.png)
Episode 097
In this episode of Product Voices, we engage in an in-depth discussion about the evolving landscape of product management and the challenges it faces in what we term the "new age of product."
Two exceptional guests, Mackenzie Hughes and Tara Goldman, who bring decades of experience in leading product teams and navigating the complexities of the tech industry, help unpack the realities of current product management practices and explore how the community can redefine its approach to create meaningful outcomes.
We begin by addressing the notion that "product isn't working anymore." This statement may seem dramatic, but it truly reflects a sentiment echoing across organizations. We examine how the product management field has become overly complicated, veering away from its essence due to unnecessary intricacies introduced over the years.
Tara and Mackenzie articulate the evolution of product management through several eras, detailing how we transitioned from a focus on delivery to embracing chaos and agility, and now find ourselves in a precarious yet promising new era.
RESOURCES
Bios:
Tara Goldman: For 15 years, Tara Goldman devoted her career to leading Product Teams. She’s been an integral part of Product Leadership at College Board, Weight Watchers, General Assembly, Electric AI, and Instructure. She is a certified Executive Coach. CONNECT WITH TARA
Mackenzie Hughes has spent the past decade in tech. She has led Product Operations and GTM teams at ADP, Electric AI, and Instructure. Mackenzie is an expert at building and optimizing operating models. She is Product Management Certified. CONNECT WITH MACKENZIE
TRANSCRIPT
[0:02] Welcome to Product Voices, a podcast where we share valuable insights and useful resources to help us all be great in product management. Visit the show's website to access the resources discussed on the show, find more information on our fabulous guests, or to submit your product management question to be answered on our special Q&A episodes. That's all at productvoices.com. And be sure to subscribe to the podcast on your favorite platform. Now, here's our host, JJ Rorie, CEO of Great Product Management.
[0:43] Hello and welcome to Product Voices. I'm excited about our topic today. This is something near and dear to my heart. Product isn't working anymore. What does that mean? That may be a little dramatic, but I think you'll get the gist of what we mean when we say that through the conversation. I'm a big fan of demystifying product management. I tend to think that we have overcomplicated things in various ways throughout the last decade or so. Product management can be complex. There are certainly a lot of moving parts. But the truth is, it's not as complicated as we have made it in many cases. And so I think that part of the things that we've done as a community to try to make product better has actually made it a little bit worse. And so we're going to be talking about that today. And I've got a couple of amazing guests with me. To help through this conversation and to give insights. So Tara Goldman has spent over 15 years devoting her career to leading product teams. She's been an integral part of product leadership at College Board, Weight Watchers, General Assembly, Electric AI, and Instructure. She's also a certified executive coach.
[1:52] Mackenzie Hughes has spent the past decade in tech. She's led product operations and go-to-market teams at ADP, Electric AI, and Instructure. She's an expert at building and optimizing operating models, and she's product management certified. They are both the founders, co-founders of Gold Hue, which is an amazing new advisory firm. So we may talk a little bit more about that as well. Tara and Mackenzie, thank you so much for being with me today.
Happy to be here.
We were talking not too long ago, and I loved something that you mentioned about the ages of product or eras of product, right, and how we've gone through a few. And that really resonated with me. I hadn't thought about it in that particular way. Although when you were talking, it really made a lot of sense. So tell me more about what you mean by that or your perspective on that, the ages of product. Yeah. Mackenzie and I started to reflect a bit on this because we've been seeing a shift. And so when we looked back, we realized that there's sort of been two distinct ages of product and now we've entered this new age. We think back to the first one. Um, early in my career, it was when delivery was king, right? Product management felt like glorified project management. There was a lot of waterfall, a lot of status, a lot of focus on making sure we were delivering outputs.
