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Justin Reilly, Tucows CPO on Product Design and Operations

Dec 6, 2021 · 32 min read

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Tucows Chief Product Officer, Justin Reilly, joins as our first non-COO, and shares on your customer's best last experience, how product design influences operations and where AI fits, Ting's excellent customer care, and how photos almost pushed a launch.

Justin focuses on building the next generation of consumer products, particularly where AI meets customer experience. Prior to Tucows, Justin was Head of Product & CX Innovation at Verizon. He founded Focus Health, Grey Seven Labs, and Qstir. He was a Director of Strategy and Experience at Macquarium, lead the Strategy and Innovation team at Arke Systems. He currently advises a number of startups focused on the next generation of AI platforms and products.

Topics Covered

  • Introducing Justin Reilly, the first non-COO guest (0:00)
  • From college basketball to Tucows chief product officer (1:22)
  • Moving from healthcare to telecom (4:47)
  • Product's expanding reach into back office operations (6:30)
  • Competing against the customer's last best experience (9:12)
  • Not everything needs a conversational interface (11:20)
  • Investing in human customer care at Ting (13:13)
  • Why Tucows does not have a COO (16:14)
  • Where AI fits in business operations (18:30)
  • Hire the smartest people, get out of their way (22:01)
  • Building trust in remote first teams (25:28)
  • Picture day saves a product launch (29:30)
  • Advice for COOs partnering with a CPO (32:17)

Mentioned in This Episode

  • Justin Reilly on LinkedIn
  • Focus Health: Health startup Justin founded to tackle chronic illness
  • DISH: Took over Ting's mobile business in August 2020
  • David Sontag: MIT researcher on Focus Health's longitudinal health work

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About Between Two COO's

Hosted by Michael Koenig · betweentwocoos.com · b2coos.com

For more on OKRs and operational excellence, visit Helm.

Full Transcript

Show full transcript (auto-generated from audio)

Michael Koenig: Between two COO's. His podcasts were phenomenal. Chief operating officers from all sorts of companies come to share their. Advice and creating these stories. All right. Hello and welcome to between two COO's. I'm your host Michael canine, and I'm excited to welcome our guests. Justin Riley, the innovative chief product officer at two cows, a company that sits at the intersection of connectivity from domain names to tings wireless service and tings fiber. Justin focuses on building the next generation of consumer products, particularly where AI meets customer experience prior to joining two cows, Justin was the head of product and customer experience innovation at Verizon, and also founded several companies, including focus, health, gray, seven labs. And Q-Star welcome, Justin. Thanks for being here. I'm excited to have you. Awesome. So it's worth noting that you're [00:01:00] the first guest that we've had on that. Isn't a chief operating officer, and I really wanted to have you on to bring a different perspective to operations, particularly as it relates to the next gen of product and the intersection of customer experience and operations. But before we get into that, how'd you end up as the chief product officer at two counts.

