Ananda Robie, Managing Director of Digital Products for the Center for Action and Contemplation, chats with The Build Tank about how the Distributed Ownership model has helped her organization overcome some of their technology pain while freeing up staff to focus on their unique areas of expertise.
Transcript
Sam: 0:04
And then one, Hey-hey-hey-hey! Welcome.
Chris: 0:13
Take us seriously.
Sam: 0:15
What were we going to call this? The Greatmakers.
Chris: 0:18
Greatmakers
Sam: 0:19
The Greatmakers, I do like it. I don't think I thought of it, but like many things now will claim partial credit.
Chris: 0:26
Yeah, I think that we should call it the Greatmakers.
Sam: 0:29
Ananda Robie is a fantastic example of a Greatmaker. She makes great.
Chris: 0:34
And what Ananda is, an example of is somebody who just really treats her people well and therefore gets this great stuff out of them. She's got all kinds of humility and ultimately has this special combination. And it has so much to do with caring about people, the people that she's serving in the office and the people that are on her team.
Sam: 0:54
You know, I feel like, that's absolutely true. And it also triggers some of my defensiveness that gets triggered when people say it's all the soft skills. Soft skills are important, but it does feel like soft skills are like, oh, that's like the nice to have stuff, nice person. But like Ananda's a five tool player, you know? I mean, that's what they say about baseball prospects that are just have all the tools like offensive defense and hitting, and this and that power and, average and whatever. And Ananda is like five tool player. She's got the whole range of skills and maybe the quote unquote soft skills, which you and I have more talk about as like communication and strategy and, diplomacy and all that stuff. That's the more rare skillset in a way. But you combine that with someone that also has the technical aptitude and then the management expertise and the willingness to experiment and get better and be humble. And it's just like, yeah. Five tool player.
Chris: 1:43
It's really interesting. You know, when they talk about the T-shaped people who have breadth in what they're good at, but then they also have one area of depth where they really know a lot about it. Any given person only has so many hours in the day to focus. And I guess my fear would be, let's say somebody was T-shaped in the sense that they had broad skills, but they also had one area of real depth. And if that depth was technical, my fear is, with those people, is that if your real depth is, well coding, for example, you're going to want to code. That's the hammer that everything is a nail for. And we sort of are wary of that because you want people who are, open to not building something from scratch when something exists already. And, Ananda has a sense of how much does she need to know how much does she need to understand to ultimately get the best product.
Sam: 2:43
I think what she is, is like she knows her area. She knows some areas very well, and she's perfectly willing to call in fact, she expects to call in experts in other areas of depth. And I think that's what you and I preach a lot, which is like, there is no such thing as someone who knows it all. That's the fallacy with the idea of a CTO.
Chris: 3:01
Totally.
Sam: 3:02
People are like, we're going to hire a CTO. I was like, for what? For what of the 12 different areas of depth that you need to master to be good at as an organization.
Chris: 3:10
Not to say that you don't want a CTO or you don't want a chief.
Sam: 3:13
Right, but it's a lot of different, a lot of different versions of what that could be and what that covers. And even if, as long as, you know, what they cover, like, okay, this person is going to cover platform development, or this, person's going to cover IT or infrastructure, all those types of things. But you can't just hire someone and be like, oh, they're super technical so now our troubles are going to be over. It's no surprise that they usually aren't.
Chris: 3:35
What if instead of being T-shaped what you want to be is rake shaped.
Sam: 3:40
That's nice. I thought you were headed for pear shaped, which I was going to resent a little bit given my recent lack of exercise.
Chris: 3:46
I thought you were going to say you were going to take it as a compliment
Sam: 3:49
of pear is pear shape to compliment. I thought that meant, uh, I thought that meant that you were eating too many, uh, snacks
Chris: 3:55
Yeah. But it would be if you, if you were pear shaped and then somebody says, well, we need in this position is someone pear shaped, and then you could be like, excellent. I fit right.
Sam: 4:05
Good. Okay, perfect.
Chris: 4:07
no, thinking rake shaped because it's like, it's the width and, enough depth on, on a, so many things that you can rake a lot of leaves, So it's really, it really, is worst metaphor. I really should have said you can't use an ice pick to rake leaves
Sam: 4:29
There's Ananda.
