0:00:00 – (Matt Widdoes): Welcome to another episode of Growth@Scale. I’m your host, Matt Widdoes, and today we are joined by Lindsey Dillon. Lindsey is the Vice President of Marketing at Harness, a fintech platform that empowers consumers to align their spending with their personal values. She’s also held a leadership role at Cash App, where she led high priority growth initiatives following the company’s acquisition of Afterpay.

0:00:19 – (Matt Widdoes): Lindsey’s also spent time leading product marketing at StubHub and Lyft. Lindsey, welcome to the podcast.

0:00:24 – (Lindsey Dillon): Hey Matt, thanks for having me. Excited to be here.

0:00:27 – (Matt Widdoes): I’m excited to have you. So for people who don’t know you, maybe in your own words, like, could you tell us a little bit about your background, where you’ve been, what you do?

0:00:35 – (Lindsey Dillon): Yeah, definitely. So I’ve spent the last ten years in consumer technology companies. So, B2C, companies like Lyft, Afterpay, Cash App, and after spending ten years there and just getting to know the lay of the land, holding a lot of different positions across marketing, I decided to take the leap into the startup world. And I’ve been at Harness for about a year now, and I’m leading the team, their first marketing hire and just building their brand, building their growth marketing function. Building their product marketing function.

0:01:09 – (Lindsey Dillon): It has been an absolute wild ride, but I love it.

0:01:13 – (Matt Widdoes): Cool. Tell us about Harness. Like, what are they? What do they do?

0:01:15 – (Lindsey Dillon): So Harness is a B2B SaaS fintech player. We actually started from the nonprofit world about eight years ago. We started supporting nonprofits as a fundraising platform. And actually our first product, and our first foray into the space was a roundup product. So everyone’s kind of familiar with roundups. So we actually, this is where you.

0:01:37 – (Matt Widdoes): Swipe your credit card. There’s a few, you know, it’s $0.31 left over and you can just have that automatically go to a donation. Is that right?

0:01:43 – (Lindsey Dillon): Exactly. So that concept hadn’t really been applied to the fundraising space, so we actually started there with our first product, built out a much larger fundraising platform. We’ve had 2500 different clients, customers in the nonprofit space, but recently we actually have expanded to serve other verticals in an impact-driven way. So helping credit unions drive more impact back into their community.

0:02:11 – (Lindsey Dillon): And we’re also exploring spaces in the music space, also in the sports sector. We’re really at the heart of Harness, about tying people spend to what they care about most. So it started off, you care about nonprofits, you care about shopping locally in your community. And in the future, we hope to use Harness to connect people to things they care about, like music and sports. So we’re just kind of getting started.

0:02:36 – (Matt Widdoes): Yeah, well, and there’s a lot to be done there. And it’s a huge. It’s basically anybody who wants to direct their money into something they care about in a way that’s automated and kind of baked into their normal lifestyle, versus rushing at the end of the year to make donations to something you care about or opening a piece of mail and being like, oh, I should donate to that. And then you forget about it and you hate yourself. Maybe later because you didn’t do it or whatever. It makes it easy to kind of contribute to the stuff you care about.

0:03:01 – (Lindsey Dillon): And the other piece that we’re really excited about is not only are we making those connections, making them seamless through our, like, our fintech ecosystem, but also connecting people to the impact directly. So it’s the storytelling components. So, like, when you donated your $20 to the SBCA last month, like, what did that actually do? Where did that money actually go? And so facilitating some of that storytelling through channels like email, through SMS, so that you actually get a readout of, hey, your donation fed four animals in need, or your donation helped buy two backpacks for these kids in your community.

0:03:41 – (Lindsey Dillon): It’s really just making that connection from that end consumer back to the client, the customer, the entity that we work with, and just helping build that relationship.

0:03:51 – (Matt Widdoes): Which really benefits everyone because the person is probably more likely to give because the idea of, I wrote a check for $500, and it went to this unknown pit of money, and I don’t even know what my impact was. And then two. Yeah. When I can better understand that, I’m more likely to give again and more frequent and maybe at a higher amount. And for the nonprofits or whoever, that’s also good because they want to tell that story as well, because the impact is kind of what everybody’s after at the end of the day.

0:04:19 – (Lindsey Dillon): Yeah, exactly.

0:04:20 – (Matt Widdoes): So you’ve done a lot of work in product launches in a number of different types of companies and even just different environments. Let’s talk about product launches for a second. How do you approach, like, positioning for new products, especially in saturated markets, when you’re launching something for the first time, whether it’s a new product within an existing .org, like just some new subproduct or it’s a brand new company starting from scratch.

0:04:43 – (Lindsey Dillon): Yeah. And I’ve done a little bit of everything from a small feature launch to a bigger program or product launch to on the Harness side, I mean, we’re still in pre market product market fit in some of our verticals. So even though I’ve done really run the gamut on product launches, they all kind of use the same recipe, which is that you need a deep understanding of the audience, a deep understanding of the landscape, and an understanding of who you are as a brand, as relevant to others.

0:05:18 – (Lindsey Dillon): The saturation part is especially challenging because some of the spaces I’ve been in are like very commoditized. So Harness to a part of the checkout flow or cash app is another player in this crowded fintech neo bank space. So even in these very saturated areas, you really have to dig deep and find that unique value prop. You need to define it and then you need to promote the hell out of it. So I always actually am just a fan of the kind of that two by two matrix or like the four quadrants where you just kind of map your X axis, your Y axis, and you start to understand where does your brand show up in those quadrants. So your x axis could be like innovation as a value prop, your Y axis could be price, and you really start to feel, okay, this is where our brand shows up as relevant to others.

0:06:14 – (Lindsey Dillon): This is what the audience needs. And we’ve learned this through interviews, through quantitative research. You look at the landscape and you start to get a feel for, okay, there’s some white space over here in this quadrant and that’s where you can start to really like, hone in on that unique value prop. And then you work with like your creative team and your content team to understand, like, how do we express this value prop? How does it show up in our copy, our channels? And if it’s a big enough product, that’s actually going to influence how you show up as your brand.

0:06:48 – (Lindsey Dillon): And so you just want to make sure to just consistently reinforce this unique value prop or unique value positioning.

0:06:56 – (Matt Widdoes): Yeah. Especially as you mentioned, the saturated marketplaces where it’s hard to tell the difference. Is this for me or is this the same as that? It’s just a different brand. And why would I use this over this? Outside of price or even sometimes features are maybe less important. It’s like the kind of brand connectivity can really matter as well. You saw a lot of that early days with Lyft where they started with the fuzzy mustaches and get in the front seat, don’t get in the backseat, and we fist bump and you can take that or leave that, but there’s a lot that goes into that, that sits outside of treating it like, well, we’re another ride share app that is just, we’re like Uber, but we’re pink. It’s like, that’s not good enough. You need a little bit more beyond that. And so sometimes these are driving product decisions because you realize in that exercise that, oh, whoa, there’s, like, a ton of white space here, and people care about that. And we weren’t really looking at that, but from doing this, we, we discovered that. Or it can be. Sometimes we are essentially the same product, but we pitch in a slightly different way, and we target. Like, there’s a little more nuance to it where we’re this for that versus this for everything or whatever a competitor may be doing.

