Every product leader deals with conflicting data, strong opinions, and pressure from the top. That's the moment, the hard call. I'm Tricia Price, and this is Hard Calls. The podcast where product leaders get honest about the high stakes decisions that have defined their careers. Each week, I'll sit down with experienced product leaders who've been through the fire. If you build software or lead people who do, subscribe to Hard Calls. Real leaders, real decisions, real outcomes...Hard Call - Episode 1

Trisha Price: [00:00:00] If you build software or lead people who do, then you're in the right place. This is hard calls, real decisions, real leaders, real outcomes. Welcome to episode one of Hard Calls. I'm Trisha Price. I'm the Field Chief Product Officer at Pendo. I've spent my entire career building software. I started off as a software engineer, then became the chief product officer at nCino, and then came to be the Chief Product Officer at Pendo.

At nCino. I had the incredible opportunity to start at the company in the pretty early days and watch the company grow, lead the scale all the way through the IPF. Then I came to Pendo where we build a platform for other product leaders. So I get to spend all of my time talking to product managers and product leaders all across the world.

And in those conversations I hear the same thing over and over again. I have to make the hard calls. I get pressure from sales, I get pressure [00:01:00] from my customers, pressure from the board. AI is turning my roadmap upside down, and it's a hard job. It's constantly feeling squeezed from every direction, and I'm the one who's left to be accountable and drive outcomes and constantly having to make the hard calls.

In this podcast, we're gonna talk about frameworks, operating models, gut instincts, leadership, team dynamics, business process, all the things that you need, all the tools you need to make the hard call. This first guest is someone who's had an incredible impact on my career. They taught me about making hard product decisions, but also hard people decisions.

How do you set up your team to scale? I've been in the fire with this person making hard calls for many, many years, and I know their impact on me on this podcast and all my career has been absolutely incredible and long lasting.[00:02:00]

Good morning, Pierre, and welcome to the first Hard Calls podcast.

Pierre Naudé: It's good to be here and good seeing you.

Trisha Price: It's good to see you. Pierre. Just to get started this morning, could you introduce yourself a little bit and tell our listeners who you are and maybe how you and I know each other?

Pierre Naudé: Yes, thanks, Trisha.

Um, I'm Pierre Naudé. I'm the Executive chairman of nCino, a public company traded on nasdaq. I was the founding Cee O in 2011. nCino and managed it until February this year. When I moved to the exec chair level, I was Cee O there for over 13 years, and I got to know Trisha when she joined our company. She knows the exact dates.

We had a very close working relationship, had fantastic experiences together.

Trisha Price: Thanks, Pierre. Yeah, I actually joined nCino in 2016 and we can talk a little bit more about that journey. And I was there through our [00:03:00] IPO, which Pierre and I experienced together, um, and left to come to Pendo in 2021. So we'll talk more about our working relationship and experiences and successes and maybe a couple of bumps in the road.

In today's podcast and the concept behind the podcast of Hard Calls is as product leaders, as leaders of product companies like nCino. The product rule's hard, right? It's always, uh. Everyone has opinions, right? The salespeople, they have opinions. Your customers have opinions. The board has opinions. The Cee O has opinions, and yet at the end of the day, as the product leader, you are sort of left there to make the hard call.

You're the one who's accountable in the end. And so maybe today we can. Kick off and start off with a hard call that each one of us had to make at nCino. So maybe kick us off. What's, what's the hard call you can remember us having to make together?

Pierre Naudé: Yes, I, I would say there's two main concepts when you drive a company.

The first one is to understand your [00:04:00] vision from day one, how big you wanna be. You wanna build a little private companies, sell it for 50 million, make a lot of money and go to the beach, or do you have aspirations to be the worldwide leader in your segment? And I think that's very important because it drives down to product what you're gonna do that actually determines do you build a platform versus do you build a product company.

So I would say strategically that is your first big choice, both as the Cee o, as well as the product leader. The second one, which is actually more directly involved with product leaders is actually scaling. So I want you to think, I know you start thinking about product choices, technology tools. Do you embrace ai?

