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122 / The Human Connection: The Tie that Binds Product Teams + Users, with Christine Itwaru

Hosted by Sean Flaherty & Paul Gebel

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Christine Itwaru

Pendo

Christine Itwaru has been in product management for over twelve years and has held both individual contributor and leadership roles across product management, product operations, and strategy. She’s worked across services, finance, fintech, and SaaS and has focused on not only delivering products and outcomes to customers but also strengthening product teams while doing so. She’s led and coached teams through product-led transformation. Christine continues to do so while mentoring product leaders on setting up foundations for strong teams, creating and delivering best practices, and standing up for a system for product managers to do their best. Christine enjoys giving back to the product community and looks at product management as a discipline rather than a role in technology.

 

In this episode, Christine Itwaru, Principal Strategist at Pendo, describes her journey from a product management role to product ops to strategy, tackling big-picture issues and leaves kernels of wisdom for us to use in our own product roles. Among them, how to strengthen the human connection between product teams and their users.

Key takeaways from our conversation with Christine Itwaru:

Product management starts with the human connection. “The human connection extends beyond the market you serve,” Christine says. “It’s internally at your company – the people who help you understand problems not just from a product perspective, but also that something they need you to solve so they can do their jobs well to help the business continue to grow.”

Product ops works to keep product teams healthy. The mission of a product ops team is to “help the product team in service of the health of the rest of the business,” Christine adds. “Product managers and product teams need to feel empowered to do their best work; product ops helps them achieve that.”

Strategy merges a macro understanding of the business with being in service to customers. Christine’s new-ish role as Pendo’s Principal Strategist allows her to remain close to the product team and Head of Product, which helps her understand their goals and how they align to product vision and company strategy. “My role combines business strategist and advisor to our customers and prospects – generally, to the entire product community.

The right way to approach AI is the same way we approach all things as product people. “Embrace AI in service of our customers,” Christine says, “and try to set ourselves up to do this thing really responsibly. We have so much to learn before we can make any definitive calls. And I love when companies are not pivoting 100%” because of some new thing that’s come up with AI.

Stay tuned for upcoming releases of Product Momentum episodes recorded live at Pendomonium 2023!

Paul [00:00:19] Hello and welcome to Product Momentum, where we hope to entertain, educate, and celebrate the amazing product people who are helping to shape our community’s way ahead. My name is Paul Gebel and I’m the Director of Product Innovation at ITX. Along with my co-host, Sean Flaherty, and our amazing production team and occasional guest host, we record and release a conversation with a product thought leader, writer, speaker, or maker who has something to share with the community every two weeks.

Paul [00:00:43] Well, hey, Christine, how are you doing today?

Christine [00:00:45] I’m doing so great, Paul. How are you doing?

Paul [00:00:47] I’m really excited to get into some very deep waters with you. I think your journey from product management to product ops to strategy has inspired me. I’m really interested in unpacking the lessons learned along the way. What are you most excited to share with the audience today?

Christine [00:01:02] Thank you. I’m finding it not a coincidence that the reason I’m sitting in this seat now is because I’m pretty passionate about a couple of things, not just in product. I feel like now, the more I think about it, it’s in life, but it definitely suits product management. One is the human connection and the importance of connecting really deeply to customers and those around you as product people. And the second is health and making sure that you create this really healthy environment so that you can really do your best in. So I’m really excited to dive in and talk about what I’m seeing and what I’ve learned along my journey.

Paul [00:01:36] Can’t wait. Let’s jump right in.

Paul [00:01:40] Well hello and welcome to the pod. Today we are really excited to be joined by Christine Itwaru. Christine has been in product management for over 12 years and has held both individual contributor and leadership roles across product management, product ops, and strategy. She’s done so across services, finance, fintech, and SaaS and is focused on not only delivering product and outcomes to customers but strengthening product teams while doing so. She’s led and coached teams through product-led transformation and continues to do so while mentoring product leaders and setting up foundations for strong teams, creating and delivering best practices, and standing up systems for PMs to do their best. Christine enjoys giving back to the product community and looks at product management as a discipline rather than a role in technology. Christine, thanks so much for taking time out of your day to join us here.

