Product Agility

What Makes Great Products Great (With Jeff Callan)

August 21, 2024 Ben Maynard & Jeff Callan Season 2 Episode 30

Send us a text

In this episode of the Product Agility Podcast, we sit down with Jeff Callan, a growth-focused product leader with over 25 years of experience and 50,000 hours dedicated to product management. Jeff has a proven track record of transforming innovative ideas into scalable products, having built and led successful strategies that have reached millions of customers and generated hundreds of millions of dollars in new value.

Jeff shares insights from his extensive career and his book, "What Makes Great Products Great," a 400-page product management boot camp filled with practical advice and "cheat codes" for product managers. The episode dives into some of the most critical aspects of product management, including the importance of feedback loops, aligning KPI's, and creating products that truly resonate with customers.

Key Takeaways:

- The significance of continuous customer feedback in product development

- Why aligning metrics across teams is crucial for effective product management

- Strategies for gathering actionable feedback and integrating it into your product roadmap

Whether you're a seasoned product manager, an agile coach, or someone interested in learning what it takes to build great products, this episode offers valuable lessons and actionable insights that can elevate your approach to product management.

Tune in to discover Jeff’s strategies for success and learn how to apply them to your own product development processes.

Links and Resources:

Connect with Jeff on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffcallan/

"What Makes Great Products Great" - https://amzn.to/4cwGpzP

Tyghtwyre Consulting - https://tyghtwyre.com/

Host Bio

Ben is a seasoned expert in product agility coaching, unleashing the potential of people and products. With over a decade of experience, his focus now is product-led growth & agility in organisations of all sizes.

Stay up-to-date with us on our social media📱!

Ben Maynard

🔗 http://bitly.ws/GFwi

🐦 http://bitly.ws/GFwq

💻 http://bitly.ws/GFwz

Product Agility Podcast

🔗 http://bitly.ws/FdVJ

🐦 http://bitly.ws/FdVT

🤳 http://bitly.ws/FdW9

🎶 http://bitly.ws/FdWj

🎥 http://bitly.ws/FdWy

💻 http://bitly.ws/GFuS

👤 http://bitly.ws/GFvy


Listen & Share On Spotify & iTunes


Want to come on the podcast?

Want to be a guest or have a guest request? Let us know here https://bit.ly/49osN80

