Christine Kuei
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Emily: [00:00:00] Welcome to LaunchPod, a product management podcast from LogRocket. Today, our guest is Christine Quay, Director of Product Management at Forever21. Christine started her career in email marketing at Experian, and her natural curiosity about digital customer behavior propelled her transition into product management.

Christine has since worked in a range of industries, including B2B SaaS, e commerce and fintech and lead product organizations at Chipotle and PetSmart before moving to Forever 21. On today's episode, LogRocket's VP of Marketing, Jeff Wharton, talks to Christine about the challenges and strategies involved in aligning digital transformations with physical customer experiences Using user research to enhance customer loyalty, tackling product management obstacles, and optimizing team dynamics for successful outcomes.

So, here it is, our conversation with Christine Quay.

Jeff: Hey, Christine, super stoked to have you on. Thank you so much for joining today. Really, really excited to have you here

Christine: Yeah. Super stoked to be here, Jeff. Thanks for [00:01:00] having me on.

Jeff: I feel like I avoided this question for a long time and now it's become my default opener just because everyone has a different path into product. So how did you get into product? What did that path from kind of maybe I see up to leadership look like for you

Christine: Yeah, thanks for asking. I'm sure you've asked this 100 times.

Jeff: and a hundred different answers?

Christine: I can only imagine. I know everyone has their own unique path. I don't know how unique Vine is, but I just wanted to share my story of how I moved into product management and grew into a product leader. , I think I mentioned in your LogRocket blog, I began my career in the email marketing space at Experian, the fintech company.

So in my role there, I launched a ton of email campaigns for, um. financial institutions. , and for one particular project I worked on, I helped build one of the site landing pages, , with the engineering team. And I thought, wow, this is pretty fun. This is cool. Like how do we do more of this? So, , from there, my natural [00:02:00] interest in sort of the kind of the online landing pages, websites led me more into product management to explore.

And then on a formal occasion, there was a job opening. Like For a product manager role and I applied , I knew the hiring manager. , I worked well with her. We had a great relationship, and, , I went through the interview process as a standard candidate, and she hired me, , because she believed in me, because I had, you know, the right foundation, I knew the people, , I was a high performer.

, and from there, I was just really fortunate to be under her wing and others, where they mentored me, , to be a very high performing product manager. , we'll go into this later, I'm sure, but I learned to be very outcome focused KPI driven. , I understood how to do user research. So it was just a really great kind of, , springboard into my career because I had access to the mentors product trainings.

Workshops. , and in addition to that, I got to work alongside with very talented UX team members who [00:03:00] kind of brought me along the journey for designing initial prototypes, running a B testing and really sort of instilling this, laser focused. 

North star type of philosophy. So that really instilled, , a solid foundation for me on a product management level, and I believe is a big, , critical reason why I've been able to be so successful as an IC. And then as a product leader, instilling these philosophies that I've learned, , to my team that I lead.

Jeff: now that's a background that I feel like we don't see as much. And I'm often so surprised by this. So I obviously I'm in marketing and. I have long felt that there's just some, so many parallels to marketing, done well and product management where you have to look at how are you executing, what are the goals what is success and define all that.

And you really have to pay attention to, prioritization and like you said, then there's even, you often are working on landing pages or other things that are being produced or other products actually being built for the marketing. So I'm always surprised not to see [00:04:00] more marketers going into product, but glad to meet one here.

So that actually was a different than most of the answers I've gotten.

Christine: Oh, that's good to know. I'm a little bit unique. I didn't think so. Yeah. I have a digital marketer at heart, Jeff. So I do understand right top of the funnel acquisition lead gen. I currently work in SEO, organic search. So I had the whole kind of holistic perspective. 

Jeff: And that, I think that actually brings us to. An interesting point about product. And when you've talked about a lot, which is when we had Carla Fisk on a couple of weeks back, she has talked a lot about kind of outcomes versus outputs and you both have worked together a couple of times now.