Justin Reilly: It's a pretty, uh, windy road to get here. So I, uh, if we go way back to university, I was, uh, I was playing college basketball and I thought that when I graduated, I would be, uh, overseas playing. And my, uh, my body had a different point of view. Uh, and, uh, so my basketball career ended a bit sooner than maybe I had planned. And I kind of had to scramble and think about what I was going to do, where all of my classmates were. Starting a company going off to Goldman. You know, I was the only person literally in my graduation line that had an entrepreneurship minor coming out of coming out [00:02:00] of Borden. And, uh, so I was kind of looking around and gone because I'm the only one that doesn't know what I'm doing. And, uh, So, what was great about that was I was at the intersection of like web two, right? So at Penn, at the time Venmo's being incubated, Warby Parker invite media is getting ready to be gobbled up by Google. Milo becomes half.com and I just did an amazing set of things happening around. And so I got into kind of social ad tech early on, and then sort of the few companies, one, you know, kind of commerce social network. The second was a digital products company. And I was consulting for a while up to that last exit. Uh, and then Verizon called as they were kind of trying to pivot from becoming more of a, you know, from being more of a like finance ops driven, traditional telco into being a product company. And that's, that's kind of how I ended up there. Amazing amazing ride through the digital transformation journey, putting in the AI foundation there. Uh, and then I wanted to go to tackle chronic illness with [00:03:00] machine learning. It was something that was kind of near and dear to my heart. My sister's been dealing with, uh, an illness for a number of years and working on coming on the other side of that, which is really amazing. Uh, and, and one of the things that's true about. You know, invisible illnesses or non-linear, uh, illnesses is that, uh, acute healthcare doesn't actually solve the problems for them. Right? It's it's you come in? I see like Michael in this snapshot, but there's always other things going on. So one of the things we were doing in focus with, uh, with ASAP and, and, uh, Dr. David Sontag at MIT was plotting that longitudinal health journey and using ML to fill in the gaps so that we actually know, okay, this is what actually happened. And actually what was going on inside of Michael's body over the last 30 years, which is actually fairly deterministic and fairly predictive of the future. Uh, and then these, these, uh, wild folks in Toronto called and said, Hey, we're, we're, we're disrupting telecom. Do you want to come do that? And I said, two cows. I think I bought a domain name from you guys awhile ago. [00:04:00] And then obviously I had insight into what they were doing with ting on the MDNO side, in the U S and starting to lay fiber throughout the United. And it became a really interesting marriage and the top, you know, the, their top line values of believing in the open internet and leaning into it was, is really in lots of ways that the diametric opposition of a lot of the trends that we're seeing right. In big tech. And so it was just perfect. And before you knew it, I'd moved from Brooklyn to Toronto and, and.

Michael Koenig: How about that? That's quite, that's quite the journey. And I suspect that you're probably the tallest guests that we've had on as well. Uh, so maybe I'm a little envious, but in terms of making the jump from health to, uh, internet, what was that like?

Justin Reilly: Well, in lots of ways, you know, I spent the time between Verizon and. You know, kind of retraining my brain to [00:05:00] think about health care. And there were, there are lots of components of that industry that are similar, right? There's a lot of interoperability problems. There's a lot of kind of training and operations problems of how do you get a physician to follow a new workflow, which is, you know, in lots of ways, similar to how do you get a customer service agent to do a new thing. So that now a new experience scales and you deliver more customer base. I would say the most frustrating thing in healthcare that starting to be, I would say maybe a losing, you know, eroding trend in a positive way. And telecom is that there's still huge moats around healthcare data interoperability across the EMR. And which is really, basically the thing that holds up great data sharing and healthcare, uh, in the particular United state. I'm going to telecom, that's starting to, you know, over, over the years will erode, as we have 5g with O ran and opened radios and kind of a bunch of stuff that starts to happen. And, you know, and networks are acting like software. So I still have to say for [00:06:00] me, moving through that, it was, I would see a lot of trends that like, okay, that makes sense. That's like this. And then I would see other things like, okay, how do I get a physician to follow a clinical decision, right. When I'm, when I'm not clinical at all. And so it was definitely kind of switching. And I remember when I got the two. Some of the language that I was using was like clinical clinical product language. And people were just like, I don't know what this guy is talking about. It took me about three months to kind of put down those acronyms and come back. Um, telecomm and that are not a real way. That's really

Michael Koenig: interesting. How it's the product experience that kind of ties those two pretty disparate industries together that you're bringing to internet and connectivity. So throughout your time, innovating on that, on the product side, what surprised you about how products role has evolved, particularly in business operations?

Justin Reilly: I would say the biggest thing that surprised me [00:07:00]

