BY The Product Experience ON JUNE 1, 2022

Episode transcript

Randy Silver: 0:00

Lily, what have you been up to this week?

Lily Smith: 0:03

I’m not falling for this, Randy, I know what you’re getting at. And I know you just want to brag, so get it over with who?

Randy Silver: 0:12

Me? Oh, okay. I just got the chance to spend three days locked in a room with 50 people, including Marty Kagan and his partners, and I learned so much. It was incredible. And I’ve managed to book some really interesting guests for us to chat with over the next few months.

Lily Smith: 0:31

Oh, yeah, that does sound amazing. But are you done now? Can we move on?

Randy Silver: 0:36

Almost some amazing people there told me how much they like our podcast, which is sweet, and how they wished you were there too. So you were definitely missed.

Lily Smith: 0:45

Ah, that is really lovely. Okay, surely we can move on now, though,

Randy Silver: 0:50

kind of because I just also want to brag about this week’s guest. I’ve known Rick Clough for years before he went to Google to become the product manager for YouTubes homepage, before he went on to help with Google Ventures, and long before he became California’s Chief Technology Innovation Officer.

Lily Smith: 1:10

Yeah, that sounds like a very interesting career. But that is it, you are not allowed to do any more thing, and we’re gonna get on with the chat.

Randy Silver: 1:19

Excellent, let’s do it.

Lily Smith: 1:26

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Randy Silver: 1:30

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Lily Smith: 1:37

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Randy Silver: 1:45

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Lily Smith: 1:58

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Randy Silver: 2:08

Rick, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast this week.

Rick Klau: 2:11

Randy, it is so good to be in touch with you again. It has been far too long.

Randy Silver: 2:16

It has been a very long time in we’re not going to tell people.

Rick Klau: 2:21

I appreciate you honouring that part of our agreement.

Randy Silver: 2:25

Exactly. So some people may recognise your name from a video you’ve done that a lot of people may have watched, but for will and we’ll get to that in just a minute too. But for people who don’t know who you are already, can you just tell us what are you up to these days? And how did you get into product stuff in the first place?

Rick Klau: 2:45

absolutely happy to I’m looking forward to talking about OKRs as well. So today, I’m the Chief Technology Innovation Officer for the State of California. I am responsible for leading a group known as the Office of enterprise technology. We’ll talk more about what it is we do in a little bit. But that is a group within the California Department of Technology. Our responsibility is to build and ship products for departments and agencies across the state. Been here about a year and a half came here shortly after leaving Google where I had been for 13, almost 14 years in a variety of roles, one of which was as a product manager for a few years. And before that was at a bunch of startups, the last of which was acquired by Google back in 2007.

Randy Silver: 3:35

So how did this transition happen? How did you leave the commercial sector and go to work in government? Well,

Rick Klau: 3:43

there’s a couple of answers. I think the short version was I took some time off the end of 2020, intending to take more than a little bit of time off. As it turns out, it only ended up being about six weeks. Because the state of California, like the rest of the country, was engaged in the early days of the vaccination campaign for COVID-19. And I got introduced to then CIO, Amy Tang, who now leads the GOV ops agency which is the agency that the Department of Technology belongs to but at the time, she was the CIO, and had been tasked with really managing a number of the technical components of the vaccination campaign. I got introduced to her through a mutual friend. And what Amy made clear was that they really needed some help with people who understood data and systems. I tried to push back I said, I don’t know Public Health. I’m not a vaccination expert by any stretch. But what they really were looking for were people who understood complex data at scale. And I was intrigued like the rest of the world was living the COVID experience, not yet a year into it at that point, and quickly figured out that there was an opportunity to be helpful. And then we can talk more about exactly what that looked like, if that’s of interest. But that was my introduction, I was actually a volunteer for six, almost seven weeks, seven days a week, 1617 hours a day was a jarring transition from being funemployed, to suddenly eating, breathing, sleeping. Everything regarding vaccination data, and somewhere in the midst of that, Amy, now Secretary Tong made clear that there was this office within the Department of Technology, whose chief position was vacant. And if I was interested in sticking around, they could use my help.

Lily Smith: 5:51

So what was it like moving from the commercial sector, as Randy said, into this very different environment? You say that they were kind of really after, I guess, a different perspective on the problem that they were trying to solve. And people who were used to using or used to kind of working with lots of data, were you then kind of thrown into a team of other people who were had come from sort of similar positions to you? Or was it like a team of people who were much more experienced in the government side of things? How did that transition work? Or how did that sort of first project work?

