to exceed the perceived boundaries of any solution and deliver product that really changes the status quo.

So here's our episode with Dane Moulter.

Dane, welcome to the show, man. Thanks for joining us.

Dane: Thanks for having me.

Jeff: Yeah, this would be a fun one. Looking across your background, right? \ you've done, big [00:01:00] enterprise. You've done, smaller startups. You've hit Bloomberg American express. You're at Navon now. But one thing I want to, it starts out on maybe is.

Grubhub and something that happened over there that I think is just such a great way to take the experience of product management and just bottle it up into one tiny little experience. I think hits on a lot of it is this idea of you were there, you would just come off of Amex and this concept of big planning and real perfection.

And you were working on basically the system to, how do you algorithmically you know, discharge drivers to go deliver things and. Had been relying on a human system and you guys were driving at perfection and kept going. And finally, a new leader came in and just said, just fricking ship it, man.

And I think there's a lot more to it than that, but it seems like a good balance of like speed. And how do you ship things fast, but good enough. Maybe we'll just start right there.

Dane: Coming into a new world coming off of an Amex experience where, you're building things that are slow and plotting, but, they're going to work, the, the impact you're going to have on the business but there's also a high risk in shipping something that's incomplete and walking into Grubhub was [00:02:00] extremely eyeopening as a PM who's coming in with that background and going we're very fast here.

We're just like right at our IPO stage. We're still very small. We're trying to build a new business and we're trying to learn something new about the mechanics of this business. We put together that's a small team and this was early days, most of these delivery companies. Now, this is the way they operate.

, they run a driver network and that's the way food gets delivered to you. When I joined Grubhub the business actually ran on just connecting restaurants that had their own drivers and having those guys go out and do the delivery. So this was a net new experience, I think, in the industry.

And so we were really just feeling our way around it. When I joined, I did a bunch of things, as a classic PM in a small company does, which is a lot of things that are not product management. I ran deliveries on my bike at lunch. I picked out boxes. We would be using to ship hats and stuff like that to these guys.

So lots of fun, what we were testing for was really building out . Some operationally efficient model to serve restaurants that didn't have their own drivers, and [00:03:00] we did that as most people would start a business with humans, dispatching those orders, calling the drivers, letting them know we'd get a little bit smart here and there, we'd give them a tool like a walkie talkie type tool for your phone, so you'd have faster access, things like that, but we never really took the leap fully in building the technology that we were looking for.

So we, yeah. Decided we'd commit. We went out, we worked with this incredible group at Georgia Tech, built this really smart algorithm, put together something that we thought was going to be really good. And we wanted to iterate our way through it, make sure it worked really well. Because the worst thing that could happen was that we didn't want to disrupt our diners from getting the food that they were looking for.

We didn't want to suddenly have it a burger sitting on the counter for 90 minutes because we just mismanaged the dispatching and the delivery process. So we're very thoughtful, right? We worked with our partners in the operations team. We were really going that works really well. If you're trying to build something that is going to work perfectly right, which was my mindset walking in.

[00:04:00] And it was, but we were slow, right? We were growing very slowly. We could add a few restaurants every week. , we couldn't really expand to other markets too aggressively. And while we're working on this project, we got a new a new COO. So a new CO came in, the guy was super seasoned, been around at Amazon, build a business there, was just, was like really focused on efficiency, but also on like hypergrowth.

And you brought that mindset to the team. And he said to us, what, why aren't you guys, why don't you guys just ship it, why don't you just go, why don't you just put this thing out there and see how it works? And we said what if it fails? What if we, what if our operations team is mad at us?

Because we've now, we've pissed off the drivers and the diners upset and the restaurants now upset, like there are a million ways this could fail and we don't want to, we don't want to fail. And what he basically said to our team was, if you don't have the courage to fail, you're never going to build anything.

And he said let's set some very aggressive goals for ourselves that feel like they're completely unreasonable, completely outside the bounds of what we could get [00:05:00] done. Let's 50 new markets with this technology. In the next year without growing our operations team significantly. Can we do that?

Do you think we can do that? Of course, we're all looking around the room like this guy's crazy. Where did we get this guy from? This is nuts. But it was the right push, and I think it's a push that I think product teams. Need to be willing to take is that you have to, you have to be able to be brave.

