Product Agility

Building Products that Scale Lessons from GiffGaff and Checkatrade (With Kim Faura)

• Ben Maynard & Kim Faura • Season 2 • Episode 34

Share episode

Send us a text

Kim Faura, former CCO of Giffgaff and Checkatrade, joins the Product Agility Podcast to share his journey of driving massive growth in two iconic companies. Kim played a pivotal role in scaling Giffgaff from startup to £500m+ in revenue and doubled Checkatrade’s growth, transforming both companies into industry leaders.

In this episode, Kim explains how a relentless focus on customer experience, platform liquidity, and data-driven decision-making was key to scaling these businesses. He also offers leadership insights on how to balance personal care with direct challenges, drawing on his experience leading high-performing teams and optimising product and marketing strategies.

Key Takeaways:

  • Scaling Strategies: How Kim doubled traffic, leads, and revenue at Checkatrade and Giffgaff.
  • Customer-Centric Growth: The impact of putting customer experience at the heart of product development.
  • Platform Liquidity: Balancing supply and demand for marketplace success.
  • Leadership Lessons: How radical candour and data-driven decisions can transform teams and businesses.

Whether you're a product manager, agile coach, or business leader, this episode is full of actionable strategies to help scale your business and improve customer satisfaction.

Links and Resources:

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

🔗 https://www.linkedin.com/in/benmaynard-sheev/

🐦 https://x.com/BenWMaynard

💻 https://sheev.co.uk/

Product Agility Podcast

🔗 https://www.linkedin.com/company/productagilitypod/

💻 https://productagilitypod.co.uk/

🖇️ https://linktr.ee/productagility


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

So if you think about website traffic, let's start there, that doubled. If you think about the volume of leads contacts that trades would receive in the platform, that also doubled. If you want to look at turnover revenue of the organization, that doubled. We move from being unprofitable to being a profitable organization, highly profitable. Actually, yes, I think you can take it from various different places and all the metrics were much healthier when I left them when I joined. 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. This is the product Agility podcast. Back for another episode. If you're listening to this, then it's probably Thursday because all of our episodes come out on the first day. We'd like to be consistent and this week is a big week because we are joined by Kim Farah, who is somebody that worked in many organisations which at least in the UK are household names. There's a company which he worked for called Giffgaff, which was a mobile phone company who, well, member phone provider I suppose is, is technically the right way of putting it. And I used this company very early on and was just blown away about how different they were and how disruptive they were in the market. Kim has then gone on to work at Checker Trade, having a huge impact at Checker Trade. So yeah, we have a lot of fantastic people come on this podcast. But I think your pedigree to set you apart from the rest, Kim. So thank you for taking the time to join us today. How are you doing? Thank you very much, Ben for having me. I'm doing great. So Kim, regular listeners will know I'm not a huge fan of reading out BIOS from people. I'd like to have introductions made by the people themselves. So, Kim, could you give us a little? The highlight reel of your career to date, where to start from? Well, I'm originally from Barcelona. I'm aware that that does not explain my accent. I, I don't really know where that comes from, if I'm honest. I lived in many different places, but I studied at Business School and very early on in my career realized that I had a big passion for digital. So I spent a lot of time thinking about digital experiences, developed the first student website with a couple of classmates that is at a Business School. When I finished uni, I thought, well, digital is where I want to go, but I could not find any business that I think I could learn from at the time. I mean, we're talking about a long time ago, that's 2005, and I decided to move to marketing. So I started my career at PepsiCo as a product manager for a local brand called Matutano, and I was there for three, 3 1/2 years. And that really helped shape my product thinking actually in many ways in terms of how we think about discovery, how do we engage with customers to develop strategies? All the strategic frameworks that PepsiCo used back then, I'm sure they still use today, because I still use them today for many of the things I do now. While I was at PepsiCo, I also realized that they did not have a corporate website. So I did give my bosses a bit of a hard time and as a result I was tasked with the pleasure of develop developing the first corporate websites for Spain and Portugal. So that was where my digital career in a formal sense started. Now it wasn't until year 2009 when I jumped from PepsiCo to a start up. It didn't even have a brand name back then. It was called Project Napa, so it was all very secretive. Secretive is stealth mode. I had to sign an NDA and a few months later it launched in beta with the brand Giffgaff. I was at Giffgaff for 10 years developing product, marketing, commercial areas and after that I decided to join Check and Trade with similar responsibilities and roles. I was at Check and Trade. I was there for about four years helping grow, develop the business. We doubled in size actually in the first three years and since the start of the year I've been consulting. So I've been supporting different businesses both telco and marketplaces to grow and develop nationally and internationally. So before we get into the area that we agreed would start on, I do have a couple of questions which are just purely too delight myself working backwards. You say that at Chequered Trade you doubled in size. Now that's quite a headline, but when you see doubled in size, what does that doubling mean? Is that number of I mean, for those who aren't aware, chequered trade is a platform where I suppose normal people can find verified rated tradespeople to do work on their homes, whether they're not