I have been in product management for more than 25 years. I've accumulated 50,000 hours of product management experience. I would say that the most important of those experiences has actually made it into the book. The book is really 400 pages of product management cheat code. Welcome to the Product Agility Podcast, the missing link between Agile and product. The purpose of this podcast is to share practical tips, strategies and stories from world class thought leaders and practitioners. Why I hear you ask? Well, I want to increase your knowledge and your motivation to experiment so that together we can create ever more successful products. My name is Ben Maynard and I'm your host. What has driven me for the last decade to bridge the gap between agility and product is a deep rooted belief that people and products evolving together can achieve mutual excellence. Welcome back to the Product Agility podcast. I'm assuming you're coming back to the Product Agility podcast because of all of the fantastic guests that we've had up until today, and today is going to be no exception. We have no exceptions for fantastic guests on this podcast on home today, we are joined by Jeff Callan. Jeff is the author of a book and it is not just any type of book. It's an incredibly practical book. In fact, the subtitle is a product management Boot Camp and the title of the book is what makes Great Products Great. And it is a joy to be joined by Jeff today to explore some really gnarly product management and agile related questions around feedback, the importance of IT challenges and anything else that happens to flow into the conversation. So Jeff, it's fantastic to have you here. Hey Ben, thanks for having me on. Great to spend some time with you and your listeners. A little bit more about me, I have been in product management for more than 25 years. I've accumulated 50,000 hours of product management experience. I would say that the most important of those experiences has actually made it into the book. The book is really 400 pages of product management cheat codes. So if you're a an up and coming product manager looking for experience without actually having to go through the Hard Knocks, I think that it's a good book for you. If you're a more experienced product person, I think there's definitely information in there for you. More advanced subjects if you're a product or a C-Suite person who might have. An interesting product, but not necessarily a lot of background. It's good there and I think it's also a good entry point for agile coaches, agile practitioners who might want to have a a better understanding of what goes on in the minds of a product manager. I think it's a really solid kind of overview foundation. Like I said, cheat codes kind of showing your age a bit. Jeff perhaps anything cheat codes or a thing anymore? I remember cheat codes, some of the best ones. I'm a gamer, so I I am still in the world with cheat codes. The only cheat code I can remember is the one for Street Fighter two and the snares allowed you to play the same character. That's anyone I can remember. Or how to how to get on Akari, Akari warriors on Venez, how to kind of continue when you run out of continues one of life. That's about it really. They were very simple cheat codes anyway. I can't remember the cheat code to get the gore in Mortal Kombat on the Genesis though. I need to get back and reflect on that. I feel ashamed of myself. Anyways, on the Internet somewhere I will be. Anyway, I'm gonna shut up because it is a great book and it is some really chock full very English thing to say that I'm looking at here across the different chapters of just really useful practical things. And I think that yes, it's a great introduction for particularly for agile people looking into product or if you're a product manager and or wondering maybe why product management isn't kind of feeling quite right in your organization. I'm pretty sure there's something in this book that will give you a good clue as to why. Absolutely that. As an aside, the topic of today was going to be around feedback. And I always like to start episodes with a question or a challenge or something which people can relate to. And I think one of the biggest challenges I come across in my consultancy work is the number of steps, the number of interaction points between the teams or the product people and the real customers, the real users who will be kind of receiving the products, who can give us really meaningful feedback. And I think as you said earlier, their feedback earlier before the recording a feedback is just a theory into a, some form of validation. So Agile was originally built for getting feedback, a feed from the customers, from the use, from the business and the teams. And yet it hasn't really delivered consistent consistently on that. If ever listen to this and thinking, OK, a great feedback is really important, but we are struggling with it in an agile or product environment, wherever they may be like what would you say to them, Jeff? Well, I I really think that getting feedback loops in place is a critical part in in the development process and the agile process. First of all, you're really looking at how do you align your stakeholders with the work that's being done? How do you make sure that you're aligned from a prioritization standpoint? But one of the most critical pieces of feedback that that I think, and this is where I think a lot of teams struggle, is just that voice of the customer. We tend to assume at some point that we know the customer. We don't always do the type of, of ongoing research, continuous discovery that is really necessary to to be in a cycle of continuous improvement. We get very focused on making sure that we're keeping the agile train going and not necessarily always