How to fix your product roadmap — Matt Feczko (Director of Product Ops, Ocado Technology)

0:00Feeling stuck in the middle of your career? The Mid-Career GPS Podcast helps mid-level professionals navigate leadership, office politics, networking, interviews, and their next career move. Across more than 350 episodes, host John Narrell and his guests share a weekly dose of practical guidance to help you stop feeling stuck and start moving forward. Search for the Mid-Career GPS Podcast wherever you get your podcasts. Follow the show and listen today.

0:55business, career, or team. Find your next useful idea. Listen to the Business Takeaway podcast wherever you get your podcasts. Click the link in the show notes.

1:09I was just really passionate about trying to make it fair for product people and to also convey what I believe and I have learned over the last 15 years are the skills that are important, regardless of AI, right? All these things, AI doesn't change the requirement. AI is just a side bet. You still need to be good at storytelling. Still need to understand the data. Still have to be good at prioritizing.

1:35Matt, we're backstage live at Mind the Product Conference here in London. It's great to have you here. How are you doing? How's your day been? Fantastic, actually. It's been a really great day. Some really wonderful talks from this morning that were super interesting and excited to talk to you. Fantastic. So for people who don't already know who you are, give us a quick introduction. What are you doing these days? And how did you get into this world of product-y stuff anyway? Yeah. So Matt Fesco, obviously American, like yourself. Could be Canadian. Could be Canadian. Secretly Canadian. Secretly Canadian.

2:06No, I have so much urgency in my voice. Obviously, I'm from adjacent to New York. No, I'm from Boston. I've been in the UK for 12 years. And I've been a product manager my entire career after graduating from uni. How did you manage that? I mean, that's a very long story, longer than we have now. But I studied computer science. I'm a nerd at heart. I loved building and making things. As a kid, I learned to program when I was 10. Naturally, I went to school for computer science because it just felt like the right thing. And then I was, I don't want to say lucky, but fortunate to get a job at Microsoft.

2:43Way back in the day, working on one of the sexiest products, SharePoint. Ooh. Almost as sexy as File Explorer. Well, I mean, I did work on Office after that. So, you know, new, open, and save is a very important feature. So, no, I worked as a program manager at the time, is what we called them. I worked in SharePoint, Office, and then I moved to the UK to work for Skype, which I think is beloved in all of our hearts. And there was a real big Skype culture. The people who worked at Skype at the UK office, there's kind of a mafia of those people that still persist to this day. Oh, my God. I was a bit of the later cohort.

3:24So after the acquisition of Microsoft, but I can still like that community is still quite strong. And then when I when I left Microsoft, I had a decision. I had the option to move back to the US or stay in the UK. I love London. I love the access to the rest of the world. This is before Brexit, obviously. I know. And, but then I said, you know what? I want to try my luck in startups. I never worked in a startup environment. I'd always been at a big company. And I thought, okay, this would be a great place to learn. It'll be interesting. Microsoft was chaotic. Startups would be, I thought, more fun.

4:00And little did I know that very, very, very different space. And I had a lot to learn over the next kind of six years at four different startups. And now you're back in the world of larger companies, not as big as Microsoft, but Okada is one of those companies that, everyone in the UK knows because it was a consumer-facing brand for a while. It's gone back into the B2B world now. Just explain for anyone who doesn't know what Ocado is, what do you guys do? So Ocado, I love saying I work for Ocado, especially in a conference like this. Everyone who is from the UK has a response of, oh, oh, so nice.

4:36Yeah, the Vans. Anyone in Europe is, what? Who? Who are you talking about? But actually, I work and our company is around maybe 4 ,000 employees. I think it was 5 ,000 a couple of years ago. We build the robots and automation hardware for groceries around the world. And so we supply technology to big grocers like Kroger in the US, Kohl's in Australia, but we're also in South Korea, Japan, Europe, Canada, etc. And we make basically like little wallies. That's probably the best analogy. If you haven't seen it yet, watch the videos. I love the fail videos. Oh, they're so sweet. When I went up to the booth to see them for the first time and there was like one guy or gal or it or they on its side, the other ones were just circling it.