Christine [00:02:25] Thank you for having me. Really excited to be here.

Paul [00:02:27] Likewise. I’d love to hear a little bit about your journey and transition, specifically from the product ops side to the strategy side of the house. And I’m curious specifically, what about your previous roles informed your decision to make that leap? And what are some of the challenges that you’ve encountered in your new position?

Christine [00:02:45] Yes, it is still relatively new. I officially moved into this strategy role only in February of this year. I think my whole background in product led me to want to do the strategy role here at Pendo. I’ve been given incredible opportunities here at Pendo. You know, we’ll talk a little bit about product ops, but that was something that they also let me start from the ground up. This is not so much ground up. My manager, or my boss, is our Chief Strategy Officer and he was like, “Let’s figure this out.” And it’s pretty cool.

Christine [00:03:13] So I’ve been able to lead through influence in an IC role as a product manager, also then manage, as I became a manager, and then help grow people’s careers. And obviously, coaching comes along with, I think, any product manager role because you ultimately need to build a sense of community with each other and you end up coaching even your peers. So I think that that’s been really fun and I’ve been in a really great position to have gotten so much time with customers and prospects. Specifically here at Pendo. That’s been probably one of the highlights of my time here. All of this is really important to me as a product person.

Christine [00:03:46] The strategy role was informed by me really wanting to get more exposure to the business and the macro environment. And to be quite honest with you, I was managing folks for such a long time. I forgot how to do an IC role. I mean, at Pendo you roll your sleeves up, but you do it as a manager as well. But I wanted to do that so that I could focus more on what’s going on with the business and then continue to learn from customers. And I’m in a really unique position here at Pendo to be able to do that. So I continue to learn from the market and from customers. So again, I mentioned my manager, our Chief Strategy Officer. We created this really small strategy team a couple of months ago now, so I’m just the second member of it. We’re going to continue to develop it while serving the business and our customers. My role is a business strategy role and then an advisor to our customers and to prospects and just generally the product community, which is really nice.

Christine [00:04:38] There’s a little bit of challenge with anything like this. I feel like the challenge has been, “What are you doing?” You know, like this question is kicking it all up. And I think the biggest challenge for me specifically going into something like this that’s new in this company, and I think a lot of people, this might resonate with them. When something is really new, you get a lot of, “What are you doing?” And not just do you get a lot of, “What are you doing?” but, “What are we going to be utilizing you for?” You know, I built such strong relationships with my partners across the organization that they’re like, “Wait, so we don’t do that stuff with you anymore? We don’t pull you into these conversations and we don’t have in front of customers?” I’m like, “No, no, no, you actually do that even more now, now it’s like a formalized part of the role, before it was like, hey, hit you up for advice here and there.” And I just naturally want to talk to customers because that’s just who I am. So net though it’s been super positive, more good than challenges that I don’t feel like we won’t be able to solve for.

Sean [00:05:32] Fascinating. So you’ve mentioned that coaching is a part of any product management role.

Christine [00:05:38] Yeah.

Sean [00:05:39] I want to pull on that thread. Why do you think that and what underlies that? You also mentioned the importance of the human connection, which we all know. Everything we do in this world is so human-centered, or should be. But what do you mean when you say coaching should be a part of any product management role?

Christine [00:05:52] Yeah. So let’s start with the human connection part first. Like, if you’re not serving your customers, if you’re not spending time with customers, then you’re not the product manager role. And I think tactically, if you’re just not engaging with customers, then you’re not doing your job. It’s not just the market you serve, it’s internally at your company, it’s your customer success manager team, it’s your sales team, it’s your stakeholders, people who need to help you understand problems not just from a product perspective, but also from, like, what it is that they need out of you, something that they need you to solve so they can do their jobs very well so that business can continue to grow. And so building those connections as a product person is really, really important.

