Increasing Productivity in Organisations with Isabel Garate Ortiz - Productized 24 TalkInTen

We’re excited to bring you another exclusive episode from Productized 2024, our third conference of the year! Continuing our TalkInTen format, we deliver concise, powerful conversations with leading experts in product and business agility. Each episode is packed with fresh ideas, actionable strategies, and real-world stories to help teams and organisations evolve, align, and thrive in today’s fast-paced environment.

In this episode, we’re joined by Isabel Garate, VP of Product at Landbot, who participated in a compelling fireside chat alongside other industry leaders. Moderated by Nina Schneider, the conversation brings together Martta Oliveira (CPO at Cofidis Portugal), Martin Feldman (Head of Product at Productboard), and Isabel to explore how organisations can increase productivity at a national level.

Together, they discuss strategies for boosting productivity, alignment, and communication within teams and across organisations, providing invaluable insights into how companies can better adapt to change and work together more efficiently.

Isabel on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/isabelgarate/

Here is the synopsis of Isabel's Fireside Chat:

Moderated by Nina Schneider, this fireside chat will gather Martta Oliveira, CPO at Cofidis Portugal, Martin Felcman, Head of Product at Productboard, and Isabel Garate, VP of Product at Landbot for an insightful discussion on increasing productivity as a nation. Together, they will explore strategies, share experiences, and provide actionable insights into enhancing national productivity.

If you enjoy the show, please leave a review and stay tuned for more great episodes from the Product Agility Podcast!

Use code PROD24 for 15% off training courses at Sheev.

Sheev - https://www.sheev.co.uk

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

• Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/0lkwAYJzVSuk5zfJ1vIDZq?si=4c691fb12f124a56
• iTunes - https://apple.co/3YvTX8p

Want to come on the podcast?