[3:14] And then we shifted into this second age that we like to think about as kind of this era of chaos and disruption, a move towards agile. Hey, just like learn as fast as you can, fail fast, move fast, break things. All of that was kind of the underpinnings. And you saw a lot of the kind of startup scene take off. And then we shifted. So we believe we've been in a new age and we want to kind of talk about what we're seeing. But over the last couple of years, we've seen a lot of, you know, macroeconomic trends that have shifted the way we operate internally at organizations and the way we need to think about product management. And we believe it's ours to define. It's so interesting to think about it again. And I hadn't really thought about the history of where we've been, but you're spot on. And again, it seems as if we're, you know, our attempts to improve, of course, did in many cases, but also either didn't improve in areas we wanted to or brought up even new problems.
[4:18] And so it's really interesting to talk about that. So, like, tell me about this new age. It's ours to define, but, like, what are some of the elements of it that you're seeing early on? What's happening in this, you know, quote unquote, new age of product?
[4:35] Yeah, so I think there's like a few indicators. But before we even get into what's happening within product, I think it's important to zoom out and look at the holistic view of not just product, but the world, right? Like.
[4:48] That is just a microcosm of where we're at. I think the world itself is in this really anxious state. So companies and people are also in an anxious state. But I think there's an opportunity here. Right. So zooming out. Right. There's a lot of inflation. There's interest rates and geopolitical tensions worldwide. Right. Not just in the U.S., but here within the U.S., we have a really consequential election coming up. Generally, there's more regulatory scrutiny from governments over, you know.
[5:17] Antitrust, monopolies, data privacy, and then generally just like these knee-jerk reactions to AI capabilities within tech itself, right? Like, what is this thing? What can it actually accomplish? And I think what we see within companies is like, companies are just collections of people. So everybody is uncertain and anxious. And in those times, right, we lean into what we know, which is how we've been doing product for the past decade, which is exactly how Tara described is we're sort of like controlling our controllables, which is outputs. And I think what Tara and I see generally is, you know, companies starting to sort of lead with no vision or strategy and just this sort of huge list of goals, which are sort of just tasks to get done and lots of micromanagement. And I think what the impact of that is, is we're working ourselves to death, but not creating things of substance or value, right? So I think we haven't defined the new age of product. I think right now we're in this weird anxiety state. But the best way to handle anxiety in general is to face it and dream up a new ideal reality when it comes to product itself.
[6:38] Yeah, I love that. So we're just kind of stuck in this anxious space, but it's up to us to define what that means or up to every kind of organization
[6:49] what that means to us and how we're going to get out of it. That's really interesting. So talk a little bit more about what that looks like internally, like, like with organizations, right? Like, like you mentioned, Mackenzie, some really good examples of, you know, we're task oriented, and there's no vision, and we're just kind of kind of go almost going through the motions thinking that's less risky, when when actually, often, it's more risky. But talk a little bit more about that, like internally, like what's happening in organizations because of this new age? Yeah, I think really concretely, vision and strategy docs are left untouched and gathering dust and sort of losing relevance by the day.
[7:34] We see a lot of product and engineering teams operating without metrics or with this really long list of OKRs and sort of unreadable, unusable spreadsheets and dashboards. We see a lot of teams with these super lengthy initiatives with really uncertain ROI that are eating up months of time, if not years. And generally, I think product engineering and design is really still struggling to demonstrate clear, quantifiable value. And because of that, you know, the behaviors that led us to, you know, really thrive in maybe 2014 and 15 of, you know, products having a lot of engaging customer conversations and experimenting and breaking things along the way isn't happening, right? It's sort of we've clammed up quite a bit. And again, I think the impact of that is we're seeing unusable products, right? I think we saw a statistic come out recently that only 20% of products are actually used, right? So those are all the things I think we're seeing. But I think, again, the most important impact is not just on the products, but it's the internal team, right? Like, we're seeing really, really talented people sort of languishing in their roles, right? Like, I talked to a lot of people in tech right now that are pretty miserable.
