BY The Product Experience ON SEPTEMBER 22, 2021

We always encourage people to experiment with their product development techniques — but experimenting with your team can be a step too far.  To get some expert advice, we talked with Monzo Chief Product Officer, Mike Hudack (ex-Facebook, Deliveroo) about how he approaches this, what’s worked and what hasn’t, how to avoid cross-team dependencies, the key to effective communication and collaboration, and much more.

Featured Links: Follow Mike on LinkedIn and Twitter | Molly Graham’s ‘Give Away Your Legos’ and Other Commandments for Scaling Startups blog | Work with Mike at Monzo — he’s hiring!

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Give Sprig (formerly Userleap) a try for free by visiting Sprig.com to build better products.

Episode transcript

Lily Smith: 0:00

Hey, Randy, I promise this is not another okrs episode, although I do love those. But how many goals does your company set at a time?

Randy Silver: 0:09

Oh, god, you’re trying to trigger me, aren’t you? Really? I mean, the place I’m working on now is actually really good at this. We have one goal per business line with, you know, a couple of sub goals that support it. But oh my god, do I have horror stories about this? Yeah,

Lily Smith: 0:25

I think we’ve probably all been there. But today’s chat me help. We’ve got Mike hudak, Monsanto’s Chief Product officer, and he has a magic number for this and the process on how to beat

Randy Silver: 0:37

a magic number. Ooh, that sounds very Schoolhouse Rock. And that reference kind of really dates me. So let’s get right to Mike before I embarrass myself any further.

Lily Smith: 0:54

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Randy Silver: 0:57

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Lily Smith: 1:05

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Randy Silver: 1:36

Mike, thank you so much for joining us today. We’re been really looking forward to this talk.

Mike Hudack: 1:41

Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.

Randy Silver: 1:43

So for anyone who doesn’t already know, you can just give a quick introduction. What are you up to these days? And how did you get into this world of product related stuff?

Mike Hudack: 1:52

Yeah. So I’m Chief Product officer at monzo. I’ve been working in product and trying to figure out how old I am. Now, there’s 20 years more than more than 20 years. I dropped out of high school when I was 15. And went to work at a startup as an engineer did that for a couple years until we went under it was like 2001, something like that. And then I moved to New York, and worked as an engineer at a bunch of random places, the National Hockey League, AOL Time Warner, and then started a company with some friends doing online video in 2005. I had my commit privileges taken away from me pretty early, because I was always in a meeting with somebody to support my changes. And I think I remember causing an incident one day and I was like at a board meeting or an investor meeting and our CTO was like, never again, you may not. And so that was kind of, I guess, a little bit of a transition towards product. I did that for a while we merged with another company bought by Disney about six months later. And then I went out to California to work in Facebook where I did product, and I worked on privacy and identity for a while. And then I ran the ads product team there. And I ran friend sharing which is all the content on Facebook that comes from ordinary people, and then move to London because my wife’s English, went to work at delivery CTO, and then joined monzo I guess, buddy, whatever. However long ago, the pandemic started, I can’t keep track of time. I started a CPOE. About a month, maybe three weeks before, before the first lockdown.

Randy Silver: 3:30

Fantastic. And one of the reasons we were really excited to talk to you besides that illustrious resume is the other some thoughts on a topic that comes up again and again for us, and we never have a good answer for this one. It’s about how you organise your teams. Because no one ever seems to get this right. There’s theories about doing it by persona or and customer type. There’s theories about doing it by platform type. Where do you start?