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

Transcript

0:00

Welcome to a very special series of episodes of the Product Agility Podcast, broadcasting for two days, direct from Lisbon Portugal and product ties 2024. This year, we're bringing you more exclusive bite-sized wisdom with our talks in 10 format, where we're going to be diving into actionable insights from some of the best and brightest minds in product leadership. And attendees this year are being spoiled with talks and workshops from the likes of Radakadot, creator of radical product thinking and Rich Morinov, author of the art of product management, helping us all find some joy in what we do. But it would be a pretty shitty conference if it was just two people. There are so many more people here and they're going to be getting as many of them as possible on here to share their talks in 10. Now before we begin, a huge thank you to our sponsor, Sheev Limited. Sheev is the company which has bankrupted this podcast pretty much since day one. I want to take an opportunity just to share with you and make you aware we do some awesome stuff. Whether it's training your product teams or coaching your product teams with clarity and alignment or you know just a simple thing of actually making OKRs work in organisations, these are all things that we are very good at. So do head over to www.sheev.co.uk, see what we do and get in contact with us. Also check out the show notes for a tasty little discount code over any of our courses. Grab a notebook because the next 10 minutes are going to be packed with actual tips from the best in the business. And here begins a talk in 10. It's the end of a long day. Productised 24. Day two officially day one for me. I wasn't able to come yesterday but it's been absolutely awesome. I have had the delight of speaking so many excellent people and we're going to end on a high. I think it could be a join by Isabelle Garate. Did I say that? OK. Yes, got up there with you. It sounds perfectly fine. Good, good. And Isabelle, you're here. You're not giving a talk to my per se and you're not doing a workshop. So you are the first person we've had on the podcast today who isn't doing either. See, what are you doing here? So it's a round table and we are talking about productivity and the organisation and how to leverage that and use some tools to make everything more productive. OK, so simple as that. Well, great. Thanks for coming on the podcast. It's been really nice to know. Easy. It's interesting of a round table. Have you spent much time preparing with your fellow round table members? We met and we discussed the discussion where we would take it, what people would get out of it and yeah, we kind of prepared for it. OK, so how did you end up being part of this round table? So I was at productize conference before the pandemic. I can remember the year. I loved it here. I sent a proposal for a talk and they said this is interesting, but it fits into a round table. Would you like to join? So I'm here. Oh, wow. OK. I was in what was the talk that you submitted? So it's about how AI pushed us to move in a different way as an organisation and how it impacted our product and our value to the users. Ah, and this is Lambot. Lambot, yes. Were you the VP of products? Yes, I am. Excellent. Lambot, for our listeners who maybe haven't heard of it, what is it you do at Lambot? It's a no-code chatbot builder. So we help organizations, yeah, build their user journeys with their customers and yeah, through multiple channels like web or WhatsApp or Facebook or whatever they want to use it. So it's quite fun. And how is productivity at Lambot? I think it's good. So we are kind of start up moving to scale up. So everything changes very fast. We need to remain productive, which is a challenge, I would say. I think it's kind of we are a small team and we managed to do many, many things. And I mean, with struggle, we learn, we make some mistakes, but we learn. And I think that's kind of give of being productive, like learning from your mistakes. Hmm. And so what do you think is going to carry over from your experience at Lambot to the round table discussion tomorrow? So I would say productivity is around alignment. It's about having a vision, communicating this passion and the strategy. Everybody is aligned with that. So we are moving everyone is moving in the right direction in the same direction. So you don't have marketing team saying something, selling another thing and then product team working in some other product. So it's about alignment is about clarity, it's about communication. And if they change, you need to change along. So I think productivity is a lot about alignment. And say, what tips have you got for people around kind of gaining alignment on it? So I would say making questions. So we are product people. We love making questions. And just this simple question, like, are we aligned? Is this thing what we are agreeing on? Or did I take something wrong? So this is a stupid question. As stupid as it might sound, it's not a stupid at all. So I would say that's the first point where you start. And if everything works from then, you can move and do many things and try to improve what you're doing. But you need to realize that you're going in some direction and to sometimes do retrospectives on how things are going and change all the time. I've over it all the time. So who are you doing this panel discussion with? Who are you doing the panel discussion with? The names. You can never say, okay, it's difficult like this. I mean, I think it's Mathieu and I can remember the surname. Ah, it's okay. It's on the website and you'll know tomorrow. That's fine. It was a mean question. Yeah, I haven't meant them yet. I just arrived. Yeah, that's hard. That's hard. I don't. It's interesting. A panel discussion, I always find them interesting things to do, because you don't. There's any stuff that you can prepare for. Are you taking questions from the audience on this, I assume? I think we will take you some time. Yeah, so you're kind of at the whim of the questions almost, aren't you? Like, how do you prepare for a parent discussion? I think we prepared together. So we met, I know what they do, but they're not the names. I'm super bad names. But I know where they work at and what they do, so what they've been doing and what they bring. So everybody's bringing a different perspective and different learning. So I think it will be really easy. When you get a question, you'll know who's the best person to answer. So I think that's the point. Nice. I don't envy you. I don't like panel discussions. So I remember talking at the beginning, you said organizations and productivity and a bit of AI. Yeah. So how does AI factor into the