Michael Koenig: is

Justin Reilly: how, how much further we're getting into the technology stack that impacts how businesses operate. So if you think about the digital transformation frame, right over the last 10 or 15 years and all the conferences and all the capital being poured into it, it's really been. At theirs to you put it into thirds, right? And the, in the stack and the top of the stack is what touches the customer and the bottom of the stacks as far back office, as you, as you can get, right. That systems of record, the vast majority of investment innovation has been on the first 70%. And so in that you don't get too far into. You know, there's pieces of business, you're going to leave out of quote innovation or better product experience or whatever. Right. And you can see this when you're like, man customer service now has like a really great experience and the customer has a new website or an app, but someone in [00:08:00] finance or someone in operations and someone in, you know, field service management or whatever, it still has this like really hard to use experience. So, so the thing that most surprised me is how. The next generation of product managers. I think the really good ones are really gravitating towards that last 30%. Cause there's, there's, there's a lot of work to be done there and they're finding a lot of personal value and utility and excitement of solving those problems that maybe weren't as exciting to solve. They aren't as shiny as a new website or an app. Chat bot or, uh, you know, uh, blockchain and Ft unicorn that does flips, right? But it's like, oh, the, in this billing system, it's gonna really impact my five stakeholders internally. All of which have really, really terrible interfaces and really terrible inefficiency in there, the way that they operate the core pieces of the business. And so I would say that, I think that's the thing that's most surprising is, is more folks gravitating towards, I mean, I think companies like. [00:09:00] Really kick-started that in saying we're going to make some of this stuff. It seems complicated or seems old and crufty, we're going to make it great. And we're going to make it really easy. And it's going to be a fun thing to work on, uh, overtime.

Michael Koenig: That's interesting. Now ting notably has amazing customer care and customer support. It's one of the things that y'all are, are best known for. You have a mantra for your team that. You're competing against your customers. Last best experience. Customer cares something that traditionally can fall under the purview of a chief operating officer. From a product standpoint, you can talk with someone instead of having to punch numbers through a directory. So how do you marry that intersection of tech, particularly AI, which I know you're really focused on and. The customer touch.

Justin Reilly: That's a great question. [00:10:00] Most of the bad customer experiences, particularly in this space are directly related to bad business decisions, right? So why is there an IVR that you have to punch a bunch of numbers? It's because the volume of calls. Trying to manually triage a terrible product decision. Full-stop right. If you look at these companies, they have billion, 2 billion, $3 billion cost centers in call center. And it's directly related to the fact that somewhere down the line, someone decided maybe we should put six and a half a million customers on one-to-one pricing. We're going to have, you know, 11,000 skews and every time someone calls in, we're going to. You know, tack five bucks on and, and so it makes it really complicated to have that customer service interaction. And so one of the things product folks can do really upstream. To make that customer experience really great when a customer does pick up the phone and call is make that really, really [00:11:00] simple so that the people that are calling actually have real problems that humans need to solve, or there are very little problems and they're calling because Michael and Justin liked to have the conversation on a Sunday night and that's, you know, an equally beautiful delight experience that drives customer experience, lifetime value, you know, so on and so forth. So I think that that's one thing. The other thing. Some of this product, people, designers, developers get really caught up in using kind of the new thing. And we saw this with, uh, with chatbots early on. It's like, oh, we're going to solve all of our problems. Not everything needs a counterfeit, a conversational interface, right? Some things are, I log into an app and I see my bill and I pay it with apple pay. Like that's we don't need to have a conversation about that. Right. Um, there were other things that might, maybe do need some back and forth and some bathroom and some clarity around a router or the type of phone you might want. That might be a delightful experience for discovery and some enrichment of information. And then pretty quickly you get into a place where [00:12:00] you might need to talk to a human. So I think for me, Using those tools in places where they make sense, but not over-indexing on them and making sure that the product decisions, particularly pricing and products and services and skews and all that stuff make, make what is traditionally a really complex industry, really simple. So at the end of the day, it's a pretty simple industry that has just been, people just have added a tremendous amount of complexity to it over the years. Right. I mean, if you think about it's you get a device, whether it's fixed or wireless or. We provision you service and you, we take payment on your bill, but that's the whole industry, but we somehow have made it wildly complicated with all of this tech and all of this bloat and all of these vendors. And so I think that's the success we saw and. Um, on the, on the mobile side. And, and one of the reasons why it was attractive for, you know, for dish to take over that business last year in August and kind of pivoted it into being a platform, business, and service of there, then being the [00:13:00] fourth carrier. And then on the fixed side, you know, continuing to build ting towns throughout the United States in places where, uh, the major players have, have left folks behind, you know, and, and just haven't serviced core parts of the United.