You know, is it. In the cloud, is it platforms? The real issue is your organization with success will grow tremendously. And how do you scale both the structure? The people management and the ability to manage hundreds of people versus in the beginning, you're a band of brothers [00:05:00] or sisters. You're all together, you're building this little company.

You're so excited because you want your first 10 customers. Well, the same people who ran that business on day one are not the same people who's gonna run it when it goes public. And I would tell you, if I come back to hard calls, some of the hardest calls is to tell those people that. The scale has outgrowing their ability to manage and judgment, because what we get paid for in the end is judgment.

Okay. And so then you have to find different positions in the company for them and bring people in that can do that scale. I think that is a critical element of management as well as product management.

Trisha Price: Pier. That's really helpful and brings me back to when you brought me on. To nCino. Right, exactly. And maybe you can talk a little bit about that.

Right. We met in San Francisco in that time in 2016, and I think you were at a critical point of scale, right? We had just signed two very large top 20 banks in the US [00:06:00] and had to make sure that they were successful with our product and we maintained our reputation, and I think that's part of why you brought me to nCino.

Pierre Naudé: A hundred percent. I still remember where we sat in one market at a cafeteria down in the foyer and we started talking. And one of my bank customers told you to connect with us, if you remember correctly. And we started talking. And I realized at the time that we moved from the very small startup with excitement and you know, 50 people in PE and then.

I needed some scale, brought somebody else in from Salesforce, which was very successful. Brought some structure, brought some more mature management, which is what we needed. But I also realized we needed domain expertise, which means banking. Do you understand banking? Do you understand credit? Do you understand how banker think, how the credit people think?

How they think about scaling, et cetera, and how they trust us. I needed a higher level of energy as well, [00:07:00] and I met you and I immediately found that the two of us just connected from a technology perspective, a perspective on how it should work, because in the end, it's about the results to the customer.

Okay. The second thing I saw was a tremendous leadership ability on how to drive people and energy in the same direction. Because look, especially technologists, I was a programmer, analyst, call it what you like. In my early stages of my career and wrote code until I was 36 years old, because I loved it. I loved tech.

We all have opinions. Every room I always walked in, I would say to people using Android and iPhone. And of course in America it's about 80%, you know, iPhones versus Android, and I would tell them, which one do you like better? Of course we all like the one we know. It's the same with technology in product.

All these new things come along, but realize the bulk of your people know the older tech and they're comfortable with it. And so how do you bring them along to adapt and [00:08:00] change and actually embrace newer technologies? That's why companies go stale. So I saw that energy in you and we decided to bring you, I still remember you said to me, well, I wanna be a chief product officer.

I said. Just trust me. Come along and, and while we find you a nice spot and you go work there and get to know the place and we'll do the right thing, if you recall correct.

Trisha Price: I do. And, and I made a big leap of faith. I moved my family to Wilmington, North Carolina and took a job that was by title, you know, slightly a step below where I was coming from, but I trusted you and I trusted the vision.

And I think it worked out pretty well for both of us. What do you think?

Pierre Naudé: it did? But you know what? Because if you look back and you have to give somebody else advice today, you would say, why would you ever do that? Well, it gave you the foundation that you managed from later on. That early stage took the pressure off of being the lead person and immediately make some calls because you didn't know the background, didn't understand the Salesforce [00:09:00] platform at the time, the technology platforms we were on.

People. So it gives you kind of like a protected way to come in, get to know the whole thing, knowing the bigger picture you and I were talking about, and then once you took over, you were fully prepared for it, and that was the foundation of your success and that was the whole scaling thing.

Trisha Price: Uh, Pierre, let's talk about the fact that, you know, you made me the offer.

It wasn't a CPO offer that I was looking for. It was maybe technically a step down, but I've always been told if you get an offer for a seat on a rocket ship, you take it and you don't ask what seat and maybe the particular title or the particular salary that you're getting offered in the moment. Is not what's critically important and, and I think that really worked out for me, like, how do you think about that?