0:08:00 – (Lindsey Dillon): And you can, I mean, you can differentiate on other things, like customer service, too. Like, our products might be relevantly the same, our brands, maybe there’s not that much difference, but, like, in the end of the day, we have the best customer service or the friendliest customer service or the quickest. And so, like, there’s a lot of different ways in. Again, it just goes back to, like, what’s your understanding of the audience?

0:08:22 – (Lindsey Dillon): What do they care about most and the landscape and the other players, and just, like, kind of mapping it out. And even, like, just to take the Lyft example a little further, like, even as they have evolved over the years past the fuzzy mustache, they still keep that very friendly brand, um, ethos in all of their marketing. You can see it in just, like, their, their, um, their, their, their illustrative style, like, it’s still present.

0:08:50 – (Lindsey Dillon): Um, so they just really carried that through even though the, the brand itself has grown up.

0:08:55 – (Matt Widdoes): Yeah. And I’m curious, like, when thinking about a product launch across kind of in a general sense, like, from an essential standpoint as well as, you know, how these differ across different industries, because there, there are nuances, like, what, what comes to mind there, particularly in the essentials piece.

0:09:11 – (Lindsey Dillon): Yeah. So working across different industries and different B2B versus B2C, the elements are really largely the same. I mean, you start with your very clearly defined goals. You move to understanding the audience. You dive super deep into your messaging strategy, your messaging hierarchy. What’s your value prop? What are the reasons to believe? How does that ladder up to your Personas? And then you get into the channel mix and understanding what channels are right for this audience.

0:09:45 – (Lindsey Dillon): You work with your creative team on putting together all these amazing creative deliverables based off of the messaging strategy and the positioning you have, your measurement and reporting plan. So all of those elements are really fairly consistent, no matter what you’re launching or what industry you’re launching into… I think the biggest difference is just between like the B2C companies I’ve worked at and the B2B SaaS company, which I’m currently at. At Harness, there’s obviously a different audience, sophistication and personas. And in B2B SaaS, you’re probably dealing with multiple buyers, whereas B2C, it’s one buyer, one decision maker.

0:10:26 – (Lindsey Dillon): So there’s some nuances there and then there’s nuances in the channel mix. I’m using a lot of sales, obviously at a B2B company and a conference event strategy, which I wouldn’t have done at the B2C. But otherwise, like, the frameworks themselves are very adaptable to any industry, any company, any product.

0:10:45 – (Matt Widdoes): Yeah, it’s funny because we see that a lot too, where sometimes people draw this hard distinction between B2B and B2C where they’re like, oh, okay, well you’ve never done B2B, and so B2B is just different. And it’s always been hard for me to see that because I think while it is different, there are, I think of like a hundred things that we could do, right, take like out of home or you take, you know, physical mailers or some of these things that are more. Or conferences and event strategy. Right. That are more traditionally viewed as B2B.

0:11:15 – (Matt Widdoes): But in reality, those come into play in consumer all the time as well. So it’s really a matter. I think, like you said, the process for many things, not just product marketing, things like user acquisition, but development and other things, those cycles are very similar. And yes, there is major benefit of somebody having background in, you know, some industry specific thing. Because if you’re going to work in semiconductors, it’s way easier for us to not catch you up on all the nuances of production and all of the technical specs or in, you know, pharmaceuticals, same thing. Like, it is really helpful to have that background.

0:11:48 – (Matt Widdoes): Gaming would be somewhat like it. It is not easy to come into a gaming company probably for the first time with no gaming background because there are some nuances that are worthwhile. But most of that stuff I think people can get caught up on relatively quickly. Call it two to three months with a buddy who can be like, oh, that’s what this word means, or that’s what this kind of context is. But ultimately, somebody having really strong fundamentals in the kind of core process of how these things get launched is really, I think, ultimately more important.

0:12:14 – (Lindsey Dillon): Yeah. And I definitely felt that when I first took the leap into Harness coming from similar B2C consumer-scaled companies, as I did have these moments where I was like, do my skills translate? Will I be successful in this role? And I was very pleasantly surprised to realize that so much does translate. And actually, my hiring strategy since I’ve been at Harness is very much to take to hire the domain expertise. I’ll teach you nonprofits. We’ve got people inside our organization that have worked at nonprofits for decades.

0:12:50 – (Matt Widdoes): Yeah.

0:12:51 – (Lindsey Dillon): They’ll teach you about banking. I want you to know about product marketing or growth marketing or creative.

0:12:57 – (Matt Widdoes): Yeah, makes sense. And I can’t remember the exact way this was framed, but it was essentially that every industry has essentially 500 to 1000 words that you need to know. And many of them are very similar to words that you used elsewhere where you’re like, oh, like art poo. It’s like, okay, once I unpack that, I’m like, oh, okay, well, that’s just this. And you’re like, yep. And they’re like, okay, great, right?

0:13:20 – (Matt Widdoes): Even something like CAC, if nobody’s ever heard CAC, they’re like, what is it? And you’re like, it’s the cost of acquisition. They’re like, oh, okay, why don’t you just say that instead? Right, or whatever. So most people, for the, for whatever industry that is, those kind of 500 to a thousand words or kind of concepts or whatever can be downloaded pretty quickly and they already have usually for some large overlap of those, their own mental space that’s like, oh yeah, over here we call that that, but that’s just the same thing. And now I’ll start saying that thing instead of, you know, people talking about ROAs versus ROI. It’s like it’s the same thing essentially, but it just depends on if you’re talking about ad spend specifically or you’re talking about more generally, ROI of a business potentially.

0:14:01 – (Lindsey Dillon): It’s interesting. I’ve never heard that, like the 500 words. It totally makes sense. And it’s something that since I’ve been at Harness, I’ve been like collecting the jargon, I don’t know, and like creating a little dictionary for people that are onboarding. But it also reminds me of like being, being a product marketer, you have to be able to speak like the technical product Eng language as well as like the creative marketing strategy language.

0:14:28 – (Lindsey Dillon): And a lot of times it is just translating like, okay, what you’re saying is exactly, it’s actually this word over here. And just going back and forth with that, just that translation of language. So that’s just really interesting.

0:14:39 – (Matt Widdoes): Yeah, no, it’s super helpful. And I’m curious, like, you know, a lot of the work that is done in product marketing can’t be done in a vacuum without talking to existing customers, future customers, customers of our competitors, et cetera. How do you think about that role of consumer feedback in shaping a startup’s product marketing strategy? And how do you know when the right time is to ask or how often to do it? And like maybe a third question on that is how do you kind of distill what to listen to or ignore when you’re hearing things that you’re not observing elsewhere but you are hearing it, or vice versa, you are not hearing it, but you feel very strongly that you have some intuition that’s leading you down a path that you’re not observing in the market.