Rick Klau: 6:27

Well, when I look back on those first few weeks, and then really the first maybe six months in the role, so first half of last year, the easiest way I can explain it is that the sense of urgency that COVID, and the vaccination campaign imparted on every day, made the environment feel very, very similar to the one that I had left, the pace was the same, the urgency was the same, the need to deliver at scale was the same. It really didn’t feel like that jarring transition at all. There was no ability to excuse taking a long time, it just, you couldn’t, you couldn’t explain away, a, you know, that’ll take another two weeks, that’ll take a month, we’ll have to put it out for bid and, and we’ll hear from vendors in six months there, that was not an option. So in the course of those first few weeks of being a volunteer, surrounded by people at the Department of Public Health, the Department of Technology, some outside vendors, a couple of volunteers like me, who just wanted to be helpful, we were all sprinting out an outcome that there was no alternative we had to deliver. I think the transition became more obvious, as that sense of urgency receded. And it started to look less like a sprint, and more like a marathon. And then to try and understand how to how to manage the tension of understanding that we are by definition of bureaucracy, we are a government agency, we we are not expected to operate the same way as a private sector, big tech company, and then look for how can we take advantage of some of what we did when we have that sense of urgency? And how can we work within the environment that we are currently working in?

Randy Silver: 8:41

I’m guessing one of the big differences is when you’re working for Google or other companies, you’re prioritising by looking at your ideal customer profile your target market and dividing like that. When you’re working in civil service, especially when you’re working in in pandemic get relief and response. You can’t choose. I mean, I’m sure you are predators, but how do you make those kinds of decisions? How do you how do you apply this?

Rick Klau: 9:10

I mean, Randy, it’s a great question. I think back to when I was my first product manager role. I was asked to lead blogger, which at the time was the largest blogging platform in the world. And I remember my my boss, a guy named Joe Kraus, somebody you may know who’s currently the president at Lime. He told me the first lesson that ultimately informed a lot of how I think about being a product manager or product leader. And he said, Rick, you you are not your target user. I mean, yes, I had a blog. I was active in the blogosphere, as we called it, then I’m dating myself and by even alluding to that term, but I knew that space it was one of the reasons Joe wanted me to come on and be the pm leading blogger and yet More than half of all content on Blogger was consumed in language other than English, two thirds of every page of all pageviews, on Blogger happened outside of North America, I was demonstrably not the average user on that platform. So I needed to make sure that I understood who those target audiences were, and then try and solve their problems. Now that was in tech, coming to the state, you are absolutely right, I don’t get to pick and choose which of California’s residents I care about, by definition, I care about all 39 and a half million of them. My responsibility is to ensure that if we build something, all of them can access it, that we don’t impose artificial barriers. Like I don’t say, oh, we’ll just we’ll build for iOS first. And then we’ll eventually solve for Android later, we need to focus on what is not the lowest common denominator. But what is the most functional for as many as possible, by default from the start?

Randy Silver: 11:08

So you can’t it sounds almost like you’re talking about a big bang approach. I don’t think that’s what you are talking, I think you are talking about an iterative approach. But how does that actually work? In this case? Can you talk a little bit about what you would you’ve done in that in that space?

Rick Klau: 11:24

Sure. I think the what what our team built last summer, coming out of the COVID initiative, which we refer to as the digital vaccine record system here in California, is a great example of starting with one particular thing to solve a very specific problem, which then becomes a foundation on which iterative and sort of next steps can happen. So we learned last spring, that people as they were getting their vaccines were getting a piece of paper. And that just offended me as a as a tech savvy individual. But it also felt like, that’s exactly the sort of thing that’s going to get lost, or it’s going to go through the wash. And as we’ve since seen, it’s also very easy to forge. And if proof of vaccination was ever going to be important, then it would be great if we could have an impossible to lose, and impossible to forge evidence of those vaccinations that you’d received to simplify the presentation of that information. And if you’re a business if you’re a venue, the reading of that data, so we proposed to the governor and the Department of Public Health, hey, we, we can build something that would be a digital equivalent to the piece of paper, not replace the piece of paper, piece of paper still works for people who’ve got it. But if you want a digital backup, we can build that from first line of code to shipping to production was six weeks, which, I mean, I’ve heard from friends in government, that that’s not the average time it takes to build resident facing websites, let alone websites that operate at scale. But this is where that shared sense of urgency was so useful, because we had a target we were we were aiming for. But we weren’t done, right. We shipped that Californians started downloading copies, then Apple shipped support for smart health cards, which is the framework we implemented. Google did the same with Android. And now we’ve delivered 16 million of those records to over 8 million California residents. But we went a step further. And we released all the code that we wrote to the public domain, put it on GitHub, and said, if anybody else wants this, you’re welcome to it. There are now four states that have deployed our code for their residents, three others are in varying stages of deployment, not yet launched live. And that made space for other states to adopt the same open source standard, even though they didn’t deploy with our code. So now well over half of all Americans who’ve been vaccinated have access to this digitally readable, unforgivable proof of their vaccination record, which the most common use is for travel. So if we want to go to Europe, if we want to go abroad, and you need to prove that you’ve been vaccinated, you now have a way to do that, that is far more reliable than than a piece of paper.