You have to challenge the status quo in a meaningful way, or you'll never truly innovate anything. And that push that we really needed to get over the edge was critical to our success. We were able to launch, I don't know if we hit 50 new markets in the next year. I don't even know. We probably tripled the size of our operations team.

But the reality is, the fact that we did it was what pushed us moving in the right direction as a company and as a product. And I think took that product from being an idea, a good idea. It turns out it actually is a good idea. Everybody's now doing that, but being an idea and actually being, turning it into a business and really growing it, which is [00:06:00] ultimately what any product manager should be looking to do, right?

As you build out your portfolio, you build your tech, you build the product. You're owning a business, right? And you need to think about your responsibility as a business owner and the way that you build a business is by taking the step, by taking the leap, by just willing to try it. Now, of course, as we did stuff like that, we failed.

There were things that didn't work. We had a team that we'd hired out in California that came in with a ton of experience delivering catering orders, right? These really like high end, high dollar value need to be there right at 11 50. So the team is in the boardroom eating at noon. And we tried it with them.

And it was a disaster. It wound up totally failing, these like extremely high dollar value sort of white glove deliveries were not getting the service level that we needed them to and we, what we realized very quickly was this is the bound. This is the bound of where we're going to go.

This is where you start to build a product that actually unites. [00:07:00] People and technology in the right way to deliver the most complete product and cover the most market you possibly can, which is to say, I think there's also this as a product leader working with my teams, I think I've seen this in the past where.

There's a world in which a lot of product teams will operate in like their lane. They know what they know. They've got their engineering team. They've got their design team. They've got a product person who's a tech person and those teams build tech. Right. And one of the things that I think we learned as we were building this product out at Grubhub was.

That tech that you're building is what we have always referred to as what you'd call your lowercase p product. It's your small product. It's a piece of a technology product that you're building. But what we realize is that what you're actually selling is something much bigger than this.

You're selling a product that has a physical manifestation. And in this case, it was the technology we were building for the algorithm, the technology we were building for the diners and the drivers and our dispatching teams and everybody to operate in concert [00:08:00] that technology matters, but what matters is the full product that you're selling, that allows you to access the market more completely.

And that might mean pulling people in, making that a part of your offering, but knowing the bounds of where your technology sits and where you actually want that human dynamic to play into your product.

Jeff: Yeah, I think that's such an important piece is if you're looking at building for the tech is not there because we're building tech, like we're not here to actually build software, we're here to solve problems. And that's how you build a large enduring company. And if you confine yourself to just software solutions, you're probably fairly limited.

Like you said, it starts to hit upper bounds of can you serve that market or you have, an area you fail because you can't serve it well, versus if you look at You're not delivering a product you're delivering an experience or maybe you guys think about it as like a capital P product, right? The bigger macro idea of it, in some cases, the best solution might be developing an interface for those humans to have the high touch with the really white glove executive large catering orders.

But if the [00:09:00] burger is, 10 minutes. Early or late for one person. It's probably I'm not going to care at least as a diner If you're, seven and a half minutes off

Dane: Yeah 

Jeff: so i'm curious your ceo came in and said, all right guys Forget perfection. We're going to ship it.

We're going to open 50 markets. We're not going to grow the ops team And threw down the gauntlet what changed and how you approached the problem or how did you because something must have? Switched in process or urgency or something to make that possible where before you were operating at, probably a click or two lower velocity there.

Dane: honestly, the biggest thing that, that shifts when you get a push like that from leadership is your mindset, right? And mindset matters a lot when you're building a product and you're going into uncharted waters and you're not really sure, is it going to work?

Do I need to test my way into this? What happens if I fail? If this doesn't work? The mindset of I have to test, I have to find out, I have to know before I go. Is one that will lead to a set of processes and interactions with your counterpart teams. [00:10:00] And, in this case, with our operations teams, where we were all very hesitant, we were willing to sit back and say, let's calculate it a little bit more.

Let's go back to our academic partners who know this stuff and just triple check that we think it's really going to work in these other scenarios that we're worried about seeing here. And you get complacent a little bit in the sense that you don't. You feel your safety net is perfection, right?