Mike Hudack: 3:56

Yeah, well, I think the question you have to ask is what is the team’s goal, because I think that teams need to be able to organise around a singular thing. And think about that all day, every day. And ideally, it’s a customer problem or something the company wants to achieve or something that a customer wants to achieve. But obviously, there’s a product surface you have to think about as well and ownership of a product surface. I’ve done the platform by platform thing before having an iOS team having an Android team having a web team. And I think the problem with that is that you responsibility gets diffused across because you know it just the responsibility for the app not for actually moving any graph or moving any numbers of matter to customers. And I think that graph word is really important. I think that if you organise a set of ambitious highly achieving smart people around a graph around a number that they can move and they can see move every day and you can put on the wall. I think you would be amazed by what people are capable of doing in that kind of situation and organised in that way. And anything that you can do, I think in order to oriented team around that graph is really will be successful. Like you can say, you know, we’re going to move customer engagement from, you know, 20% of daily actives to 30% of daily actives over the next three months. That’s a great way to organise a team.

Lily Smith: 5:17

So if you had, let’s say, a few different teams, and I’m assuming we’re talking about kind of cross functional product teams at this point, and that have a designer and UX person and whatever they whatever it is, they need to deliver what they even want to deliver. And you’re setting them up so that they’re working on different goals. How do you ensure that those goals aren’t in conflict with each other, because if one team is working on acquisition, say, they might then increase churn and then you have another team that are looking at reducing churn? And they’re like, Hey, you guys, you just did this. And I was like, masterful on numbers. How do you check the alignment of those different teams?

Mike Hudack: 6:09

Totally. So one, one thing that I think is very powerful, if you can, is to have metrics that capture the negative externalities, that you might create as much as possible. So perhaps, instead of going against new customers, or churn, you go against the active customers, because then the team can hold responsibility for both things, and can decide autonomously how to trade off between those things, right? Because as you say, otherwise, you end up gaming the metric and you’re like, Okay, I can get a million users. But you know, 950,000, won’t be active tomorrow, I hit my goal. So I think as much as you can find that compound metric that captures both the change you’re trying to make in the world, and the ways that you could gain a feeling that you can have health metrics. So you can say, you know, onboard at least a million new customers, while maintaining a churn level of no more than 15%. something of that nature. And those kind of goals, I think, also work really well they kind of emphasise to a team, what matters. And at the end of a planning cycle, you can look at that and determine whether or not you you know whether or not you hit your goal and whether or not you did so, in a healthy way.

Randy Silver: 7:20

I want to go two totally different places with this. So I’m going to start with the low level, and we’ll come back to the high level. So I’m curious about how you structure the teams themselves. So you know, people aren’t resources, but you need to resource the teams with certain capabilities. And I’ve seen some companies do it by going, we want all full stack dev so we can be platform and technology agnostic, and not to be dependent on anyone else. I’ve seen other people say, Actually, no, we need specialists in this area. How do you how do you approach it?

Mike Hudack: 7:50

Well, in terms of engineering, I think it’s probably very stage dependent, and the nature of the work. So when you’re very small, when you’re one or two engineers, I think it’s hard to get away with anything other than full stack developers. As you grow, you can get all the way to the limit and say, I have release engineering, I have security engineering, you know, and you get you get deeply specialised at a mid Stage Company, or a scale up or something, which is like series A Series B, I think now you’re starting to look at real differentiation at the level of like, I’m an iOS engineer, I’m an Android engineer, I’m a web engineer, my back end engineer. And then that’s also when I think you start breaking off like a platform team and stuff like that. It’s probably not until you’re 1000s of people that you have a specialist release engineering team, although, you know, some, some products might demand that. And then I think there’s also the question of like, what kind of product manager you would have? And what kind of designer you would have, you know, do you have somebody who’s more IAA focused, more focused on information architectures and becomes more interaction focused, you know, which is that I still believe you should hire generalists, but you know, people kind of move in one direction or the other. And then with product managers, you’ll have specialists who specialise in like, you know, lending, for example, and know that inside and out, and then you have generalists. And again, finding a good balance between those people and in your area, I think is also very important.