from very small to the very large jobs. I'm sure there's maybe there's more to it than that, but I mean, as a headline, that's what it is. When is it doubled inside What? What was that doubling? Was that number of people like me coming on trying to find carpenters or was it for tradespeople? How was that measured in every way you could possibly measure this? So if you think about website traffic, let's start there, that doubled. If you think about the volume of leads contacts that trades would receive in the platform, that also doubled. If you want to look at turnover revenue of the organization, that doubled. We move from being unprofitable to being a profitable organization, highly profitable, actually, yes, I think you can take it from various different places. And all the metrics were much healthier when I left them when I joined. Yeah, but what changed? Well, a lot of things changed so. Let's start with what was the history of check a Trade. So check a trade is a 25 year old organization and for the 1st 20 years I would probably say it wasn't as digital product oriented as it has been for the last five years. So just to give you an idea, when I joined, I was tasked with developing demand. So the consumer demand, home owner demand and because we were realizing that trades had been joining, but we were, we were not satisfying the demand, the volume of leads that they were expecting from the platform. But very early on, I realized that they weren't even counting those leads. So there was no tracking in place with regards to how many calls would a trade receive, how many messages. So my goal, my KPI, my OK R if you want, was drive. Drive traffic felt very odd for me at the time. So I started digging into why is the case, Why are we just looking at traffic? I was having conversations with the marketing department which were part of my remit to see what what activity they were doing and a lot of the activity was just bidding on cheap keywords. For example, they would bid on gardeners in Scotland as it was cheap, cheap cost per click. Now check a trade had very few gardeners in Scotland. It didn't really result in high conversion, but they were hitting that KPI of driving sessions, driving traffic. So my first three months we're very focused on working with the data and insights team to tack the site up, make sure that everything is tracked end to end. And we started to create metrics that made a lot more sense. So we matured a lot as as an organization within the first six months as a result. So marketing completely changed the way that it was running their activity. They were, they started focusing on leads, those contacts from a product point of view. We started developing products and features that would help scale grow this contactability between home owners and trades because very early on we realized, I mean, we're, we're in the business of matchmaking, right? So if home owners come to the platform and they don't find the right trades person to do the job for them, then we're not doing a great job. And likewise, trades are joining, check a trade to get jobs. So if they join and they realize that they're not getting those leads, then the other platform is not going to work for them and they're not going to stay on. So that was the focus from very early on and as a result of what was classic, what gets measured gets managed. Quote from from a. Miss Peter Trucker. I believe so. So, yeah, when you start managing the right metrics, everything changes so you're able to double the size of the organization. I would say if there's this this one thing, it's because you're focusing on the years that matter the most, the ones that will help drive success for user platform, which has a lot to do with platform liquidity. Platform liquidity. It's a very technical term, isn't it? What is platform liquidity as well? Marketplaces are there to satisfy liquidity. What does that mean? In a nutshell, I've seen this described as if you are coming into a platform and you come out of that platform, that marketplace, having fulfilled your intention, then you are satisfying liquidity. What needs to happen for liquidity to be satisfied? Where it's it is a balance between supply and demand, right? So let's make an example. Let's talk about Uber for example. So what would platform liquidity mean for Uber? Well, if I am going to be hiring Uber car, if I come to the Uber platform and try to book a car, but they cannot come to my location or they're it's going to take a very long time for a car to arrive, then you're not satisfying that inherent consumer demand. And the same would happen with the driver, right? So if they join the platform, they're just sitting idle waiting for jobs to come and surface so that for them to take, then that is where liquidity suffers. So you're always in this constant tension to balance the demand with the supply. And the most successful marketplaces realize that very early on. And so their North Star metric, their goals are around matchmaking, ensuring that supply and demand meet. Awesome, useful. Thank you very much for that. Anyway, now I will go back to where we said we were going to begin. Now that my own. Desire for knowledge has been satisfied. You have had a quite a career. And I'd love to a bit more about giffgaff as we go through as well because they really did make a big impact I think in the United Kingdom in regards to what they're offering and how they shifted the market. And obviously it did have a huge impact at Chequer trade. I wonder if from your reflections on your career and from the work you do now supporting other product leaders, like what do you think is the key ingredient for a successful career in product? That's a good question, Ben, because often it touches on multiple things. Product managers are leading so many different disciplines that it, it's very hard to just put your finger on you got to be very good at this because the answer to anything you can think of is likely to be yes. But maybe that the one ring that rules them all for me would be curiosity. Curiosity tends to stand out for me because the most competent product managers that I've worked with, the ones that move up in the organization, they tend to be more curious than others. And what does that mean, right. Well, what that that means is that those product managers