Michael Koenig: Yeah, that's so interesting. And what I love about two cows is that typically, and you mentioned this customer care are viewed as cost centers and ting, and perhaps it's similar to Zappos in that you have had product innovation. That has cut out a lot of the traditional friction points that customers have. And what that's allowed, if I'm sort of hearing you correctly is for ting to invest in having that human to human interaction to deliver that magical, unexpected experience, because you've cut out so much of the typical customer care issues that turn customer [00:14:00] care into a cost center. A fair

Justin Reilly: synopsis, a hundred percent. And, and look, I've only been at two cows for two years, so in no way, shape or form, can I take any credit for all of that? Right. I just got here, uh, the team that had built the mobile business, a then B and O business started in 2012 and then fixed in 2015, really focused on simplicity and. Making it easy and making, you know, the, the kind of mobile that makes sense, uh, smarter mobile. And that was really around just like, Hey, like pay for what you use, call us if you've got any problems where we're, we're here for you. And I think, you know, the folks that run, uh, our call center teams or CXO organization, Ross, Tom, you know, that, that, that squad. They've just hired really amazing humans that actually want to have great conversations. And that was one of the things that struck me because when I came on board, I was trying to figure out the same thing you were figuring out. I was like, thanks for the only telco that wants a phone call to go through. So let me, let me understand what's going on and you watch these folks have conversations [00:15:00] and they're amazing. I'll give you one anecdote that I think speaks to this is, is I've sent stolen this person away to be on the product organization because he's so amazing. But we had, we had a gentleman that. Is still one of the most prolific in BNO and telecom device, community members on Reddit and people would go to him to say, I've got this sprint phone. What do I do with this? What do I do with it? Rather? You know, it just, it just unready. And he was just spitting out content cause he loves the space. Right. And when he started, you know, having more direct customer interactions, you know, people would start asking for. Right. Hey, I've got this like mobile problem. Can, you know, I will kind of give his name out in the public, but you know, can I, can I, can I talk to this person? And now you have this like beautiful thing where it's like, people are calling ting that aren't tin customers that have a phone problem and then arrive. Well, maybe I should just do it with these folks. Like why would I, if I could call this person [00:16:00] to unlock my phone and help me with this problem with my mother that has this older phone or whatever, maybe I should just switch my service and it creates these like really invent angelical, you know, really passionate customers that are passionate about the money they save, but also passionate about the service that they get.

Michael Koenig: And I'm sure you made some enemies by stealing them away and take the profit. So two cows doesn't have a CLL. Can you maybe tell us a little bit about that? I would say that,

Justin Reilly: you know, I would say that right now, most of the, most of that is probably related to the fact that we have three distinct businesses. Right. And, and that continues to be. True. And we'll, you know, we'll be true, uh, you know, in the future. So you've got, you know, as you outlined before we've got the domains business and then we've got, uh, the MSC business, which is kind of this pivot out of MDNO and to being a software for telcos, and then we've got tin ISP. And so, you know, one of those businesses is pretty [00:17:00] mature in domains and the other two are hyper-growth businesses. Um, right now, I think we've been fairly focused on product and engineering and customer service and just really building and running fast. So

Michael Koenig: you all are about to get flooded with resumes. We'll be right. This week's episode of between two CRMs is brought to you by running remote the world's premier remote work conference. I'm building remote teams and businesses. Now in its fifth year running remote is curated to teach in secret strategies and tactics. You can use the very next day to manage and grow your remote team. Incredible executives from companies like Cisco zoom, Citrix, Twitter, Upwork Toyota. Pixar have graced the stage to share their vast knowledge more than 6,000 liters. If a tenant rubbing remote events. And now after a brief virtual only stint running remote is back with a live in-person event on May 17th and 18th. In Montreal, Canada, you can get 30% off tickets [00:18:00] if you use my special coupon code between two COO's that's. B E T w two C O s@runningremote.com. See you there. So listen to the, to the operation folks listening. How should we position our mindsets? When thinking about the impact that AI can have on business operations, outside of the front facing customer experience? W what should we embrace?