Ananda: 4:30
Oh, this is so fancy.
Sam: 4:32
Only the finest.
Ananda: 4:34
I just assumed we'd be like recording a zoom call or something.
Sam: 4:37
Yeah, well, that's probably smarter, but instead we're trying to make it more complicated on ourselves.
Chris: 4:42
This would be a good thing for stump the unicorn. If, if there's something that's going to require learning a whole new tool to make something 3% better, do you invest staff resources?
Sam: 4:52
What do you say?
Chris: 4:54
Yeah.
Ananda: 4:55
A hundred percent, especially if it's really expensive.
Sam: 4:59
Well, uh, thank you, Ananda Robie, for joining us. We just were reminding ourselves that we were going to call this show the Greatmakers and what a perfect title to bring you in. And then we had, we went on a little rant for a little while about how you're a Greatmaker and a five tool threat, which is a compliment. I'm not sure if it sounds like that. It's a baseball term. Five tool threat. You got all the pieces. Uh, so I don't know, is this making you uncomfortable enough yet?
Ananda: 5:26
I was going to say, thanks for having me. And y'all are just way too kind with your feedback. I, maybe we set a little lower expectations, like a pretty good enough maker, and then, you know, we'll see how it goes.
Sam: 5:37
Right. We hope this isn't too boring.
Ananda: 5:39
Yeah, a mediocre maker
Chris: 5:41
A good make- yeah, a good enough maker. It is really interesting that in this realm good enough would be great compared to most organizations because most organizations are floundering so desperately
Ananda: 5:54
sometimes that is the unfortunate truth. Yeah.
Sam: 5:58
and it's inspiring too you to can be good enough.
Chris: 6:01
It's not very...
Sam: 6:01
Um, Ananda, we've been blabbering and we haven't let you introduce yourself. That's the other awkward tradition here. You want to introduce yourself?
Ananda: 6:09
Yeah. So my name's Ananda Robie and I am the Managing Director of Digital Products for a nonprofit in Albuquerque, New Mexico called the Center for Action and Contemplation.
Sam: 6:20
Yes. Quite a distinguished organization. Very cool. And maybe one of the more advanced examples of the product team, the digital product team in action under your stewardship. And I sort of feel like we've been on a little bit of the Ananda Robie Build Tank publicity tour lately. We, we had that Q&A with you, you and I just presented a session and now we're doing this and we appreciate you taking all the time to do that.
Ananda: 6:46
it's been, honestly, it's been really fun and I y'all are so gracious with your kindness and praise, but I mean, truly, I feel like it's been a journey we've been on together for six years. I wouldn't have known about this model or had the support and feedback and guidance I needed to, you know, really implement this at the CAC and iterate it over the last six years without your brilliance and wisdom and expertise. So it feels fun to be able to look back over the last couple of months and all the different arenas we've been talking about it and, you know, talk about what the journey has been like, what it is like in theory versus practice. It's been really fun. I came to the CAC, really, because they knew that they needed to implement Salesforce. We knew we needed to do it well, and I believe our executive director saw a presentation, Sam, that you did, and heard the wisdom in the approach and wanted to do that for the CAC. And I think one of the requirements of getting you all on board to support was that they had an internal admin to kind of guide the... steer the ship to not outsource the brains as we often say. So I really think that's how my position came about.
Sam: 7:54
I remember, see, one thing I think is so cool about the CAC's journey is it's been really organic. You all have given it the time and space it's needed. And so yeah, your journey did start out as a Salesforce admin, right. And I remember that conversation saying, you guys need someone internally. That was the fight back then. And it's so cool to think about how it has grown and morphed organically to not only a full Salesforce team, a really highly functional Salesforce team, but an entire digital products department that also includes your website and like all the overseeing of the technology and stewarding it in a really high quality, thoughtful way.
Ananda: 8:27
Yeah,
Sam: 8:28
Such a cool journey.