will be the ones that will not say like, well, I'm not very technical. They will not say I'm not very analytical or I'm not very commercial. I'm not very, you name it, right? So usually they will try to become that, right? So it doesn't become a barrier for them for growth. They will have their limitations like everyone. They'll have their strengths and their weaknesses for sure. But they won't allow that to become their limitation. They won't make that their limiting belief. So if you're not technical enough for a role, and obviously you you are working for a technical organization most of the times as a product leader, then you've got to become more technical. And what does that mean? Well, you need to speak engineering language here. So you need to know how they're coding things. You need to understand what languages they use, what constraints they have. You need to work very close with them. So you're bringing value at a technical level. Why? Because you are representing them, right? Often product leaders are going to be standing in front of stakeholders, representing not only the product function, but the entire area. Be that engineering, be that data, be that design, right? So you've got to become technical, you've got to become commercial, you've got to become analytical. You've got to be able to do things with your own hands, working with data, right? You can't just rely on an analyst to crunch numbers on an Excel spreadsheet. The most competent? Product leaders are curious to the point where they would be able to do the job of a designer to some extent. Of course not to, you know, don't expect them to be entirely competent. But you can see how they're working on designs, be that on PowerPoint and Excel. Even on Sigma, you can see how they are crunching numbers on Excel spreadsheets to help understand the impact the business is having on specific areas. And maybe they're not able to code. Many of them can code and very competently. But crucially, they would be able to have a conversation with engineers and challenge them in terms of their approach from a technical perspective as well as well, right. So that, if I was going to say, sets a product manager apart, is that they never stop learning. And as a product discipline, it's so important to continuously adapt to this environment, right? It's constantly changing. So the more you try to elevate your game around curiosity, the more chances you will have to succeed. Are you familiar with the fixed and the growth mindsets, The work done by Yeah, by Carol Dweck? Because that's what it made me think of when you were speaking there. It's that desire to say if I don't know that yet, rather than saying I'm not a data person, I'm not a, I'm not an engineer, I'm not a marketing person or whatever it might be. It's a case of looking at and saying, well, I may not be the world's greatest expert, but I can definitely learn enough to be more useful, I suppose. And one of the consequences then, and this is a question of exercising that curiosity and learning those new things. Do you then see that these leaders and yourself get more respect from their relative functions or do they feel like you're overstepping the mark? So if you've learnt some you wet skills and you're doing some mock ups yourself, have you, do you find that gets respect or do you find that pisses people off? The great question, Ben, I think it's going to depend very much on the situation. And in some cases, you will feel like you're stepping over, you're getting more into their. Area of work and they will feel either challenged or get defensive about that. But still it's, it's a leader's job to step into those areas and find where those boundaries are. And in many respects, I think it, it does require some adaptability by everyone. Let's say the specialist functions do expect not to be challenged and also they're going to have a limited career, right? So businesses will grow, individuals will develop as a result of people stepping into their ears and being challenged. And it's a fine balance, right? Because the, it's very easy to retreat. It's very easy to say like, I pissed them off, so I should no longer be challenging them, right? And maybe a framework that's very useful in these types of situations and conversations is Kim Scott's Radical Candor framework. So I, I, I use that quite a lot because often product leaders think that they need to care personally, which for sure you do need to care personally about your team and team that you're maybe not managing directly, but collaborate, collaborating very closely with. So you've got to care for them personally and that's how you're in your respect for sure. But challenging directly is fundamental. The best leaders, be that our product or just business leaders, they're very good at challenging directly. And how do you get into that sweet spot of caring personally and challenging directly, which is what Kim Scott refers to as radical candor? It's trial and error. I don't think there is that. Just just do this and you will be very effective as a leader because it's going to depend on context, it's going to depend on the situation, it's going to depend on the individual that's receiving that information. And for everyone, there is a different approach. So I would say again, stay curious. Try it like not because it's not because you're gonna have bad experience. You can, you gotta stop doing it. You gotta try it more until you find the right balance so it becomes very effective. People listening to this maybe thinking, well, it all sounds very straightforward. I just go and exercise my curiosity and go and ask lots of questions. I'll go and have those straight up conversations. I'll I'll look at radical candor and I'll figure how to engage with people in a particular way. But have you ever seen the exercising a curiosity go wrong or have a have an impact which wasn't the desired impact many times and what was the I think it's probably worth talking about my own personal situations and examples where very much as you are saying then to me either questioning or challenging area that I may not be directly responsible for but closely impacts my line of work was not received with open arms right. So you you would start to see a defensive behavior bit more of an attack as to well, you're not doing your job right or