organizational productivity command? So I think in several ways. So one, it's a tool. AI is a tool. It's just something used to get to your objective. And how you use it is on your own. And how your company or your organization allows you to use tools, it's important. Like, I can give you some examples. So at Lambot, we've made some workshops to teach everyone how to use the tools to make their job more productive. And that means preparing what kind of tasks am I doing every day? Are they taking me a long time? Is there any tool I could use that could speed this up or not? How do I feel about it? So is it super boring, it's super tidy as every time I do this or not? So then you think of tools, under tools, like every day, there's new tools. But there's people and people talk and then you learn, so have you seen this thing? Have you heard of this thing? So it's how you incorporate them to your work in a good manner. So not to substitute you as an individual, but to use it for your good. So I'm saving time and doing things faster, better, I'm getting feedback. So stupid frameworks like you tell the AI. So look, there's three people in this room. There's, I don't know, sales person, there's a marketing person and there's a developer. And there's this discussion around, what would they say? How would you advise me to bring the topic in a difficult situation? So you can even prepare for meetings just to like generate any ideas and just learning and preparing, like other than, I don't know, doing tasks, summarizing doing some excellates for you. So there's plenty of things AI can do for you. So if you do background then to the whole premise of organizations and productivity, do you perceive that there's an issue of productivity in organizations? Most of the times, yeah, I would say so. Yeah, it's sad, but it's true, like even like from large organizations to small different topics probably, like large organizations, they take too much time to make decisions on that's impacting productivity because it's lots of time. In smaller companies, it's about probably like focusing on one thing and I'm trying to do like plenty of things at the time, if you're a small team. So I think every organization is facing problems with productivity and not every organization will have the same solution. But of course, you can get like a lot of help in every case. I just really think of a time when productivity wasn't an issue. Kind of think of a time when productivity wasn't an issue. Probably when there's alignment, there's a focus, there's like everybody's super motivated. So people on the health is super important, like feeling you're doing something right and you want to do it and then having the focus and the ability and everybody is aligned with you. I think it's when magic happens, it's like everybody gets to the point. I wonder, I'm paying with me on this one. Is it when things are much simpler? You're working in a manufacturing plant. Yeah, things are complicated. We could break things down and actually we could include productivity by everyone doing their thing really well. We could look at that overall process and we could figure out, okay, as long as we each do our this thing in the best way, then we're going to actually and we can control what's coming in. We're going to get some pretty awesome shit out there at the end of it and we can really wrap that up as we need to. But then problems get more complex. Organizations get more complex, things we're creating get more complex and there's individuals then we're not in situations where we can just do the single best thing repetitively, but not productivity won't come from individuals just doing their thing better. In order to solve those complex problems, what we've discovered is that actually having people who are willing to learn different things and work as part of a team is what is the productive way to solve those complex problems. So it's the productivity issue. If I follow that logic through is maybe an echo of the fact that as teams, we don't work that well together and what you're saying about that alignment that clarity actually what we're saying here is the magic ingredients you mentioned help us make a great team and it's great teams that can solve complex problems in a way which we can look back and say like shit would be really productive. Is that fair? Yeah, actually we can learn a lot like in digital work from factories like I've been working at physical products and you go to the factory you shadow the people do their thing you clock it you see how it's a change so one input one output and then the next thing it's the same in an organization so everything is linked together you need to make it work as smoothly as you can so you just need to observe to clock to listen and then to put everything together so that it will improve so it's I mean you can take the same approach. Yeah, this is why I think a lot of the time got missed with a lot of the agile movement was the strong lean element of it you know and I think it's such a shame that they lost a lot of the good stuff that would maybe win in agile because people just got wrapped up and trying to make the shit ton of money from it rather than actually kind of going back to actually with somebody ideas here have really sat really sound why don't we just try going back to that oh no no let's make this money just making lots of scrum masters that's rewarding yeah people are scared and people when they don't know about a topic or they even experience something it's harder for them to see but I think with small changes like you cannot change like the whole thing in one day you need to start with the tiny things okay this tiny change will make a huge impact and then it will prove us an example then maybe we can go a little bit farther and farther and you have the whole organization so I think that's a good like tip start a small but then you'll see like it grow in and it will impact everywhere awesome one lovely way to end the up and end our little episode here so there are timers up it's about thank you so much thank you if you have hung around for some not but really appreciate you coming at the end of the day it's been lovely to get to meet you meet you people want to find more information linked in is a good place link yeah and your fireside chat your round table will be on released on productized tomorrow yeah so it's tomorrow it'll be 11 30 11 30 and then it'll be out on youtube at some point in the future so I encourage people to make sure they're subscribed to productized to make sure they get the videos and get to see you in action tomorrow I can't wait to hear how it goes yeah thank you so much I really enjoyed it oh my pleasure if I go for listening I'll be back again at some point soon thank you