Ananda: 8:29
If I had thought that's where it was going from the beginning, that would have been very overwhelming. So I'm kind of glad that it has really organically evolved and developed. I would say when I was hired, what turned me on to it was coming from an organization that didn't have a, digital product team model, and didn't have kind of the blue and gold team divide or allyship... I knew I oriented towards technology, but in addition to being able to do technology had to do so much other stuff, either off the side of my desk or my Salesforce work became what was off the side of my desk. I remember when I first came across the white paper and was first thinking about applying to this role, thinking what a relief, it would be to have such clarity of what I owned and why, and not have to venture into those other areas, which were areas I'm not as skilled at and don't enjoy.
Chris: 9:20
Yeah, that's so much what we see. There's this piling on that happens with technical people or people who are competent with technical tools that they sort of just become this catch-all for anything that's sort of like difficult for somebody else to do. And, um, it's, it really is amazing how pervasive that still is.
Ananda: 9:40
I think if we didn't have this, there would be some pretty extreme siloing, because different technology platforms would be managed by or owned by different teams and there wouldn't be a lot of that cross- department pollination and collaboration. I think there could be a lot of bad investments and wasted money because there isn't that kind of universal ownership and universal thought about strategic investment and strategic use. There'd be a lot more dysfunction-- platform's not working as they should. And then the part that's hard to quantify, but I absolutely know would be true is there'd be a lot of lost optimization. So a lot of lost opportunity.
Sam: 10:23
We asked you ahead of time, if there was some subject that you wanted to talk about it and I and you did choose that distributed ownership model, right, which we sometimes call the blue and gold. And I wonder if this is this is very mean, but could we put you on a spot to just like explain to people what the basic basis of that is? And we can jump in as well.
Ananda: 10:40
I mean, isn't that your guys's job,
Sam: 10:42
Yeah.
Ananda: 10:42
of course. I'll do that. If I had to boil it down, I would say it's just the ethos of making sure you hire and allow people to focus on what their areas of interest and expertise are. Which sounds so simple. Um, but if you do it well, it makes such a difference. And when we apply it to digital products it's basically about dividing your staff into two different areas. One area is the tool optimizers and the other area are the tool users. And there's different responsibilities that each of those areas have, and it's because they're very different skillsets and they're very different things that folks enjoy, but when that partnership is there, it can create really beautiful results.
Sam: 11:31
Beautifully said. And I think, and the blue/ gold thing refers to just a chart we made years ago where the, where the tool optimizers or the Blue team, or your team at CAC and the gold team is the, is most people in most organizations, which are the content side users, people who are trying to use tools to accomplish their work in the world. And I think it was Chris who said many years ago, everybody likes to geek out on something. And so the heart of this model is trying to sort people into what they're most interested in, what they love geeking out on what they're best at, so that their time and their interest and their energy is optimized. And I think what you often see without that usually there's a hole, the biggest gap is on blue team side. And so you've got a lot of gold teamers who are bogged down with all this stuff that they're trying to do. Like, you know, you're, you're a fundraiser, you didn't have a CRM. So you go out and you talk to a CRM development shop, and now you're in charge of the CRM, but all the time you're spending on that is not spent on fundraising. And you're doing a bunch of stuff that's not really in your interest or expertise. The same could be true for communicators on a website. So this model tries to just sort people into like optimizing their time and their interest. So they're happy with what they're working on. They're good at it. And they have, like you said, that partnership between those two sides to make things happen.
Ananda: 12:43
It's funny because the first time when you said that, I thought about like the sorting hat in Harry Potter.
Chris: 12:49
That's what they, that's what we should, we should figure out how to actually make one of those. But I think that what we find a lot of times in organizations is that when you put the sorting hat on somebody and you figure out, okay, this is what you... You know, you were hired because you're you bringing some kind of magic to the table. And unfortunately you're only half of your job is that, and half of your job is something where you have no magic. And so what happens is, is that you get your magic done in 10% of your time, because the other half of it takes you 90% of your time, because it's not your magical skillset. But once people are doing what they want to do, oftentimes not enough people have been hired to do this tool optimization thing, because it just isn't on enough radars because this is, I think, a thing where people who are less technical often underestimate what it takes to get things to work right.