why don't you focus on your own things? You got plenty of problems on your own area to focus on. So why are you, you know, looking into this? So those types of responses to questions, challenges happen. They happen on a day-to-day work environment. And I'm sure that even I have, you know, had defensive behaviors in the past when I've been challenged for my years of work as well, right? Would those be reasons for us not to adopt that approach? I don't think so. I still feel like you you've got to just find different ways to work with. Sometimes we would class them like these difficult people and especially if they have their daily, you need alignment that you need to work close with. Then building that relationship with those difficult people is key to help you grow into your organization and help gain that respect of that those leaders. So yeah, I think perseverance is so important as as much as curiosity is key, I think perseverance is key to make that curiosity in that learning work. And yeah, you're going to have to bounce back again and again from those. Situations which are definitely not comfortable, right? And it's great that you mentioned this kind of difference between the growth mindset and the fixed mindset. And I've also seen that referred as being on your comfort zone or being on your stretch zone, right? And I think that plays such an important part of this because what when you face those challenging situations where people don't respond well to your approach, then you may retreat back to comfort, right? But you sit on comfort for too long. You don't grow, you don't develop, you don't learn. So you won't be able to drive the business forward. And as product managers, we are business leaders. So you've got to step out from comfort. You've got to move into stretch, and you've got to find different ways to influence and impact the people you work with. If it's backtracked a little bit, were you suggesting that people consider working on the difficult, not a difficult and inverted commerce here, but the difficult people to win them over, they gain their respect if they're if they're engaged with what you're trying to achieve is critical. So rather than trying to avoid those kind of harder conversations that harder work on the relationship actually then to persevere and really try and for what? Have a better phrase like win those people over 100%, right. Look, we all have to deal day in day out with difficult people. Sometimes it's our boss, sometimes it's a stakeholder. But the answer cannot be delegate that let's get someone else to do that for us. The answer cannot be, let's avoid it, right? Let's, let's try to minimize the interactions with that stakeholder. If they are pivotal, if they are crucial towards the approval or the progress of your area of work, you need to find a way. And that finding a way is where curiosity kicks in again, right? Because those difficult stakeholders, I am sure, will be influenced by others, by other leaders that are more effective than yourself. What can you learn from them? So who should your mentor be in this situation? Maybe it's another stakeholder that also has a close relationship with that leader. And instead of just, you know, ganging up and bitching about that leader, how about finding ways and exploring formulas which may have worked at influencing them? So if it's a technical leader, right, you need to find way to understand their area of work, understand their challenges and try to explore ways where this relationship becomes a win win, right? So if they see that as a result of the interactions with you, they are able to progress on areas that really matter to them at the same time as areas that matter to you. If they see that level of reciprocity, then you will gain their respect. And I'm saying technical, like I could say finance, like it could be a chief financial officer who you're having problems with. If you get very close to their areas of work, If you gain the respect of people that report to them, if you are able to understand those business cases, the risks that they're continuously trying to manage, then you're more likely to win arguments or, you know, sometimes they they probably are right. Maybe you know, the the finance leader is deciding not to progress with an initiative that you're very keen on because the risk is too high and the investment too big and the return of investment too small. But the more you're able to, well, I suppose not only accept, but this is more about anticipate, right? This is more about understand it then the more competent product leader you will be because you're, you're working together with them to define this business initiative, right? Which effects product for sure, but it affects every area of the business. And the more you are close to them, the more you know how these models are created, the more you work with them, the more you even develop them yourself, the more likely that you will gain that respect and see like, well, actually the way you're thinking about this makes a lot of sense. And how do you minimize risk? It's often by minimizing effort, right? So if you're able to meet those MVPS, if you're able to build them in a way that a CFO can understand, OK, you're not asking me for half £1,000,000 right now. You're just asking me to commit to, let's see, a month of work and validate, prove that if after one month I'm moving these metrics which will have a financial impact, then let's progress. But. If I cannot prove that case in one month, then let's pivot to something that may become more valuable. And one day then there's this humidity and the acceptance that we are not the done, we're not the finished product, and we are having to change ourselves and rely upon other people to do great work rather than just the good work. But that humidity is a key ingredient here as well. If you people are listening and they're wondering this, yeah, even that sounds great. But I, I know that I do struggle to kind of accept that I'm not going to be like the person who can do it all. Oh, to exercise that curiosity. What support have you find works well then for individuals who are trying to go on this journey and be that curious person, but just don't feel like they've got what the, the inner, inner tools and there's some inner work for them to do. There's so many