[9:01] And they're sort of, again, languishing in their roles, or they're even exiting the workforce completely. Yeah. And I think there's a cultural aspect that we see as well, which is when you're in this state of kind of like languished anxiety, you see a lot of finger pointing. You see a lot of infighting, right? And so you see, you know.
[9:27] Employees pointing the fingers at leadership and execs saying, hey, you know, they don't know what they're doing. You see the executives pointing their fingers down at the employees saying, we don't have the right talent. How many times have we heard that? We don't have the right people. You see tensions between engineering and product you see tensions between you know product and go to market teams it's just this kind of like this microcosm of when everybody's feeling this way then you start to project it sort of outwards and everyone is feeling a different pressure in different ways the reality is people want to win they want to win people want to achieve something They want to, you know, get to that successful state. And it seems like we are, we have veered so far away from that. And we have to start kind of crawling our way back to that culture. Yeah, I love that. And it's so true. And it's so easy to, even kind of in somewhat benign ways, you know, make it us against them, right? And then you've got these, you know, five, six, seven groups of buses and everybody else's, right? We other everybody else. And I think that's so dangerous and can definitely happen in this environment. So let's build on that a little bit, Tara.
[10:45] The, you know, we, you, you mentioned kind of let's, let's define it for ourselves, right?
[10:52] Like how, what, what can companies do to, you know, change it at least for their world, right? The community itself and what we've done to, what we've done to product will maybe take a bigger, bigger effort. But for an internal, you know, look at the world and a company itself and a product leader, product team, et cetera, what can they do? Like, how can they move things forward in a positive way for themselves? Yeah, JJ, that's a great question. And I think, you know, as product people, one of our core skills, and I think you talk about it in your book, is we got to be curious. And I think when we're in this state of anxiety, we stop being curious. But if we can lean into it, embrace the curiosity, how can we, in a meta way, use our product management skills and evaluate, you know, how are, what are we doing? How are we operating? What are teams feeling? And is this how we want to be? Or can we zoom out and really assess, right? How are we working? How are, like, are the things that we've put in place actually still delivering value? Are they making people, you know, excited and happy to come to work? Or are we just doing them because we've kind of ingrained this into how we work and operate on a day-to-day basis and they're part of these sort of playbooks that we've seen and heard about?
[12:12] I think that, you know, we need to kind of bring this era of bringing people together, right? And so what I see a lot of is executives kind of, or teams even tossing tasks over the wall to someone else and pushing the pressure or the onus elsewhere, right? And it kind of perpetuates this us versus them. So in a way, like if you're a leader, I would say, you know, this doesn't mean that you have to sit with your team and handhold and micromanage throughout the entire, you know, life cycle of some kind of work product, but you do need to kind of define what good looks like. What are the guardrails? What are the constraints? What context do they need that you have that will help them do that job? Because at the end of the day, we all, I think, kind of agree what we're doing right now is not working. So there's no harm in trying something or experimenting like in really short periods of time with something completely different. And so in our perspective and what we do with our customers is like, let's just blow it up and simplify it. Right. And we're not saying at scale, just stop work and do something totally different. But again, using those product principles, how can we experiment on the two to three things that really matter to your organization? And how can we kind of take a team or two and try it out and see, is that now, you know, driving the behaviors that we're looking for? Are we starting to see more of a we mentality? Are we driving towards metrics that make sense?
[13:41] Are people more excited? Because right now, morale is really low. And when we're in those low states, I mean, it's really hard to innovate and think of how can we deliver value to our customers when we don't feel like the way that we're working is delivering value to ourselves. And so I think it's really just taking the principles that we know and love for how we build products for customers and applying it to ourselves.