5:22It was like the saddest thing. But no, no, it's really, really impressive technology where it enables grocers to deliver groceries at a much cheaper cost than doing it in store. But over the years, we have built up our proposition to not just do big robots, but we do delivery from the store. We cover the whole journey from the customer experience to shopping online to the last mile to the driver delivering it to the doorstep. So, Matt, before you joined Okado, you were a customer-facing, business-facing product manager, B2B, B2C product manager. At Okado, you're more on the dark side of product ops.

5:58I have never heard product ops being called the dark side. I think I'll own that. They're a Star Wars theme. So yeah, so I was working at a company called Manual. I was the head of product, operations. So I was responsible for everything from the pick and pack to the account management. And I got a LinkedIn message one day from an Ocado recruiter for a role for head of product tops. And basically, the email was all about this role that I had never heard of. I was like, oh, there's like an actual function designed to try to improve the product management experience. I love Decato, as everyone who lives in the UK does.

6:37So I took the interview just to find out. And it turns out the recruiter just, she searched and it just stripped the comma from my title. So head of product operations, head of product operations. She told me about the role. She said, okay, you're going to help the product team. You're going to help like figure out how to build a roadmap, prioritization. and I said no no that's not me I ship features I ship software I work with customers and users and she said why don't you just have a chat with this guy Steve and I said fine fine always take the chat Steve has been working at Ocado uh it's still there for like 23 years or so started out in uh in the ops uh I think I don't know if it's a grad scheme but he was in the fulfillment center and he and I just got on like a house on fire.

7:26I just really respected him. I really respected his commitment to the company, to the problem space, to the evolution of his role changing, him cutting into product. And he convinced me to interview. And then three and a half years later, yeah, still there. And recently my remit has expanded, not just from product, but we've renamed it to product and engineering ops. Because what I'm seeing, and I think this will change in the industry, you're only as effective if it's both halves. of the delivery mechanism. Like, what are you doing? Why are you doing it? How are you doing it? And how do we make it actually possible?

7:57So yeah, if we tell people what to build and it doesn't get built, we lose all our credibility and nothing gets done anyways. And engineering needs some support. Like they're often said, go and do this, but they have to figure it out. And having us function that allows them to move faster, to move better, it's exactly the same as product, right? They just didn't have that defined. So yeah, so that's what I'm doing now. And it's been quite fun. Okay. So let's just get into a little bit about product ops because this is a tough one sometimes because as team scale, I work with lots of teams that get to the problems that come with scale.

8:35So communication and collaboration and prioritization at scale are really hard things. And they're hard to do within the product function alone, let alone communicating out to other people with a common story. And the problem is that we all want to work in the ways that are best for our teams. Oh, humans. And AI makes it even worse. Absolutely. But we need a minimum viable bureaucracy. There are certain things that are non-negotiable that we have to do the same way. Even though it may constrain our team or it means that we're doing things twice sometimes because we need to be able to communicate at certain levels.

9:12But we all use JIRA in different ways. We all do roadmaps in different ways. We all prioritize in different ways. how does this actually work? How do you avoid product ops just being a PMO for a product? Yeah, and it's a big thing. And I can give you the example of when I joined, the ask was, hey, Matt, can you help us build a roadmap? And I first thought, okay, so there's 350 people in product, like 3 ,000 developers. You spend hundreds of millions of pounds a year on R &D, and you don't have a roadmap? Like, how did we get here? we have lots of road maps they do they do and at the time actually akado had roadmaps and they're all and i say this to everyone they were made in google slides every quarter they would spend two months of every quarter making slides of the roadmap to to share out what our strategy and what our roadmap and our vision would so one month of actually doing stuff i hope so i mean who knows maybe they were just like you know describing off um this is before ii so who knows what they were doing.