I'd love to dive more into this around kind of building empowered teams and how do you do this? And it seems like a key part of that really is this idea of outcomes versus outputs. And it's a good parallel cause it's something you run into marketing to a lot where, it's not just about getting the thing done.

It's about. Actually achieving a goal and just the kind of outputs are secondary to that, to the outcomes. So on that, love to talk about you, you found yourself at two companies [00:05:00] there where I think they were digital transformations, digital maturations. But can you give us a little background there first and we can dive in.

Christine: Yeah, sure. Absolutely. So for contact Carla Fiske and I worked together at Experian and then we left the organization, went on our separate product career journeys. Then we reunited back at Chipotle in 2020, both as product leaders. We were hired to help really help elevate and drive digital maturation and transformation efforts at the company.

Jeff: I can imagine Chipotle in 2020, interesting place to be the rise of, digital ordering and online ordering and just how do you run the brick and mortar and the digital and this world that had historically been, I would assume almost totally brick and mortar suddenly had this giant digital element to it.

What did that look like when you walked in the doors there? , what was the kind of initial impression when you came in and that they need this maturation? Um,

Christine: Great question, Jeff. So as we all know 2020 was a year of the pandemic, and Carla and I joined at the height of it, right? It's somewhere in 2020. And really, [00:06:00] at the time, the top priority for Chipotle was supporting their online orders, just the digital growth, the surge. So really, their focus was on growing and scaling their digital business to support this hyper surge in online ordering.

Restaurants were not readily accessible. Customers couldn't go to their favorite restaurants and order like they normally do. It was all online. I remember at one point my team, because it was so just frenetic and just so chaotic, they had to take customer calls. Like the call centers, they were intaking calls from customers because of just the flood of people just were just upset.

They couldn't go to the stores and their online orders were wrong. So it was a hurricane. It was a tornado. Eye of the storm. Yeah. In 2020 at Chipotle and they doubled down and executive leaders from probably CEOs, and below to say, we need to fix this. We need to get things right. We need to put a lot more into our digital product organization.

Jeff: Yeah, and I assume, step one there. There's, I feel [00:07:00] like there's been a lot of talk recently about outcomes versus outputs. And the whole, Marty Kagan has his whole soapbox right now about the theater of product. And that's, feature teams and that kind of stuff. But I've loved this and this is a great example.

There's a point in there where for something like a Chipotle, where it is going, just as such a seismic shift in how they're going to market at some point, it really is it better to just get the feature out and good enough versus really perfect quality? Is there a place where this kind of idea of just feature output is actually the right thing?

Metric. And then at some point you maybe swap or what do you think about that?

Christine: Yeah. Another great question. You're on a roll today, Jeff. And for, and I will say Marty Kagan I'm a fan of his, I actually

Jeff: Oh, yeah.

Christine: his workshop in San Francisco. He is so inspirational. I have his books, multiple books. I just wanted to give him a shout out. So back to your question though

so here, Chipotle when I joined, right? So when, to answer your question, it was, In the, we need to get this done mode, right? Because there was just so [00:08:00] many features, heavy backlog, tech debt high stakes environment from customers, stakeholders, we just needed to get things shipped out the door in time just to make sure people got their digital burritos, right?

They needed to order. So in that specific scenario, I would say, okay. Yes, we had to lean in more on the output. We had to lean more on execution and getting our Jira tickets into the sprints and executed and that's fine at the time, completely acceptable. I would, again, I have the storm, but I would say overall holistically, that's not how you want to operate on if you want to scale and really lead your team to success, that should be more a short term Almost a dire situation where you really just have to keep churning out features after feature to meet the needs because you're just so overwhelmed.

So that's an outlier situation that I stepped into and then I had to obviously turn that around within Carlos partnership to be much more outcome driven, much more thoughtful and intentional about how we launch products.