focused on having those conversations with potential customers, potential stakeholders, making sure that you're integrating the voice of the customer into the work that's being done. And, and remembering that feedback loops are an important piece of customer retention. You know, a lot of companies are do a pretty good job on the front end of their funnel and then they've got major leaks along the way because they're not doing the things that they need to do to retain those customers. By by having the conversations with the stakeholders, by having the conversations with the customers, you're, you're hopefully discovering those things that you need to do ahead of time so that you can keep your customers happy. Do you think that sometimes people believe that feedback loops have to be kind of engineered and designed and put in set in concrete so that they're absolutely there, or can they be just as simple as an organic conversation? I think they can be as simple as an organic conversation. I think there's two different tiers that we're talking about here. I, it is definitely a positive thing to have a continuous research mode where because then you're building it into the rhythms of the company, you're building it into the timelines of the company. But there's a lot of things that you can do just generally like passive data collection and you're leveraging analytics. There's I I done in the past sat in on customer support calls just to hear what what customers are saying. It's not carved in stone as you said, it's just. My, I'm going to spend Friday afternoons listening in on customer care calls and that comes kind of a bit of a routine. And doing that over time you pick up things. What in your experience, your own personal experience, what's been some of the biggest obstacles you've had to overcome in putting in place those feedback loops? Sometimes it's as as simple as you're not being measured by the same thing. So I'll tell you a story. When I was at the mobile carrier Sprint, I was managing location products and we would get care tickets back from the care teams and it would simply say problem with navigation. Navigation was the product. And when you're trying to troubleshoot that, it's almost impossible, right? So I went to the customer care manager and I said, if I could get you guys to ask one more question, I would be able to start to, to troubleshoot these. And the question was what was the time of day and where were you located when you experienced the problem? Because then I could look into network conditions at that time of day and I could say, oh, in Charlotte, NC at rush hour, we have a problem with this, this cell tower. And I'll never forget what the customer support guy said to me. He basically said, I can't do that. I'm like, why not? He goes, well, we're measured on the length of our calls and adding a question to our call means that the length of the call will be longer and that then we won't hit our metrics, we won't get our bonus. And so he basically told me, no, I never got that information. So simply having aligned KPI's, aligned vision and goal is, is, is one of the biggest things that I think's frequently stand in the way of being able to execute on this. It sounds quite obvious when you say it, but they realization that misaligned KPI's and maybe misaligned organizational strategy or operating model might may get in the wave and the people are being able to get the feedback, which is really beneficial. How do you suggest then that product managers or product owners, maybe natural coaches that listen to this and say, yes, OK, that that's, that's me. Like this is a challenge that I'm experiencing right now. Maybe they've got some frustration or some panic, something not quite comfortable with. Like what would you say to them as some advice as to try and help to influence the system or or change things in some way? Agile is set up. To like we, you mentioned earlier, it's set up to generate and incorporate feedback. It's an iterative process. The reason that it's an iterative process is, is not just because we like doing things every two weeks, It's because we hopefully you, you have the, the, the retrospectives, the reviews, the stand ups, All of those are opportunities for the team to, to observe what they're doing, observe other inputs and then make changes on what you're doing, adjust the, the user stories, adjust the backlog prioritization as a product owner, which I think product being the product owner is one of the hardest jobs that I, that I ever did when I was in product management at Sprint, simply because you're trying to keep this team going and you're trying to work, you know, three, at least three or four iterations ahead of time. And, and so how you gather information, how you incorporate that information into that process, how you can reprioritize your backlog on the fly. Because all of a sudden you've been talking to the care team and you have a new number one thing that's popped up to the top of the problems list. And we can take care of that in, in the next iteration, but it wouldn't have even been on the list two or three cycles ago. So there's just, it's such a benefit if you can, if you think back to those old waterfall days when you had to try and, and move something into a queue, Agile gives us so many benefits to being able to incorporate feedback. So if we're working with leaders or if we are a leader and we what do then take some positive steps to create a cultural shift. Because I'm guessing when it comes to feedback and if we think of, I mean, everything could be feedback. It's sometimes it's it's receiving that message you didn't want to hear. It's a new backlog like I'm going to the top of the backlog. It's finding out that the thing you thought was going to be really, really