That's what you're leaning on. And as soon as that safety nets ripped out from you and saying, you're not here. And this is not what we're just going to catch you. We're not waiting for perfection. We're not waiting on this. It changes absolutely everything about the way you engage the teams around you, right?

You go to them with you bring urgency as a product person, you bringing urgency into that conversation. You're bringing the risk taking the push to the teams around you. And that mindset becomes very infectious, right? And so getting direction from a leader like that tells you, you have the freedom to be brave.

Go be brave. Go try. Just try. Let's you have a functionally different conversation with your teams about how much risk you're willing to take as you're shipping something. , your stakeholders, [00:11:00] you bring this energy that says, let's just try together. We're in this together. Let's work on it.

And it can make a huge difference. And I think it's one of those things that yeah. It can be a hard lesson to learn. You have to live that moment where someone tells you're not being brave in order to feel it and go. But once you understand the freedom that allows you, it works in every scenario.

It doesn't have to be food delivery. It can be any scenario where you're operating in a completely unknown space. You're not sure how the tech is going to work, how the product is going to work. But you know that when you've tried it, when you're brave, it makes the people around you support you in a more meaningful way.

You work together to drive toward an outcome. And that's really what Switch for us at Grubhub was just starting to challenge ourselves and take risks. And as a collective unit start to feel that was okay for us to do together, right?

Jeff: I love the kind of view of what changes is bigger than one, maybe, operational process or something. It's this idea of be brave and product or don't be brave and right. Be brave and ship and, change the [00:12:00] world or, in stock trading might be like, take a, a portfolio kind of ETF or broad.

Dane: in an index. It's safe. It's going to grow. But you could also play the market and you could do this. , it's interesting. I'm now I'm here at Navon, which is as a company is a very technologically centric sort of travel management company, which is in an industry that is old school.

It's an industry that is , very much. Like I call my travel agent books my travel. I hang up the phone. We're all good. Everything's fine And as of course as there's you know New generations are hitting the market OTAs are more prominent or like an Expedia or a booking.

com are very prominent in the way you live your life as a traveler that mindset of I'm gonna call somebody that's not and that's not there anymore, right? It's not there anymore And what's interesting is though, to build an agency that challenges that status quo, you have to have a lot of people in the company who actually know how that works, who knows the inner workings of the system and knows really, , how this [00:13:00] works and how you fulfill an airline ticket or get a hotel room and pass a credit card to a hotel room so that everything is booked.

But this mindset that we, that would be picked up at Grubhub, one of the things I see out of the leadership team at Navon is. They believe very much in the same sort of let's be brave. Let's challenge. Let's go. And what I find is our role as a product team here is so much of that. And it's what you're trying to do.

If you exist in a company that is trying to disrupt fundamentally disrupt something, you're always going to need subject matter experts that know the old world, but they're going to be bound to the old world. They're going to understand how that works. And they're going to tell you and your teams every day.

You can't do it like that. It doesn't work like that. This is how it's always worked This is the thing you're going to need what your job is as a product manager is to set that mindset is to come in and say we're going to try We're going to be brave. Let's do it together We're on the same team here and we're going to deliver something fundamentally different than what the market has seen before And you're going to fail there are going to be [00:14:00] moments where you fail We've done it here at nirvana where we've tried too hard to put Technology in on an operational process that doesn't connect the dots between the airline and the traveler and us as an agency and the corporate program that's managing.

It can be very hard, but the it's that mindset that you're bringing to the table that lets you actually build the innovation and really push forward, spaces where there is a problem to your point where there's a problem that needs to be solved. That's our job as a product team is to come in and challenge and push and stepping outside of those comfort bounds is how you're going to get that done.

Jeff: I love the kind of framework of, be brave, but within that, what that means is, give the team a big goal that they're pushing towards help everyone understand that there is a shared sense of. Loss. If you miss or if something doesn't work that's not on one individual.

We, we, as a team agreed that we might fail once in a while. And there's a shared sense of failure together when you're trying things. And it's, as long as you're trying the right things and pushing forward in a way that makes sense and you have grounded theses and [00:15:00] why sometimes it's not going to work, but it's okay to fail.