10:12And if you weren't in the meetings, like if you weren't in the product planning meetings, you couldn't actually voice your thoughts on the roadmap. There wasn't a document to describe what we were going to do and why. I mean, it was basic, basic things. And I think at the time, CPO had the intention that I would help to, and my team would help to like just operationalize and fix it and make the slides better, right? Or make like not have to redo it, but the symptom, I think that's what's interesting about product ops is product ops people are product people. We are trying to understand the problem, the actual problem.

10:45And I think what's nice is try to determine a solution and then try and implement the solution. And that's actually what has been so fun, I guess I would say, being on the dark side. Because you kind of have the power to then make it better. Now, I think product ops people are different. I am, in the insights world, extremely yellow and red. So I have all of the extroverted energy and kind of decisiveness. but you have other product ops people who are like hands-on on the ground blue and green who can actually help individual teams move on so with with my world i looked at what they were using with jira and it was just a i can't swear what a disaster let's just i mean beyond belief there was no consistency there was no this is what a feature is like i said okay how do you use epics epics had and if you know jira nomenclature epics had parent epics and they had parent epics and depending upon the team that team used epics in a certain way and so kind of like a dictatorial tyrant i came in and said no absolutely not no this is the structure we're going to follow i fortunately backed it up with um denise teal's and melissa perry's book uh product operations which i had to read because i just started the job and then to figure out like what do I do?

12:05And there was a page that was about the hierarchy. And I was like, oh my God, this is why we have a problem. This is literally the issue. This makes sense. Why don't we do this? We don't have a hierarchy. We didn't have a concept for a high level initiative. We didn't have a concept for what a feature is. And so we worked and we created this sort of movement that we called the Jira revolution. And we worked to try to get the teams to change their ways of working. And so the thing during that journey, it took a long time. The hard part wasn't coming up with a solution. The hard part was adoption, which is what product is.

12:38How do I get basically 3 ,000 people to change how they operate, how they work, how they think, how they describe their work, how they share their work, how they prioritize their work? And it's still a journey. I think we're much better than where we were. But, I mean, God, back then it was like third world. Okay. So when you joined, people were spending two months out of three just planning. Making slides. Making slides. What does it look like now? Oh, now. Now is so much fun. I mean, we can say the buzzword AI, but now all Jira data is correct. So we're still evolving it. I think the important bit about governance is you allow it to change with the way that you need to operate.

13:20The key thing for us as a business, Ocado has a goal to get cash flow positive. We've talked about it at our earnings recently. So in order to do that, we need to be clear on the investments we're making, why we're making them, and what value we think that they'll bring. So we now have clear delineation of initiatives. We know what these things are going to bring and what value we think that they're going to provide to us. We know how much we've spent on it. And then we can talk about those every six months. So my team and a number of other teams have vibe-coded apps on top of Jira data. And actually, I'm planning on in the next governance cycle to not have any slides.

13:57Slides are dead for product planning. We have an app. You just walk through the app that shows your data. The data is your source of truth, and it should tell the story of what you're doing and why you're doing it. That's it. And I'm curious because one of the challenges, we want to standardize things at a certain level, but we also want to enable people to work the way that they work, the thing that works best. So is AI enabling people to just work however as long as it imposes the structure for them? Yeah, so you said it yourself, like what's the minimum viable, right? And that's what we think.

14:30The minimum viable are those minimum fields. Let's just go with NJira. You need filled in so that you can tell a story. And I think it's an interesting discourse because ultimately, if the standard value is how much is this feature going, values is going to drive, as a product people, we don't think in that terms. We think in how do we think this metric is going to move? Right. How much are we going to move the ability for drivers to deliver, you know, more than just 22 or 20 orders in an eight-hour shift? or how many items are they going to add to their basket? If we show them something new and exciting, this new ice cream flavor, which shout out, I think I had the chocolate Guinness Jude's ice cream.