[14:08] Yeah, isn't that ironic that, you know, we're, you know, at least in theory, really good at that for customers, and we don't always do it for ourselves. But it's a good reminder that we are good at problem solving. We're good at, you know, simplifying for our customers. Why can't we do it for ourselves and our organization? I love that idea of just kind of finding a few
[14:31] things to focus on and really making that work. I think that's really important. So, so one thing you mentioned was metrics. And I know that part of, part of some of the things that isn't, that that's not working is the fact that we, relying on metrics is a wonderful thing. Like there, there's nothing wrong with that inherently. In fact, it's, it's very, very good, good practice. However, if the metrics aren't leading us to what we need them to be, right? What, what, what leads to success, what leads to behavior change, whatever it may be. It just becomes part of that, you know, bogging us down, right? And so tell me what you're seeing about, and either, either one of you can, can jump in here. Tell me what you're seeing about, about metrics and what, you know, is that a big part of what's happening here in terms of, you know, just throwing a bunch of metrics at the wall and hoping they hit and, And that being part of the problems that we're seeing. Tell me about that and tell me how we can get ourselves out of that.
[15:33] Yeah, I think teams are working backwards. And I'll describe it this way, right? Like, I think that we're seeing a lot of product and engineering leaders set up their teams and then define metrics later. And I think we need to do the exact opposite of that, which is pick the, you know, three to four KPIs that you're going to measure your team on, and then gather your team around those goals, right? And the reason I say that is because, again, as you mentioned, right, I come from a go-to-market background of leading sales and customer success teams. And although everybody's struggling in tech right now, I see go-to-market teams struggling the least. And I believe a lot of that is due to having clearly defined metrics, right? Like when I was leading a customer success team, you either hit your retention goal or you did not, Right. And I think on the product and engineering side, they see that as very scary
[16:33] as, oh, I could get fired at any minute. To me, I see that as you have more control of your destiny. Right. Right now, you are hired, promoted and fired in product and engineering based off of somebody's opinion.
[16:49] What do you have more control over? An actual metric or somebody's opinion of you, right? Which is more risky. So what we're seeing a lot of is, again, like, you know, a lot of, you know, a long list of OKRs, which I honestly have not seen work at scale. I would love to be wrong about that and see something different. But what we usually recommend is, I know Tara put it as blow it up, but I think it's a, you know, take three to four metrics that equal good or you believe equal good and validate those and have your team report on that instead of filling out a roadmap, right? And over time, you'll see if those metrics equal good, right? And they equal progress.
[17:38] And I think the really great thing, too, again, is we see sort of a lot of execs and high level leaders sort of descending on their team to say, you know, let's sit down and talk about your your initiatives and what you're working on, your roadmap every week. And I think a lot of that behavior is driven by this lack of metrics right because imagine if you're an exec or a senior leader and you have a dashboard right and you can easily see this team is is green right I'll leave them alone these teams are yellow and red let me go there right um Taryn I joke about this because I use uh uh an airport as an analogy right so like if I'm at an airport, I could see all of my on-time flights, my delayed and my canceled. I'm not going to run around checking every single gate, right? I'm just going to go to the delayed and canceled to help out. And how much time is that going to save me, right? So I think the key takeaway here is, Number one, if you can, right, like lean into the metrics, right? Pick three or four and just start reporting on those and see how they go.
[18:48] And two, you know, if you're a leader, help your team understand how the metrics actually are going to help your team, right? It's a big behavioral change, but I think overall, it's the right way to go, at least for now and the state that we're in. Yeah, I think McKenzie kind of brings up some great points. And obviously, at different levels of the organization, we have different levels of autonomy to sort of make that impact. And I fully believe that everybody plays a role in an organization, just like we have the us first, them mentality, you know, across teams or up and down. We're all complicit. It's like any relationship, right? Like we all played a part in this. And at the same time, at every level of an organization within a product team, you have a role to play. Again, a lot of times I can see product managers saying, well, you know, it's all the executives and the leadership and they're doing unto us. And at the same time, look, we just gave a talk about this a couple of weeks ago. Have you used your product skills and customer research skills? Do you seek to understand your leader's perspective, right? Are you understanding what position they sit in, what pressures they may be feeling, where they see the future going? What is important to them from a goals perspective? Do you understand the financials of the organization? If not.