Lily Smith: 14:38

So one of the things you said is that you have to build the services for the entire population of California. And it totally made me smile that you were offended by this piece of code. I received one of those in the UK and I was also like, what is that Yes. But then there are also people who might be offended by having to use a digital service rather than having like a paper card like, you know, older generation, or people who are just slightly more, you know, not ofay with technology and a bit kind of afraid of it or whatever. So, just in general, I mean, obviously, you’ve had this experience with your pandemic sort of response. But in general, as well, since you’ve been working on other projects, like, how have you kind of dealt with people or the challenge of those who are slightly less ofay? With technology?

Rick Klau: 15:44

It really it’s a great question, I’m glad you asked, because this gives me a chance to talk about one of my favourite parts of both that experience with the vaccination record system, but then how we think about equity ultimately, is what you’re what you’re referring to, in everything else that we do. So first up, no one is required to use the QR code that our system implemented. If you have a piece of paper, you still can use that that is still valid as proof of vaccination, anywhere that that information is, is required. So first and foremost, it was not a replacement for or a requirement or a mandate. At any point in time, we made very clear from day one, this is largely a backup a copy is for your convenience if you want it. And then thankfully, the smartphone platforms adopted support of this framework, which then meant that anybody that had a smartphone could store it natively on their device, which made it easier to retrieve. One of the reasons that we chose the framework that we chose what’s known as the smart health card framework. It’s open source, so it didn’t cost us anything to implement and adopt. But more importantly, a QR code can be printed just as easily as it can be on a smartphone. So we worked early on with some long term care facilities, for instance, where a number of senior citizens and people who who have potentially limited faculties where we could work with the long term care facility, and they could print these records on a piece of paper just as easily as we could deliver those QR codes to a smartphone. As a result, we were solving for anyone, rather than saying you need the latest greatest iOS build, or you need to be on just Pixel phones or Samsung phones, like it meant that absolutely anyone, whether you had access to technology, or simply could go into a county health department and say I want I want a copy of this printed out meant that it was it was broadly available to anyone.

Randy Silver: 18:04

I’d like to ask about a little bit more about how this was built or some of the challenges about it specifically. I’ve done some work with with government here in the UK. And I’ve seen that it the makeup of a product team is potentially different because the challenges faced in civil service are different. I’m curious, what does a product team look like for you right now? What kind of roles are might be included? That you wouldn’t have had at Google, for example?

Rick Klau: 18:31

I glad you asked. I mentioned early on that when Secretary Tong asked me to stick around and lead the office of enterprise technology. My first question was to say, Well, I’m I’m not really an enterprise technology guy. I’m not sure that that’s a fit. And you said no, no, don’t worry about the name that ultimately is a bit of a, an accident of history. Let me tell you what they do. And and once she described the composition of this team that I eventually got asked to lead, like, Well, that looks exactly like the teams I lead at Google. So I’ll just tell you what the departments within my office are. There’s this group of software engineers, there is the dev SEC ops team, there is the product and project management team. So those are two different disciplines within one group. There’s UI UX researchers. Yeah, I saw. Yeah. And we can talk about that I’ll die on that hill every day of the week. You are you UX researchers, web designers and developers, geospatial analysts, data analysts. All of those people work in the Office of enterprise technology built around building and shipping products, or websites or applications for our customers who end up being departments and agencies across the state. So when we spun up a team to build what became The Digital vaccine record system, it was a UI UX lead, a product lead, an engineering lead, about a half a dozen software engineers. And then a couple of folks from the dev SEC ops team to spin up the infrastructure on which we deployed v1 of the product, it looked exactly like the product teams I lead at Google.