positive has actually kind of failed at the first total. This is all data, this is all feedback. So as as leaders, what advice would you provide for ways in which they can help create and spark this culture of feedback? That's a really interesting question. I think part of it is having that daily interaction with the feedback. If you start doing that on a daily basis, if you're always listening. Always finding opportunity to communicate out, you start to build that culture where it's not just about listening, it's about action, right? I can listen to you all day long. And if it's just blah, blah, blah, and then I go off and I do whatever the hell I want to do after that, then after a while, I don't even get your blah, blah, blah anymore. You're just like, I tried to give Jeff some proper feedback and he never listens to me. So I think a big part of it is listening, but an equally critical part is what do you do with that that and if you are listening and acting, that goes a long way towards creating a culture where feedback is is encouraged. So the take away from that is that we should be listening more and then not only listening, but but doing something with that or and then can be and making clear that we haven't just kind of received the audio, but are not doing anything with the content. Right, exactly. So it's basically in tangential a little bit, but maybe not when we think of a term MVP. I know it's a greatly overused term and it's kind of almost in many, many realms ended up being somewhat like jargon because it's, you know, it kind of means the finished products in some instances. But if we took the idea of a minimum viable product and that minimum viable product is there's still theory around that, right? There's nothing proven at that point. And you're doing exactly to get feedback so that you know whether or not to continue or not. In the book you, you cover MVP, don't you? Have you got a feedback story related to that or maybe something how well feedback could have helped us an MVP story. I've evolved a little bit even since I wrote the book on the subject to the point where I'm, I'm just, I'm not even a fan of the term minimum viable product much anymore because I think people don't necessarily understand what it means to be viable. I've also heard minimum lovable product and I don't necessarily you can love a product. What we have to remember here is that sales is the ultimate feedback, and our goal should be a minimum sellable product and not a minimum viable product, not a minimum lovable product. Because the organization expects that if you put something out there and you call it viable or lovable or whatever you want to call it, that they're going to be able to sell it. And the problem with that is, if you're not doing proper prototyping cycles, if you're not doing proper iterative development, if you're not gathering that feedback earlier in the cycle and making it actionable and executing on it, then the 1.0 version of your product is probably not the sellable version. Frequently what happens is you put out a minimum valuable product and then the the, the people who you actually want to have to cut a check to buy the product, you're like, Nah, it's not, it's not there yet. And then you get a bunch of feedback that you incorporate into the 2.0 version and that becomes the sellable product by doing proper prototyping, by pulling that feedback in earlier in the cycle, by engaging with designers, with the the all the rest of your team early clear, then you're much more like and making it the goal to launch with a minimum sellable product instead of a minimum viable product. I think that you're going to actually see better results. You're going to make your organization happier because again, sales is the ultimate feedback loop. It's actually an interesting one, isn't it MVP how it has been so overused is it has become pretty meaningless for most people. And I think that, you know, feedback is so critical to understanding as to whether or not you've got something which is sellable or some of the you want to use. Because you're right, the ultimate feedback is are you generating some revenue from the thing that you're doing? Or at least if it's not revenue, whatever, how you articulate value, that exchange of value from a product perspective. But it is hard for people to take feedback that isn't particularly what they would like to hear, especially if it's their baby or something they've invested a lot of time in. Have you got any tips for how feedback can be delivered gently if we think that maybe it isn't the type of feedback that people want to hear? Well, a lot of times the world is just going to figure it out for you. It's going to, you know, the world and reality is, is crueler than people who are trying to help you. So part of it is understanding that there's egos involved, understanding that it's not going to be a message that people want to hear. I don't know that I would say pull your punches though. I mean, eventually you got to hear what you got to hear. Rip the Band-Aid off and all. So I'm, I'm a big fan of just living in a reality world. And if if you don't provide the feedback and you know that it that the product's going to sink like a stone and you're just kind of quietly letting it happen, you're not really serving anybody's ego in the long term anyway. So let's just be big boys and girls, have the proper conversation. Doesn't mean that you have to be an A hole about the whole thing, but you know, have the proper conversation and then let's figure out the path forward. I mean, that's really the reality is, OK, here's what's, here's what we've experienced. This is what's likely to happen. Now what do we do? What's this path forward from here? Yeah. I think it's important that people understand that you