[20:10] Get well-versed on them, ask the questions, right? See where they're coming from. Also, just asking those questions, they may not have answers, but it will start to get them thinking about them. And so if you're really kind of empathizing and understanding, you know, where are you coming from? What are your needs as an executive? Then you can come up with potential small ways to experiment and negotiate on how you can maybe approach things differently, right? And it's the opposite approach of this binary thinking where it's all or nothing. It's all of them. They don't understand us. We have to do something like flip the tables, right? And instead, it's just understanding their root need and saying, okay, well, can we agree that for the next month or two months, right, we can experiment with something here? And you're starting to meet in the middle. And so I think at like product manager levels, at middle management levels, it's a little bit more complex because you have to negotiate both, you know, for your teams and elevate some of those great ideas, but also coach your teams to come with solutions versus problems. And as the leader, kind of being open to, you know, hearing that feedback and helping them understand, you know, what you're looking for. Because at the end of the day, everybody's position is valid. We just have to find ways to kind of meet in the middle and experiment our way forward together.
[21:40] Yeah, that's so, so, so important and amazing. I love the way you put that, especially like as product managers and anyone who's not like the leader, right? The kind of ultimate leader, we often feel powerless or at least allow ourselves to feel that way, right? And as product managers, we are in this unique position. Our job is literally to influence others and, you know, understand customers or audiences or users or what have you, and to turn those skills around to truly understand what the leader's going through. I think that's probably the biggest disconnect that I've seen in all business, but specifically in product, you know, management team to leadership is, you know, everybody thinks the leader doesn't know what they're doing or doesn't have any reasons for what they're doing. And that's just not true, right? It doesn't mean they're all great and all of us are perfect leaders, but we do have, you know, a perspective, we do have a point of view, and we certainly have, you know, expectations upon ourselves and what we're trying to accomplish. Now, as leaders, we do need to be clear about that and make sure that our teams know the why behind our things that we're asking them to do. But as product people, we really should turn that around and say, hey, you know, what is in it for them? I mean, what is, you know, the reasons for this. And I think that's really amazing.
[23:03] Nothing else, honestly, like as a, if you're out there listening, kind of almost a junior, you know, product person, use that as practice. I mean, really, I mean, it's kind of internal and you may not think it's a safe space because they're your leader, but, you know, practice on, you know.
[23:20] Elevating that curiosity and that understanding of your audience and use that as the ability to build it. So I love that. I think that's really, really important.
[23:32] So let me ask you this. We've talked about what leaders can do, what middle management, what product management managers, et cetera, can do. If you were to go in, which is literally what you do now, which is awesome, but you go into a client or a new company, what are the first steps? Like somebody out there listening who's like, this is all great. I love it. I totally am bored. You're the smartest people I've ever listened to. But what do I do tomorrow, right? Like what happens? Like what's your advice to someone at any level? I mean, you can pick and choose, but like what's the advice to get started?
[24:12] Like that first step to get out, to get unstuck, if you will. Yeah, I think it's, again, like take a product-centric approach. Um, and that's all Tara and I, I do within our own business and with the customers that we work with, right? We, we do research, right? We seek to understand not just the perspective of, you know, the people within the teams that we're working with, but the cross-functional, um, partners as well, right? Right.
[24:43] And, you know, connect on what are the top pain points? What are the top problems that we're seeing? And not only what are the top problems, but what is the impact of those if we don't solve those problems? Right. And I think from there, right, even before getting to solutions, we need to prioritize those based on the impact of what's the most problematic. And then from there, I think we've we've talked a lot about this is, you know, creating hypotheses and experiments to try to solve the problem in sort of small incubated ways. Right. I think as leaders and Tara and I have done this ourselves as well at companies. Right. We sort of we go to an offsite. We create this big list of things to do. And then we come out and we're like, all right, let's execute on the list. And it usually falls apart, right? So the way that we've changed our approach is we experiment with smaller groups, see what works, and then we're able to implement at scale. And I think, you know, when we say implement at scale, change management sounds much easier than it is, right? There's a lot of championship building that you need to do within the organization. And make sure you have those key players that are going to help you lead the efforts.