How do you think about that as advice to our listeners?

Pierre Naudé: Firstly, you have to understand the psychology of that meeting and what the hiring person is thinking about is, I'm gonna bring this person on. I've got high [00:10:00] expectations. I'm gonna promote her here shortly. I wanna see the enthusiasm, the energy, and the all in attitude.

And I always remind my kids as well going there. Pretend this is the best job you apply forever until you get the offer. You can always say no, but you never go into an interview sitting there saying things like, well, you know, I'm not so sure. That sounds to me like a lame horse, and I'll be very polite and talk to you about your interest and worry about you.

When it's over, I'll tell people, go find somebody else. Because what I want is somebody who comes in and is gonna be headstrong with me down this path with these audacious goals and things we dreamt up that we are gonna be. And that's so important that you've got that enthusiasm and you've got that drive and you show that up front.

Once you're in the boat, you've got an opinion, you can speak up, you can argue with us strategically, but that's, you're in the boat and then you help us to drive the company in the right direction.

Trisha Price: So Pierre. [00:11:00] From day one, you had a vision for nCino that was. Huge. Right? It was, I mean, when there was seven of you sitting in one conference room, there was a sign that said, global leader in cloud banking, global leader in cloud banking.

Seven people in Wilmington, North Carolina. Right.

Pierre Naudé: Yes, we actually put up a sign at the, at the entry door of the small building that said, worldwide headquarters.

Trisha Price: Worldwide headquarters in Wilmington, North Carolina with seven people in one room. And you know that fast forward it you, you are the global leader in cloud banking and you never, you know, as we talk about hard calls, there were many times people doubted us. There were many times people doubted the ability to execute on that big vision. And yet here you are. IPO successful company, clearly leader to the [00:12:00] cloud, now leader to AI leader internationally as it comes to cloud banking.

Like talk about. The perseverance, how we did that. What were some of the hard choices and pressures we were under, uh, to get there?

Pierre Naudé: Yes. So the first thing is you have to understand scaling at that rate is chaotic. So you need people who's very adaptable, enthusiastic, and is willing to run through a war proverbially for you.

Okay? So we set up a set of values for the company to say, what you hire has to fit in this box. It is very simplistic values, and I'll urge you to go look at the ENC CNA website and look at the set of values. English is my second language, so I used very simple terms of how to do that. Okay? But one was to have fun because if you come into that situation and you cannot laugh at yourself and have fun, you cannot survive there.

The second thing is to understand you may be reassigned to other roles. Of a drop of a coin because that's what it takes you [00:13:00] to be flexible and just do things and rotate into different roles to grow your career. Okay. The third thing to realize is lots of failures. It, it's not gonna succeed on day one, because I remember we started winning big banks and I mean mega banks.

Okay. Like Truist, bank of America, et cetera. In about the 2016 timeframe and at our annual user conference in 2017. We just signed Bank of America. We've got these big, big banks with their own specific requirements and they try to steer the company because they know we're a smaller company. I announced we are gonna build consumer lending, and the conference I thought was gonna cheer for me, literally groaned, and then started complaining about how could we divert resources off to that.

Now realized. Our resources behind us. The funding people said, Peter, you've got as much money as you need. Just go as fast as you can. So we could hire at a very fast rate more people and de redirect them off to consumer, which by the way, in the [00:14:00] end turn had to be an extremely difficult build. I don't think people understand the complexity behind consumer lending and banking.

It's highly regulated environment, but the point is we took that leap of faith while keeping these customers happy and keep on growing the growth engine, which is commercial. Okay. And Trisha had to end, endure the pain of hiring all these new people, putting teams in place at that rate. In the meantime, we tried to change integrations.

We tried to take on different platforms because. The salesforce.com platform is great for workflow, but once you get into deep data analysis, integrations, et cetera, there's other tools you can use. So we had to adapt Amazon as a, as a separate platform in the journey and then make these technologies work together at the same time.