things. I think this works in a different way for for everyone. How do you continuously learn? Like for me, having conversations is where I expand my knowledge in a way that satisfies me right? Because it feels like I'm building a network, I'm building a personal relationship and and at the same time, I'm getting a lot of guidance from people who have been in similar situations. So mentoring as an approach, coaching is as a model does, does work very well for me. Other people get a lot of inspiration from listening to podcasts or, or from reading books, right? And, and that's the way they learn. And you can learn so much from listening to podcasts. So it's, it's an incredible tool that definitely did not exist very early on in my career. And now I've adopted in a way that it's kind of part of my routine. I'm always listening to something that will challenge me and and will make me think about areas that I'm currently working on in, in a in a different way and bring different perspectives. So often listening to these conversations, which is yeah, it's, it's one thing is participating on this conversation. The other one is, is listening to it For me. Both of them work, but these approaches are supposed for me more fulfilling. I get a lot more from them. Then I would get from reading a book, for example, I do read books, but I probably spend less time reading books that I do having conversations or listening to podcast. It will depend, right? Everyone will have a different approach as to what satisfies and and develops that curiosity. And one thing is knowledge, right? One thing is learning about all these things, but if you don't apply them, then that's not going to be worth much. So the next thing is putting them into practice, right? And that sometimes is where the barriers are, right? So people know what they've got to do. People know that in order to lose weight, they need to, you know, eat healthy, go to the gym and all those things. But they don't do it as consistently as they would like. And it's, there's an element of, of committing, there's an element of discipline. There's, there's an element of, of just finding those opportunities. Maybe you can talk about my dad actually, that's all right. So cuz I, I use him a lot as an example for him. He come from Spain, a religious family, and my dad found that what public speaking wasn't his strength. What I, what really impressed me is that I saw him as develop his public speaking skills as as I was growing up, I thought of him not being good at it, if I'm honest, but he saw there was a lot of opportunity for improvement. He would the way that probably it made sense to him the way he expressed the challenges were around an anxiety. So so he had issues dealing with anxiety when he was speaking in public like I think we all do, right? So but he realized that in order to improve that he needed to practice, right. So how do I get better at public speaking? You can learn a lot about public speaking in books. You can learn a lot about publicly speaking by seeing other speakers speak and, and the, you know, doing excellent work doing that. But then the next thing is you need to do it yourself. How do you do it yourself? Practice. There's just no other way. You, you got to practice. And the way he approached it is like, well, we would go to church every Sunday and he would always ask if he could go speak and read the Bible in front of everyone. And every Sunday I would see him like, does anyone want to read? He would always put his hand up and although it was uncomfortable for him, although it was, you're speaking in front of a lot of people, literature that probably you're not entirely familiar with, He would always step up to the challenge and I, I realized how he would. Go about reading because it's not only, you know, standing up in front of public sounds very easy, like you just reading a book in front of everyone. Everyone can do that. Well, not really. Not really. If you want to, you know, step up your game. And you would see how he would start looking at the public while he was reading. He would make pauses, get people to reflect the way he started reading became very different from day one to let's say day 100th of reading the Bibles really got me thinking as to well, that's that's the approach and that's the approach in so many things in life, right? You're not going to learn to ride a bike by reading how or watching a video on YouTube. How do you ride a bike? You've got to get to it and you're going to have to fall many times if you want to learn a new language. It's exactly the same, right? So every different skill, be that hard or soft skill, requires abundant practice. That's the price that I would recommend everyone thinking about. Like I had also challenges in public speaking. And the way that I went about this, I think it was year 2016. Like it was one of those years that I said I'm going to have a new year resolution and I'm going to limit it to one thing. I want to get right at public speaking. I want to be an excellent speaker and I remember talking to my boss and telling him, look, I want to go into this, I want to train, I want to develop. And he was, he was thinking, well, you're already good at public speaking. Wow. Why do you how do you want to do all of this? Like, because I want to be great, may be good, but I want to get even better at this, right. So I started looking into great speakers, people internally in the company, how what they had done to develop their skills. I was recommended some courses, some materials, some books. And again, I just took every opportunity I could to speak because that's that's what really made all the difference and things that at the time, I felt this is very uncomfortable, like recording myself on video and then watching back and seeing, Oh gosh, I'm saying this word again and again. And I'm, I'm in here and I'm, I'm in there and I'm not very clear here and I'm not very expressive there and I'm very monotone there. And the more you critique yourself and analyze yourself, which is very uncomfortable to do, especially, you know, the first time, like, I just hate watching myself on video and probably still do. But the more you do that, the more you learn, the more you see, like, why do you hate yourself? Because I'm doing this all the time and I know I shouldn't do