And we have the team permission to do that. I love the kind of broad idea of how do you enable that and switch that mindset on. It takes more than just say. Go try. It's, we're going to share failures as a team. We're going to have this big goal. We're going to hit it. And we're going to also find out what the bounds of failure are and where is it okay to fail?

Where's it not okay to fail? Maybe, or where can we push the product where it can push you? That's awesome. I have experienced the travel piece myself more recently. I'd like to admit where there's a, in house travel agency and you have to call and it. I can see the huge benefit to having this be in a tight system.

Like right now, teams here spend a ton of time on travel. You have to go self book. You have to deal with what flight do I take? I think it's a wildly inefficient process, but the other one, if it's just a very traditional one can also be tough. So how do you take a tech, look at it and build a better process that gets all the efficiencies of that kind of more centralized travel function, but all the benefits of modern technologies, a great.

Product to push and I can see the huge benefit, but also I'm sure a tough one to tackle.

Dane: Yeah, it is. It's [00:16:00] interesting. You said yourself, right? You're a corporate traveler and you're traveling for work. And the interesting thing I think about the space that we operate in is traveling for work in some ways can feel a bit like traveling for yourself.

Like you said, you want some choice, you've probably got your airline you like to fly, your hotel chain you like to stay in, whatever it is, and so those may be things you would have been doing on an Expedia or booking. com as you were booking for yourself, or you might go directly to those guys.

What adds to the complexity of business travel is it typically comes in sort of two spaces. It comes in the fact that you exist in the construct of a larger program, you have a boss who cares how much money you're spending. You have a finance team that cares how much money you're spending as, when you're traveling around, it would be really awesome if we could all stay at four seasons in a suite when we're on the road, set up in first class every day, we can't. And so there's that complexity that's added into it. And I think in historical models. That's what the agent was keeping you in control of. They were helping you. They were not giving you the option. Now [00:17:00] in, in the, wild west of going out on Expedia, you could book whatever you want and really it's going to come back to your financing.

So we've got to solve that problem. The other problem that we really work to solve is Really on the servicing side, it's really about management of your booking business. Travelers change their flights all the time. They change their hotel stays all the time. You've got that meeting that's running long.

You want to stay an extra day or you're on the road and, suddenly you need to get home because your kid is sick or something. Those are extremely unique scenarios to. You needing to change your travel on the fly. That doesn't really impact leisure travel. When you come on vacation, you're on vacation, right?

You already know what your plans are. The timing, what's locked in. It's extremely fluid and on the business travel side. And there's also a little bit more pressure, right? If you're on your way out that morning for a meeting in the afternoon. I take day trips. I live in Chicago.

I take day trips to New York all the time. If I don't hit that 6 AM flight, there's a very real chance. I'm going to miss that meeting that starts at 11 30. And that's a big [00:18:00] problem. And so if I'm on the road and that's how I've booked my day, we've got to be able to react, we've got to be able to help solve that problem for you.

Those are like, especially on the servicing side. This is an area it's a really hard nut to crack as you're moving from a world where you had a human who would call the airline for you and do this stuff or go call up to your hotel. And we've had to, we've had to really think differently about what kind of technology we're using.

To solve those problems. And , you imagine a world where every airlines got a different sort of schedule system and everybody's got a different tech stack that you're working with and every. And so what we've had to do is we've had to challenge the teams and say, these are historically going back to this concept of being brave.

These are historically not solved problems. They exist really well within one airline or within one hotel chain or your car rental company, or you name it, what are you going to build on top? That's going to standardize this. How can we put one layer in on top that lets us represent these changes in one way or [00:19:00] the other?

And it's the telling the team that there it's okay to try has always gotten us over that pump, challenging status quo around. There's no way to know if a blizzard is going to come and can I change my flight for free? It's a whatever go ahead. We're going to let you solve that problem freely And I think to your point, Jeff, you said it a second ago is it's not just telling them to go solve it.

It's helping them understand the problem and the business opportunity that's aligned to that is so critical and helping them understand, look, what you're doing here is saving time for the customer. Let's quantify it. Let's set a goal around it. You're saving money. For the company, because you're, you're not charging extra to have an operational overhead that's attached to it.