Ananda: 13:44
That's a good point. And I do think it's true. Like you said, once you start doing that sorting, you might recognize that those gaps exist. And I also think at first it's a little hard to either quantify or qualify what the gap is, because it is a bit of a new orientation towards technology. Because we're not talking about the old stereotype of technology, which is just IT, you know, where it's just computers and servers and, you know, security and that sort of thing. It's really looking at your technology as, with the same kind of focus and support that you would look at your fundraising or that you would look at your programs. So technology is not just this stagnant thing that you put in place and as soon as you take it off the shelf, it does what it needs to do and then you never look at it again. It's just like a program that is going to the content and how you deliver it and what it gives to your audience is going to grow and evolve and iterate. And it's a living, breathing, developing thing. We look at our technology the same way. It's something that's going, needs to be stewarded and cared for because it's going to need to live and breathe and develop and change along with the organization. You know, you start by talking about it in theory. And then you start to put it into practice. And I think once you start to bear the fruits of that labor, at that point, once it clicks, it really just gets absorbed by the culture and has been used really heavily.
Sam: 15:12
We have been talking recently about production versus production capacity. Sort of an extreme example of that is sometimes you have a technical team or a database team where everyone sends their data entry to be done. And we, of course, as you know, think of that as, that's fully a gold team function. Like everybody should be able to do their own data entry. Everybody should be able to pull their own reports. And then production capacity is if you need to level up in your skills on something, then come to the blue team and they'll help you level up. But just executing the work on the systems is not technical.
Ananda: 15:43
Correct.
Sam: 15:44
And I wonder is this part of the value you get out of saying that's a goal team task?
Ananda: 15:49
Yeah, I think it's basically from the perspective of creating that partnership and ally- ship to be like our job is to build, implement and optimize tools that allow you to do your work well. Um, so it doesn't mean that... I don't know where this analogy came from. I'm going to assume it's one of Chris's brilliant, um, isms that he created, but it's, you know, the other thing we'll say is like, we don't want to make the blue team, a department of paper.
Chris: 16:18
That's a Sam one.
Sam: 16:19
That's one of my onlys. That one was mine.
Ananda: 16:22
Sam so sorry for not giving you the, your credit where credit is
Sam: 16:26
It's all
Ananda: 16:27
due. Yeah, we shamelessly steal all of these isms from you all. Cause they're such like brilliant little quick one-liners to explain the kind of theory behind it. But yes, even though we built, maybe let's say our event registration platform, it doesn't mean that from then on whenever we want to spin up a registration, we are using the platform that we set up in order to do so. We are actually selecting and implementing a platform with the intention that it is user-friendly and intuitive and enjoyable to use so that we can hand it off to our, you know, either online education or events or podcast team, whoever might need to host an in-person or virtual event. And they have the platform they need in order to set that up and use it. If they need new functionality, they come back to us, we iterate. If they have questions, need more training and experience an issue they absolutely come back to us. But the whole point is that we are creating products that empower them to do their jobs well.
Sam: 17:25
And I assume they're way more happy about that, right? It's like, they're the chefs in the kitchen. You're making sure they have the knives and everything, but they're not, they don't have to sit there in the other room and say, now, could you chop the celery up?
Ananda: 17:35
Totally, I mean, I think it's about distributing empowerment. So we're making sure all the teams are empowered to do what they need to do, utilizing technology. To do it any other way would mean that we're going to hoard the ability we're going to hoard the empowerment, and then we're going to create a bottleneck. The idea with distributed ownership is to distribute knowledge, distribute, capacity, distribute, empowerment.
Sam: 18:00
Beautifully said.
Ananda: 18:01
I think one thing that our gold team partners just got really used to is that I ask a lot of questions because I'm really curious and interested the why behind what we're doing, because the why behind what we're doing allows me to make really well-informed strategic decisions. When someone comes with a request, there's not always an obvious, easy technology solution. I think depending on the overall outcome and goal, there's often 10 different ways we could implement something from a technology perspective. So what they're getting from me is not just an executer of technology. They're getting a really strategic thought partner. So there's certain considerations they're going to bring to the table from their gold team perspective of what they need and why. And then I'm bringing my blue team considerations to the table and asking really thoughtful questions to basically get at the strategy and approach that would best meet their needs. So I always like to not think shortsightedly, I like to think really long-term and I like to think kind of strategic. I like to work smarter, not harder. So what can we build? That's going to work longterm and be able to improve and grow and develop and make everyone's lives and work easier.