Lily Smith: 9:14

And in the companies that you’ve worked in, have you seen, you know, we’ve gone through those different shifts of ways of working, and presumably there are challenges that come alongside then changing from, say, a full stack team to a more specialised

Mike Hudack: 9:33

setup. Yeah, hugely, I think, you know, and I’ve seen that at different stages in different sizes. I mean, one thing that I’ve definitely seen is like transitioning to having like a Core Data engineering team, for example, and teams having to figure out how to move things in to be supported by that team, and what the contract is between like a product team and a data engineering team is actually a very, very hard thing to figure out. You know what the product team is used to being in control of its own destiny and running its own infrastructure. But also like it’s more efficient for somebody else to provide that as a service. How does that work? How do things get prioritised? That that’s a legitimately really hard problem. And you see this as well, you know, I think, when I started at Facebook, they were like seven people who worked on photos, maybe it was 20, you know, and then that team becomes like 100 people, and 150 people and you go from, we used to have this thing where like, if you’re hiring a pm from Google, your job was, you know, optimising a 300 by 250 pixel box somewhere on the ad word screen. And your job here will be running photos. You know, it’s just like a completely different scale. But then you have to bring a company to the transition in the other direction, where eventually your job again, is going to be a 300 by 250. pixel box. And that’s a very difficult transition, I think, for an organisation to go through and people to go through.

Lily Smith: 10:59

How did you see that happening successfully? Like, what were the what were the sort of main things that happened to make that go? Well?

Mike Hudack: 11:07

Well, it didn’t always I mean, some people will will say, you know, my, my scope is shrinking, and I just don’t do this anymore. And that will happen. I think that the the conversation to happen there to have there is around impact. And how many people’s lives are you touching? What kind of changes? What kind of scale Are you operating at? You know, it’s possible that just running the comment box on photos now has more impact than running all the photos a year or two ago, right. In fact, I think that’s likely true in lots of different places, and lots of different examples. And so you can have that conversation and talk about like going deeper into a thing and doing it really, really well as well. But you know, Molly Graham, who is early at Facebook, wrote a great post about this called giving up your Legos. And she’s absolutely brilliant. And it is such a good post. And I think captures everything here better than I possibly could. But it is really all about impact. It’s having a conversation about impact. And I think that great cultures are built around impact and people seeking impact. And being incentivized around impact and being excited by it. And that base cultural layer, which also influences how you set goals, how you work against goals, how you think about your team’s role. That is also the thing that can affect how you feel about an organisation scaling up and there being more people around you.

Randy Silver: 12:35

So how do you avoid you? Yes, you scale these teams up, you go from, you know, being in charge of photos to being in charge of a 250 square box. That means there’s a lot of other teams as well. How do you avoid cross team dependencies? As you scale this? That’s a problem I’ve seen happen again, and again. And again, you go from executing to just waiting for other people to do the thing you asked?

Mike Hudack: 12:58

Yeah, I think one thing that is really important, which is a maxim I’ve tried to live by, is decouple everything, like do not do that, to the extent possible have no dependencies, and to the extent that you do have dependencies, have them be kind of like, well documented with an SLA around them. And what I mean by that is you might be dependent on like, at the extreme at the limit of a really big company, you might be dependent on the platform team to provide your database. But that should be a well contracted relationship and everything else you should be able to do completely independently. You know, I think it’s relatively rare that you find dependencies, which are truly unmanageable in a separate way. You know, I can think of like a new redesign coming out, and you having to wait in order to ship your thing into the new redesign might be an example. But in that case, the way that you handle that, I think, is that the entire company has to mobilise around getting that redesign done as quickly as possible, so that everybody can chip into the new surface and not waste time. And I think if people’s goals are good, and well set, it’ll be in everybody’s interests, you know, independent, the culture is good, it’ll be in everybody’s interest to go and help do that. So that the dependency is cleared and you can go ship on top of

Randy Silver: 14:15

it. You make it sound way too easy.

Mike Hudack: 14:19

I’m trying to think of an example.

Randy Silver: 14:20

I think there’s just a big there’s a big caveat there with that, if the culture is good, and I think that’s that’s the scary part in a lot of places.

Mike Hudack: 14:28

Definitely. Definitely. And I think almost everything leads back to culture. Right.