Let's quantify it. Let's set a goal around it and then telling them, let's go see how far we can push this. Let's see if we can really get this done. That's what's going to drive that innovation. And I think that's really key. What one point you said, though, that I want to key in on a little bit is the is the, is really those business [00:20:00] outcomes.

And that ultimately, this accountability back to some measure of your business is really important and is a really important way. I think as a product leader, it's your job to communicate to your teams, right? You mentioned I spent some time at Amex. I think this was the first place I really got this exposure to Amex or to the business management was at Amex.

And when I stepped into that world it was slow, it was plotting, we talked about that there, it was so focused on what it was doing both for the customer and for the company in every single thing that you were working on. And I'd come in from a background that was a little bit of just, it was very engineering centric.

It was very, we had a pretty tight user group where they weren't going to go anywhere. We had them locked in on our product while I was at Bloomberg. And, I stepped into Amex where you're dealing with customers who have choice. They have a lot of freedom to go choose what they want.

They have a lot of things that they want to do. And and you've got a huge business that is like fluid and growing and changing. And I'll never forget [00:21:00] walking into one of my first planning meetings that I was working on with my broader team there, and I thought I'd come up with this really great list of here's some things we can do some cool features we can launch can make these customers really happy, which was the world I was living in before we were pushing things that we're going to drive the right outcome for the customer.

And these right sort of experiences. The team looked at me and they went, do you know how much money it costs us to run this platform? And I said I was like no, is that something I'm supposed to know about? I'm not really sure that, it was like this eye opening moment where I went Oh my gosh, I don't know anything about any part of this business and I need to learn and I need to learn, I need to learn now.

And and that really pushed, I think that's a growth stage that every PM needs to go through to experience because it's how you're going to set those goals. Brave goals for your team because you understand the business mechanics. 

Jeff: from, going to business school back in college, I had a lot of exposure to accounting classes but people always ask as I talked to more junior marketers and other folks.

What is the path or what's the most surprising thing about [00:22:00] as you move into more senior roles? And my answer is never the ones of the thing because it's basically one go learn accounting Go know it because that is the language of business is accounting recognizing a couple of these things and how they work has such a huge impact on how you do your job that you are going to be capped out a certain level if you don't.

Either learn that or fundamentally understand it. And then the other piece is always just if you really like product, if you really like marketing you have really like engineering, probably don't push too hard to go too high in leadership because the amount of real deep marketing or engineering you do as you move into leadership really declines. 

That's a good story though. It really catalyzes that point though. You're not again, back to you're not just creating software. You are fixing a problem, but you're also fixing a problem in the context of a business that you operate in.

Jeff: We're here to sell stuff and to make money ultimately for the business. And you have to look at also what's it cost to deliver this, capital P product at the same time. One thing we've experienced here is, we deliver, digital experience analytics.

And how do you understand what [00:23:00] your users are doing in your application? And even back to before I joined the company, when Matt, our CEO kind of sold me on coming here, the big thing wasn't session replay, it was, we have access to all this data via this is currently unstructured, right?

You like, Right now we're basically living in the world of TikTok, but without the recommendation algorithm, right? You just have a list of videos and you're hoping but we, from that point, even way back then was as AI kind of grows in capability, we're going to be able to use this data to not make you go search, but to practically surface, like, where are things going wrong?

Where can you improve the experience? Where can you improve your business outcomes? But because we have this deep data that we can train on, we did other things to build, proprietary data sets and own that. But we had a team back to earlier point you made about like giving the team a big goal, tell them what the business goal we're teaching it or we're trying to fix here is and then set them losing and guide them right.

The goal was , I don't care about slightly faster finding a sessions. How do we deliver insights into these are the things that are most important that you need to go solve in your digital [00:24:00] product. And the AI team, had the freedom to go, yeah, but at the same time they also came back and would say, I got this solution, the open AI costs or whatever, the Gemini costs are going to be like astronomically high.

So it was either a, we're cool with that because we're going to, we're going to fail on accounting for a minute while we go deliver this value and we'll figure out how to make it cheaper. Or B, let's go solve the cost issue first.

Dane: Absolutely. Yeah. It's super interesting, right? It's like you said, I think, and the more you move up in leadership, the more that those skills become really important and you truly realize the sort of jack of all trades, you really have it in the product and marketing organizations, especially those leaders.