Justin Reilly: I would say that taking on a, you know, uh, an honest audit and stock of all the things that your shop does and think about the places where more. And a tighter feedback loop on that thing, that operation to, you know, just, this is a thing that happens between humans and some systems and like w w what comes out of it, right.[00:19:00] Is there room for that to be more efficient? And could it be more efficient, not by better process, better human process, better communication, but simply by automating something, or simply by having better visibility into what that thing is doing. We're in this. Era of this AI hype cycle where, uh, I think we're starting to get a little bit more honest with ourselves around what the current models can do. And I like to think about it. Like you're going bowling and you put up the bumper lines. A lot of the models are super strong when it's clear, what's being discussed. Right. We're having a conversation around flying on an airplane and we're going to stay in those bumper lanes. Right. We're going to change our seat. We're going to ask about air miles. We're going to do all that. When we go outside that, and we start talking about. It becomes a bit more challenging, which is why I kind of, you know, generalized [00:20:00] AI as you walk up and talk to Alexa or anything out there is a real challenge. You can say anything to it. And so there's challenges with the same thing as in systems, right? You kind of generally know what the system is supposed to do or what this ops person is, their, their day-to-day job. There's a lot of really great, you know, models out there that can help optimize those, those workflows. I would say that's one big thing. The second thing I would say. As this becomes more pervasive, it spits off a tremendous amount of data and getting really good at understanding, Hey, this is the data we should pay attention to. And this is the data that's just noise will be super important for COO's chief data officers, you know, folks that are looking at optimizing a business to be more. Uh, that's where I see a lot of people get hung up. They get kind of, you know, drunk on the sauce of all the stuff coming out. Oh, we got all these miles spinning up this churn model, or it's telling me we should, you know, optimize this piece of this warehouse management system or whatever the thing is. And it's, it's confirmation bias of, you know, kind of [00:21:00] what's been put in or it's just noise. And it's, it's, it's actually more inefficient than just, you know, operating without some, some fancy, uh, fancy modeling.

Michael Koenig: So it sounds like don't get too hung up on the promise that AI will fix all operational problems, be selective in the systems and the innovations that you take a look at.

Justin Reilly: Absolutely like creativity, the individual human on how they, they, they drive their organization and the nuance with which. You inspire another human in your organization to do a thing or to do a thing differently. That's almost impossible to automate, right? So there's so, so many important pieces to, to leadership and to motivating folks, to, to get things done in a efficient way and in a way that's modern and thoughtful. And future-proof, those things are, are, are not easily [00:22:00] automated.

Michael Koenig: Well, that's the perfect segue. And you must have known that I wanted to go here next in terms of leadership. How do you think about leadership and inspiring folks on the product side, but also as it relates to other roles, because product isn't siloed anymore,

Justin Reilly: I have a pretty simple mantra, which is hire the smartest people in the world and get the hell out of their way. I see my job as working for, for my folks every day, set the vision, be really crisp and clear on that. Give them space to run and rock with the right swim lanes that we've set up organizationally, leave a bit of ambiguity there, right? Sometimes people are going to bump into each other and that's collaborative and good and healthy tension, uh, and then block and tackle for them on things that are blocking them from getting work done. Uh, if we do parts one and two, right, you have to do a lot less of three, but, uh, [00:23:00] Yeah, I try to keep it pretty simple. I don't, over-index on, you know, really complicated frameworks for, you know, tracking progress and all of that. I think sometimes know I've made the mistake in the past that misused asset and misuse human in a, in a seat can be solved with process it can't right. It's, it's, it's a talent problem. Not a process. Problem processes is pretty easy. When you have some rock stars, then it's just getting them to follow the process because most rockstar. You know, don't want to color in between the lines. That's the problem that I would prefer to have, which is like, no, I need you to track, okay, ours, that's an important thing. Right. And you know, you all figure I'm busy shipping, like, you know, get out of my office. Right. So I would say those are the big pieces for me. And the last thing I would say there is as businesses scale. And I've certainly seen this at every, you know, whether it's starting a company and going from myself. A couple of hundred employees or two, you know, Verizon, thousands of [00:24:00] employees and now a two cows. We've more than doubled the workforce right over the last couple of years. So we're north of a thousand. Now the human connection that you have with your team, who they are, why they get up the duality of who they are as humans, that they're, you know, complex human beings, just like yourself dealing with in number of things out in the world at any given time. Being really in tune with that and understanding where they might be coming from at a granular level. Right? Like, okay, I know this about Michael. He's had these things. How would he, this is probably where he's coming from in this interaction is for me, I think my most important task, because at any given time, that kind of acute moment of, of dealing. With someone, making sure that they leave that with clarity, feeling good about the work they're doing or, you know, they might not always feel good, but they're going to feel accountable and supported in, Hey, that didn't go well, how do we kind of move that forward at scale? And with remote work, [00:25:00] I think we're seeing a lot of organizations struggle to find that. I mean, we've hired an enormous amount of people that have never met in person and. We're remote first and we've got all the tools in place and we believe in that, uh, for all the reasons why it's great and the human connection, the things that we need to do to build relationships and build trust is, is something that, that, that keeps me up at night. And that's something that I'm constantly thinking about.