0:15:24 – (Matt Widdoes): How do you think about that generally when engaging with customer feedback on timing and how to approach it?

0:15:29 – (Lindsey Dillon): Yeah, I think in general, my philosophy is ask for feedback at every single stage. You should be bringing the customer with you on the journey of product building, product launching, product optimization, product growth, product sunsetting. Every single stage as much as you can bring the customer along. And that can come in so many different forms. In the beginning, it’s a lot of like research, qual/quant, talking to people, interviewing people later.

0:15:57 – (Lindsey Dillon): It might be more just looking at product usage data and things like that. You can do small focus groups with prototyping. Like there’s so many different ways to get like various layers of feedback and it just kind of depends on budget and like how deep you need to go. But my philosophy overall is ask for feedback at every single stage and the more you can incorporate it, the faster you’ll find product market fit, the faster you’ll encourage adoption and the faster you’ll end up reaching your goals.

0:16:29 – (Lindsey Dillon): And I think a comment about just being at a startup is I find a reaching and collecting customer feedback is both easier and harder because it’s easier because I actually, I personally know many of our customers at this point and I’ve been on calls with them. I might have been involved in the sales cycle. So I’ve got a good rapport with them and I actually, I get on the phone with them and I just say like, hey, we have this idea for a feature.

0:16:55 – (Lindsey Dillon): What do you think about it? Or hey, we have this early prototype, can you take a look? Can I have you play around with it and give us your feedback? So I think in that sense it’s actually like easier. And I feel closer to my customers, maybe more than ever, which I absolutely love. On the other hand, at a startup, it’s just I’m wearing all the hats. So it’s like not only am I talking to the customers, recording their feedback, analyzing their feedback, collecting the feedback, deciding what products to build on the feedback.

0:17:25 – (Lindsey Dillon): So it’s just kind of a lot. And sometimes I’m like, I’m feeling a little bit like, okay, I’m in a bit of an echo chamber with myself, so it’s a little bit of a double-edged sword there. And to your last question about, like, there’s a lot of noise in feedback, and so there is a bit of, like, a, watch out in terms of, like, you will hear super passionate customers or super passionate, like, internal stakeholders that heard one thing from one person.

0:17:51 – (Matt Widdoes): Yes.

0:17:51 – (Lindsey Dillon): And so you do need to just, like, understand what might be an edge case and what might be a nuance in that person’s experience. Experience versus, like, okay, let’s solve for, like, the collective. Let’s solve for the biggest problems facing our customers with our product or our platform. So I try to at least listen to all that feedback, because all feedback, I think is valid, but it’s just kind of like some of those edge cases. I might just, like, file away to see if maybe I hear it multiple times and maybe it becomes a bigger problem.

0:18:23 – (Lindsey Dillon): But that’s just kind of like my filter, I think, for thinking of what is the highest priority, what we can solve for the masses versus those edge cases.

0:18:31 – (Matt Widdoes): Yeah. Cause you can end up, we see this a lot where you end up, particularly for companies in the B2B space who have one or two really large customers who are like, I want this thing. I want this thing. I want this thing. And then in reality, it’s like, nobody else wants that, though. And so, like, and then you might build it, and then they’re like, oh, yeah, it’s cool. Like, we didn’t, we don’t actually want it anymore, or we thought it would be different, or we used it and just didn’t do what we thought it would, even though you built it exactly like we asked. So I think having that kind of radar that probably gets built over time to be like, okay, that’s a.

0:19:03 – (Matt Widdoes): Or like you mentioned, the really passionate consumer who’s like, oh, and you could do this and this, and then you’re like, okay, like, calm down, Bob. This is not going to happen. Right. This is, you just outlined a $15 million project that would be a totally different company. But, yeah, I agree that would be cool, but we’re not going to have that anytime soon. And the classic example is like, you take a focus group and you say, hey, we’re thinking about launching this new phone.

0:19:25 – (Matt Widdoes): What do you think about it? And they’re like, oh, I love it. What do you think about the design and the weight? It’s great. What do you think about the battery life and the specs? Oh, it’s great. How much do you think you pay for a phone like this? I’d pay $700 for a phone like that. You would? Yeah. Okay. Well, we have one for sale right now. And they’re like, oh, actually you’re like, well, how much would you give me for one right now? Would you give me $500? They’re like, I don’t need a new phone. It’s like, so you have to kind of take everything with a grain of salt because sometimes in those interviews, the people, people, they want to be helpful, and they also don’t want, they may have their own biases, but they also don’t want to let you down. And they want to be like, yeah, it’s a great idea. And you’re, like, trying to, like, pull out. Like, I want you to beat this up. This is why you’re here. So that takes a few cycles. And that kind of higher level of rapport can be very helpful in those kind of cases where you probably start to find your own, like, favorite people to go to, where you’re like, you’re going to always give it to me straight.

0:20:09 – (Matt Widdoes): And they’re going to say, I don’t know, that kind of sounds expensive. And you’re like, it is expensive. I’m glad you said that. Like, you’re right. But I think so many companies know deep down they need to be talking to their customers. And sometimes we’ll talk to them and say, cool, when’s the last time you spoke with them? And they’re like, oh, pretty recent. And then you start digging and they’re like, well, God, I guess it was 18 months ago, and we’ve made, like, all these major changes since then. So I think that your comment on doing it at every stage and trying to find a way to be, especially for the smaller companies that can’t dedicate, like, a full time team to that, where you get this massive benefit. But it’s obviously a big investment to find a way to have a framework by which you can kind of measure your progress against your goals with the, you know, feedback from the consumer side and make sure that you’re not getting too far off course at the same time.

0:20:54 – (Lindsey Dillon): Yeah, I think, I mean, it definitely isn’t as easy as maybe it sounds because like you get so deep into like, your day to day work and you have to meet all these milestones to launch this new product. And all of a sudden you do realize sometimes, like, especially at like, the bigger companies I’ve worked at with the bigger product launches, that you haven’t talked to the customer in four weeks or eight weeks or something.

0:21:19 – (Lindsey Dillon): So it’s great to have those voices on your internal team, and a lot of times it’s a product marketer or the product manager or if you have someone that’s like voice of the customer, if they’re responsible for that area, having that person in your internal teams just constantly bringing it up, like, have we to ask the customers about it? Why don’t we just go talk to our customers? Why don’t we pull some customer data on this?

0:21:44 – (Lindsey Dillon): It’s easy to kind of get out of that rhythm and just having that checkpoint and that voice that’s constantly bringing you back to the customer is important. And it’s just, it’s not always in the, like, cadence that you get into when you’re deep in product development.

0:22:04 – (Matt Widdoes): Yeah. Because the. Yes. The milestones and deliverables take can overlap and you have people who are sometimes stuffing in new features at the last second, which takes it even further and can lead to all sorts of challenges in this world where anything can be done. And so you have to call what is going to be done at least in the next sprint. I’m curious how you think about, and maybe you could describe your approach to building and optimizing a product funnel. So you’ve talked to customers.