Lily Smith: 14:36

And I think one of the other things so we you know, we’ve talked about that kind of that cross functional product team, which is often you know, your QA, your engineer, your designer, UX, and your product manager, but then you also have your sales and marketing and legal and all, you know, compliance or any of those other teams that your impact So how do you see that kind of changing? Or Yeah, as teams grow? And you get kind of more of these cross functional product teams? Like how do you see them then interfacing with these other groups so that they’re all still able to achieve the goals or just there must be like, as a legal team going, oh, I’ve got all these different product teams asking for these different things. And I don’t, you know, how do they How do they end up prioritising their workload?

Mike Hudack: 15:30

So I think you have to start prioritisation goals at the company level, which is really important. So I think the CEO has to stand up in front of the company and say, these are the three things that matter to this company for the next three months, six months a year, whatever the right timeframe is probably six months, you always end up at six months talking about 12, talking about three, six months. And these are the three things that are kind of like non negotiable do or die. And one of them is super ambitious. And one of them like we should just get done in our sleep. And then there’s one in between, I don’t know. But there are three things that matter. And they are at the top of a stack ranked list where there is no number four, this is the way that I do it. Not everybody does. And if you are on a legal team, or a finance team or an engineering team, it is expected that you will do everything that you possibly can in order to achieve these three goals. And then anything that is not on the list with a very important caveat is less important and gets out of the way. And the caveat is that you need to do a set of things to stay alive. And those things can’t be D prioritised. So you can’t D prioritise platform health, you can’t D prioritise compliance, you know, those things need to be done, and they need to be done well. But then when you look at all of the product initiatives you can have in the company, all of the, you know, project work that a legal team could do. You ask yourself, Is it serving these three objectives? And if not, why am I doing it. And then typically, the way that I would do that, then is to cascade that throughout the organisation. So you might have areas which are collections of multiple teams, each one of those would have three things to do. And then each individual team or some, some folks will call them squads will have three things to do. And in my world, no more than three and ideally, only one. And then you can just focus around that. And you can get that done. And it’s incredibly clarify, just don’t do any of the other stuff.

Lily Smith: 17:31

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Randy Silver: 17:42

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Lily Smith: 18:02

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Randy Silver: 18:24

So how long does it take you to put that together as a quarter on a quarterly basis? You know, there’s that whole thing of it’s very easy. When you’re at the top table to say it’s these three things, but not to fully understand all the implications of what you’re asking for. And the further down the stack you go, the more they say, Oh, God, that means this and this, and I have to rebuild this, I have to do that. Or they have to skimp on something else. Down does it take and have you go through that process to make sure you’re doing it? Well.

Mike Hudack: 18:54

So it depends on the company, the size of company and the complexity, right. And I think you can come up with a list of things that matter to the company, those three things. Honestly, I think most companies can do it in a day. They just choose not to. But I think that if you get a group of five people together, who helped lead that company with a whiteboard, I would be shocked if they can’t figure out what those three things are. And you might not get to total. You might not get to total agreement, you might not get to full consensus, but you’ll know what they are. So you could do that quite quickly. And if they’re if they’re done, right. One of the might be like launch a product like a ship goal. But I usually encourage people to make them metrics based and say, Well, I don’t really care about whether or not you ship the product. I just want 100,000 people using it, which I guess implies that you’ve shipped it. But you know, it’s 100,000 that matter not having shipped it.

Randy Silver: 19:50

ship with two customers is not the goal.

Mike Hudack: 19:53

You’re exactly right. Yeah. You have accomplished nothing until you scale it You know that you may have gotten 99% of the work done? We don’t know. But yeah, get to 100,000 customers on the new product. And then you ask every team to do it. And I think the trick is that you want to do and, Randy, this gets your question when to bottom up top down. So you kind of want the company to issue guidance, like these are the three things that really matter. And then you want every team coming up and saying, well, this is what I can actually achieve. This is what I can do. This is how I can contribute to that. And then you have a meeting in the middle, where everybody gets together and says, Oh, well, why can’t you hit this objective that we set? Do we need to get you more do we need to change things, we need to change the goal. And that’ll take a few again, depending on how big the company is, a couple days or something like that. So at the limit, for a small to midsize company, I think you can do this in a few days. I think for a big company of hundreds or 1000s of people, realistically, it’s a few weeks.