Cause you are balancing all of those decisions all day, every day. And I think it's those moments where , you do have to make decisions on I'm willing to take a hit on this because I need to push the technology forward, or I'm not willing to take the tech yet right to that point because I can't afford it, or the revenue generation isn't where I want it to be.

But it's how you, I think, as you're building your career, if your [00:25:00] goal is leadership, to your point, if your goal is to do the product or do the marketing or do that, maybe don't, right? You don't maybe don't want to go there. But if your goal as a product person is to be a leader, , you've got to ask yourself those questions every day.

And everything that you're doing is. Am I impacting the business? What are my counterparts think about this? How are my counterparts going to work on this? Where's the connection back to the human that actually might need to do something within this product and how does that deliver something that's greater?

What's my go to market motion for this? It's that well rounded view that you need to build up as you go through your career and you need to ask yourself am I getting exposure to that? Am I getting an opportunity to learn what it means? To make a decision about accounting and maybe, take a hit here and there because it's for the greater good, you've got to tuck those under your belt a little bit as you're building your career so that when you're in that scenario that you're just describing where your AI team is coming back going, great, I can spend 500, 000 a month on technology costs.

Is that okay with you? You actually have something to work off of, right? You can [00:26:00] make a sound decision and balance those objectives and make the right decision for your team and your product and your company.

Jeff: And back to we're here to solve big problems and, sometimes it's okay to fail. We need to decide where that's okay. Where are we allowing the upper bound of like how far these things can push to? And where do we call it? To that point though I think you've run into a few situations around, part of moving this stuff forward is how do you balance good enough?

And where is good enough? Good enough, right? And it seems throughout your career, maybe even especially like at Expedia with some of the work you did there, there's a constant thing of you all move quick, you all move forward and this is part of delivering these big goals is being willing to take these risks.

But how do you make that call on, good enough is here at this one on this project is from here and this other one's, way up here out of sight.

Dane: Yeah, Expedia was a, was really interesting. I went to Expedia shortly after spending time at Grubhub where, we talked about the goal was go fast and take risk and let's try it. And Expedia was this [00:27:00] interesting sort of blend of we're going fast, but we're not going quite as fast.

And we have a big business to run all my time at Amex. We may be willing to take more risks as a different kind of business that we're growing here and whatever the thing that I found super interesting at at Expedia was. There's a really strong culture at that company around testing and being willing to take small tests to learn something greater. And so, when I first started there, I worked on the mobile app. Which the mobile app at the time was really a very small piece of the overall product. 

It was a very, if you remember the old commercials, I might be dating myself a little bit, but they were great commercials. But it was very web centric and the mobile app was just this wasn't like, the year 1860 or anything, but it was the mobile app was still starting out.

Dane: It was a new piece of what this portfolio offered. And it was, in the single digit percentages of total bookings and basically sessions that the company was getting. And we saw, but we saw lots of opportunity, right? We saw some data that suggested, people who are [00:28:00] using the mobile app, unsurprisingly are way more brand loyal.

They're going to come back. They're not going to click through all your ads that you're paying all this extra to get to. They're going to come directly to you and it's going to be really efficient for your business. They're going to have a better experience with your product and your company. And so we really wanted to drive that up.

And, What we spent a lot of time doing was running tests that were really simple, like really basic, put a banner on the website that says download the app. If we see you're on mobile web, right? These like little things and they weren't complex. It was just little tests. Hey, can I change some language here to see if it, people are getting clicked through, if that actually gets them in, are they committed changing some of the experiences on the mobile app to keep people who had been bouncing out, coming back in new push notifications, small tests.

But the important thing that, that, for myself, I was learning, I think we, as a group, we're learning as we went was you're starting to build the principle of understanding leading indicators and the lagging metrics that follow them. And so to go back to your sort of your accounting principles and the revenue outlook and the [00:29:00] things that you're really trying to ultimately build as you're building a company.

You as a product team who are working on these things, or you as the marketer, who's building that small ad, what the way that you can really contribute to the long term impact of the business is to understand the little metrics that matter, , how you're going to change something today and learn about its potential impact on the lagging indicator.