Chris: 19:18
And I think that really might be the central superpower of, somebody in your role. And we talk about being the understander in chief. And there are people that can do that checking a box. Have the conversations, gather the requirements, and people can be like, okay, well, and, uh, talk to them about this and they want this, this and this and fine. Okay. Blah, blah, blah. And you know, th there's lots of levels of, of caring about doing that. But the fact is, you have an innate sort of, you're driven to understand and understand more and understand better, and that drives you to have more conversations and better conversations. And really, I think that is the primary superpower among the other skills that you need to be a great product manager.
Ananda: 20:05
Well, thank you. I enjoy it. And I think when we talk about, you know, blue and gold, that's a part of what you were saying earlier about: everyone likes to geek out on something, or everyone likes to geek out somewhere. I genuinely enjoyed geeking out there. I don't know where it comes from. I'm also, I'll just say on a personal note, like I'm extremely dyslexic. So for me growing up traditional school and traditional learning, didn't click or come to me very easily. So I think that's just something that is a part of my personality. I've always had to try to like translate things, to make sense in the way that I learn or do things differently or reduce the mental capacity and mental load of tasks because the cognitive processing I'm slower at that. But I just got good at asking questions and not being ashamed of asking questions until, you know, I felt like I got a grasp enough that it made sense for me. And so I, I used to really see that as like a disability and now it's really fun to see it evolve and to have found a niche where I feel like it can be seen as a super power rather than like a disability.
Sam: 21:14
God, that's so cool. You know, Getting back to this idea of distributed ownership, I was thinking about how because we have sort of an extended history of working together with you all at CAC it's come back around at various times. We've sort of had to revisit and re incubate it at different times. So I was thinking about how we started out, like we talked about with Salesforce and that was your realm. And then the organization sorta had to redo it for the website. And I think people sometimes have a hard time seeing how the website is the same. And then once you do it, it may be it's like forehead slappingly obvious. But I remember having to sort of reeducate the organization again. It'd be like, there are great ideas that are latent that no one is allowing out because they just don't believe in the capacity of the organization to make them real. And they feel like they're trapped and they, you know, they just don't have the basic tools they need to do their job. So I I'm interested to know just about how that process has been for you, seeing the, seeing the whole model and distributed ownership take, hold in terms of the website.
Ananda: 22:18
It's such a good question. And before I dive directly into my answer, I'm going to do a shameless plug for, that's why I think our ongoing partnership that has been on and off as we've needed it has been so vital and important, you know? These are things that I felt like I knew through and through. And then when we evolved it from applying to CRM to web as well, I even needed a refresher. I needed kind of a reinvigoration of how that divide works and how it would be applied to web. So you're absolutely correct. When six years ago, when we were implementing this model, as it aligned with the CRM implementation and Salesforce implementation for our organization, you know, we had awesome support. We did it super well. And then we kind of went about our business and disbanded our partnership with The Build Tank for a couple of years. And then when we thought, you know, what, we really need to bring web into this model as well, because this is not being utilized as the CRM team is, uh, we got back together and did that refresher. And it's just been so helpful to have that support over the last six years when we've needed it at different times and for different areas.
Sam: 23:23
The way I remember it also is, is not even that the CAC came back and said, we need to implement that model. I remember Michael reaching out and just being like, we've got all this pain around the website, what's going on. He's just like, you helped us fix the CRM thing. Can you tell what's going on here? And I remember coming in and saying, it's, it's the same thing, same, same things happening over here that you fixed over there. You just didn't fix it over here. And I think it is hard for people to see that. It's obvious in retrospect, but, um, I think this happens all the time for Chris and me, right? Like we see the same pain symptoms repeatedly and we're like, Yeah. That's this gap. Yeah. That's this gap. Yep. That's this gap.