So you go to the engineering level, they're complaining, come on man, I just learned this tool. Now you do that. How do I make these two work together? What you have to do is lay out the vision and the excitement that this is an opportunity. [00:15:00] Every obstacle is an opportunity for be more successful, simplifying deep complexity and actually doing special things.

And what Trisha and the team did was always to embrace that kind of an excitement. So if you know the building, we've got a three story building engineering, sit on the second floor. Okay. I'm on the third floor with sales and marketing and the corporate functions, and I used to love to walk down there to the second floor and have fun with them and explain to them, guys, I used to be you.

I wrote code. I know what I'm doing to you, but this is fun. This is the most exciting time of your life. So you can comment on that and how it worked out. Yeah,

Trisha Price: look, it was, it was so much fun. And if I recall, when you would come downstairs, we would call it the engine room that you would visit exactly in the engine room.

I,

Pierre Naudé: I, a Titanic. And I said, it's the engine room down there. I have to go down there, the proverbial engine room, because we were

Trisha Price: powering the company, we were the engine. And, and Pierre, you knew totally. It, it, it [00:16:00] is you, you brought up a couple of really fun and interesting moments. You know, 2017 when we.

Started down the path of consumer lending, you know, that was in support of your vision from day one about being the global leader in cloud banking. You didn't say we wanted to be the global leader in commercial lending, but it was hard. You're right. And I think when we talk about hard calls and we talk about the pressure of a product leader, you know.

We were still in early innings of commercial lending at that time. Right. And there was still a lot of work to do. You talked about integrations, you talked about, um, we, we haven't talked about, but like our underwriting or what bankers call our spreading technology. You know, we were in the midst of really beefing that up.

We were in the midst of trying to add AI and machine learning, doing acquisitions all at the same time to start doing consumer lending. And, you know, I think about hard calls. [00:17:00] That was a hard call and it was hard to execute on, you know, and I think some of the mistakes, when I think about some of the mistakes I made as a product leader during that time, some of the tricks, tools that we used in commercial lending, I tried to utilize the same ideas, concepts, frameworks for consumer lending, and that's where.

I made mistakes and broke down. Like you get a tool in your toolbox and you say, Hey, that worked, right? Let's use it like commercial lending. Highly configurable can do integrations on the fly using sis and partners. They're sort of bespoke and custom to each bank. But then you come to consumer lending and that product has to completely out of the box, rip and replace.

Existing complex systems. And I think some of the things in the early days of 2000 17, 18, 19 of consumer lending, when we tried to, or I tried [00:18:00] to sort of use the winnings from commercial and apply to consumer, I think were were some real lessons learned for me.

Pierre Naudé: I remember it so well, I thought this morning about collateral, for instance.

Mm-hmm. And to the audience, you buy a house, your house becomes the collateral to the loan. In other words, it backs up the loan. If you don't pay your loan, they're gonna sell their house, take their money. Well, that's a very simplistic one-to-one relationship. If you take that same example to a complex commercial loan where the collateral could be multiple pieces of assets, you could have a board of directors who sign off on the loan, et cetera.

All that combination is so much more so you try to take this very complex structure and push it into a. A consumer loan, which only needed a one-to-one relationship. And we were like, well, it's a platform so we should use the same underpinnings. There's many of these shared components. And later on we became smart enough to do that.

And the most simple example I can give you is you can take your kids to school in a Camry, in the minivan, a school bus. [00:19:00] All three of those are transportation mechanisms. So when I speak at the top, I said, we're in transportation. You can decide to build a school bus, a minivan, or a Camry. Three very different vehicles with the different levels of comfort.

Totally different utilities. And so you have to think upfront, which is the one you want? One kid in a Camry, maybe four in the minivan, or 50 in a school bus, and you're gonna architect different, your safety mechanisms, your seats, your configuration, the driver comfort. Everything is different. Yeah. And so you have to contemplate those things.

And don't be pedantic. Sit back and say, this is a very specialized thing. I'm gonna build its own utility. Or this is a common share component and we were, you know, open to make those changes. There's one other element I want to touch on, uh, Trisha, which I know is gonna be heresy in many product groups as they think about organization structures.