That's going to drive your business forward. And so . What I always tell my teams even now is let's run small. You may not know this dynamic at all, and you may not understand how a single percentage point change on your conversion funnel is going to change your revenue outlook for the rest of the year at this point.

But go run the test. It's a cheap test. Let's run the test. Let's try and find out. Let's do enough of them. And as you're building up those tests if you keep that focus on the balance of these are my leading indicators, and I understand the lagging goal that I'm looking for, even if it's some lofty goal that my, CEO gave me, and I don't understand it at all [00:30:00] because I didn't go to business school, which I did not, and I'm still learning this stuff, that's okay, but if I can stay focused on how am I learning right now today and trying to connect it, and I'm going to get it wrong a bunch of times as I try, but I'm going to try.

Okay. You naturally find your way into this good enough state, right? , and that's what I think everybody, when I, during my time at Expedia, this was what our teams were really good at this. We were really good at testing these iterative tests, finding the linkage between the metric and understanding what that was going to do to our bigger goals that were being handed down by the most senior leaders at the company.

And it's just like you, you have to run them though. Otherwise you'll never get there. And at some point you'll reach this natural break where you're going to go, actually, I understand it. And I understand that last test, the number test number 11 on that same feature that we've been looking at is the thing that's moving the needle.

And collectively now we're going to, we're on track to hit that goal. And at that point you can move on. And I think what was so cool about that experience was. [00:31:00] The, we were, we never really worried about reaching that perfection point, right? We've talked about perfection and I got this sort of, whiplash experience where we weren't going to do a perfect that grow up at all.

We're just going to go and we're going to try what the experience taught me was really that you can have that sort of. Feeling of it's chaotic, we're going really fast. We're going to do things, but it's all in the spirit of reaching that bigger goal that you're trying to achieve.

You can find a path to it that feels structured and feels, like you're really learning as you go, rather than just throwing stuff at the wall and hoping it sticks. You're pushing out in a more methodical way that lets you understand the mechanics of your business and really grow your business.

Jeff: Yeah, no, at some level you have to look at the bigger goal and how are you getting there? I think we ran into something like that here a little while back. And generally I think people, I think this highlights one thing. Be able to generally undervalue how important is basic research can be on some of these things and allowing the team a little bit of room to conduct the test like you said, doesn't clearly [00:32:00] have, you don't have complete line of sight to how that's going to move forward.

The big picture thing, but it's cheap. It's easy to do. And you might as well do it. And we had one of those a while back where on our blog, it was some like conversion, a little window that popped up. And someone had some idea, but what if we did it this way versus that way? And everyone's that's dumb.

It goes it flies in the face of every best practice we've ever heard. But it is it's going to hurt. Okay, go for it. Hey, it ended up like quintupling conversion. It was like this ludicrous effect that we just. Did not expect, but we've then used that for so many other things down the line that like it's added millions of dollars probably to the company.

And it's just this little thing that we learned that we did and just optimize so many different app placements we did and so many different things that we worked on. And it was one of those things that we were just like we're not going to bother doing that. Like, why do you want to do this? And it was I just want to see if it works.

I have an idea. And had such wide reaching applicants, but if you don't do those things, you don't, Yeah, I do think there's an element of we had a guy on called [00:33:00] McHale Lewis recently he's over, he runs digital product, whole foods. And he talks about this idea of four types of luck.

I'll be honest. I forget which type of luck this falls into, but there's a level of if you don't try some of those things, you're not going to create the luck for your future for yourself.

Dane: yeah, absolutely. You've got to, you've got to I think it's your responsibility as a leader on your team, whether you're like a line level PM who's running, running a team with, three engineers and you're working on 10 pixels on a page or you're running an entire organization.

I think you've got to create space for you and your team to learn more about the mechanics of your business. As long as you understand the long term goals of where you're trying to go, your job is not to just set a plan. And then work your way there and just work through the plan and that you've got to, you've got to allow yourself the freedom to explore it a little bit.

And it goes back to that mindset on being brave, right? You have to be able to be brave and take the leap and try things and know that they're not going to work and do that. And it doesn't mean you have to do it where you're risking your whole [00:34:00] business by trying it because it's an early stage thing and you're just going to throw it, you're going to throw everything you got at it.