Jeff: Yeah. That makes sense. I remember I [00:09:00] had a manager years and years ago. And my first, actually at my first tech startup I worked at, and we were just slamming through, thing after thing. And the level of productivity was, probably two X, what was really sustainable.

And it was a lot of just putting out, marketing feature, the equivalent to features in marketing. And finally, he sat down and pushed back on, on leadership of the company. And I made the point that, you call it breakneck pace because if you do it for too long, you're going to fall and break your neck.

And I always took that to heart that there are things that you do in. In a sprint, not an agile sprint, but a, sprint is in a short, extremely fast focused period, but that's not a sustainable thing. And maybe you have those once in a while, but in reality, after that, you have to take a little bit of a rest and, Slow it down and look more forward.

I always think those have a time and place, but you have a really good quote here that I've read a few times from places you've talked. This idea of, what got us here won't get us there. And I feel like that's really applicable to this idea of there is a place. For feature team [00:10:00] kind of facet or feature team focus for a little bit, but that's not going to get you to the next level, as you said it's not going to scale.

So what's the pointer, what's the signal or how do you know when you need to take a hard look at that and go, okay, we need to stop, we need to prioritize and we need to start flipping to more empowerment, more focus on outcomes and really building this much more. Productive team is going to build the next level of what we need to do.

Christine: Yeah, you just hit the nail on the head. That mantra, what got us here, won't get us there. Something I used a lot at both Chipotle and PetSmart when I was trying to really empower and level up my team. And with that said what makes me really propel this idea is that, when I come into an organization, my initial assessment period, my, my first 90 days, I make a lot of observations.

I do a lot of evaluations, both on people, process and technology. Within that time period I don't know, based on my experience, like they're falling short here. They're like, we need to move the needle in these specific [00:11:00] areas. So it's more of an overall assessment that I make based on their current processes, the talent of the people, how they work together.

And if I feel like there is a lot of room for improvement and I get the executive backing, this is where. You know where I make my mark and I can use myself on the example of Jeff, right? So so during my product career, I grew the most when I was challenged right and quite frankly pretty uncomfortable for example I had to go completely out of my comfort zone to be a salesperson for a day and make a pitch to a fortune 500 client I had to Do guerrilla style user research when I asked for feedback on my prototypes from Starbucks customers.

So what I'm the point being is that you need to really get out of your comfort zone and push yourself To make significant changes. So with an organization that this applies to them as well, right? So challenge the status quo Really evolving your team to a higher, holding them to higher expectations, right?

Reworking processes, making sure you're aligned across the board and ensuring your stakeholders, have that [00:12:00] buy in. But it's really just, you can't turn around, for example, an e commerce business by continuing to do more of what you're doing and expect different results. You need to take some risk, some calculated risk to really move that needle and swing for the fences and go big or go home mentality.

So obviously you can't be reckless. You need to take those risks, calculated risk. But at the end of the day, if you're not seeing your kind of your sales moving in the right direction, you're getting this constant negative sentiment from customers, right? Your mobile app is not well liked. You got to make those changes.

Jeff: So that, that's the idea of I think people call it the empower empowered product team or empowered product. And there's a lot of change that needs to go on there, right? There is people, the people need to line up with it. There is management support. You can't do that alone. You can't.

You can push for it all you want as a product leader. But if you're standing alone and you're, that your C suite and the board maybe is pushing against that, it's [00:13:00] not gonna work, so you have to line up a lot of ducks. So a couple things to go through here, I always like to focus on people first.

So there, step one on the risk I see is just. You have these people who've got you to where you are, but maybe some of them don't want that next step. Maybe some of them look at it and go, it's pretty good the way it is. Why do we have to change? And how do you, how do you deal with that case first?

Where you have a team member who's been there for a while, who comes to you and says, it's good the way it is. Why are we trying to change this 

Christine: So I can give you an example at Chipotle when I was going through my valuation, I was very clear on, the end product vision, the product goal with my team. I was handed over a team who were business analysts. I got converted to product owners and the head of product just told me very transparently when I joined Christine, I, I don't know what to do with these people.