15:10It was out of this world. And I didn't need to, but I added it. How do we translate those metric movements into value to then articulate what we think all of this accrue is going to provide? So my team's been working with finance, which is great, on how we translate metrics to value. You know, what does that metric tree look like? How do we talk about it? So product ops, my job is to make that easier so we can all speak the same language and that therefore they spend very little time with bureaucracy and more time talking to developers, talking to customers, figuring out what they're going to do, validating their assumptions, rolling that feature out with new people, doing products.

15:52So you've also developed a set of skills a framework of skills around this. Tell us a bit about that. Yeah. So what I love about my job, and I have said to you before, what I love about my job is I can solve and I can work on these big problems that I see in the organization. I am, I would say I'm a call center, but I think we are very valuable because I am a force multiplier. We have solved the roadmap problem. Okay. We have solved the financial valuation problem. And one of the things I wanted to solve around two years ago was the skills, the people problem. You know, we would have, we're a big company.

16:34At the time, we had 300 product managers. And I came from my early career at Microsoft. We had hundreds of them as well. And what I liked at Microsoft was they had this performance management system where you could self-reflect and you could get feedback. But what they didn't have was as a product manager, what am I supposed to do? And that has been an age-old conversation of what is my job. And I have thought about this. I have been a PM at 10 companies, maybe it's 8.8, let's round up to 10. I've worked with so many different teams. I have worked in different functions geographically in the US and the UK and in Europe.

17:09And the key thing for me is trying to articulate to Ocado what are the important skills that they need for a PM to be successful. And so I took on a project a year and a half ago. We had a little bit of a work. We were going through some reorg or something. And I thought, you know, now is a perfect time. Let me take a step back and try and solve this problem. Because everyone deserves to know where their career should take them, what skills that they should work on. And so I took a combination of an existing framework on a platform called Reforge. And I also interviewed our CPO. And I said, tell me what you think is important for a product manager here to be successful.

17:47And this is all kind of without AI. Like I did all of this. I think at the beginning, there was like chat. We did used to be able to do this. Yeah, I was like, oh my God, I actually did my job without it. This is pretty cool. Yeah, I did my job without it. And I overlaid what he said, what I'm hearing from people, my own experience, what I've seen in the market. And I essentially created a framework with 12 skills across four themes. So three skills per theme. They cover everything from like execution, influence, strategy, skills like storytelling and evangelizing, skills like problem solving, prioritization, leading with data.

18:22And we created specific definitions. And I created a really high tech Google spreadsheet where you would be able to track your own perception of your own skill. And then the manager, your manager, would also give you a score. We'd overlay it on a radiograph. stuff and then that would be basically what you can aspire to what you can do and it's a the point of this whole thing was so that the manager and the ic had a conversation the end of the day it's about the conversation about how i see myself how you and my peers see me and where i want to take my own skills in the future and moving forward and so yeah it's been we've been running it now for two years and it's a game changer okay let's dig into this a little bit because it's not the specific skills and the definitions that I think is the real challenge in most companies.

19:10Although I see when I've done this with other people, I find that there's very type A people who fixate on every single word in the definition and say this. Well, actually, let's stick on this for a moment. The challenge in that is you've got teams that do fundamentally different things. From a topology standpoint, you've got platform and enablement teams and customer-facing teams and the skills they need are different. So a senior product manager versus a product manager in a platform team will need different skills versus in a customer-facing team. Yes, I think if you're a hardware engineer, if you're a hardware, it's true.

19:45We try to make the skills generic enough, something like domain experts, right? So depending upon if you're a growth PM running experiments and trying to like growth hack and see the changes versus you're a hardware PM building robots that take five years, and you need to understand the P &L of how much you're going to spend from an external cost. Those are two very different things. That said, domain expertise is relevant to both of them. So we tried to take the skills. And to be honest, that took about six months to come up with the agreed language. Fortunately, I'm so relentless and nitpicky that I was not happy until basically everyone in the organization was happy with the skills breakdown.