But you can do it in small ways, just like you described small, cheap tests that feel almost researchy in nature, let you learn so much more about the way that you can build an efficient business and an efficient product. And you've got to let yourself and your team have the freedom and the courage to go and try those things.

Or you might just, as you said, be leaving millions on the table and you'd never even know it.

Jeff: I think what I've loved about your career, as we've been able to talk through this one thing that Tracy, we haven't touched on is now you're at Nevon, you're solving these big, hairy problems that, blend kind of old tech and how do you bring it forward and how do you keep SMEs in the loop, but also the same time go maybe we can actually change the things you think are carved in a rock, but it's bringing all this together, right? Like, how do you look at the cost of things? How do you look at the problem you're trying to solve? What's good enough versus what are the things that you probably need to keep a human in the loop on?

And AI is coming into it more and more where you guys are dealing with just like very nebulous new tech that no one really knows a ton [00:35:00] about and how we use it because it's so brand new. How are you and the team wading through these and prioritizing and looking at here's the problems we're going to solve and how do you move forward in the best way with the, everyone has limited resources at some level.

So how do utilize those best?

Dane: Yeah, absolutely. You're spot on. I think it's, I always love reading reading blogs about AI because about one day after they're published, they are out of date because it's no longer relevant to say this is not how it works anymore. And it's, that's the speed of the open source.

That's the speed of the technology and it's changing. And I think it's a really interesting time to be working in technology because, of course, how many people are also saying we do AI and we're doing this thing and it's a common refrain. And you as a product team, you as a marketing team, you have to know, you have to listen to it.

It has to be part of the way that you're working, but that comes with a lot of uncertainty and a lot of like gray area. It's very unclear what you should be doing there. I think what's working for us, what's working for [00:36:00] teams that I see who are really living in the space very effectively is.

They're going back to those principles that they've built up over their career. All the things we've been talking about here need to come together your job. I think you said it actually really well earlier, which is your job is to solve a problem and as long as you keep your team really focused on what that problem is.

It doesn't matter what the technology is you're using, right? In the past, that technology was a website that you would go to use Expedia dot com, right? It was a website. That was a problem was I couldn't travel easily. I needed an expensive travel agent as we've evolved. That technology becomes very mobile centric or it becomes something, Maybe something like a voice tool that I might have on my Alexa device or something that the interface is changing slightly.

And AI is just the next iteration of that. And it's a new piece of technology as you are building out your business, as you're building out your product, you got to lean back on what you know, you got to lean on the ability to be brave, how you're building a mindset [00:37:00] around that. You've got to lean on, your commitment to the problem you're solving, your commitment to the business goals that you're trying to achieve, how you're setting those goals, and then you've got to be willing to take a few risks here and there to try it so you can really see and learn as you build out toward that future state.

So I think, AI is not the last time that we'll see some massive change in the way that we are all building our technology and our products and our businesses. And this is just another step. It's a good opportunity, I think, for everybody to look and learn and say, what is it that really makes me a strong market or a strong product manager, a really strong engineering team and lean on those first principles and then push those through into the next technological evolution.

Jeff: Exactly. No one looks now and says, Oh, I'm glad we used Bluetooth for that versus some other wireless. 

Dane: Exactly. 

Jeff: so it's a tool that we have. Dan, it's been awesome having you on. I, I feel like I, I'm three X smarter now on product. So thank you for going all through this.

It's been great. If people have questions or want to follow up or, learn more about Nevon or anything where's a good place to reach out? Should they hit you up on LinkedIn? Is there somewhere [00:38:00] better?

Dane: Yeah, no, I've you can obviously if you want to learn about Nivon, we've got nivon. com. You can go check out the company, sign up or you can reach out to me directly. LinkedIn's a great place. I'm on there, message you back. Always happy to jump on a call and chat with anybody who wants to talk.

Jeff: So there's something I love about the product community and marketing in general has been, I've learned so much from just hitting someone and be like, Hey, you said something cool. Can I ask you some questions about it? And it's so rare that people say no, but no, thank you for coming on. This is fantastic.

It really cool experience here. And I really appreciate you coming on. Yeah. Hope to 

Dane: no, thanks for having me.