Ananda: 23:59
Yeah. And I don't know exactly why maybe the gap wasn't as easy for us to identify if I had to theorize, I would say it's because CRM is really seen as a super technical internal database platform for us, whereas web it's not necessarily oriented to as like that sort of a platform because it's so front facing. So rather than your internal technology team owning something like a CRM, which I think was an easier sell, the technology team owning the web there was a lot more reluctance around that from our marketing and engagement and creative teams. So it was just the reeducation of the beauty of the partnership of let's think of this website as a tool. And it's a tool for accomplishing our mission. It's a tool upon which we do marketing, we do communication, we do external messaging and brand building. But in order to do that, it needs to have functionality that's optimized. It needs to be constantly iterated upon and supported, or else it's going to be really ugly and outdated and honestly, an embarrassment for the organization if it doesn't get that kind of ongoing investment, support, and stewardship. You know, you all have a great article that talks about this. Once you have that alignment, then a lot of that, um, turfy ness or territorialism will dissolve. And it's not that we didn't experience that at the beginning. And it's not because anyone has that intent within our organization. It's mostly because we hadn't been doing web well. So there was a lot of well-earned distrust. And a lot of belief of like, "I had to fight hard to even get it to where it is today. So why would I let that go and risk it falling back into dysfunction?" So I think once we're able to articulate the theory of the model, but then very quickly set it up and get some really quick wins, it wasn't hard to then set up this same kind of collaborative ownership. And even this year, we're still in an ongoing project that we're calling governance, where it's just getting really, really clear about roles and responsibilities around the website and what the processes are in order to support that. And it's become a really beautiful distributed ownership model and collaboration, but it just took a little bit of internal education and demonstration to get there.
Sam: 26:21
Yeah. that makes so much sense. Yeah. It's that people, once they realize they have an ally, that's going to help them get to somewhere better, they're only too happy to sort of release their grip on something, right? Their grip is because they have spent so long not having the tools they want. So they finally like, I'm going to own this thing. I'm going to build a new website or I'm getting, you know, I'm going to find someone to build this database. And then once they realize, oh, wait, I've got, I've got a greatmaker here who's going to help me do it better and I can just focus on my pieces of it then there, then they're thrilled to give up that, that turf.
Ananda: 26:51
Yeah. We did a listening tour when we first proposed bringing web into the digital product team and treating it in the same kind of ownership model that we do for CRM. We just started with a listening tour. And it was truly, I think, a bit therapeutic for our gold team partners to just be able to honestly say, here's, what's working, here's what's not, here's the dreams that I have for it. Here's like the dreams that I think will never be accomplished because it happens too slow or it would cost too much. And just be able to get that all out on the table and then say, we're going to care about the success of this just as much as you do. And we're going to bring some expertise and capacity from our side of the equation to get you to where you want to be. And it doesn't have to be completely owned and executed by you. And we're going to bring even more, um, strategic thought to the equation then even what you've already been holding so far.
Sam: 27:44
Yeah. Awesome. Well, as, as maybe suspected, we went a lot longer with this than we intended to, and then we promised you that we would, uh, but I think we could all talk about this stuff for forever. We did say we were going to play stump the unicorn before we let you go. Uh, so maybe we'll just have one little stump the unicorn question. It's not really a quiz because this one is just something that Chris and I have been just haggling about this very day. So it's just like basically having you help us do our work to, to answer this question. So we, we don't even have a right answer here, but we are haggling about where, whether design. So we talked about the blue, blue gold divide. We were talking about whether design is blue or gold. What is your opinion?
Ananda: 28:28
What a good question. If we're talking about design, as it refers to like data architecture, that to me is clearly blue. How are we eventually going to want to report on and analyze this data? The design of that falls on our blue CRM team. If we're talking about design, as it comes to like UX UI, that's a bit shared on, like, let's say our web side. So we're going to get input from our marketing team and from our creative team about our brand story guide or our, you know, visual look and feel. And then it's up to us to build the platform that can represent that. And so design is a UX UI question that is informed by both blue and gold on our web side.
Sam: 29:13
Mic dropper.
Chris: 29:15
You, you just, uh, basically, um, took my side of the argument. So I am the winner.
Sam: 29:22
No, that's not true. That was, I think that, that's how I, well, okay I thought that's what I felt too. But you just pulled the rug out from under me so I guess, I guess I'll have to say you're the winner.
Chris: 29:32
I had to jump quickly to take the win.
Sam: 29:34
Yeah. You'd be like what Ananda said. I feel like you just solved it for us and I appreciate it. And now we will steal from you.