I don't have the time. I was like, can you help me out here and figure this out? Said no problem. I got you. This is why you hired me. So I spent my first 30, 60, 90 days evaluating each team [00:14:00] member, identifying their strength weaknesses, again, at the same time cascading, the north star of my head of product the vision to elevate the team, new roles, expectations.

I came in here, I was, I wasn't too like a drill sergeant, but I was pretty assertive and telling the team, What you guys are doing BAU business as usual is not going to cut it for me, like just because you check the box and you've launched a JIRA ticket doesn't mean that I'm going to give you a high rating.

I will rate you based on, that's what I more or less hold of that. So I'm going to rate you based on what you did for the customers, right? What KPI numbers you hit. How did you drive sales? How well do you work with stakeholders? So it's much more 360 Qualitative quantitative versus I launched 10 year tickets this month like way to go, right?

That being said through the process of analyzing the team some team members. I did get pushed back I just full transparency. They were just not aligned to the goals the mission they didn't understand why they needed to do more why I wanted more out of them versus just You know Sending me a summary of the 10 tickets they launched that month.

And that [00:15:00] was it. Cause in the past that was good enough. Oh, you've launched 10, 15 things way to go. But I'm more of the, so what? Okay. So you've launched it. So what now? And for a couple of them, it just wasn't in their career path. I'm not sure they just weren't aligned with that.

Through, through voluntary and involuntary attrition, I had to rebuild my team. Yeah,

Jeff: that, sadly that sometimes is what happens. And I have found is usually better for. Everyone when you know you can, there's a good reason you kinda walk through just, Hey, this process isn't matching anymore. Thank you for, like you said, what got us here won't get us there.

You got us here. Thank you. But yeah I think that is so important to just be very clear about here's how we're going to look at this going forward. Here's what success is. At some level you do need to lay out this is what we're gonna do to get ahead and, uh, happy to discuss. But in the end, this is it's.

Get on board. So that's, one piece of it is building those people. And then, you brought up some people, unfortunately did have to, leave either voluntarily or involuntarily, and that [00:16:00] means you are inevitably in some cases, hiring at that point, either you're scaling and growing the team or you're replacing those people.

How do you hire great people? What's your secret to, or what do you key off of when you're trying to find the best people for your org?

Christine: It was rough, Jeff. When I there was a time period where I had probably who four or five open roles at a very busy time period. So these were integral parts of the team. They've led the scrum teams. You know how hard, so under the gun, I was under the gun to get good people at the height of what 2021, which I think you're aware it was

Jeff: not a good time to be

Christine: It was. That it was the inverse of today, right? The employees had all the leverage. So I was fighting tooth and nail and Chipotle is a great brand, right? Great company. So my recipe for success when I had to hire under the gun and a tight market was really I want to be that first step in evaluating the person on a very sort of qualitative level.

When I say qualitative, I was looking at their potential. Attitude, right? The things that like will really [00:17:00] make them thrive and grow at a company like Chipotle. I was looking for somebody that really wanted to be there and I was looking for intrinsic motivation and basically like a genuine interest.

for the company, not just looking for a job because I knew they were interviewing at other places. So I was a first barometer. I had to trust myself because I put myself in their shoes. Since I was a product manager for close to seven years before I became a leader, I knew, I know, I knew what they were thinking.

So after that, I had a panel. I carefully selected like an engineering leader, some product, Team members you wax and I leaned on them to like, Hey, I want you guys to set them on a quantitative, either do a case study, ask them like harder questions, but I want to make sure they can do the job right?

Because I'm the one evaluating their like potential and like the intangibles. I leaned on my team of experts to really evaluate the candidates. Pretty much on the job performance. Can they do the job? Can they work with you? So and I have obviously I had very good relationships with my engineering leaders with my ux leaders with the team and [00:18:00] you know I wanted them to get excited.