it. OK, well, how do we try to improve that? But like, it's the most, it's like the most severe type of feedback because it's so painful for many of us to look at ourselves when we're doing something. It's awful. It's like, if you ever see yourself running, you know, like I, I run like that, Like, why, why, why do I look like that when I run? But it's the same when you're watching a video of yourself. And it's just that this horrible unfiltered feedback was even for your eyes and then your, your talk, your inner voices. Then really, I find for me criticizing so much of it, saying I shouldn't do that. And then because it's you're getting it from yourself, it's this horrible kind of recursive loop. It can be quite, quite an awkward thing to do. I got over listening to myself a long, long time ago. Having a podcast means that, you know, those first six months is pretty painful. But after a while you do get used to your own voice. And interesting, I found that my voice, but I hear and the voices it sounds have kind of now met in the middle. So for many people, you always think you sound different when you hear yourself back. And I find that actually the more you listen to yourself, the more it seems to just reach an equilibrium and you kind of in your head sound the same on on both sides of the coin. But I, I think that's fantastic advice. And I, you know, it's the focus element I liked as well. I was saying stuff for New Year's resolution and just saying you're going to focus on one thing. I think that so much of our life is taken from us by our inability to focus on one thing and try and do it well. And whether that is learning a new skill, you know, say something from UX or engineering or marketing or finance or getting some new knowledge or getting better at public speaking, I think that we succeed when we focus. So if I think back to what you were saying as a product person or as, yeah, even like I say, as an agile coach or something like that, actually, I think this is actually very true for people in the agile or particularly agile coaches and scrum masters. Learn about business, learn about what makes a business tick, actually understand how to read a balance sheet or look at a profit and loss statement or understand how things are actually contributing to the bottom line. And what's the difference between capital expenditure and operational expenditure. And actually getting your head around some of those things means that you can have different conversations with people, which will ultimately, I think put you in a really good stead to to continue to succeed. So it's that being able to in embrace the new things and have that growth mindset and not think that we're a done deal and just also get over ourselves a little bit. But with that said, I really want to just divulge, divulge, not divulge. I really want to satisfy some main curiosity here because Giffgaff where you kind of started your career in the UK because you moved to London, didn't you from Spain for Giffgaff. And I think Giffgaff is such a fascinating company. I mean, just because of the decisions that were made and the identity it created it for itself in the in the UK was so different to all of the historical mobile phone companies like Vodafone or two or BT cell Net. I think maybe it was that time everyone going back a bit too far. But it was always very stuffy. It was always very expensive and it was always like you were stuck into some ridiculous contract and then began into shops like phones for you. And you could get a new phone but also get a television or a DVD player and it would just seem such a ridiculous market. And then Giffgaff come along and seemed to spark a change, I think. And So what I would ask you and ask if you can share this with our listeners is when you think of giffgaff in your time there, what would you say was the USP the unique selling point for giffgaff and, and how did that kind of help it become the success? But it now is. So if there's one thing that I think stood out from day one at giffgaff, which is very different, I think it's still very different from most of the telcos in the UK is the relentless focus on customer experience and having Net Promoter score as their golden metric, their North star. And when I say relentless focus, it's like this just never a compromise on that metric. So, so from from day one, I mean giffgaff had a community even before it had a mobile network. And so we were very close to working with customers, with members to help grow and develop the business. And they were the ones feeding back, you know, if if things that we had thought about had been originated were. But we're rubbish. We were initially told that was the case. And I think those that relationship grew. I mean, to the point that when, when we had problems running the business, which you often do when you're in early stages, you would be open about them to the community and say, look, we've we've messed up here or this is not working. And through just being open and allowing for members to provide their feedback, get their perspective, building that honest and transparent relationship. What's really pivotal to making giffgaff? What, what they are, what they are today. And they, they still are. I mean, when I see they still are the leading network when it comes to that Net Promoter score, EU Switch Network of the year, which recommended provider, like all the Ofcom surveys that are run annually, Giffgaff usually stands out. They are #1 why? Because they just focus on customer experience way above and beyond. And let, let me give you an example of how far they take this. And this is a very clear example because these are messages and emails that I'm sure you're getting as well as as a, as a, as a giffgaff member. And this every month you're going to get a notification, which we call best plan advice. That notification will tell you what plan you should be on. Currently I'm paying 15 lbs and I get huge amount of data. But often I'm being recommended to, to downgrade like I'm paying too much money. I shouldn't be paying 15 lbs. I should be paying 12 pounds, 10 lbs. And that is so unusual from for any other network to do that because they way they, they think about this is like, hold on as a CFO, what you're trying to do is to get people to move up, right? So it's the distinction between