Randy Silver: 20:56

So you’re doing that that conversation, I’m guessing with your product leads and your engineering leads in the room at the same time so that they understand the trade offs each other you’re not doing these in one to ones.

Mike Hudack: 21:07

No, this will be you know, at the end when you’re actually doing the reviews, I think company leadership, CFO, CEO, CTO, and then from each team, engineering, product design, legal if it’s appropriate, everybody who’s part of that team that needs to deliver that outcome. But you know, as few people as possible, you need to balance it, because otherwise you’re not going to have a frank conversation.

Lily Smith: 21:34

And do you see those support functions? Have you over the years? Have you seen them changing the way that they work in order to support the changing way in which product teams work? Because there’s, there’s generally like, such a focus around the goals and the product teams are delivering those goals? So do you see that these other kind of supporting functions are changing the way that they’re working in order to facilitate the product teams work?

Mike Hudack: 22:07

Yeah, hugely. So one thing I think that I’ve seen, which is really great, is integrating legal compliance, all of these different roles within a product team. And depending on how many people you have, and how big the team is, that could be at the company level, it could be at the area level, it could be at the individual team level, whatever is appropriate and matches your your circumstance, but actually making them feel as part of the team. And not always thinking about them as support functions, but rather thinking about, you know, legal as being a part of the product that you ship. You know, the tasks are the terms of service are important. They’re part of what we’re building. And they’re not just there to like write the terms of service afterwards, maybe we if it’s important, maybe we actually think about that at the beginning. At the same time, we’re thinking about wireframes, you know, and the lawyer is in there. Helping with that initial product process just as much as a designer is. And I think that also makes everybody feel really invested in the outcomes you’re trying to drive. And they start, you know, the lawyer starts thinking about this as their product as much as anybody else. And I think that’s incredibly powerful. And then organizationally, I think, a great organisation, will, everybody in the company is pulling in the same direction. So hopefully, you have a leadership team, which is sitting there aligned around those goals, where the chief legal officer or the general counsel feels as much ownership over hitting that goal as the CTO or CTO.

Randy Silver: 23:39

So I want to flip the perspective on this a little bit. We’ve been talking about the view from from the top table, let’s talk about if you are the product manager, or part of the product team on something, and this goal comes down and you say, Oh, crap, there’s just no way we can hit this in this timeframe. You know, the most dangerous word in our profession is just and someone says, Can we just do this? And he said, No, no, we can’t. And here’s 15 reasons why but you don’t want to walk into that meeting and sabotage your career by saying no to everybody more senior than you. What mistakes have you seen people make in that meeting? Or, you know, not responding to well? And what how can you handle it? Well, how do you communicate back and say, This isn’t realistic? Here is what is. So