Okay. Yeah. And we had many, many arguments about organization structures, and I know if you read the textbooks, they will tell you in today's world you have [00:20:00] an engineering team. And you have product. Mm-hmm. And then product ideate and they look at the product and they, then they write Jira tickets and boom, it goes to engineers and they get this ticket.

And I used to call that, that's the 20 page spec. And then they reinterpret that and they write the code. So they somewhat removed. And you've got flexible in resources, so I'm sure if you're from a big company, you're gonna sit there thinking, yeah, but that's how it has to work because I need to flexibility in resources.

I would tell you as a guy who wrote code till I was 36 and became a Cee O of a public company, it was very successful, is that I never understood that way because what you make with me then is a code monkey, and by the way, that job I just described today can be taken over by AI immediately. The value of the engineer is actually be a domain expert.

I could never be as big and spend all my time as a domain expert, but that's why I believed in product managers with a bunch of analysts around them, people who come from the [00:21:00] business and who can analyze all the user requirements, all the fields, all the editing, et cetera, and they can write the spec, but write a two page spec, sit right next to the programmers, involve them every day on what's the vision of the product, what is the use cases, and so on.

Now you give them a concept and say. Here's this tag detail, but let them write the code. So I'm still an advocate of smaller teams with good leaders around domain expertise. And those teams can be led by ex engineers, ex product people, or ex business people. Yeah. But you pick the strongest leader who've got some imagination, understand where the future is gonna be, understand the industry.

Trisha Price: Yeah.

Pierre Naudé: And that way. You have to break up your product into these smaller components. Your dilemma with that is when you build an enterprise architecture like we did is Trisha will say, well, wait a minute, now I've got these rogue bandits running around and, and then I duplicate stuff and how do I architect?

Well, that is, this [00:22:00] is the a hundred million dollar question. You got architects coming across. The reason people change these org structures is actually always to fix an old problem. So we went from these smaller teams to this big construct of engineers over here, engineering managers and product people over here.

That's awesome. From flexibility. The problem is the engineers are coding monkeys and then they get moved around and the product guy who owns the delivery dates says, well, they took three of my people. Then they're gonna move three different ones in here who's got no background on consumer. They come from commercial, so they kind of give me this commercial like consumer experience.

Trisha, you'll remember all this. Yeah. Okay. So there's no religious answer on that, but what I would tell you is in my experience, the closer you keep and train the engineers. To the business solution, the more innovation you'll get, you'll be amazed because they know the [00:23:00] tech so well, how these engineers and not all of them, but I will tell you these 10% of them wants to move into management and wants to run products.

I was reminded my team, what did Steve Jobs do before he ran Apple? He wrote code. Okay. Yeah. What did Bill Gates do? He wrote code.

Trisha Price: What did we do, Pierre?

Pierre Naudé: What

Trisha Price: did

Pierre Naudé: we do? We wrote code. Wrote code, and we understand it. You know, I would go to the second floor and Theresa would laugh because I would go there and talk to the techies and they would go, ah, it's an old, what does he know?

He doesn't know this stuff. The difference was when I did it, we literally had to manipulate. The code at the memory level, at the database level, because we didn't have the resources. We didn't have the computing power today. Today they've got the luxury of our ineffective code. We could not do that. Yeah.

So actually we have a very deep understanding of how the the processes work, how the [00:24:00] databases work, how memories allocated, how this thing works, how the integration, you know, I did network engineering, I did deep database engineering and design, and what that gives you is a fundamental understanding. Of how this is gonna go.

So you have to connect that technology with the people and make it interesting and make it a great place to work.

Trisha Price: Pierre, remember we used to tell everybody all the time, we had the first same first job outta college, which was writing Colbalt on the mainframe.

Pierre Naudé: Exactly. And the kids used to laugh at me until I remind them also a disassembler, which is actually manipulating the engine.