20:27And it could work for our whole split. So the secret there though is they are specific in their intent, but not specific in their application. They're interpreted for each team and relevant. Yeah. And that's what I've tried to do in the past. It's more important, the philosophy of the skill rather than this is exactly how you demonstrate success at it universally across this company. And it's not perfect, right? I think it's pretty good. But like, for instance, for me, I personally think my, and this is because this is about my identity, storytelling and evangelizing, which is a skill. I think we wanted, they wanted my CEPO wanted to call it effective communication.

21:05And I was like, nope, it has to have some flair. So storytelling and evangelizing. I think that is one of the most important skills because it actually summarizes every skill. If you can tell a story you've led with data you are a domain expert you can prioritize you have vision you have clarity you have problem solving because you can explain it in the story and so yeah the hard bit was not well six months of coming up with the list but then also convincing everyone to do it to follow it but i am nothing but not relentless so i got 150 people in the organization to do it to just run through the skills assessment and give themselves scores.

21:46We had 100 % completion. Fantastic. Yeah. Now let's talk about how people use it. As you said, it's the purpose of this is to have a good conversation between the manager and the staffer. And that is critical. But where I usually see this is it gets turned into something around reward and promotion as well. So how is it used? How do you approach that? Yeah, it's an interesting one. So my approach originally was let's focus this on not reward and promotion, but we will get to that. But the key thing was to have a consistent framework because what I saw, what I didn't mention is when I had interviewed product managers and said, how are you being assessed for your skills?

22:25They all showed me a different document type, Nero, Google Doc, Slides. And I was like, this is how do you move between teams if you're asked and expected to do different things? So that was part of the reason was consolidate the way we do things. Naturally, once you have this framework, it's useful to use this to understand promotion. And actually, it has been helpful. We have used it about promotion because it makes promotion fairer across the whole organization. Beforehand, the way the promotions would happen is if you had a manager who was just super on it, they would get their people promoted and the other managers who aren't wouldn't.

23:04And so you have this disadvantage between the ICs who think that they should be, but then basically their managers and pushing for them. If you have a consistent framework for how promotions works against a skills matrix that is consistent, then all of a sudden you have so much more fairness and transparency. Yeah, I can't tell you the story as well. I could tell you the stories, but around working in large organizations where managers pulled me aside and said, okay, this is the secret. You have to create relationships with all of my peers because if you don't have those, then I can't win the argument for you in the room.

23:34So I know you're good, but you have to help me play this game. Yeah, there is, you know, there's always going to be a bit of a game in some respect. I think the framework helps to make it fairer. And I think the thing that I'm most proud of around this whole thing is that I was just really passionate about trying to make it fair for product people. And to also convey what I believe and I have learned over the last 15 years are the skills that are important, regardless of AI, right? all these things, AI doesn't change the requirement. AI is just a side bet. You still need to be good at storytelling, still need to understand the data, still have to be good at prioritizing.

24:12But the success of this framework has been the fact that engineering, 2 ,000 people, they took my framework and they made it their own. Data did the same thing. UX did the same thing. So they basically saw what I, we were doing in product and said, hey, this model works. So we went from a group of 150 people with a framework to 3 ,000 people all now have their bespoke frameworks for their craft. How different are they? They're, you know, what we did is the themes for the three skills per theme, those are the same, so execution, influence. But the skills themselves are different and are specific to the crafts, to the disciplines themselves.

24:52Okay, so you're doing this across product and engineering as well as design and related functions. These skills, they don't seem to be very specific to the product development teams. I've long held that good product management is just good management, period. How universal is this to potentially the rest of Ocado and to other companies? I think it can be adapted. There are some specifics. So for instance, we made a deliberate focus on one skill being about product adoption. that being a specific scale we want product managers at a cotto to focus on and that's because product managers didn't believe at a cotto their job was to do product adoption they thought their job would be to deliver features and the partners would just adopt it themselves so get stuff into production and that's it exactly or like i sent an email to to doreen doreen now we'll just do it with her customer and actually we want them to be able to use it to track it to see the impact I believe that that will evolve from there.