Mike Hudack: 24:29

first of all, I think you want to work in a company that values truth. And we’ve talked a lot about culture, but like you as an individual get to choose to the maximum extent possible where you work and you should work at a place that values truth. And so if you don’t feel comfortable saying I can’t get this done, you should consider where you’re working. Now. There are two possible reasons why you might not feel comfortable saying that one is because you’re being asked to do the impossible and the other is because you’re not being ambitious or creative and And it’s really important to try to differentiate between those two. And it’s an uncomfortable process to try to figure that out. Having done that, if you’re going to say, I can’t achieve this no matter what, to go back and explain why. And you know, you have to think about whether or not if you were in the other seat, you would come back and say, You’re not being ambitious enough. And and why? and think through that, and really, you know, be intellectually honest with yourself. If the answer is you think that there’s a possibility that you could get it done. Then you sit down and with a whiteboard and your team and you try to figure it out. And if you still can’t find a way you go back and you say, I can’t do it. But the best, you know, I’ve seen people do this in both directions. So many times my favourite example of this, which is completely different, Randy, than the question you’re asking, but I’ll mention it anyway, is a team came to us at one point at Facebook saying, we’re going to get to a million advertisers in the next six months. And I think at the time we had about 150,000. And the leadership teams that you’re not, you’re never going to do this. It’s impossible. And they said, You know what, it’s possible that we won’t do it. We agree. But we want to try, we want to set our goal as a million. And everybody hemmed and hawed and said, Well, you know, we don’t want teams here to have unrealistic goals. And you know, that could be really bad, and so on and so forth. They were like, No, we want to do it. And they did it. I think they hit like 1.4 million in that six months. And it was absolutely incredible. I mean, it was one of the best things I’ve ever seen. And then, on the flip side, I’ve definitely been guilty of asking teams to sign up for unrealistic goals, having them come back and say, I can’t achieve this and saying, You’re not being creative enough, you’re not thinking through this enough, sign up to it, you’ll figure out how to do it and being wrong and having the team absolutely crushed under the weight of that. And that’s way more destructive than asking them to hit a realistic goal, and then beating it and coming up. And so if you’re a pm stuck in the middle of this, the key is to know what situation you’re in. And to work at a company that values truth, and really to ask yourself, what is the best that I can do? In my in my seat right now? And sometimes, the answer is actually, this is the wrong goal entirely. You’re asking me to target monthly active users, and I believe the highest leverage thing is to get daily active users. And then your job is to go back to management and say, you know, you’re setting the wrong goal. And here’s why. And you may or may not be right, and you need to be open to that. And and company leadership may or may not be right, and they have to be open to that.

Lily Smith: 27:54

So, I mean, that sounds challenging, on multiple sort of levels of like, being able to understand where you are, I guess, you just get there with experience or like, is there? Is there something else that you can do in order to know this stuff?

Mike Hudack: 28:15

Better to know the difference between whether or not something is realistic? Or you need more ambition?

Lily Smith: 28:21

Yeah, exactly. Because we’re all we’re all unique individuals as well. And I think that’s the other thing is, you know, you will get, you will get people who are just much more ambitious and just go, Okay, I don’t care if it’s realistic or not, I just like give me a challenge. And now relish that, and then other people who will just you know, they want it to be something that they can achieve, because they will get satisfaction from achieving it. But if they’re not looking like they’re going to achieve it, they will crumble and you know, exactly like you saying, I guess maybe it’s like a leadership thing as well of knowing what’s the right strategy for the product person to?

Mike Hudack: 29:02

Yeah, absolutely. And I’ve definitely been guilty of getting that wrong and misunderstanding a team and thinking that they were the type that needed a really big ambitious goal to organise around, but actually they’re the type or needs to make, you know, slow and steady progress. And that is a thing and I think, you know, knowing that about yourself is incredibly important. And to some degree working in the right place based on that, you know, there are different parts of an organisation typically a different specialties within product which lend themselves to one or the other. You know, I work with incredible people who like to dependently deliver incremental change that adds up to something really, really big over time. And then I work with people who like to take huge risky swings, that may be zero or May, maybe 1000. And in any company, there are going to be places where each of those things are are more appropriate than others. Working, finding that fit between the work and your personality, I think is really important. And then you’ll find yourself in that conflict less on a day to day basis.

Lily Smith: 30:10

Do you think as well, some, it’s almost, you know how some companies will set values, a lot of companies these days set set values, that there may be more of a bias these days towards the ambitious, like, go get it type of way of working rather than the No, I want to set something achievable and more pragmatic.