So I for me a big part of my key success for hiring talented people Is having others around me right vetting them in the same way I would because I wanted them to have a stake at The table my partners who would be working with my team on a day in day out basis You

Jeff: Yeah. No, that makes sense. Were you actually doing like the initial call screen? Or do you have a recruiter doing that? Cause I have an opinion here, but I'm

Christine: Yeah, so it's great. So the initial screen at the high level like comp and things like that title was through a recruiter, but I was the one that really honed in on the, like I said, the coachability, the intrinsic motivation, the intangibles. I don't think the recruiters. Went to that level.

It was more the sort of like the high level questions from my understanding. Obviously they probably dove into some of their job experience but not to the, not, they didn't interview them like me.

Jeff: Yeah, no, that was, I remember 2020 extremely well, because we are hiring a lot of people at that point as everyone was.

Christine: The pain. It's

Jeff: Yeah. And that was one of those times where I [00:19:00] found, I think our recruiters actually were very happy about this because I told them, don't even do the first call. Just schedule the initial thing with me.

I'll go through everyone. Just load me up. I'm going to do everything I can to get this done. And it was, I think it helped hiring because a, it telegraphed to the best people that it was, A really important role that you're not talking to a recruiter. You're talking to the hiring manager right out the gate.

And B, like you said, you able to understand that nuance a little bit where maybe someone doesn't take all the boxes correctly, but they have that intangible, or maybe they do tick the boxes on paper, but there's just something, a skew there where, it's not going to work. And I love recruiters.

We have a team of fantastic recruiters here who are amazing and they do great work, but but just being, close to doing the job day to day, I feel like you have a better sense for. That was my secret there that I think we were able to hire really well. So I'm always curious how people handle that.

so now, we've gone through outputs versus outcomes and how you, overcome that, as well as how you get, those really top tier people and how do you make sure you have a team aligned [00:20:00] to, moving towards this kind of idealized state of fully actualized, empowered product team.

But does one of those things have to come first? Do you have to build the empowerment and do you have to build that end of it? Or do you have to get the great people there first so that you can gain the trust to get that empowerment? Like I assume leadership has to back you to do this. So how did you look at that?

Did you start on one side of the other or what's the process there?

Christine: Yeah, that's a really thoughtful question, Jeff. Can I answer yes and no or

Jeff: Always. That's the fun of this.

Christine: Great. So for the yes, I would say that at Chipotle, as I talked about, I had to hire four to five people within a short span of time. I wanted to, I needed to hire the right talent. That were aligned with my mission and value and I shared this with them during the process So in that perspective, yes, I started with the people because I brought them in I hired them myself and they were able to excel in their roles quickly, because they already Aligned with my mission, the goals, the [00:21:00] kind of outcome driven philosophies that I had, because we talked about it during the interview process, and this is the kind of environment they're used to working in, and they're super ambitious, so it was easy for them to take part of this digital maturation at Chipotle.

For example, on the flip side of PetSmart, I had a people leader reporting to me where he moved from a senior manager of front end development, which is pretty technical world. So he was managing developers to leading, five or six product owners, completely different roles, completely different BU, but he was able to make that transition and I empowered him to do so because he had the foundations of being outcome driven.

And he was very customer centric. And a servant leader like myself. He is probably one of the best leaders I've worked with. So for me, I just had to teach him the product management one on one, right? Just a different kind of nuances, the strategies road mapping, things like that, but. The hard part, right?

He really had down. [00:22:00] He understood when, I had the KPI, work shopping, and I wanted the team to really focus more on the data points, the customer pain points and challenges versus going back to it, the JIRA tickets, right? The assembly line. And he understood what I was trying to achieve, and he evangelized that.

And that was so critical for me as a people leader to have my leader. Cascading my message because it just reinforces my, philosophies.