0:22:32 – (Matt Widdoes): You’re still working very closely with internal creative and dev teams and other stakeholders within the, when you kind of think about, you know, building the initial and then further optimizing a product funnel, what goes into your kind of framework there.

0:22:45 – (Lindsey Dillon): Yeah, I think if you’re like dream state, if you’re lucky enough to have these resources, I think dream state is you start with this pod structure. I’ve been at a lot of companies with pod structures and even at Harness where I’m trying to bring a little bit of that mentality and framework to our product development area. But the pod is like, ideally a product marketer, a product manager, someone with design, an engineer and analytics.

0:23:13 – (Lindsey Dillon): So again, dream state, you are well resourced and you have all those roles. Smaller company like, I typically wear a couple of those different hats. That’s fine. The highest performing product teams I’ve been on have those roles in the pod and then I like to meet with the pod like probably daily. Sometimes if you’re like really close to a launch or you’ve just launched a, but maybe it’s a weekly cadence, but you keep that pod really focused on solving the user problems. Or we use a jobs to be done framework.

0:23:46 – (Lindsey Dillon): What is the user telling us that they’re struggling with? Our platform, our product, our features? What jobs can’t they do because we haven’t developed something to help them do that job. If we keep it very focused, again, very customer centric and we design and build on those user states, that’s when you start to see this pod mentality just really ramp up because we get something into market, we get into the hands of the users, we begin to collect data.

0:24:18 – (Lindsey Dillon): We’ve got that designer, we’ve got that engineer. We can continue to iterate and tweak. I’m a huge fan of launching quickly, learning quickly, being very iterative. I like to de-risk projects in terms of engineering investment and time by just launching mvp learning, Quick V1, V2, and so forth. And again, goes back to our earlier conversation, earlier question, which is that customer feedback, as much as you can get through all these launch cycles, is super critical.

0:24:50 – (Lindsey Dillon): You know, you get the quality, you get the quant, you find the points of friction and you work in subsequent iterations to remove those.

0:24:58 – (Matt Widdoes): Yeah.

0:24:59 – (Lindsey Dillon): And so I think like in general, from a philosophy standpoint, like the most important ingredients to me for like launching, building, optimizing a successful product funnel here is that customer centric thinking. We were already talking about a very curious mind. So you’re always constantly asking like what could we be doing better for the customer? Where are the friction points and then just that speed to market and how.

0:25:24 – (Matt Widdoes): Do you measure the success of these types of initiatives? What’s most important to you when looking.

0:25:29 – (Lindsey Dillon): At that from a KPI perspective?

0:25:31 – (Matt Widdoes): Sure. Yeah.

0:25:33 – (Lindsey Dillon): I think setting up the measurement and the reporting right from the jump and making sure that you have different milestones to check in on. And I think that’s super critical in the initial planning stage and then establishing what are your KPI’s from a business POV, a lot of times it’s a revenue target, it’s a product adoption target, product usage. You might have a whole list of secondary KPI’s that you want to track.

0:26:01 – (Lindsey Dillon): And so you have your milestone, you check in on progress, you, from a strategic point and from a product development point, understand what are the things that we need to tweak what KPI’s are we not hitting? How is our performance and how can our next version of the product or the next version of the communications that we’re sending out, how can that start to address some of the gaps in our performance?

0:26:25 – (Lindsey Dillon): I also am a fan of setting like pretty aggressive targets at the onset. I think it’s like a great way to rally teams and get people excited, just be very ambitious. I like to have the goal at the top of every meeting agenda, every document we have. Get people really focused on something that’s exciting, a little aggressive, and then I’m like pretty satisfied if we reach maybe 80% of those targets.

0:26:51 – (Matt Widdoes): Got it. Yeah. I think having a worthwhile goal, and again, something you mentioned, something that people are excited about is super important because we spend so much time at work and it’s like we want to be able to find fulfillment there and that what we’re working on actually matters and we know what a win state looks like or what does a home run look like. It’s really important. I think you mentioned setting up the measurement and defining those KPI as well in advance because so many times I find companies are kind of moving the goalposts a lot or they didn’t really set goals at the beginning. They just said, we’re going to do this. And then it’s like, but how will we know if we crushed it? Because everybody on a high performing team wants to crush it. And so, and I think it’s really important to set those goals when everybody is sober and doesn’t have the data to kind of say, well, actually, you know, we right now getting, getting two installs is actually not so bad. It’s like, no, the goal was 2000. Like, what are we to, let’s not, let’s not like rewrite history. And I think having that standard, if you don’t know where you’re going, it doesn’t matter which way you go kind of thing.

0:27:50 – (Matt Widdoes): And so being able to crystallize a team around those kind of aggressive but attainable goals that are meaningful is really important. You mentioned earlier too, hiring right now for domain expertise. I’m curious, what other philosophies do you have on kind of team management, hiring and cultural development?

0:28:09 – (Lindsey Dillon): My favorite topic. I absolutely love talking about culture, team management. It’s so important to me. I could talk about culture dev all day long. I think it’s just the number one ingredient to building a successful team and.

0:28:23 – (Matt Widdoes): Maintaining it too, right?

0:28:24 – (Lindsey Dillon): Exactly. Yes. And it’s like, it’s so expensive to hire and then if you have to rehire because you don’t have the right team with your culture. So I do think it starts with hiring. And so from the very beginning, like at Harness, because I started out as a marketing team of one, I did have like a very specific vision of the type of team culture I wanted to build. And I was fortunate enough in this position to be able to hire in. Obviously that’s not always the case, but because I had this opportunity, I really wanted to hire this like very specific persona, which was like an enthusiasm to win, passion for impact and really grit, especially in the startup space.

0:29:06 – (Lindsey Dillon): Super important characteristic to me. Also, I want people to have lives outside of work. We spend a lot of our lives at work, but like, I want to know that you’re interested in things outside. I very much have a work hard, play hard mentality, so I want to work with those type of people. So I think it absolutely starts with hiring and I, and then once I’ve got the right people in place, my leadership style is just very much like lead by example.

0:29:34 – (Lindsey Dillon): I have a really high quality bar for work and so that means I need to live up to my own quality bar. And so anything from leading a major project launch to just leading our team meetings, I put in as much effort as I would expect anyone to do. Also, a key component I think of, like leading by example, is rolling up your sleeves. So I’ll do whatever it takes to get the job done, whether it’s, you know, jumping in and coding an email or writing a headline for copy or, you know, you know, determining the whole strategy for launching a new product. Like whatever it takes, I’m able to roll up my sleeves. I want to show that every layer, every career stage is important and that I’m willing to do that work. So I want my, the folks on my team to be willing to do that work as well.

0:30:24 – (Lindsey Dillon): Another thing that I really subscribe to is just the concept of steward leadership. So I believe as a leader of my team, I’m here to support and serve the team, not the other way around. My biggest goal is to hire people smarter than me, and then I get them the tools, the resources they need. I make sure they’re supported and valued, and then I get out of the way. That’s really what my philosophy is on team development and hiring and culture.