Mike Hudack: 30:36

I think it really depends on the company. And I think even this, you know, you can think about different ways of working where you make lots of small changes that add up to really big outcomes. And you just work on kind of like incremental improvement after incremental improvement. And you can do that without being bombastic and going after the big headline number, and yet still deliver something really big. And I think on the other hand, you could do something huge and have it be ill conceived. And, of course, it’s like high beta, it could be binary and not get it think each company needs a mix of both. And I think that it would be wrong to say that any company over the fullness of its life should organise around one or the other of those extremes. There will be times when each is appropriate. And you need to know which those are and you need to know what type of product leader you are, and therefore, what parts of the organisation or what organisations to work out.

Lily Smith: 31:37

So, and in order to kind of know that one of the things that I’ve done a couple of times and a few different companies that I’ve worked in, is these like psychometric tests, like there’s a whole huge variety of them out there. And do you tend to do that in the places where you work? Or do you find value in things like that? Or

Mike Hudack: 31:57

Yeah, monto does discovery insights. And I have been shocked by how accurate they feel. And I think that as people have done them, I, you know, I’ve read people’s and had this aha moment of like, oh, everything makes sense. You know, I know a different way to work with you, you know, it’s been really phenomenal. And I find that mine describes me, well, I find that for 99% of the people I work with, It’s uncanny, actually, and I find it

Lily Smith: 32:26

fascinating. Yeah, like, I did one I used to be so sceptical. But I did one very recently, I can’t remember see me colour profile, I think it’s called. And that described to be incredibly well. And it’s just very interesting that we now can shortcut getting to know each other by doing like a little quiz. Even that, yeah.

Randy Silver: 33:00

taking one step back from this. And, Mike, we’re running out of time, this has been really fantastic. So I think this is probably the last question. Um, we talked a lot about company culture, we talked a lot about how to set that culture. But if you’re someone who’s thinking about joining a company, and finding one that values, honesty, and the right kind of culture, how do you recommend people to do that during their job search? How do you determine, you know, when a company is putting its best foot forward, whether they are living up to their values, whether they’re the right kind of place to work? I think

Mike Hudack: 33:37

it’s helpful if people tell you real things in an interview. You know, everybody should give you an opportunity to ask questions. And if they don’t, you shouldn’t work there. And when you ask questions, you should ask hard questions. And if people tell you that everything is perfect, you shouldn’t work there. If people give you a measured answer, with the good and the bad, and help you make a good decision about where to work, that’s a really good sign. I’d also try to spend some time with people who work there outside of an interview setting, have coffee with them, have a beer with have lunch, and get an opportunity, again, to learn about the company. And it’s so important, every every single company has things that are wrong with it. And if people aren’t willing to tell you that, then that you know, then they’re not honest. And similarly, though, on the other hand, if they’re so negative, well, you don’t want to work there either. there’s a there’s a nice in between, and you’ll kind of know it when you find it. But it’s incredibly important. Yeah.

Randy Silver: 34:43

saying, Okay, I understand that. These are things you say that are negative about the company. They’re not so bad for me. I can live with that. That’s not such a bad thing. Yeah, totally. Yeah, Mike, that’s a really good answer and a great way to wrap this up. Thank you so much. for joining us today.

Mike Hudack: 35:01

Thank you both of you. Thank you, Randy. Thank you Lily. Really appreciate the chat.

Randy Silver: 35:15

I love it. Dave also and Schoolhouse Rock. We’re both right three is the magic number.

Lily Smith: 35:22

It’s okay Randy sometimes you oldies are actually right about things. You just need to be reminded about it every now and then.

Randy Silver: 35:32

Well, you know my memory is going but I just got to tell you to get off my blonde Millie. See you next week.

Lily Smith: 35:50

haste, me, Lily Smith and me Randy silver. Emily Tate is our producer. And Luke Smith is our editor.

Randy Silver: 35:59

Our theme music is from Humbard baseband power. That’s p au. Thanks to Ana kittler, who runs product tank and MTP engage in Hamburg and plays bass in the band for letting us use their music. Connect with your local product community via product tank or regular free meetups in over 200 cities worldwide.

Lily Smith: 36:18

If there’s not one negue you can consider starting one yourself. To find out more go to mind the product.com forward slash product tank.

Randy Silver: 36:27

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