But these are the kind of calls you have to make. And so what I'm telling you is. These are hard calls because it affects technology choices and you make a technology decision that's wrong. A platform decision, your company will pay for it. Yeah. So you have to understand that. Stay your course, but be willing to change when you see it doesn't work.

Just like we stay the our course on the Salesforce platform, but when you realize the front end [00:25:00] technology needs better flexibility and quicker development, we move that to AWS. We integrate the two things, okay? When we realized we're gonna go big into the data business, that's not a good application for the salesforce.com platform.

So we moved that to AWS and Databricks. So those are the things you have to make. The second really emotional, big decisions you're gonna make in your career is actually the scaling question. When is your best buddy that started the company with you, or the person that worked five years with you, not ability to scale anymore?

Some people are built for these startups and that's what they like to do, and they run around the chaos. When you become 2000 people, it's a very different management structure. The management meetings are different. In the early days, I would sit around the table and ask everybody, what did you do last week?

Sounds kinda like DOGE, doesn't it? What your five things you did last week? But then as you get big, your leaders start thinking strategic. They've got. [00:26:00] Roadmaps that they have to report on. They've got very specific metrics and that's how you track the business and you talk about strategic directions, international expansion, who's gonna lead it, et cetera.

I mean, Tuesday you'll remember we had a very great example, pull, and Daniel, one of the founders and great guy, best sales guy I've seen in my life, pullin was what I would call a captain of a SWAT team. Very good at that. But the moment sales scaled to a certain thing, I need a professional manager, somebody who can run scale.

Yeah. And we put Josh in place and he

Trisha Price: was amazing.

Pierre Naudé: Josh was amazing at scaling and running a very specific structured organization with best practices, databases, et cetera. So I moved poin to London to start of Europe for me. He was the SWAT team captain going to the wild over the hill. Capture for me as much as you can tell me what's going on, where do we go?

And then there's a certain point Europe scale to the point where Poland come home and he helped me with m and a in strategy [00:27:00] because he knows the company so well.

Trisha Price: Pierre, I love how when you talk about hard calls. You think about it, um, through our history from seven people to thousands of people. You talk about it in two ways. You talked about technology decisions, platform decisions, like the ones we had to make with Salesforce and AWS, and then you talked about people decisions.

And as a product leader, as a Cee o. As a leader in general, you gotta make people decisions and you gotta know who are your captains of your SWAT team, who are your real leaders, that that can do process and drive change at scale and bring energy as you talked about. I think it's really interesting and fun how you talked about hard calls in both of those camps, right?

The people calls and the technology calls, and we even kind of talked about 'em in the third way, which is more [00:28:00] like the product strategy calls, right? Like the consumer lending the. You know, the, the calls that we had to make there to go into consumer lending, and I think that's great because it's easy to think about the hard calls as just the product calls or just the technology calls.

But I love your focus on the people because we can't be successful leading companies through an IPO leading companies to scale getting products out there without the right people. And it's interesting how you talked about Poland and Josh as two critically successful people. nCino's success, but in wildly different ways

Pierre Naudé: that I think a very important thing around that is because on that journey of scaling and, and growing your business and be successful, you will have differences.

Sales always wants more faster, et cetera, and it's difficult, you know, and, and, and as a Cee OI had to make sure I keep somewhat at bay because I understand what Trisha had to do, how complex it was, [00:29:00] how difficult it was. Sometimes I would say guys, even though they tell you they're gonna do this in two years, there is zero chance they finish that product in two years, so don't count on it.

Oh, but they said, so we still hold 'em accountable. Well, you know, we're writing code, we all know the ratio. An engineer tell us one month, it's actually four months because they forgot about testing and integration and packaging and getting what I call whole product to market. Yeah. Whole product includes training of the field collateral.

All the documentation, training of customers, marketing, getting sales equipped, et cetera. There's a massive number of things that has to happen after you've written the code. Yeah, so that one month the coder told me is actually quite irrelevant. I just use that as a proxy for how long it'll take to get the thing to market.