0:30:53 – (Matt Widdoes): Cool. Yeah. I think not just the willingness, but the ability to roll up your sleeves. I can count a few times where I’ve at least observed or been directly involved in a situation where you see, leaders who don’t actually understand the fundamentals of maybe something that they’re managing or have are so far removed that they’ve lost touch of the reality on the ground and that there’s like nothing. Well, there are many things, but there are a few things more demoralizing than somebody who’s managing down with no concept of what’s going into the recipe, essentially.

0:31:24 – (Matt Widdoes): Uh, and I think that, yeah, that attitude of jumping into fixed things when needed, it’s like, my attitude is always like, we can retro this later, like, we can, but like, right now we have to ship. And so it’s like, what if somebody’s behind scheduling something or they’re not going to get something done or they’re really struggling? It’s like, okay, let’s just get that done. And, like, we can. There were, there are times later to talk about why or how we got in the position, but I think that willingness to jump in as a leader is super important as well. And it pays dividends back just in that people know, like, okay, like, if at all, like, they’re, this person is with me in the trenches and we’re all focused on the goal and we’re not focused on the, you know, who did or didn’t do what when, where, you know, in the heat of battle, essentially.

0:32:04 – (Lindsey Dillon): And it makes me a better leader because even just a recent example is we just onboarded a new email service provider, and it’s been 15 years since I’ve launched an email by myself, soup to nuts. So just getting in there and thinking through the mechanics that need to all go into a successful email warm up and your first email launch, it was so good for me to go through those motions again so that when now I have a lifecycle marketer who’s incredibly talented, but now I’m like, okay, well, I have empathy for what you have to do. I have an understanding of what you have to do on the platform, and so I can help support you and lead you even better than if I hadn’t gone back through that process.

0:32:50 – (Matt Widdoes): Yeah, I think that empathy is like the biggest piece that comes from working in the system, because if you don’t, well, one, walking the assembly line, if you will, is helpful from time to time because you can kind of understand things. Two, you also might unlock some. As somebody who hasn’t seen it for a long time, you may find, one, there’s some new feature that had not been bubbled up or two, something meaningful had changed where you’re like, oh, that’s an interesting thing that we could do or could stop doing or whatever that might be. But it does give you a better sense for in the email world as an example to kind of lean on that. It’s like, oh, I know why. It takes more than 12 hours to turn around a tested email that’s going to go live.

0:33:27 – (Matt Widdoes): There’s a lot that goes into that. And yes, from the design to the development to if you’re developing what you probably should be, to the QAing and the deliverability and the copywriting and the testing of those lines and the rollout and then the reporting and all of these things that go into what seemingly on the surface is just an email, but it’s never just an email in a traditional lifecycle standpoint.

0:33:49 – (Lindsey Dillon): Yeah, exactly. I feel like I one day should learn or shadow an engineer or something so I can actually fully understand when I ask for, hey, how long would this take for this? Yeah, they’re like, that’s not a quick fix. And I’m like, I believe you, but.

0:34:05 – (Matt Widdoes): Like, yeah, yeah, seems like it should be. Yeah, that’s the, yeah, this is the plight of the non technical is being like, okay, well that’ll be, that’s like a week. And then we’ll do this other thing. Someone’s like, that’s not a week, that’s nine months. It’s like, how is that nine months? And then you dig in, you’re like, okay, that’s fair because, you know, especially if you’re working in like a live environment that’s super connected and has five different backends that are all communicating. I’m curious, as an extension of the kind of philosophical approach on leadership and kind of team building, how do you think through, especially in this role where creativity is so important, how do you end innovation so important?

0:34:42 – (Matt Widdoes): How do you think through kind of driving creativity and innovation within marketing teams?

0:34:47 – (Lindsey Dillon): Yeah, so, so many different ways from like the super philosophical to more of the tangential or the tangible, like from the get go. One of my most important cultural values is I want to set up like psychological safety so that everyone can be themselves, feel comfortable, then they can express themselves more freely and therefore just like open up a much more creative, innovative atmosphere. I’ve also found that teaching people who might not always work in the creative space how to give creative feedback so you’re actually not stifling creativity, you’re being additive.

0:35:27 – (Lindsey Dillon): I felt like that was really important. So one of the first things I did here at Harness is I led a workshop, a lunch and learn just on how to give creative feedback to be a very much a yes and culture and yes, that absolutely shows up in like design meetings, creative meetings, marketing meetings, but it shows up everywhere and strategy and engineer just to always have that mentality of yes. And I also like the classic like format, which is like, I like, I like, I wonder. So you’re like, okay, I like that idea.

0:35:59 – (Lindsey Dillon): I like what you did here. But I wonder if you did this thing that like simple framework. It sounds kind of like elementary, but it actually is. It’s incredible what it can unlock. So I think it’s from like a philosophy cultural thing. It’s some of that stuff from a more like process oriented path. How I foster innovation and creativity is just sharing inspirational materials. So it could be related to work you’re actually doing if you’re building a new email campaign and you’re out and looking for inspiring email newsletters. Or it could just be like, oh my God, I saw this amazing color that this company used in the wild.

0:36:42 – (Lindsey Dillon): And you can in so many different ways, like remote cultures now it’s a little bit less organic and you kind of have to force it a bit. So you could just do like an inspo slack channel or a monthly meeting where you just bring your creative inspiration. There is no like objective or agenda. It’s just to share and to be inspired. One of the things that we do at Harness is we have an entire Figma library that’s just swipe.

0:37:11 – (Lindsey Dillon): So anything we are inspired from, inspired by, we just drop it into this like ever expanding library. It’s huge. So they’re everything from like inspirational colors to inspirational buttons to this email newsletter. I love the headline. Like, everything goes into this swipe library. And then when you’re in this briefing phase, or maybe you get stuck, it’s.

0:37:36 – (Matt Widdoes): Great to go there and just walk the. Walk the halls of the swipe library.

0:37:40 – (Lindsey Dillon): Yes, yes. Exactly.

0:37:43 – (Matt Widdoes): That’s cool. It’s funny, there’s two things that jumped off at me that made me that I thought I’d flag. One is you mentioned the yes and culture, which is classic improv, kind of. Yes. And building on top. There was something I learned this from good friend Dan Barnes, who is at Network at the time. They had a process that I thought was very interesting in. It was more executional in its nature, but it was a ‘yes if’, which is a little bit different than the ‘yes and’. And really this comes into play is I say, hey, Lindsey, can we get a new page up by Friday night? Or like maybe I’m asking you Friday, and I say, by Monday.

0:38:23 – (Matt Widdoes): And most people’s reaction to something like that is no. Right. Because it’s Friday at 5:00 or whatever. Like, no, but there’s always a yes if. And I think that’s the big thing that I’d taken away from that, which is. And the yes if may not be tolerable. Right? It doesn’t mean but it’s not yes at all costs. Because the yes and can sometimes devolve into it. Like, well, where is my space to say no, right? Because sometimes I need to say no. Right.