Ananda: 29:41
What was the premise of your argument though? What, what had you on the other side of the equation, Sam,
Sam: 29:46
Well, I wasn't, I'm going to say, Hey, how come everyone's
Chris: 29:49
this is
Ananda: 29:50
How'd you having such a wrong opinion, Sam?
Sam: 29:52
I wasn't. I do think, uh, well, I think it's exactly what you said. I think a lot of design is blue. I think, uh, some elements of design is blue and I think creative direction is gold.
Ananda: 30:03
Yeah, I think it depends on what we're defining as design and that then if you define design a little bit more, clearly it becomes more obvious.
Chris: 30:12
But I think the way you said it really represents the fact that it's the classic distributed ownership model, where there is a creative director who has a vision and they, if they can make that vision happen with the existing tools, great. They can go for it. If the platform needs to be tweaked, it needs to be improved, to get to the point where they can have their vision come true, you do need somebody who has those sorts of design skills coming to the table. But it's that, it's that classic distributed ownership, uh, model, I think to, to make it happen.
Ananda: 30:51
Yes, that was even better said than what, what I said
Sam: 30:55
No chance.
Ananda: 30:57
It's open. This is a little bit more of a tangent, but I'll just throw it in here. Whenever we onboard a new employee, we usually do like an all staff gathering and we might throw out some kind of question that everyone answers just as a way to get to know each other. And I really loved, we were onboarding someone, uh, for our creative team and our creative director threw out the question of, like, what about your role would you consider creative? And what about that creativity do you like? And I loved that question because I don't often feel like technical jobs-- I think it's changing nowadays-- but historically, technical jobs weren't necessarily looked at as creative jobs. And I think there's nothing about my job that's not creative, from how we put a platform together, what it's solving, how this data is going to talk to one another, how it's going to supercharge someone's role or simplify it. It's just so creative, how we take all of these different inputs and all of these different puzzle pieces and get them to fit together really well. Which feels like such a creative problem solving challenge to me. So, I think that's when we're talking about design it's like, what part of the design are we talking about? The more creative like branding or are we talking about the, how it's represented and implemented on the platform? So it's both.
Sam: 32:15
So well said. Yeah, Ananda, this was awesome. Thank you for joining us. We are going to ask you to do this frequently. Please come back.
Ananda: 32:24
Thank you guys, I'm just, yeah. My life and career and orientation to technology has transformed since meeting y'all. So anytime I get a chance to connect and geek out over this kind of stuff with you, I will absolutely say yes.
Sam: 32:39
That's amazing. Thank you, Ananda. So appreciate it.
Ananda: 32:42
K Bye!
Sam: 32:48
Well, there you have it. The fantastic Ananda Robie.
Chris: 32:53
She's uh, she's a Greatmaker, despite any humility that would say otherwise.
Sam: 32:58
She's unbelievable. She's Yeah. Really is, like I was saying, a five tool player. She's got it all. She's got all the pieces. And you know, it's like you listen to an Ananda... We spend a lot of time talking about sort of the, the abstraction of the type of person that you want on board in your technology team. And as an abstraction, you can sort of nod your head and be like, yeah, okay, okay, okay. But when you listen to an Ananda, it's obvious how that's going to be one of the most valuable players you could possibly have in your organization at any level, in any area. You know what I mean? I mean, talking about force multiplier, like in Ananda and a team of people who work under Ananda's benevolent direction is like what an incredible impact on an organization.
Chris: 33:44
Yep. She's a force multiplier. We talk about the two sides of being a product chief that, they're the protector of the realm and the greatmaker. And really Ananda embodies this so innately Always a challenge. I mean, I can see why she said she sort of takes this sorta, like, I don't know my greatmaker, maybe a good enough maker because there's always room for improvement, but that's the point. Nothing stays great. no piece of technology stays great. If you don't keep innovating. You either go forward or you go backwards. You either invest in it continually or it, or it rusts and clogs and freezes.
Sam: 34:28
Amen! We believe this stuff and we do. It's true. Uh, this was fun. Thank you everyone for joining us. See you next time. Assuming that we do this again
Chris: 34:36
on The Greatmakers with a couple of bozos.