care. You're doing it with the vested intentions. So there's a classic line, which is we judge other people based upon their actions, but we always judge our own actions based upon our intention. Exactly. Exactly. And, and yeah, making, making clear our intentions and I'm doing this because I care about you and I care about our products and our business. And that's why I'm, I'm going to say what I'm going to say is if you get help, wrap their head around maybe some of those tougher data points they may be having to receive. Yeah. I mean, it's not nobody wants to hear bad news, but I guarantee you my experience in a decision making capacity and my experience when I was giving information to a decision maker is nobody likes surprises. So they like surprises even less than they probably like bad news. So don't surprise them, give them the bad news and just get it over with. What's the most difficult feedback you've ever had to receive, Jeff? In the professional capacity, not talking about anything else. I had a situation prior to my working at Sprint where I was working at another carrier, Cincinnati Bell and I had eight different bosses over a two year. And I came into my performance review and with a relatively new boss because they were always relatively new. And basically my boss basically said, I'm not sure what you do. And so that was kind of the the, the toughest thing that I ever had to sit through because she then proceeded to rate my performance based on the fact that she didn't really even know what I was doing. So God, that's harsh. That was a rough day. Yeah. Did that then make you want to leave that job or did you able to? Did they put it round in some way? We eventually found a path to party. Yes. So it was I, that was my next job was at Sprint here in Kansas City. Nice. OK. I'm trying to think of the hardest and the hardest feedback I have ever had to take. And it wasn't even like it was direct feedback. I think it's gonna like implicit or indirect feedback, which was just. I was a really crap manager. Yeah. I find I always find it very difficult to manage things or even maybe trying to get people to follow some new way of doing things and then choosing to ignore the feedback. I would say, which is kind of giving you indication that things aren't going great and just try to stick on the the path, which was the the path I wanted to take rather than the actual path that was kind of let being laid out in front of me. Yeah, that's that's always tough, isn't it? Yeah, that really is here it is. So when it comes to getting feedback out of people. Have you got any particular tools or techniques ever than just a plain conversation that you'd like to use to, to get that information, that data from the stakeholders, customers or users? Well, of of course, you know, there's all sorts of passive data collection that we do these days. And I'd say that that's in many cases the biggest part of of what we do is that passive data collection. But if you're talking about a mobile app, a screen that asks a single question, so you're not really interrupting the flow surveys, interviews, user be testing all of that is, is low touch, low impact on experience ways to collect information. You know, we've done sensitivity analysis based on the feedback that we, we get in terms of, of, you know, our social media pages and, and there's all sorts of different ways from a passive standpoint that you can, can collect information that the user doesn't necessarily have to participate. Talk about data. Chapter nine of your book just put up here. So there's a story, no products data. Do you know what it is? And you start off a chapter with a quote from Steve Jobs, which he says the most powerful person in the world is the storyteller. The storyteller sets a vision, values, an agenda of an entire generation that is to come. What is this chapter about? Because it seems like an interesting premise, right? That we can create a story from something that maybe seems as dry as some of the individual data points I'm talking about? Absolutely. I I think so. If you give people a column of data, they'll kind of glaze over. If you make a graph out of that, you might at least hold their attention for a little while. But if you tell them a story that engages them, they're going to remember the key points. They're going to potentially become an advocate for whatever your path is, and they're going to tell that story to other people potentially. And so a lot of this is about refining the raw data and turning it into things that are useful. In the book I talk about something called the the Callen Data Cycle where raw. Raw data comes in as a signals at the beginning of of a cycle. And just like you wouldn't be able to run your car off of raw gasoline that's just been pumped up out of the ground, there's a refining process that happens before it goes into your gas tank. There's a refining process that goes into turning data in some into something useful. So you get these raw signals, you hand them to an analyst or to a data scientist, and they create some structure around that that takes it from what I would call the data stage into the information stage. But it's still not really ready for other people to use. And that's where I think that product managers frequently can step in and bring business context to this information. So now you, you bring context to the information, you turn it, take it from information into something we'll call an insight. Now that is in the insight stage, you can start to think about, OK, how am I going to build a strategy around this? How am I going to build tactics around this? And the execution of those tactics becomes the next batch of raw signals that feedback into the front of the loop. So to me, that's the processing loop. The that data