Randy Silver: 20:20

It’s interesting, we wouldn’t have done this before. We’ve had policy people, policy specialists included as part of the team as well, sometimes as the product manager. Because there was a whole thing of navigating through the infrastructure and understanding the differences between deploying in the commercial space and, and what needs to be done in government.

Rick Klau: 20:41

We we also in just to talk, I would imagine, this might be interesting to some of your listeners, we we deliberately built this as if it were an outside private sector, we had a proof of concept working within a week, we wired it up to the production system a few days later, knowing that if we can start demoing, to internal users with live data, it was it was viscerally different, to see your information on screen than to see John Q Public demo record, because it felt more real. And then it became something that they could once we had a public facing URL to send out that was on the dev server, that they could start sharing with family and friends and say, Hey, can you can you hit this URL, tell me if it works for you. And get real feedback from their communities also meant that our you know, early user testing was much easier to do.

Randy Silver: 21:42

Was this seen as disruptive, unwelcome or disruptive and terrifying.

Rick Klau: 21:47

I mean, I’m thrilled to report the former, we worked very closely with the Department of Public Health. In fact, so little bit of detail here. So one of the reasons we were able to do this is that by law, every administered COVID vaccine in every state in the country is required by law to be reported to the state’s immunisation registry. So there is a database that each state and the district in Puerto Rico all maintain, that is a log of Rick got this dose on this day, and this lot number, etc. With that information, we were then able to build this public facing front end, for the vaccinated individual to get access to their own data. The guy that leads the immunisation registry guy named Michael Powell, who’s been at the Department of Public Health for, I think, maybe even two decades, remarked to me, shortly after we launched, we have wanted to share the data that we have with the public, since I got here. And we have never been able to present this interface in a way that users could take advantage of. And candidly, there was never that, that crisis that made it a top priority. So this became the moment where we seize the opportunity. And we ultimately were able to do something that the Department of Public Health really wanted to see done. And now gets to be something where they’ve talked publicly about, they want to take this and expand it. So it’s not just COVID vaccines, but any vaccine. Why wouldn’t you I mean, all that information lives in the same database, you could make it a far more functional environment to present, you know, proof of your kids vaccination records. So when you register them for summer camp, you don’t have to chase for the different doctors, from the different cities you used to live in, you can have all that information easily accessible through a web portal.

Lily Smith: 23:57

So what are things like for you? Now, you kind of mentioned, I think that the department that you work in acts as a sort of agency to other departments in the government? Do you have these different departments come to you with projects that they want to get done? Or like a Is it very much that kind of client agency relationship, or do they come to you with problems to solve?

Rick Klau: 24:25

I mean, I think it’s a little bit all the above. Right. So we are at the beginning. And really at the end of last year, my deputies, a woman named Phoebe pronto who actually came also from the private sector. I’d worked with me at Google a number of years ago spent some time at Salesforce and Tanium. She and I sort of looked out at the year ahead and said, Okay, what where are the reusable components that if we built them would be leverageable in as many different places as possible. So you You might have seen our team made an announcement earlier this year that we have launched the California design system. It was a partnership between us and the Office of Digital Innovation. What that is intended to be is a shared design language. That makes it easier for anyone producing public facing content, whether it be a web app, a website, could be a mobile app, that they all have the same design language, visual language, to make it easier to know that you are actually communicating interfacing with the state of California makes it also harder to build things that are harder to use for the residents to interface with gets back to our equity comment earlier. We’re standardising all of the web content that we manage. And in partnership with WordPress VIP, we’re building out a digital ID ecosystem so that instead of having 19 Different usernames and passwords for 19 different government departments and agency websites, you have one login.

Randy Silver: 26:04

You’re not an enterprise guy, but single sign on using exactly every enterprise.

Rick Klau: 26:09

So yes, I in fact, I have been in conversations where Oh, we this is the SSO project. I’m like, well, let’s, let’s talk about giving residents the ability to control how much of their own information is shared with departments or agencies. But you’re absolutely right, Randy, at the end of the day, yes, it’s all these systems need to talk to each other, if we had a common authentication layer would make things a whole heck of a lot easier. And then, like, as we have had more of these successes, we do hear from other departments and agencies, who say, Boy, it would be fantastic. If we could take the same team that built the vaccine record, or people who are familiar with how you did it, and apply that in other environments. So we try and this maybe is the time when we transition to talk about OKRs. Like we’ve tried to be very thoughtful about aligning our objectives and priorities as a team, so that we don’t get distracted, we don’t try and boil the ocean. But occasionally, we will get inbound requests that ultimately align with who we are, what problems we’re trying to solve and represent tremendous opportunities for impact, so that we can then think about what outcomes are most exciting to be achieving. And then we’ll we’ll we’ll try and pick and choose as responsibly as we can.