ARPU centric and customer centric, right, when you're customer centric to a fault? That's what you're going to do. You're not going to care so much about what's the revenue you're getting from each individual member. You will care more about the experience. Now the good thing in this from a financial point of view is that those communications had little impact with regards to people trading down. People often think like, OK, well maybe I'm not using that much data this month, but I was on holiday, but next month I may need that data. So I don't want to be in a situation where I run out of data in the month, so I'll just stay there. So most people would think I'm fine. But the effect it had, it's like these guys are really looking after me. I don't need to keep on checking if they are trying to grab that extra pound from me or not. I don't need to be worried that, you know, I'm going to have an increase within the contract or outside the contract. So all the, all those here are very transparent and, and also like everyone I know, the the plans we call goodie bags have evolved and changed over time. But for most of my tenure at Giffgaff, there were only 6 plans and those six plans, 6 plans were the same plans for everyone. It didn't matter if you joined yesterday. It didn't matter if if you joined five years ago. It didn't matter if you joined from uSwitch. It didn't matter if you joined directly or from Patriot. If you're paying 10 lbs, you're going to get that amount of money, which by the way, that's what Netflix does. That's what Spotify does. All the business with high Net Promoter scores have, they don't tie you down to 24 months, do they? They will tell you, well, this is the price, this is the plan, this is the product. Take it. Maybe your first month is free, but then you know you're on a recurring plan and you can cancel anytime, right? Whereas so many other telcos, they're not. The reference reviews a few times like they're building a prison, right? They're trying to tie you down to 24 months. Worse, we're building a hotel. We're trying to make it very comfortable. We're trying to build the best experience so that you want to stay, you don't want to leave. But we we tried to avoid all the mechanics of tying you down. Giffgaff were pioneers in terms of helping networks change their mobile numbers. So moving mobile numbers from network to network used to be a big blocker. That was awful, that awful experience. It was awful experience used to be locked with your network as well. So having that unlocked was a massive pain as well. So we were pioneers on developing features and selling phones which were all 100% unlocked before anyone else. Then regulation contents for everyone else by the way, following very much our practices and and now everyone is a bit more of the standard from that regard. But it it was just very clear that giffgaff was always step ahead in favor of of the customer. Yeah, it almost felt like it broke a monopoly of Versace, maybe not a traditional monopoly, but it felt like the big telcos at the time could basically do whatever they wanted to and there was never incentivized to make life easier for the customer. You know, I think the fact that like I mentioned before, I think in the early noughties in the United Kingdom, the amount of stuff and stupid, crazy stuff is to give away for free just to get you to sign up to a network and get you to take a phone was just, I mean, fantastic in many respects. But now you look back, you think, my God, it's crazy the amount of, you know, it's like video games consoles, you know, TV's or whatever it was or, you know, cash given all cash to sign up, you know, all that's disappeared. I think it's disappeared because actually now the, the whole industry has changed for the better. And I think giffgaff was a, it was absolutely fundamental in that. And with this, I think we are kind of running out of time, but I'm enjoying everything. You talk that when your your role at Giffgaff when you joined. What did you join as and then what did your role become? Well, I took a big gamble joining GIF Gap actually, because for me it was was key that as I was at PepsiCo, it was becoming very clear that I wanted to join a digital organization. But it wasn't a easy year. It was 2008, 2009, and I was realizing that also opportunities in Spain, in Barcelona, where I lived, not abundant. I just, if I'm honest, I couldn't see any opportunity to join a digital organization that I could learn from. So it felt like, well, probably I'm going to have to join a startup. And if I'm going to join a startup, where is it best for me to be looking at? Is is it Spain or should I go abroad? And I started thinking about this. I also girlfriend now it's my wife. Actually she, she, she was living in London and so that also played a, a huge role in terms of my decision to, to look at roles, look at opportunities in the UK being a difficult year, moving industries, moving countries, all of that at the same time was, was a big gamble. So I could only take a more junior role at a startup on a six month contract. So I joined as a marketing exec at Giffgaff. That was my first official role and I did the role for six months, I guess in a way that prove I prove the business that I was capable of doing a lot more. So within months I was promoted to a head of I think the official table was head of e-commerce. I think product was still not as widely adopted, but but it was product, it was product and it was digital marketing it. I mean, it was still a team of 12 people, Giffgaff for the first three years. So it, it was you're doing everything, you're doing UX on PowerPoint, you're doing all the copy on Word, you're doing web analytics yourself. It's just like, you know, proper start up mode. So I took more and more of those different discipline skills, not because I suppose was an expert, but I, but because I was just kept on learning them. But you know, on the evenings reading about web analytics, VNS's Web 2.0 book, I remember reading that one. I read inbound marketing on weekends and on holidays. So just kept on reading about all things related to digital marketing and product, which played played a huge role to to my career cause 'cause I've suppose when, when when I'm looking at opportunities for consultancy, I'm I'm able to go to that zero