Michael Koenig: That's very interesting. So in terms you spoke about remote and building. Right. I'm working currently with 150 folks spread across 40 countries. I've never met

Justin Reilly: anyone at the company

Michael Koenig: before building that trust and that sense of community and belonging is challenging. How have you all gone about it? And are there any tips that you might give to other leaders [00:26:00] in a similar situation, which is quite common?

Justin Reilly: One of the things that I think we got wrong in the beginning. And it was, uh, it was, uh, it was a well-intended approach on my part, I think, was trying to recreate the water cooler conversations in the Hangouts via virtual, but really what it did was just stress people out that they had to have more screen time. Like let's have a joint coffee in the afternoon and people were like, I just want to get off the screen for a bit and go pet my dog. But with. So I really started kind of like walking that back and saying, Hey, I actually think you're working more than you were before because you weren't commuting and you didn't have this time. So whenever you're not in the meeting or you're not working, like take that time to yourself to kind of refresh. And then, you know, my goal was to build a little bit, uh, Humanity and back and forth at the beginning of a call or at the end of the call, living, leaving some space for that, even if it's a super tactical call. I actually think that over [00:27:00] time as the world opens up a little bit can go away as well. And all of your human trust interactions happen a couple of times throughout the year where the group does come together, right? So you kind of intentionally purpose build those human in-person moments throughout the year. It's going to vary by organization. Some are going to be, we never come together. We come together once a year, others are going to be once a quarter. Some will be maybe once a week, you know, in a, in a joint kind of office area. So then each organization has to find that piece for themselves. You know, for me, it's about being intentional in every interaction. When we hire someone new, knowing as much as I can about them and understanding where they're coming from, because those can be just comments. They don't have to be big. Like, Hey Michael, tell me about yourself. Let's do the whole place is okay. I know something about you and this becomes core to how I discussed. Work, right. I, I, okay. You're a really big, uh, you're really big into chess. And so I'm bringing that in or, you know, your daughter's a singer and [00:28:00] I'm bringing that in. Right? I think those are just like natural human things that not everyone is used to doing because some of us are introverted and extroverted and came from D we were all, you know, individually complex humans. But if you build little bits of those things in the intentionality of that human connection is I think super important. And then, you know, there's maybe. Uh, an obvious thing that, that, that I see. And I think, you know, winning kind of solves everything sometimes. You know, when you have tough relationships, when you're in a Fox hole and your working towards something, and that thing shifts, it's unbelievable, the amount of, you know, trust and community that, that builds. And sometimes it's working on something hard together and it isn't the coffee, it isn't the. We we know something about each other's lives. It's that Michael and Justin went into a thing was really hard. And we came out with some scars, but we did it together. And now we've learned a lot, the amount of times that we've been on a late night phone call or, you know, [00:29:00] triaging something on the weekends. And we've found out about a lot of each other because someone's kid runs in or, you know, you can tell a joke because you're sleep deprived. There's something in that that I think, uh, and obviously that comes from the startup startup manifesto right. Of just building and moving fast and breaking things. But those, those things help curate community to, so I've

Michael Koenig: got to ask, I mean, how'd, you know, that I like to play chess and my daughter likes to sing that's

Justin Reilly: I, a lot of reasons lottery

Michael Koenig: research. There we go. There we go. So this is one of the questions I love asking a cos and. We experience crazy operational problems that pop up each day. And we've all had these moments where you have a new problem and you thought, well,

Justin Reilly: never thought I'd see that.