Randy Silver: 27:34

So you mentioned OKRs, we definitely have to get into it. But you did the original OKR video for Google. And we’ll link to the YouTube clip in the show notes. So it sounds like you’re still using them and you are able to use them in this situation. I’m curious, what is a good OKR look like in selfless surfaces is different than what you would have done in commercial.

Rick Klau: 27:56

I mean, I think the biggest challenge when coming from the private sector is that you take for granted that it is the outcome that matters. That if you think about OKRs, at some level, you are making a prediction about the future. And then you are trying to align all of the pieces within the company in service of achieving that outcome. Avoid distractions, look for compounding output. And everyone hopefully understands that the outcome is the thing that matters. When you look at civil service, what we’ve observed is really a couple of things. One, they’re often competing inputs to what is in fact a priority. So that’s that’s a challenge. It is also sometimes difficult to know, with conviction, what the outcome might look like. So you will see teams start to focus on the things they have more control over the inputs, who’s doing which work, what work, how long will it take? When will you check in with me again. And so there’s some tension there. It’s not that anyone’s fighting. When when Phoebe and I try and come up with we think this is the outcome that we want to achieve. But it’s it’s it is a challenge. I would say that we are now in our third quarter of using OKRs within our team. What we have seen is an extraordinary acceleration of pace of execution. And I’ll give you one very tangible example where we were in the process of making this migration to WordPress VIP. We currently have responsibility for 7080 websites scattered across four or five different infrastructures. And we went through the planning exercise we had some goals set in q1 of out which sites would go live on WordPress VIP by the end of the quarter and had some attendant metrics around that. So it wasn’t just a binary, we’re going to launch a thing and not care whether it was better or not. But in mid February team got back to me and said, Yeah, this is going to be we’re gonna have to do a bunch of infrastructure work before we can start the migrations, migrations probably won’t happen until June. I said, Well, timeout, we, like we all agreed, we’ve got a handful of sites we’re going to launch, it was important to us that we do this, the OKRs became the way to have conversations across the different departments to borrow some resources, and deprioritize a few lesser important things. We got the first sites live in March, we’ve now got 10, that have moved over, we’re moving two to three a week, at this cadence that if we had waited until June, we would still be at zero waiting for a lot of the sort of under the hood stuff to be done. So the team has benefited from learning by doing and a commitment to those outcomes that I’ve just been thrilled by.

Randy Silver: 31:10

It also sounds like you’ve set them at the right level. This wasn’t a team level objective. This was an agency level

Rick Klau: 31:17

objective. And And as I’ve benefited, it’s hard to believe that Okay, our video is now almost a decade old. I’ve had hundreds of conversations with startup founders, leadership teams, entire companies, where I’ve presented at all hands and tried to help them understand what it means to be at the right level, and then how to how to think about top down versus bottoms up. And what we have discovered, I think the biggest takeaway for me, is it facilitated a way to have that conversation, where I think I’ve been here long enough to be able to observe that state government, government in general is inherently top down and hierarchical. And we have tried to create a culture where it is very much bottoms up. That does not mean that leadership doesn’t do anything, it means that we try and push trust deep into the organisation give them an opportunity to surface for us when there’s tension or trade offs that need to be made. And ultimately, OKRs became that language. And as the team got more fluid, they were able to bring things to Phoebe and I that that helped us understand what they were seeing. And they had good context for how we thought about what those trade offs might be.

Lily Smith: 32:36

So what’s it like with the teams that you’re working with? Like, does working in government tend to attract a certain type of person? And if someone is listening to this thinking, Yeah, I’d really like to solve like, fundamental problems for the general population. Is there anything that they should be trying to get well versed in all kinds of learning? Or how can you prepare for a role in this in this world? And I realised that that’s two very different questions. But