25:51But this is right now what we saw at Ocado was a gap in the skill set. But you can rename that to value delivery, value realization or something like that and interpret it in different contexts. Exactly. And I think that will be the case. But to answer your question, I do think it can be generic. We have definitions of each skill and they are very, we have the specific Ocado definitions of what they mean and how we relate to the word partner and our customer. And so we try to apply a slightly bespoke lens so that each product manager can just read it and understand. What I haven't done, I'll admit, is AI the shit out of it.

26:30So like, you know, I'm going to probably in the next couple of months, take the tool, throw AI into it, make it into a Vibe Coded app, you know, do all that stuff, have history and trends. So you can see what the organization is doing, anonymize, and you can kind of work towards that and link out to sources. I think once you have the model and the foundation, all of these extra magic and things becomes really quite easy and can be quite fun. Yeah. Tying data into my hypothesis and my manager's observations, even if it takes a while to get there and say, I wonder what are the correlating things?

27:06I wonder what are leading and lagging metrics on this? Oh, my God. And just helping say these are things that your peers are doing that you might consider, things like that. And the power, I think, also with what big data gives. So, you know, look in Slack and see what people have done. What have I done? Where have I promoted? Have I not actually celebrated my own successes and wins? The documents that I've written in Google Drive, look at all of them. Is anything missing and should I be sharing that? What skills does this relate to? And based on my own profile, would you give me recommendations?

27:33I mean, all of these things now become super interesting for the development of product people that I think is, yeah, like, if not, it's still super important. Okay, so you went from Microsoft to startups back into a large company. Small companies probably don't need this function. There's a certain scale that you need to be before this becomes a room. About how big do you think you need to be before ops becomes something you need to seriously devote time, or not just time, actual headcount to? Yeah, like product operations and sharing. I think it's an interesting one because I think depending upon the personality of who you've hired, they'll play that role.

28:17And someone has to figure out how you're doing it. I think when you get to like over 30 product managers or if you are geographically distributed or culturally distributed where things become harder, I think it's interesting to at least invest in some percentage of someone's time on the ways of working and the waste that happens by this level of inefficiency. I mean, Okado desperately needed it. Whenever I am out with co-workers and people have been there for a while and they get a little bit tipsy, they always say like, oh, my God, thank goodness you joined. You know, the chaos before you was ridiculous.

28:56And so, yeah, I think around that mark, 30, 40 p.m. But even at the 10 person where you start to split team and split team and split team, when you're trying to build a cross-functional roadmap where you have dependencies and all of a sudden, like you don't know how you're going to build what you're going to build next because you can't figure out the cart before the horse. Ask the questions of what's needed for product ops and then implement it yourself. Yeah, I think that the difference being with 10 people, 10 teams, you should be able to do without an external headcount, an extra headcount.

29:31But 30 to 40 teams, you're starting to get to a different. And one thing that's interesting is I don't know how AI is going to change this because one of the talks today talked about, you know, AI slot that is being created. I'm thinking even internally, we have the number of Vibe-coded apps. I mean, I own three or four apps that I create. The management of those. But those are all quality. Oh, super high quality. The 5 ,000 lines of code in AppScript that I've read every line of. But through that, like how product operations actually will become more important. Because how you manage the builder aspect, now that everyone's a builder, who helps those builders share, improve.

30:14I think that's going to be a very interesting product ops function that is ripe. Okay. And you got started in this case mostly by playing good cop, bad cop on JIRA. I'm only known, you're the JIRA guy. I'm like, oh my goodness, I'd love to be something more than just JIRA guy. But this was your way into starting to fix the problem. You saw roadmaps as an issue. The symptom, the underlying issue was lack of data consistency in JIRA. Fix that and things get easier. Yeah. Let's assume that's not going to be the case or the best way in every company. But what's the somebody starting to deal with this in their organization?