But so you're gonna have these differences and you have to have someone in there with a firm hand. To, to make sure the priorities and the, the results stay aligned. So it is very interesting. And then the next one is to, to also understand [00:30:00] as you scale and you move people around, especially when somebody had the chief product job and then you bring somebody in over them, that there's nothing personal about it.

Treat them with respect. Try to keep them in the company. You'll succeed about 50% of the time. Some of them do have an interest to stay and go do something else inside and they get it. By the way, the people thing, it's too much. So here is a key little nugget on scaling. If you wanna scale, and I've always said this, I can go run Apple tomorrow.

Not really, you know that. But what I mean by that is, as long as I have seven good people, if you look at your hierarchies. Every manager should have, on average, about seven people reporting to them. Now, in less complex functions, you're gonna make it 10 and in more complex, you probably make it four, but seven is your historical average.

If you just focus as a leader, whether you're on product, sales, customer [00:31:00] success, if you focus on hiring the very best seven people working for you that you know is gonna take you to heaven, you will be successful. If you're also willing to say, we are gonna have disagreements and debates, but once we set the strategic direction, we're all gonna go focus on execute.

'cause obviously two people didn't disagree with you and now they have to come and do the vote. Once you've said, this is what we are gonna do. There's no debate anymore. We are gonna go execute and we will come back and report on the results and out work and change course if needed. Okay? The third element is, I'm looking for the right word, but let's call it no jackasses.

You find this group of people in companies and they normally very technical in very good, who will do the silent veto. In other words, they sit in a meeting, they go, yep, yep, got it. Then when they walk away, they go behind the scenes and they've got a group of people they influence. They go, nah, never work.

That's not the right [00:32:00] call. We shouldn't have done that. Those people actually use as their power base, a board bunch of junior people that they influence and they second guess you all the time. Okay. They are actually just a bad influence in the company. I can tell you we were brutal on that. If, if we find them out and you do it in public and you tell the people Exactly, because normally let's call this person Jock.

John was very smart, brilliant, good technic, et cetera. But man, they're disrupting. And they, by the way, they, they gather information, keep it to themselves, and then they make everyone dependent on them. That's a power base. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, so those kind of people get 'em out of your company. Now there are some companies who build a whole enterprise on just people like that.

It's sort of places I wanna work at, and I've not seen that many successful places like that. Yeah, they typically churn through people as well, because it's impossible to work there. But I would tell you to identify the characteristics of the individuals you wanna hire [00:33:00] and actually make sure you stick to that.

Will remember till my very last day as the functional Cee o, every new hire group. I'll go speak to them for an hour when they're coming, and I will tell them that maybe their mamas didn't tell 'em this, but they were selected one out of a hundred, one out of a thousand applicants we had. And they're special.

The fact that they're India, they special. Now they have to prove to me that we were right.

Trisha Price: Yeah, Pierre, those are, so I have a funny thing and then I'm gonna say the two things that I really took away from. That leadership style and things you taught me. The funny thing is you just made me laugh and think about when you said your mom, because I'll never forget that our dress code at nCino was look in the mirror and tell me, would your mom be proud if you wore that to work?

And then look one more time, just look a second time. Yes. [00:34:00] And that was our actual address code policy at nCino. Which just, and by

Pierre Naudé: the way, if they, if they say, I think it would be okay, I said, I wanna talk to you mama that will scan me. Right? Have your mama

Trisha Price: call me. Have your mama call me.

Pierre Naudé: Yes.

Trisha Price: Um, exactly.

But the two things I think Pierre, for me, in, in terms of, I think that really helped me grow and be successful. Working for you at nCino and continued in in my path. One was this whole product concept. I did not understand that concept before coming to work for you, and I learned it the hard way through mistakes and with you.

But that whole product thing is something I've definitely taken with me at Pendo, actually at Pendo. We used to have Scrum masters in our engineering team. And what would happen, and this will sound familiar to you, what would happen to me is people would say, yeah, it's done. Look in Jira, it's done. And I would go look in the product, 'cause I use our product daily and I'd say, well it's funny 'cause I don't see it.