to 1 stage. But also the same time Giffgaff when I left was a 500 million revenue business with three million members, right. So if I've, I've played both cards and I really enjoy both, they, they require very different leadership styles for each. They all have their pros and cons. But yes, those are the different opportunities that I've been exposed to. So very early on, I joined as a marketing exec and within three years I was the chief commercial officer reporting to the CEO. And how did your leadership style evolve then as the company grew and became so successful? It had to had to, it's inevitable, right? So because I probably tend to be very detail oriented and I used to apologize a lot for that in terms because I would step into people's areas, I would, I would often be able to do their work or often I would do their work. So I had to rein that a bit back, right? And I had to explore ways where my style was less of a manager, less of a micromanager, more as a leader, more as a coaching the teams, developing the teams. But that is a lot easier, especially when you step in the organization and you're able to recruit great talent. So in my latter years at at check a trade I was able to hire. One of the most talented team I've I've ever worked with, and it was an absolute joy because that's where you can really adopt everything you read on books about yeah, you got empower, you got to delegate, you got to let them run. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense when you got very highly motivated and skilled individuals. But when you don't, and often when you are in more junior positions, you're working with graduates, then that's not the right style. You've got to be a lot more directive and you've got to be their mentor and you've got to be very clear and challenging to see them grow and develop, right? So all started changing the more that that talent density did grow and I was able to adapt more of an empowering leadership traditional style. I think talent density is an interesting way of putting it. I was having a conversation with my friend who is amazingly successful. No matter what this person does, they always just the greatest at it. You know, they're a particularly wonderful person and they took on a role doing something which had never done before and has been absolutely instrumental in telling this organization around from their point of view of actually just originally being an events type person. And that did a huge impact, but created a team to alleviate her workload to focus more on the things that she believed that she should be doing. And at the weekend, they said to me, no more work is getting done. No, no more work is getting done. I'm just enjoying my job less. And it comes down to talent density got some great people, but they're just not, they're not as talented as they as, as my friend is right now. And as a consequence, the work doesn't get done to the same quality and the work doesn't get done quite as quickly and as a consequence doesn't have the same impact. So they're very in a position now where they're wondering like, was this the right decision? I think you're right. It comes down to that, that talent density. And I think getting the right people in is one of the critical factors to be able to be a successful leader. I don't think you can be a really successful leader if you haven't got those great people. You could be a really terrific manager, but it's hard to be a leader when you haven't got those great people. I mean, I would almost go so far to say it's it's maybe impossible to be a great leader and have a huge impact if you don't have that right talent density. All right, Kim, our time is over. Actually, I can't sit down. My clock is longer than I'd normally take on an episode. But that's because I just really enjoy what you've been saying. It's been an education for me and I can't wait to get this episode edited and in the ears of all of our listeners. But before we wrap up, Kim Iset, if people want to find you, first of all, are they free to connect with you on LinkedIn? Absolutely yes. Yes. So LinkedIn is, is very easy/ Kim Farah. So name and last name and we will put that link into the show notes as well. And Kim, is there anything you wanted to make our listeners aware of that you haven't already mentioned? Well, I think I mentioned it briefly, but just for them to be aware, I've I've embarked in a new journey. So I'm now self-employed. I'm the CEO of my own company. I'm a strategic consultant and I've been helping out several businesses. They tend to be around the industries that I've LED, so be that telecommunications and marketplaces, but I'm sure I can help in other areas. So if anyone needs a bit of support from a strategic perspective, be that product on marketing, I'm really happy to have a conversation. Excellent. Well, I will make sure that that is clear in the show notes as well for SCA purposes. If nothing else, please everyone do give Kim a shout if it's such an amazing experience. They're working at some awesome companies that have gone on to achieve huge things because in part of Kim's presence there. So well worth checking him out if you do have a need. I will certainly be talking to him about. I was getting a bit of advice from a marketplace that I'm going to be launching, but that's enough of that, enough of that because I don't want to share over share too much, but just remind me. Actually, I did do a live coaching session about the relationship with my Co founder on the podcast last year, which we released as a whole episode. So if anyone does want to hear me being coached, it wasn't an easy conversation, but there is the live and pretty much unedited version of that on the podcast. So yeah, go on Spotify or iTunes and do go scroll back and look for my episode of Masha Akka if you want to hear me being, well, dissecting myself basically. Anyway, Kim, thank you so much for coming on everyone. Thank you so much for this thing. We'll be back again next Thursday. So do make sure that you well, click on the download or the subscribe button, whatever it is in your podcast platform of choice to make sure you don't miss it. Kim, once again, thank you for coming on everyone. Thank you for listening. This has been the product a Jersey podcast.

People on this episode

Head Shot

Ben Maynard

Host