Jeff: And then, looking up now from that same kind of objective, did you have to do anything to, to align, maybe your CEO or other people you reported into to say, hey, we're going to change how we do this. This is going to be better. It's going to be a change, but it's going to be 

Christine: Yeah. So I would say for any type of digital, large scale digital transformation or maturation, step one is you need the executive buy in to your point, right? So at Chipotle, because I was hired on to lead this initiative, it checked the box. At PetSmart half checked the box and was almost there.

Jeff: There's a single line. Yeah.

Christine: It was a line, it was a [00:23:00] vertical line, it was missing the arrow. The product team, very on board, obviously, of course, right? To really level up the teams and organize our processes in a different way. But, The CTO or the engineering side were asking questions like what is really going to change?

And because they were more concerned about any of these changes impacting their velocity, right? Their throughput, because they're for engineering, right? They're really predicated on we need to get these code releases done. We need the volume product is different. That buy in wasn't completely different at PetSmart.

Jeff: And how do you accomplish that? Cause I think everyone's used to maybe having to go up vertically, but this is a case of, maybe going a little bit more horizontal and, leading and bringing other people along or convincing others, go with this plan, that's going to make their life easier.

Probably better in the long run but change is never, change is always a little painful. So how'd that process look? How'd you get that CTO to come on board with that?

Christine: Yeah, so at PetSmart, I had a really strong relationship with the VP of product, my other product [00:24:00] leader peers, director level, so we just really influenced through just socialization, right? Just like creating a couple useful visuals and slides. And really, it was more about just meeting and just talking things through.

We just had a lot of conversations to explain the type of changes that we wanted to make. We worked together, we brought our team in, we brought our engineering team into the fold. We wanted to make sure that we got their input, right? Because it would impact Their processes as well because they are part of this front team.

So it was just some education some workshop sessions It was just very collaborative, right? So that's the way how I work how I lead and then through these kind of numerous sessions workshops communications we were able to get alignment right during the process because Our engineering team kind of the light bulb clicked during that process, and they thought, Wow, this is going to help my team.

They're going to understand the what and why the product owners are going to be more organized in their backlog, management, things like that. So they really did see the valley, right? But we just had to bring them along the journey, which I [00:25:00] think is a critical piece for any transformation process.

Jeff: It's interesting. I feel like I've heard more and more recently about this kind of cross functional accountability. We had Jason Penkethman on from a Simpro recently, and he talked about the same thing is he'll actually bring in not just the. Engineering team, but sales, marketing, all the groups involved in everyone will have a, they'll see the benefits, but they also have accountability goals of how we build this collaboratively and how we all signing on to be responsible for, outcomes as a result of this work.

I feel like that's a neat trend. I love seeing is this, building a holistic company takes. Aligning everything. And I think one of the lessons I've learned coming up through, 20 years of doing this and going from an IC to a leader is. So much of success is, part of success is doing the right things and doing them well, but part of it is ensuring that there's alignment throughout the org about those things because you have one team doing really well.

You still have a lot of levels to go before you hit revenue. That's neat to hear you [00:26:00] talk about that too. I love that. Do you mind if we completely pivot? I feel like we've been on people and kind of empowerment of product teams a lot, but I'm going to just completely 180 degrees change the, Subject that's cool.

Because you've had a unique experience here where several companies in a row you have been at places where there's a big digital component, but there's also a big brick and mortar component. And, I've had a long background in sass. It's something. I have not really run into as often.

So this always intrigues me. It's a world. I don't know what I'm always curious about. What are the unique complications that come up with that? Chipotle, PetSmart, Chipotle, especially I can only imagine you're, people ordering, but then the last mile is in person PetSmart. I'm not, as sure of, how the interaction crossed over, but what comes up from that?

What do you have to think of that maybe doesn't happen in pure SAS? And, can you kind of walk us through what that looks like in general?

Christine: Yeah, definitely. Because I've also come. I SAS companies, so and software companies. So I get that Jeff. I think the [00:27:00] biggest change for me evolving from more tech SaaS companies to brick and mortar is just that you have a storefront, right? You have that physical location, the PetSmart store, the Chipotle restaurant, right?