0:38:49 – (Matt Widdoes): And so what ‘yes if’ does it solve for that by but not. But it still doesn’t introduce a no, which is in this made up example. Yes, if we have all of our engineers work overtime and if you and I work through the weekend and if I can take next Thursday and Friday off as a result. Right. Or we can bring in pizza and Cake and cookies for the teams and whatever. But, like, that’s like an extreme example. But another example may be, can we add this new feature?

0:39:18 – (Matt Widdoes): I like this new feature. Can we do this? The yes if there might be yes if customers like it, if Stacey likes it, if the team likes it or whatever. So that’s like a nuance that I had learned there that I thought, I think is really interesting, especially for people whose knee jerk reaction can be more skewed towards the that’s not possible kind of approach in worlds where it really does sound impossible. Right. But it’s like, how do you say something can’t be done when in reality anything can always be done? It just might be yes. We need to put the entire team on this for the next six years. Is that an okay? Yes if. And the person may say no.

0:39:51 – (Matt Widdoes): Or maybe a more tangible is for somebody working on, you know, with lots of different teams. Yes, if you can get. If you talk to Stacey and she says, you can deprior, I can deprioritize this thing I’m working on right now for Stacey that she needs by end of day. And if Bob also says, I don’t have to do this thing Monday or Tuesday, and then that gives this person coming to you asking for that is like, okay, we’ll be right back. And then they talk to Stacey and Stacey says, yes, if you can go do this other thing. And there’s this never ending stream of ‘yes if’. ‘Yes if’s that somebody has to untangle.

0:40:25 – (Matt Widdoes): And if they reach a spot where somebody gives them a ‘yes if’ like that they can’t maintain, then you can’t do this thing by Friday because your ‘yes if’s were not met because somebody else’s ‘yes if’s weren’t or weren’t made. So anyways, that’s interesting piece that I had picked up somewhere along the way. And then the I like, I like I wonder format of have you heard of. I think it was the Stanford thing, but it was I like, I wish what if? You ever heard of that?

0:40:48 – (Lindsey Dillon): Yeah.

0:40:49 – (Matt Widdoes): So it reminds me of that. I actually haven’t heard of the I like, I like I wonder, but I like the using it. I had not to use it. I like, I like, but I like it. Yeah, I like it because it gives, it forces somebody to immediately say something. Two things. Positive.

0:41:03 – (Lindsey Dillon): Yep.

0:41:03 – (Matt Widdoes): And then it gives them this opportunity that is kind of this what if or this kind of yes if thing. Right. Like, I wonder if that might be too bold or I wonder if the teams will like that or whatever, but it starts you off on, like, a more positive keeping options open format, and.

0:41:18 – (Lindsey Dillon): I love the word wonder because it just automatically infuses curiosity.

0:41:25 – (Matt Widdoes): Yes.

0:41:25 – (Lindsey Dillon): So, like, that word especially, like, I just. I don’t remember who taught me this framework. I wish I could give them credit, but, like, I just love the use of that word because it’s so, like, it provides such a jumping off point, which is just like, I’m. I’m curious. Tell me more why you think this or why you propose that. Is there space for us to develop something different together? It just is. Like, it opens up this really nice conversation space, and so it’s. It’s definitely a framework that I’ve brought to every company, and I think it can really just shift the, like, the vibe in the room.

0:42:02 – (Matt Widdoes): Yeah. It’s also neutral.

0:42:03 – (Lindsey Dillon): I also love your. And if, like, I’m going to yes, if it’s yes, if it’s yes, yes, I’m going to. I’m going to teach that to the team next week. I love it.

0:42:12 – (Matt Widdoes): It’s really important for companies that are, for people that are moving very fast, because we all get people swinging by the desk saying, hey, can you do this thing? Can you do this thing? And you can say yes a lot, but eventually you can’t keep saying yes and actually fulfill all the obligations that you’ve already made. And so. And nobody wants to hear, no, I’m too busy. So it’s like, okay, well, what’s this if? It’s like, and the ‘yes if’ to you might seem crazy. Like, yes, if you can get Stacey to get off my back about this thing that has to go out by 07:00 p.m.

0:42:39 – (Matt Widdoes): and then I go talk to Stacey, and I say, here’s what I’m trying to get done. And I was told if you could deprioritize your thing till Monday, I could have this thing. And for all we know, Stacey might be like, great. Yeah, that’s fine. I don’t actually need it today, if that sounds more important. And. Or, yes, if you can go talk to Bob, who told me that I had to go out Monday. I don’t even care when this goes out. Right. But it’s like, there’s always some string of stuff that we don’t have time to unpack because nothing would ever get done if we said, well, does this really have to go by Monday? And who asked for this like that? That sucks, too, right? And so I think the thing I take away, too, from the I wonder statement is that there’s nothing really positive or negative attached to it. Nobody’s making a claim. Like, I like this. I like that. But I think this is too dark in color.

0:43:22 – (Matt Widdoes): Okay, well, that is a clear judgment. Matt thinks it’s too dark. But I can say I wonder if. I wonder what, like, multiple shades of that would look like. I wonder if there’s, like, some shade. Like, I like this. I like that. I like where this is going. I like purple. I wonder what it would look like if we made it a little darker or a little lighter and be curious to see those next to each other. It’s like, okay, great, we can do that. Versus, like, it should be darker is like, nobody wants to hear that. And you kind of pop the balloon at the same time. Yep.

0:43:46 – (Lindsey Dillon): And you can. And you see it. You see the vibe change in the room. Like, and it happens a lot, especially if you have, like, maybe more junior folks or, like, newer folks starting to present something and maybe someone, like, a little bit more senior or someone that they’re not familiar with comes in and they say that blue is too dark. It’s just like, oh, it’s just this, like, defeat. And you’re just like, yeah, I like the pops, the balloon. It just kills the vibe.

0:44:12 – (Matt Widdoes): Yeah, yeah. And I wonder. It leaves it open for interpretation, and it gives also the person saying that a chance to look at it and say, actually, I like it the way it is. Like, I thought I wanted. When I said, I wonder what it would look like in a few different other shades, I was actually thinking I’d like to see it darker. But now that I see it darker, I actually think it’s the right path. Love you by. Right, so. Yep.

0:44:33 – (Matt Widdoes): Cool. And so I’m curious, like, thinking about your role leading the team at Afterpay. What was that transition like after kind of being acquired by Cash App? Many people have not been through an acquisition. Many people have, but those can be pretty significant. I’m curious how you navigated that.

0:44:49 – (Lindsey Dillon): Yeah, definitely. I think I have been through a couple in my career, and I think it does get a bit easier each time because you see the light at the end of the tunnel. You see what manifests at the end once you get through this bumpy part. So the Afterpay to Cash App one is probably about my third time going through it. So if anyone is going through it for the first time, it’s bumpy. I promise. It gets better. It gets easier to navigate these things over time and throughout careers.