goes through in order to make it something that the business can actually run on, just like gasoline becomes something that your car can run on. I've have the current data cycle up here, which is what collect, order, interpret, strategize, execute, and then rinse and repeat. Yes, exactly. Excellent. And I says then with that, it's really important that if we're looking at collecting that data, collecting that feedback that we have some kind of anchor, some kind of North Star that is guiding the data that we're collecting. And we're not just kind of spuriously starting off. If we did start at that collection phase, we need some kind of outcome or something working towards right absolutely. And and the North Star, it's amazing to me how many companies kind of skipped this step, but. Giving you a North Star helps set the prioritization for the entire organization. It enables people who aren't sitting in the room with the C-Suite to be able to make good decisions because they understand the company's overall North Star, the overall direction. It allows you to more properly set priorities. It it defines for the organization what winning looks like. And when you're in a game that doesn't really have a lot of rules and there aren't a lot of we, we create scorecards and dashboards and all those things to try and tell us are we winning or not? And having a proper North Star is like saying that you're going to play for the Super Bowl as a, as AUS football team or for, you know, the cup and soccer. And so if you don't have that goal, you drift you as an organization. I don't think that a team goes into a, a, a sporting event without the goal to win. So let's define what winning looks like and then then when we achieve those goals, the organization can feel good about it. So when it comes to defining what that is and what particular guidance, right? Because I think the problem is with North Star, it's almost in some communities, some organizations become the same as MVP, right? It's almost like a meaning meaningless thing when it should hold a lot of value. So what would you look for in a Great North Star? Well, so you have a problem that you're trying to solve. You have a target customer that you're trying to solve it for. You have a solution that you're talking about, you have some type of a business goal for the organization. Then you have a proper North Star metric that says, you know, So what you're basically saying is for this target customer that with this problem we propose this solution, We'll know we're successful when we achieve this business goal and that we measured by the North Star metric. That to me is you can simplify it down or boil it down and make it a little less wordy, but that's the the core of what the North Star should look like. And it's more than just an artifact, right? This is a shared understanding. This is something which everyone in what inherently knows and it's set at the top. And then in your opinion, that should then proliferate through the entire organization, like every single person in the organization is working towards that North Star and then collecting feedback and data and telling stories about data based upon that point in which we're going to in a perfect world, yes. Now in a multi product company, there may be product level North stars, but there still should be alignment between the product level North star and kind of that overall business goal. Because if your business is doing things that are where they're trying to be the value leader in a particular industry and you're gold plating everything within your product, you're not really well aligned with the overall business goal. So it's important to to make sure that even if you have group level or or department level North stars, that all of that goes back up from a hierarchical standpoint. In my world, I think that there should be a thread that you can follow from, from every tactic that's on your road map all the way through to a goal that aligns with a North star, that maybe aligns with an overall business North star. And you should be able to trace that back. If you can't connect it back, then the question that you would ask yourself is A, do we need this tactic? B if this, if we do need this tactic, then is there an unstated goal or something unstated in our North Star that we need to adjust the North Star for? But one way or the other, there should be a true up. I like that. I mean, I'm a huge fan of being able to connect what we do to a bigger purpose and something that's motivational and being, like I said, to have that, have that thread from my older coaching teacher, like a golden thread, the thing that you can see and you can pull and every time you pull it, it kind of rings. It rings a certain belt or a star in this instance. Massively important because it motivates us. It gets better. And so importantly, when we're looking at feedback and collecting data, it means we're going to collect hopefully more frequently the right type of data rather than just any old data for any old spurious reason or something, which is for a pet project, something we love and that we really want to go for. But actually there's no, it doesn't really align to what we're trying to do here, right? That's really, really important. Did you have a North Star for your book? Oh, my, my book, I did. I product managed the heck out of that. I had, you know, driven into his life actually. Yeah. I mean, because that's what I know, right? So I sat down and who's my target audience? What's the pain point that they are experiencing? And very much, you know, kind of an overall goal for what I wanted to accomplish with the book, which was that whole concept of being a product management boot camp. To have it be a book that I could give to a, a new product person or even an