Michael Koenig: Would it be safe to assume that, uh, you as a chief product officer have similar experiences and if you do would a,

Justin Reilly: is there one that comes to

Michael Koenig: mind [00:30:00] that you can share?

Justin Reilly: Yes, I'm trying to sift through which one. So it's true then. It's absolutely true. I will, I would tell you a story and I would generalize it to, to protect all parties involved. I was working on it on a really big scaled product and it had human, you know, a bunch of humans involved that would, you know, kind of both actively and passively be using the. And the product got built. They got through all the regulatory things, you know, we're, we're ready to go. And the thing that was going to torpedo the product was whether the individual humans liked the photos of themselves that would show up on the product. And the group of humans had a let's use the term joint ability to say no to using the product and. It was one of those things [00:31:00] where, you know, there was regulatory components. And so it was going to be a really challenging national problem of, well, what if one or two people say no, that it's kind of a no for the whole thing. And so we're going through this and working with some really smart folks on my end. And someone comes into my office the next day and says, you know, I was thinking this morning, my son has picture day. Let's just do picture day. And I was like, what? And he's like what shipped photographers all throughout the United States. And everyone gets a new headshot and just thought, what's the, you know, what's that going to call? And he just like, I've already math done. It makes sense. And I was like, great. Do it. And then it became this delightful moment where people, you know, all these folks that were gonna have to use this product, going to have to, what was gonna actually make their jobs better, remove that last thing of like, what's my picture going to look. And then everyone got new Facebook, you know, and [00:32:00] Instagram headshots that they're going to use for LinkedIn or whatever. And it solved the problem. I just never thought that was going to be a problem that I was going to need to solve. Wouldn't go, wouldn't building a digital. Well, that's brilliant.

Michael Koenig: I hope you, uh, are still working with that guy because that's, that's a great solution. So, and this is, uh, one of the last questions for COO's going into a new business. What advice would you give them in their approach to partnering with a chief product officer? Okay. Hmm.

Justin Reilly: I would say do your best with the, with the time that you have to understand the customer and. Whatever the customer is, is consuming from that business really, really well because you know, kind of core partnerships inside of business, particularly B to C businesses, uh, that run well is when every part of that business understands. Why, why that customers had to use the jobs to be [00:33:00] done framework. Why is that customer hiring us? Like, what are they hiring us? And when you understand that it informs so much of what comes into the ops, where it comes into the people team, what comes into finance, right? Like the whole, the whole shebang, if you don't understand that, I think that's where people get sideways on stuff where, you know, well, why are we doing it this way? Right? Couldn't it be done this way, but not understanding how that might downstream impact the customer and most good product folks. You know, customer champions, right? So they're going to think most, you know, kind of first and foremost about how the customer is going to experience that, that thing. Uh, and the next thing to inform all the decisions, you know, that kind of, uh, go down the line. So I think that would be my biggest thing, obviously, like it's going to vary by company. By a person. And frankly, you, you, you know, you might have a really great CLO and not, not such a great CPO, so it might not, you know, it might not even be, [00:34:00] would be the, you know, the, uh, the, the case that that's, uh, that you, you are getting a customer first approach. So, but yeah, I would say understand the customer and it'll help inform all the decisions you make going forward.

Michael Koenig: Fantastic. Well, there it is. Everyone make sure you pay attention to the customer. Get in there first and make sure you understand the value that the company is bringing and how the teams are working towards that. Well, Justin, thanks so much for coming on the podcast. What's the best way for people to keep up with you and what your team are working on?

Justin Reilly: Probably, uh, Twitter and LinkedIn. Twitter is just an MRI Lea Porter's Justin Lincoln's justice. Easy

Michael Koenig: enough there you have it. Twitter. Justin Riley. There you go. So thanks for listening, Justin. Thanks so much for coming on. Really appreciate you being here and, uh, tune in next time for our next CLO chat, um, between two COO's and be sure to subscribe on apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you [00:35:00] listen to podcasts. So you never miss an episode visit between two COO's for more information. And if you have. Please leave us a review on apple podcasts and tell others about the show so they can get great advice from phenomenal COO's or in this case, chief product officers. Thanks for listening to this week's episode of between two COO's tune in next time and until then, so low.

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