[26:01] There's also a lot of communications that need to be done, which I think, you know, in the past, we ourselves have fallen flat as leaders on, right? We've been like, all right, if we send out this Slack message, everybody's going to get it, right? Coms have to be done in varied ways, right? You have to, you know, create documentation, you have to do live and async training to bring people along and make sure they're well supported. And even after you implement a change, right, like you still need to be there monitoring and making sure that there's success and iterating as needed. I will say too, you know, in product as well, we like to touch things a lot. It's not something I always recommend in change management, right? I like to batch changes and make sure that the team is ready to take those on and see how those settle for a bit before introducing another change. So I think, again, it's very much about figuring out what the problems are, prioritizing what's the most impactful and really being focused in how you go about creating change and transformation.
[27:03] And again, experimenting your way there, seeing what works and gathering champions along the way to help you implement that change. And it's not, again, only focusing on, you know, Let's change the process and the systems. There's so much that goes into that cultural change, right? Like making sure that you're shifting those behaviors and seeing how people are impacted with what you implement. Yeah. I would say it's hard because when you're in an organization and I'm going to talk about myself right now, like you have blinders on your bias, right? You have a certain perspective that's deeply rooted in your own experiences and your own position and what your job is. And so sometimes it is hard, but if you can sort of extricate yourself from your body and your role and think like, if I'm an objective third party person here, what questions would I want to ask to understand the root problems? Because what we also see is a lot of surface level problems being brought up, right? But we have to, again, like, why is that? Well, Why is that? Right? Like what is underneath that? Because then we end up solving these surface level problems and spending all this time and energy and nothing really materially changes. And then we start going back to our, oh, maybe it's the people. Right?
[28:22] And so I think that's where you really need to be in this state of mind of let me kind of take this approach. Where I see this done well the most is usually when new leaders are entering in an organization and they don't have any opinions and they haven't been either jaded or influenced in any way, shape or form. And they kind of do that listening toward that assessment and really seek to understand what is happening here so that I can really push the team forward. And I just wonder if why is that a one-time thing? Can we kind of think about this being kind of what Mackenzie said? You can't just like get going on a change and then set it and forget it. Can you revisit that exercise at some frequency that makes sense for you or your organization to do a pulse check, to reevaluate like what's working, what's not working, how, you know, how, repeat that. Because what happens is we then get bogged down by all the things that we put in place and that has built and kind of stacked on each other. And we're usually additive, right? We keep adding, adding, adding, adding. And if you're taking those moments to kind of reflect and say,
[29:30] okay, does this still make sense for us? It's an opportunity to remove or shift. I always say you need to Marie Kondo, your processes and ways of working, like look at it and see if it's still bringing you value and joy.
[29:44] The one thing I'd like to add too is like most organizations that we've been in or work with also sort of lack the foundations for change as well, which is usually where we help out quite a bit, right? So I look at it in five key pillars, right? Is there a clear vision and strategy?
[30:04] And again, going back to metrics, right? Are people measured on metrics? Do they have very specific ones that are sort of their guiding lights? Do they have good operating rhythms, like meetings to hold themselves and their teams accountable? Is there a way to distribute information and reinforce information through good communication methods? And generally do they have some sort of operating model right where they have clear guidance on how people make decisions how they build and how they problem solve and who exactly does what in an organization and how are they measured especially in you know this this very you know strange dynamic of product engineering and and design these people who are you know, um, you know, have very different roles and, and are interested in doing very different things, right? Is it clear what each, each role does? So I think that's a really key part of, of what we do too, is like, do they have the foundations for change before we start, you know, chipping away at the biggest problems?