Rick Klau: 33:12

I’m happy to I’m happy to take both. First off, I think there are people for whom this is their career, right, the civil service community, people on my team, I just had a guy announced his retirement, he’s been with the state for 38 years. It’s extraordinary. When I work in tech, I’ve never worked at a company that was 38 years old, let let alone head someone at the company for all 38 years. So it’s, it’s inspiring to see people who have devoted their life to public service, and have found an opportunity to give of their talents. In what is I think, the most customer service oriented industry there is like we have 40 million customers who depend on the state of California for a number of things that are vital to their day to day. It’s not optional. It’s not a nice to have, it’s often a need to have. So there are people for whom this is their career, and they deeply feel the pull of public service. And it is a wonderful career with benefits that accrue when you have that longevity. The flip side, to anybody that might be listening to this who is at one of the big tech companies or has been at a startup and is wondering, is this really the best and highest use of my skills? I would say there are plenty of opportunities to plug in either as a volunteer recall I started in this current role as a unpaid, just sitting in on calls and then trick trying to figure out where I could add value. There are 1000s of those opportunities across state and fed neural level, somebody that’s doing a phenomenal job of surfacing a number of those and being a bit of a matchmaker as the US digital response here in the US. And I know there are analogues in in other areas. I’m speaking later today at the Code for America, summit Code for America is also a wonderful partner in those efforts. And then I think there’s also a role for people who look at this as a tour of duty. I see this a lot in particular at the federal level, where people take advantage of whether it’s a new administration, or the regular turn turnover of people who spend a year and a half, two years in DC, increasingly remote now that COVID has made remote work more of a default, and simply say, I just, I want to give back. I, I am not necessarily solely motivated by optimising for income, I want to I want to contribute something meaningful, and I can’t think of a better place to do that. Then in government, I think that you know, whether it’s through the US digital service, which is trying to play that role at the federal level, you’re increasingly seeing teams at the state levels do something similar. I think if I were a young, early in my career product manager, the opportunity for impact is is unmatched. And the need is just extraordinary.

Randy Silver: 36:32

Rick, I think we’ve got time for just one last question. So following on from that, for anyone who is making the move from commercial to public service, whether it’s full time, whether it’s part time, whatever, whatever way they contribute, what’s the one thing that they really need to know? What’s the thing that’s going to surprise or shock them? That’s different?

Rick Klau: 36:55

I’ve thought about this a lot lately, because I talked to as you might imagine, some friends of mine who had made this transition before I did, and I wanted to learn from them, what, what do I need to know, and and pretty consistently, their feedback was, it’s going to be hard, it’s going to take a long time, you need to be prepared that the time horizons are just fundamentally different than they are in the private sector. And then I showed up, and as I told you all earlier, it didn’t feel any different. And it’s only after sort of the focus of COVID receded that I started to see a little bit of what they they were talking about. The best way I can think of describing it, is think about the last, or maybe the most memorable customer service experience you’ve ever had, where you were talking to somebody, they were on a script, they were doing what they thought they were supposed to do, you aren’t getting really what you need out of this experience. There are some people for whom the minute that doesn’t go exactly the way they want it to go. They just the hang up, they’re like, Nevermind, it’s not, it’s not worth it. And there are other people who who can persevere through that experience where the customer service person is doing what they’re supposed to do. But at some level, hopefully, you can figure out how they and their script and they’re their framework, like there is a path where you can get what you need out of that experience, and get your thing fixed, get it replaced, get the warranty approved, whatever it might be. And there are times when working within a bureaucracy feels like that. But the really good news is those are the moments where you can build customers for life. Like because you start to see what’s possible if everybody just sort of allows for the opportunity to get to that good outcome. So it’s different for sure, from working in Silicon Valley where I spent much of my career. But when you see the cascading impact, that’s possible. It is I can’t recommend it highly enough. And I’m hoping that somebody hears this and decides to make a call or drop an email into one of those groups I mentioned. Because I think I think they’d find tremendous opportunity to put their skills to good use.

Randy Silver: 39:22

Well, we’ve got links to all of them in the show notes. So if you are interested, please do take a look. And please do get in touch it. The limited amount of experience I’ve I’ve had working with civil servants has been incredibly rewarding as well and I can’t recommend it enough. Rick, thank you very much. This has been a fantastic chat.

Rick Klau: 39:40

Randy Lily, thank you so much for having me on. It’s been a pleasure.

Lily Smith: 39:44

Thanks Rick. The product experience is the first and the best podcast from my In the product. Our hosts are me, Lily Smith and me Randy silver. Louron Pratt is our producer and Luke Smith is our editor.

Randy Silver: 40:09

Our theme music is from Hamburg baseband power. That’s P AU. Thanks to Arnie killer who curates both product tank and MTP engage in Hamburg and who also plays bass in the band for letting us use their music. You can connect with your local product community via product tank, regular free meetups in over 200 cities worldwide.

Lily Smith: 40:30

If there’s not one near you, maybe you should think about starting one. To find out more go to find the product.com forward slash product tank