experienced 1:

00 and that they would get things out of it that would impact their their daily work life, that they would come out of the experience of reading that being a better product person. My so I have a consulting consulting company called Tightwire. And this the tagline for the the company is better Products, better world. And so the idea being that if I can make better product managers, then that aligns with my companies overall vision. Better product managers means better products means better world. It reminds me of what you're saying that I mean, I think everything reminds me of this. I think I'm just gonna need to get over my confirmation bias. But things like radical product thinking, and we're really talking about that. What's The Who is the ultimate person we're looking to whose world we're looking to improve. And there are other people that are on that way, but we have to understand what that journey is. And I think it's interesting that I have probably once a week, I have this conversation with somebody about the difference of with companies who have products which are B to B&B to C in some way. And they can never decide whether to focus on the the B to B side more, the B to C side more. And how do they understand what their actual, why they they exist or they are providing, you know, data to the other businesses, which then help out individual consumers? Like how do they understand who it is that they're ultimately affecting? Do you feel that if as long as you do the B2B side, the BTC side will sort itself out? Is it vice versa? And that's a big challenge for people. So I don't know, I know this isn't anything to do in particular the conversation that we were having. But have you got any advice to people who can't quite figure out like who they should be focusing on for their for their purpose, for their North Star, for their reason for existence? So there's a book called the Cold start problem by Andrew Chen and he talks about creating the marketplace. And that sounds kind of like what you're talking about here. And in his book, he talks about there be there's an easy side and there's a hard side usually for most marketplaces. And that you need to have a strategy for acquisition for the hard side. And frequently the harder side is the B to B side of a business. So you can bring in customers, but if they don't, if you're creating the marketplace and you're bringing in, you're doing a dating app and you know, you're, you've got a whole bunch of people in San Diego, CA and not a lot of people in London. And so it doesn't really help the guy who's downloaded the app in London find his next date. So how do you create that flow of people so that you when, when people come on to your come into your market that, that you've got balance between that B to B side and the B to C side. And so a big part of it is just building that strategy around the, the hard side of the market. I like that. So when it comes to getting the feedback, you're getting feedback from the hard side because if you can get that going on the marketplace, hopefully then if they're putting good things in the marketplace and the other side will just match up overtime as long as you're doing just enough marketing, right. So when Uber rolled out, they rolled out market by market and they had to subsidize drivers in the market for a period of time because the last thing that they wanted to do is have rider looking for a ride having to wait half an hour an hour for the the ride they were they wanted to have that be 15 minutes or less. So their strategy was we'll subsidized the, subsidized the driver pool and build the demand for with riders. And so that's that's just another example of this situation where you've got this, you've got to have a balance between the supply and demand in the market. They need some kind of incentive to get them in there, whether it's incentivizing or reducing commissions or something to get enough groundswell, you know, like eBay. I'm assuming that, you know, if ebay's fees were sky high, what they were now when they started, then who would have listed anything, you know, but now if eBay in the UK and if they have, I think because they feel challenged by a company called Vinted. This is my guests who don't actually charge you to list. So now eBay said, if you're selling second hand clothes, we're not going to charge you any listing fees because they know that if they do, no one's going to use eBay anymore for a second hand clothes. They're all going to go to Vinted. And I think it's an interesting, you know, articulation of that awesome Jeff. We're, we're running out of time and, and also my office is getting, it's like a sauna, Jeff, it's very hot on here. So I think it's, it's time to bring our conversation to a close. But before we do, is there anything in particular you think that is that of critical importance? I would say a couple of things. I think it's, you hear a lot of conversation about the idea of, of using feedback to move really fast. You know, I think that you can move fast with your feedback, but the idea is that feedback you're not really failing just because you're getting feedback that's bad. You're you're using that to true up for the next iteration, right. And so I think it's important to not have a failure mentality when you're getting bad news. It's an see it as an experiment, See it as an opportunity to, let's say, fail productively, learn the lesson that you need to learn and then apply it in the in the next iteration. The they make movies out of a story with this arc. I did a thing, it failed. I learned something from that. I applied it to the next time I tried to do something and I had a success. That's that's the story arc for a movie. So just because you have got experienced bad feedback, don't assume that that's end game. Take that feedback, apply it and get to your next success. Sage, sage words and something. I will be listening back and making a note of that and maybe put it on my wall on a post it note because I think it's a really, really good advice. Jeff, thank you so much for coming on and sharing all of your wisdom, right and your stories. Thank you. Like it's it's been rich. I think I've yeah, I've asked a lot of questions. I haven't that maybe you've done it in my normal style because I think I just really wanted to understand, you know, things from your perspective, say thank you for being so courteous, right and sharing so much information and for right such an awesome book and it's really practically useful. So I do recommend people listeners, if you haven't read it and check out the show notes. There'll be a link to the book in there that also be a link in the show notes to Jeff's LinkedIn. So if you do want to connect with Jeff and ask, you ask Jeff a question, Jeff, I'm assuming that's OK. But people do that. Absolutely. I do this to connect with people. And so if they don't reach out, if they don't connect with me, I'm going to be disappointed in them. Well, don't disappoint, Jack. Connect with him. Everyone, thank you very much for listening. And Jeff, thank you very much for coming on. And this has been a particularly podcast, and we're back again next week.

People on this episode