[31:10] Yeah. I, I, so many good points there. Um, I would think that part of the, the importance and you both kind of touched on it, which is making sure that part of the communication and part of the stated behavior change or culture change is that we will pivot, we will change if needed. That a lot of times when we put, when leaders or organizations put in this new change, this new process, this new whatever, you know, it's met with some resistance as always. And then, you know, whatever down the line, if that process isn't perfect, it's deemed a failure, right? And we have to redefine failure. Failure means we didn't check in on it. You know, we didn't change it when it was broken. That's failure, not changing it. Changing it when it's broken is success, right? And so I think that's a big part of this as well. And I love how how both of you have framed this. So, you know, my last question, we've touched on so many great insights,
[32:18] but any any final like words of wisdom for folks out there who are going through this? It's they're like, yes, that's exactly what I'm going through. I didn't have words to it, but now I do.
[32:28] You know, any words of wisdom for folks listening out there that are feeling the pain of what we've been talking about? I think the biggest thing is really leaning in to the anxiety and, and, and facing it. Um.
[32:42] And not only, you know, within the company itself, I think, again, people are in a really anxious, tough state right now and fearful.
[32:52] And, you know, Tara and I talk a lot about Conway's Law, right, which is like how your organization works within how you are within will reflect in your product and services. So I think about this one line from a Lauryn Hill song, which is, how are you going to win when you wait right within? And I think about that for companies, right? And people who work within them. I'm like, how are you guys going to succeed if things are not right within the company? So helping yourself and helping your partners win and think up a new way of doing product or working together cross-functionally is only going to help everybody else within the company, but also in terms of your customers as well. Yeah. And I think I'll add to that in a way, I think Mackenzie always did really well. And sometimes I even struggled with it, which is, can you extricate yourself from your role, your department, your function, your level, etc.? And can you just get curious and ask open-ended questions? Like literally one tactic you can use tomorrow and in a way that is inviting, right?
[34:06] Help me understand, dot, dot, dot. Think about ways to open a conversation versus close it and genuinely seek to understand what is going on to see if there's a different way, a different perspective, even if you have strongly held beliefs, right? And I think the one thing that I've learned is other people have showed me this. Everybody in their position when I was in leadership roles, I had strongly held beliefs. But then people like Mackenzie would ask me these insightful questions. And I was like, oh, well, maybe I should be thinking about this differently or maybe I should bring that up. And so you never know what those questions could lead to. And you may not know, but it may give them a spark, whoever you're asking, of inspiration or just like an idea to shift their lens a little bit. And I think that's worthwhile. Yeah, that's amazing. You know, it just kind of brings to mind as as a leader, as I think back, the the people that I remember the most on my team and the folks that I think the most highly of, if you will.
[35:12] Weren't necessarily the people who did the work the best. I mean, obviously, that was a big part, but it was those people who asked questions who made me think, right? And so I think that's a good like learning moment for all of us that no matter where you are in your career, one, you can listen to others and they will have good feedback and good questions. And two, no matter where, if you're on day three of your career, you've got a natural curiosity. Ask the questions. You never know the impact that it's going to have on, on a leader or a peer or someone. So, you know, always kind of be that, be that person to, to question and to, you know, and to listen to the questions that come your way. So I love that. This has been amazing, amazing. I've loved this conversation. Most importantly, we got a Lauryn Hill quote in there. That was, that was kind of, that was the icing on the cake for the conversation. But Tara McKenzie, thank you so, so much for joining me and for this conversation. I've loved the insights you brought and I appreciate you spending time with me. Thank you again. Thank you. Thank you. And thank you all for joining us on Product Voices. Hope to see you on the next episode. Thank you for listening to Product Voices, hosted by JJ Rory. To find more information on our guests, resources discussed during the episode, or to submit a question for our Q&A episodes, visit the show's website, productvoices.com, and be sure to subscribe to the podcast on your favorite platform.
[36:40] Music.