0:45:20 – (Lindsey Dillon): The biggest thing I would tell myself, and the biggest thing I coached my team on, especially during this transition, is just have patience. First of all, I’m not a super patient person by my personality, but this is a time where I just really try to take a deep breath and just have faith, trust the process, some might say, but just have faith, faith and patience, that things will work themselves out.

0:45:49 – (Lindsey Dillon): And while you’re trying to have patience, which is a lot harder of an ask, I know, than it may seem, but is really to focus on what you can control. So I love the, like, spheres of influence control framework. I use this a lot. So, like, in. In the middle, you have what you can control, and then the next layer is what you can influence. And then the third layer is the things that are outside of your control or your influence.

0:46:17 – (Lindsey Dillon): And sometimes I would actually diagram these with my teams. So, like, during a particularly challenging week, there’s a lot of transition. Maybe you have new teammates, you have a new team. People have left. It’s very chaotic during, like, some of the most chaotic times, I would actually say, like, okay, let’s actually just write things out. Let’s put things in three categories. What can you control completely? You can control your own emotions. You can control your response to things. You can control how you show up to these difficult meetings.

0:46:50 – (Lindsey Dillon): And then the next column is like, what can you influence? Okay, well, maybe I can’t influence, like, my new team that I’m on, but I can probably influence in some capacity, like, what projects I’m put on. I can say, like, these are my skill sets. This is what my experience is. Even though you’re a new manager, to me, like, this is, I might be able to influence where I’m landing. And then things outside of your influence is like structure, unless you’re on the leadership team, probably outside of your control.

0:47:19 – (Lindsey Dillon): So I think just helping. It really helps to write these things out and just like, make them tangible. It kind of demystifies them a little bit. But it is rocky, it is chaotic. It takes probably a year. I think every transition I went through takes about a year. So I just focus on, like, what’s in my control, keeping my team as much, like, mentally healthy as I can. And these are some of the frameworks I do.

0:47:47 – (Lindsey Dillon): Yeah, I think that’s really my advice on that. It’s really challenging, so I feel for folks going through it.

0:47:53 – (Matt Widdoes): Yeah. And getting your whole team on the same page is always a challenge. I’m curious, like, especially across different functions, programs, focuses, how do you think about as an extension of whether part of an acquisition or not, like, how do you, how do you think through aligning diverse teams to accomplish common objectives and, you know, what, what impact has that had on businesses you’ve led?

0:48:11 – (Lindsey Dillon): Do you mean like in a remote culture?

0:48:14 – (Matt Widdoes): Not necessarily. It could be, though, I think. But it’s as far as, like, keeping them cohesive, keeping them, like where, like you mentioned in this, in this case, you have a new acquire. People are like, hey, things are changing. There’s all these things happening. Maybe we have a new mission. We have a new, we have new people entering and, like, getting that whole team, even if some of those people are new, kind of on the same page and, you know, focused on, you know, aligned on kind of the same common objectives.

0:48:45 – (Matt Widdoes): I’m curious, like, any, any thoughts on that more generally, outside of maybe an acquisition?

0:48:49 – (Lindsey Dillon): Yeah, I think it comes down to just getting to know the person first. So if you know a person as a person and you establish a good rapport and baseline, it’s just so much easier to manage conflict, to manage the unknown, some of those anxieties that might come with maybe a transition or a new project or a high pressure project, the more you get to know someone as a human first, that’ll just help you work together, make decisions together, move quickly, except failures, et cetera.

0:49:22 – (Lindsey Dillon): So I think it’s like if I’m working with a, you know, a stakeholder or peer for the first time and maybe they’re not meeting my deadlines, I might lose patience really quickly. But if I first got to know them and understood that, like, oh, yeah, I know that, you know, Tom’s in the middle of moving his family to a new city, so he’s stressed out. I’m sure I’d find a lot more patience for some of the deadlines or projects there, or, you know, we’ve bonded over our. Our love for, you know, music or something. It’s just way easier to manage a hiccup in a project and, like, form that cohesion if you get to know the person first. And where I was going with the remote thing is that, like, I’ve been remote for four years now, and it’s not as easy. Right. To establish rapport and culture. And so, like, you do have to do things that are, like, a little bit more forced, which, like, feels a little unnatural. And actually, sometimes it can kind of feel a little cheesy. Yeah, but in my experience, those things work, even if they are a little cheesy.

0:50:22 – (Lindsey Dillon): I’ve done things like, you write a user manual, which is like, hey, I’m Lindsey. These are some of my traits. This is some of the stuff I really value in people. This is my communication style. Like, you can get really into the nitty gritty on something like a user manual, and then you, like, make time with someone to share it, and it’s. It’s incredible what that can unlock. I actually have, like, a memory of those, a teammate and I, that just, like, we could not see eye to eye. We had so much friction, and we did this user manual exercise, and we just, like, learned so much about how each other thinks.

0:50:59 – (Lindsey Dillon): I’m someone who thinks out loud, and I need to, like, talk things through with people, and she’s the opposite. She’s very, like, internalized. And so I think we kept finding this conflict where I was like, what’s your opinion on my idea?

0:51:12 – (Matt Widdoes): I’m not ready to give you an opinion.

0:51:14 – (Lindsey Dillon): Exactly.

0:51:15 – (Matt Widdoes): You’re just asking me my opinion all the time. We’re just talking. We’re not talking. This matters. This is forever. Yeah.

0:51:21 – (Lindsey Dillon): And it would stress her out, because she’s like, I don’t know how to give you my opinion right now. I need to, like, go home and, like, with it. And then we were like, oh, okay, well, that’s easy. I’ll just give you more time. Done.

0:51:33 – (Matt Widdoes): Yeah.

0:51:33 – (Lindsey Dillon): And so I think, like, things like that are so beneficial.

0:51:36 – (Matt Widdoes): Yeah. I’ve never heard of that idea of having a user manual for an individual. I’d be curious to, like, yeah. If there’s some format for that that somebody could use. But I do. I do think it helps that I think that another piece of what you touched on is that kind of humanization. It’s easy to forget to like, in the heat of the moment when we’re all trying to ship something or whatever, that, like, at the end of the day, we’re all just monkeys on a rock hurtling through space. Like, where it’s like, does this really, like, it’s funny you mentioned in the kind of inspiration bucket of, like, a button we liked, but it’s like, we have buttons we like now. Like, that’s what we do, right?

0:52:09 – (Matt Widdoes): And so it’s like. But at some point, you have to take a step back and be like, okay, well, like, we can. We’re still silly people or serious people or whatever, people outside of work, and that kind of humanization and understanding what motivates somebody and just seeing them as, like, an individual, which is easier in the office environment because you get to go to a happy hour together, or you’re hanging out and having coffee, or you sit down, have lunch together, or any number of things. And when it’s funny, I find myself now, like, when going into big offices of clients or whatever, and just that energy, many of them are, like, half full, but even then, the energy of, like, just a whiteboard in the same room that we could walk over to and in 30 seconds be like this, this, this.