The Forever 21 store. So the biggest kind of, and I don't want this to be a buzzword, but I'm just going to say it. I'm sure you've heard it. The omni channel. You've got to bridge that gap between the physical store to the online journey, right? Because I've seen in my experience, it's hard to do this.

It's difficult, but there's ways around it. And so for me it's really understanding, like, how do I get my app and web together in parallel, but also the store. Somebody's shopping in the store. If they want to check something online, they need to do that simultaneously.

That is the biggest challenge, because with the store and restaurant, there are operations teams , point of sale teams, which is, adds a different level of complexity when you're developing a product, because it's not just software developers. There are people that are like working on sometimes physical [00:28:00] kind of items.

That was the biggest shift for me coming from a more kind of true B2B SaaS or e commerce to like physical stores where I could, I had to walk in and look at certain things at Chipotle, their assembly line. That, that's a very unique challenge and it's very difficult to solve.

Still working through that today, obviously. But yeah,

Jeff: Now, is that in your role at those companies, were you responsible for, cause you can have the best digital experience in the world, but Chipotle, if I'm going there and I'm hungry and I just want to pick up my burrito and something goes wrong, the entire perfection of that digital experience can go out the window in five seconds.

So do does that responsibility extend to the in person too, or is that separate kind of responsibilities there?

Christine: yeah. So we had a digital restaurant experience that supported our restaurant support team or restaurant operations team. I think the number one customer complaint, it could be different now, but at the time it was, my order was wrong. Something was missing. That was number one, because we had a separate [00:29:00] digital make line that was just focused on making orders for digital channel orders.

But yeah, there was obviously margin for error. So so when people are in the store, they're upset. Actually, one time, somebody was upset because their order was wrong when they walked out before they checked, and they were just arguing. And I said, Hey, What happened here is like, Oh, I use the app.

I had to walk me through the situation. They showed me their order on the app and sure enough, it was, it looked correct. but for the assembly digital, a bake line just forgot an order, it was like extra cheese and they did extra block instead. So I said, Hey, you know what, this is I apologize.

This shouldn't have happened. We're going to make it better. And I gave them a. I think a gift card, like if I had some gift cards on demand, but I gave them that and they were pretty appreciative. And I actually use that opportunity to ask them user research related questions about their process and experience ordering through the app. And that was actually really helpful to do that sort of on demand Absolutely.

Jeff: Honestly, sometimes it's the screw ups that are, the minor [00:30:00] screw ups that you fix the fix can actually create more loyalty and more happiness than just if it went perfect from from the get go. So that's always interesting. And you got some good research out of it.

So, yeah I asked because it was interesting. For the interview series that we do on the blog, our team had talked to Bernadette Fisher over at ButcherBox and she runs product over there, but product for that team runs all the way from digital and, acquisition all the way through to shipping.

And how do you think about packing, this meat that you're ordering into boxes with dry ice and everything. So I'm always interested when, product crosses over , into IRL, if you will. Cause that's a whole new can of worms if you're not careful. Christina, it was awesome having you on.

This was a fun time. I'm glad I got to hear so much about these digital transformations and maturations that you've gone through. I think some really good tips that people can take to look into. How do you build these teams? How do you turn around teams or maybe more? Output focused.

How do you turn them around? How do you get that empowerment? How do you build the right teams? Just fantastic info. And also just, always great to hear anecdotes from [00:31:00] Chipotle. Cause I I think that's a place that we've all been. But if people , want to follow up with questions or have, things they're curious about is there somewhere people can find you or.

Christine: Yeah, they can find me on LinkedIn. My profile is right there and just feel free to send me a message and I'll be there to answer.

Jeff: Awesome. Well, It's great having you on. Thank you so much for coming and we'll have to chat again soon.

Christine: Yeah. Thank you for having me on Jeff.