30:54They're seeing the problems. What's the question that they should be asking first to saying, right, we need to get started. We need to get really serious about this. What's just a good place to start aside from? Yes, obviously, Jira consistency. You know, okay, there's fundamentals. The book I mentioned, Prompt Operations, is quite good because it describes the different difficulties that functions have. In that book, it described the enterprise problems. The enterprise blew up. So our business blew up. So the roadmap was confusing. But you might have a different version, which is we don't know how to do analytics well, or we don't understand how to incorporate customer research into a better way, or we don't have a clear sense of what product is expected to do, what's engineering design, etc.

31:39I think the question to ask is, what are we missing? What are our blind spots? And where are there opportunities that we could change the way of working? At the end of the day, product ops or product and engineering ops, I see it as the connective tissue in an organization or an organism. You cannot move without all of your fascia, the plasm that allows the muscles, the bones, the skeleton to stride. So find out where there's tension in that organism and figure out where is that tension coming from. That to me, product ops, finds the tension and solves the tension. and then like as anything as you age this new tension so you find where that one is it's a little bit like whack-a-mole but i actually think that you solve you do solve each problem as you go and anyone who is in the field like my number one advice is don't do everything like just good product do one thing at a time and just try to make sure that you've really solved the problem because if you just try to keep switching from one to the other then it literally is whack-a-mole and you'll never actually get to the finish line.

32:46Matt, this has been great. I think I've got time for one last question. So then you were just talking about how this is, you're describing this is almost a thankless task, but there's always something else. So how do you celebrate success? How do you communicate the value of the work you do? As you said, people get drunk and they say, thank God. That's not necessarily the thing that you want to hang your hat on as it's nice, especially if someone else is buying around. Exactly. But what is the thing that you're doing day to day, you and your team to say, look at the value of our team? So it's an interesting one because the question you're also not asking is like, how do you prove value for product ops?

33:25Because it's often hard to see the metric changes in like what is the metric that we prioritize the roadmap, that we've built the right thing, that people haven't quit, you know, is it retention? And interestingly, when we post on Slack or we do a thing in a video, The number of emoji reactions might be a certain number. You know, if someone else shares a photo of their cute dog, they're going to get like four times it. So does that prove our value? I have learned. So recruit product managers with cute dogs. Well, I have a, by the way, I now have a six month puppy. That is very easy. She's adorable.

34:02The way that I've now solved this is my key thing. And I tried for three years. I finally was successful a couple weeks ago, was bringing all of product together. When I joined three years ago, we had 300 people, 350. And I said, I think one of the key issues in a product community is that we have grown organically over COVID. And we have become isolated in our silos. I want to bring the product community together. Yeah, yeah. In six months. Six months go by. Yeah, yeah. In a year. Six months go by. Yeah, yeah. Continue, continue. you. And my current boss, James, I said to him a year and a half ago, James, it's time.

34:41We're getting together. James, like most of my other requests, he goes, sure, if you figure out how to do it. And yeah, we organized, I organized a product day. I brought all product managers from the entire world together, including UX, product and UX, hosted by Amazon, really graciously hosted. And we had an amazing day. And the question you asked me is, how do I feel that our value is there. The Polish product managers who'd never give me any sense of emotional reaction told me it was the most fun that they had and didn't think that I was going to be that funny. I was like, how do you not know me?

35:14Of course I was going to be that funny. But no, in reality, I think it's about bringing the people together and having them learn from each other. It's why I care about the skills because they can see each other. It's why I care about Jira. So we have a very clear roadmap. It's why I care about just clarity and sharing. So I think if you can bring your people together and you can have them learn from each other and you can be that that connective tissue, that conduit. It just makes working in your environment, your company just so much more enjoyable. That's fantastic. Thank you so much, Matt.

35:42Thank you.

35:44Matt Feczko: The product experience hosts are me, Lily Smith, host by night and chief product officer by day. And me, Randy Silver, also host by night. And I spend my days working with product and leadership teams, helping their teams to do amazing work. Lou Ron Pratt is our producer and Luke Smith is our editor.