0:52:50 – (Matt Widdoes): Take a picture disappear, or that ability to, yeah, cater in lunch or whatever, it’s just super nice being, there’s no substitute for that face to face FaceTime. And I think there does have to be a little bit of extra effort, or there doesn’t have to be, but people would benefit from having that extra time together as a team that, even on zoom, is hard to do. Even if you do have, like, a, let’s do like, a lunch and learn with each other, there’s still something about, like, you know, when you’re face to face, it’s very difficult for somebody to have the computer open and sneakily be answering an email or checking slacken. And even if we all have our computers up in front of us face to face, it’s still hard to be doing that. But here you can kind of sneakily be doing all sorts of things and, like, not be fully engaged. And there’s something about that kind of space together where you feel the same breeze and you hear the same glass break in the back of the restaurant or whatever that is, that just can’t be, can’t be replaced. So finding that face to face time at the company level or individual level when possible, I think. I think is also super important.

0:53:53 – (Matt Widdoes): Finding that way to really understand the people on the other end are just people at the end of the day, that go home and have their own oftentimes very interesting lives and cool stuff going on that is worth knowing about.

0:54:03 – (Lindsey Dillon): Yeah, I think, like, well, there’ll be some study in like another five years about remote culture that will tell us how important small talk actually was there is and how much like you miss that. When you are, like, walking into a meeting together, you’re walking to the next meeting together and you just don’t have that sometimes if you’re on screens or you are more of a remote team. And so I’m very curious to see when that study comes.

0:54:26 – (Matt Widdoes): You know what’s funny? There was actually this study that was done, this is pre-pandemic, but where there was this guy who had gotten into this, he was in India. He was living there for a short term American guy, and he basically found himself. He ate a bunch of potatoes. I don’t know, he just always eats potatoes. It’s like a staple in his diet. But he lived right above this freshen kind of produce place.

0:54:47 – (Matt Widdoes): And every day, or every couple days, he would go down and buy a ten pound bag of potatoes. And every day the conversation went the same from, like the time he, his first day buying potatoes to, you know, a year later, see the same guy. He’d say, hey, how much is the bag of potatoes? The guy would say, twelve. He’d say, I give you four. Guy says, ten, he gets six. They settle on eight every single time.

0:55:09 – (Matt Widdoes): And it got to the point where, like, on the days he wasn’t buying potatoes but still leaving his, you know, his apartment, he’d see the guy and they’d wave, hey, how’s it going? Or whatever. And like, they knew each other, right? They were. They knew each other on site, right? And so one day he decides to just go down and give the guy $8 for a bag of potatoes. He has $8 in his hand. He just says, hey, man, how’s it going? I’m just picking up a bag. Gives him eight. The guy says, oh, no, they’re twelve.

0:55:30 – (Matt Widdoes): And he’s like, dude, come on. Like it’s me. And he’s like, you know, this guy’s twelve. He’s like, I’ll give you four. He’s like, I could do ten. And he’s like, I’ll give you six. And he’s like, now it has to be ten. And he’s like, no, you like, this is where you say eight. And the guy’s like, potatoes. The prices have gone up. Like, I know, I know you like, of course, I bet like it’s, you know, prices, prices, prices.

0:55:53 – (Matt Widdoes): And I think he either bought them for ten or just walked away unsatisfied. And then two days later he’s buying more. This guy eats so many potatoes, I guess, but he goes back down and he says, how much are the potatoes? Guy says, twelve. He says, four. He goes, six. He goes, eight. He realized that that little negotiation you couldn’t skip, that’s kind of like the equivalent of our small talk, right, in this example.

0:56:13 – (Matt Widdoes): And so he, it would beg the question, why is that? And so what, and what are those overlaps in the western culture? And so he started looking at it and basically exactly what you said, that walking into the meeting together, the presentation is done, we’re collecting our papers and kind of talking like, oh, what are you doing this weekend? And, okay, great. See you. Bye. Or, hey, we’re going to go grab dinner later if you want to join us kind of conversation.

0:56:35 – (Matt Widdoes): And they studied it and they went into situations where they basically said to the test participants, we want you to. And I think these were live environments. I don’t know all the details, but I remember this original story is on NPR. And they had one group just do the normal, did you catch the football game this weekend? Kind of conversation, icebreaker stuff. And then they had another group that was just getting down to brass tacks. We got in, everybody’s here. Okay, let’s just jump into the meeting. We don’t have a lot of time to cover it, blah, blah, blah.

0:57:03 – (Matt Widdoes): And what they found was that the groups that didn’t, that skipped the small stock stuff, spent inordinately amount more time. Like 10x. Like it took multiple meetings, multiple weeks, multiple things to get past and find resolution because they hadn’t found that kind of common human element of that kind of song and dance that is part of the culture that you kind of can’t remove. Similar to that negotiation piece on the street in India buying potatoes.

0:57:28 – (Matt Widdoes): There is really something to be said for that. And even on Zoom, I think that still exists. But. And as forced as it can feel to be like, oh, yeah, it’s real hot here right now. And like, oh, I love Denver. Like, I haven’t been to Denver in a long time. Okay, great. Well, today we’re here to talk about this other thing. Right. But it just, yeah, there’s something to it. So, yeah, the, like, psychology behind all that is very interesting.

0:57:49 – (Lindsey Dillon): Yeah, we used to have, again, it feels forced, but like, we had a list of 80 questions that were a little bit more small talk questions. But some of them did get a little bit more into, like, who you are as a person would be like, tell me your favorite childhood memory, or, like, what was your first concert? Or something like that. We had those. This list, and, like, any time a big group came together, we would start with one of those.

0:58:15 – (Lindsey Dillon): And again, feels forced and weird, but, like, it helped so much. And then I do think, like, once we got into the work, people felt more comfortable. They felt more heard, more seen, blah, blah, blah. So it’s invaluable, those human elements in the workplace, in cross functional teams, in highly functioning teams and remote teams and hybrid cultures, all of the things.

0:58:38 – (Matt Widdoes): Yeah. And you need time to kind of switch gears, too, because you’re coming out of something else. And, like, yeah, it takes it, like, I think helps take it away from being transactional, more of, like. Like you said, that kind of empathy of seeing somebody as another. As, like, a human. Right. It’s like, to hear their fondest childhood memory is, like, very personal and, like, it’s hard not to see them as a human. When somebody tells you about going fishing with their grandfather and learning how to drive or something, you know what I mean? You’re like, okay, I can relate.

0:59:07 – (Lindsey Dillon): If someone told me that story and then told me that they didn’t have my deliverable, I would feel a little softer.

0:59:13 – (Matt Widdoes): They fish with their grandpa. Like, come on, give them a break. Cool. Well, Lindsey, thank you so much for the time today. It’s always great chatting with you. I appreciate you sharing all of your feedback here and thoughts. I know it’ll be helpful for our listeners. So thanks again for taking the time.

0:59:27 – (Lindsey Dillon): Thanks for having me.

0:59:28 – (Matt Widdoes): Yeah, cool. Look forward to next time. Take care. Bye.