And [00:35:00] they'd be like, oh yeah, that. Because we haven't trained so and so and so it's behind a flag and it's only rolled out to this group. And I'm like, well, then it's not done. And I learned that from you. And so I took those scrum masters and we put them into product operations, reporting into product instead of engineering.

And their job as program managers became, if it is not being used by our customers, if it is not being sold by our salespeople. It is not done. And we even started measuring whole product score and how people engage with Pendo as a product isn't just how they use it in the application, but it's are they engaging with everything else around it in our community, right.

Our thought leadership around it. And so that is something I really appreciate that I learned from you and I think has been a big success for us at Pendo in terms of launching new products because from day one. I put those program managers in [00:36:00] place and measured whole products, so thank you.

Pierre Naudé: You do you remember the flywheel concept we put on the board that said, look, and, and, and I realize I, I'm, I'm talking to a broad audience of people, okay.

From a junior engineer all the way to a marketing specialist, a salesperson, and everyone looks through the lens of what they need. And so what I did is I created literally a visual of a toy train, and I said, right, guys, here's the problem. It stops at the station of the engineers and it picks up the code that's completed.

Sales can't use it because there's no collateral, there's no sales selling, nothing. So it has to collect requirements coming around the track from each of these people. What's it you need before you can sell this? And then it goes back into the bucket. We start building it and different people are responsible.

It could be marketing, it could be product management, it could be engineers, et cetera. And then finally you start delivering it with the same trend coming around the track. And as you deliver product [00:37:00] that's now fully baked in the whole product. You actually collect new requirements because who speaks to customers?

Well, marketing, because we do market research, sales speaks to customer every day. Don't forget that professional services speak to them every day because they're implementing it. They see all the flaws of everything. Okay, how about support? Well, they take all the calls and they think, what the heck were you thinking that this thing could ever work like this?

Okay, so you have to make sure you've got a flywheel concept or a train track that not only. Deliver products and training and concepts, but actually collect information from all those stakeholders. Yep. That's why it's so complex to build these things.

Trisha Price: Yeah.

Pierre Naudé: That's why you need methodologies and people who can work together.

Trisha Price: Yeah, because products aren't successful because we shipped features, products are successful when our customers get value from them, when we drive revenue from them and they're adopted and used and loved and so, you know, it doesn't stop at shipping.

Pierre Naudé: Whether we [00:38:00] like it or not, and we are proud of the products we've built this, you get measured on your financial success.

That is actually the little measurement on the side. I know we've got metrics and you look at this and so on. In the end, in a capitalistic society, you get measured of how many of these things did you sell? How did the customers react, and are you making money on it? And I will tell you this whole AI revolution is gonna change everything we've done.

If you're not willing to cannibalize your business and your processes by applying ai, you will be left behind.

Trisha Price: Totally agree, and I think that's just gonna make these hard calls that we've been talking about that much harder. Right, because are you focused on short term and hitting your numbers and hitting your goals, or are you focused on reinventing yourself?

And long term with AI because the whole game's about to change. So the hard calls are not gonna get easier. They're gonna get harder.

Pierre Naudé: [00:39:00] Exactly.

Trisha Price: Well, thank you Pierre. Um, I truly appreciate you spending time with me this morning, taking me down memory lane, but most of all, I appreciate your mentorship, your leadership, and helping me become the product leader and being prepared to make the hard calls that I get to make every day.

So thank you.

Pierre Naudé: Trisha, thanks for having me. And I have fond memories of us working together and I always told you I was lucky to have you

Trisha Price: and I was lucky. Thank you so

Pierre Naudé: much.

Trisha Price: I remember you told me one time, this is a once in a career situation. We're all in on this rocket ship and you were right. And um, I have fond memories as well.

Pierre Naudé: Thank you and have a good day.

Trisha Price: Thanks. Thank you for listening to Hard Calls, the product podcast, where we share best practices and all the things you need to succeed. If you enjoyed the show today, share with your friends and come back for more.