Christine [00:06:31] And I see a product manager who just starts is not going to generally jump in and say, “I’m going to be a coach.” What happens, I feel like organically, as you build your career as a PM, you start to become a little bit of a therapist for other product managers who start to come in. This space is still challenging. It’s always going to be challenging, but that’s because there’s so much thrown at you. So I think that’s one of the best things, though, is when you start to become this person that people feel very comfortable talking to because you’re offering this different perspective and offering advice… You know, you don’t even realize you’re doing it. It starts to maybe peak product people’s interest and one day becoming either a group product manager or a leader of some sort.

Christine [00:07:13] Or for those who don’t find that their time is going to be going mostly towards that or they don’t want to spend a significant time towards that, that’s their way of saying I’m going to focus on the IC track and become a high-level IC at some point in my career. That’s another great thing with product. You still have the human connection either with your peers or other product people and your customers, or you’re like, “No, I really need to spend the time with the customers in service of this business.” So, you know, hopefully, that answers your question. I just feel like it’s such a human-centered role that people don’t think about it that way until later on in their career when they say, “Man, I wish I had somebody to help me think through this,” right?

Paul [00:07:49] Yeah. Well, we’re all figuring it out in real-time. You know, I keep finding myself struck looking back at Apple launches from 2006, 2007. Like, this whole industry isn’t that old. So we’re still kind of figuring out how this all fits. So let’s dive into product ops a little given your work in the space. And I’m curious about your overall thoughts on the role that you have now and where it’s going, as well as some of the things you’ve left behind. Will you get back to those things someday?

Christine [00:08:14] Yeah. Product ops, overall thoughts, product ops teams, when people, sometimes you don’t have a team of them, they’re really meant to keep product teams healthy. That is what they should be focusing on overall is to help the product team in service of the health of the rest of the business. More and more people today are figuring out how to lean into this the right way, and some people don’t still. And that’s where a lot of people say, “Hey, can you give me some advice? Do we even need it?” That’s fine. That’s another fair question. What I find is that it really ends up depending on the leadership’s view of what a healthy team is composed of, right?

Christine [00:08:46] And so it also depends on the value that a leader places on the systems around the product manager versus the product manager creating just the product and the experience, right? There needs to be something that allows them to do that so that they can own and iterate, you know, on the product and on the experience overall. They need to feel empowered to do their best work.

Christine [00:09:05] Another thing is, is this definitely a separate role. So something else that I end up talking through when I talk about product ops is this is a separate role from a product manager. There have been some great podcasts out recently that I’ve been listening to where a lot of leaders are leaning into product ops as a complementary partner to the product manager, and those are the folks that I’m mentioning. They’re doing it in the right way. They’re not just throwing everything at them so that the product manager can do their job. It’s like, “No, what can you do that’s going to empower them to do their best work?” Not just, “What can you take off of their plate so that they can go do more of what it is that we want them to do?”

Christine [00:09:38] And we’re seeing, like, a few companies that have this role lumped under the Chief Operating Officer or an ops team. I’m open-minded about it. I think we still need to suss it out a little bit. You know, my personal belief is you need to be as close to the product team and as close to the Head of Product as possible so that you understand what their goals are, how this will align to company strategy or product vision and strategy. But there may be a company that’s doing that where the ops leader is giving that flexibility or the product leader has actually opened up lines of communication so that they can do that effectively. It all depends on really how you set your goals and what’s available in any organization to be able to execute on them.

Christine [00:10:19] Let me see, what have I left behind? I think at some point some day, thinking back to both product management and then product ops, I miss building a team of humans. I miss building product and experience for customers. Even in product ops, my customer was the internal teams that we had here at Pendo, and building that experience of being connected to the product team so that they can serve their customers better. So there’s always something there. But that’s not to say that this new role is not allowing me to do that. I think this is a different type of thing where I’m building upon the community that we currently have with Pendo and also with Mind the Product so that they can continue to thrive and make connections with each other.

Sean [00:10:58] Cool. You mentioned the goal of product ops is to build healthy product teams. How do you know you’ve got that? How are you measuring success for that role?

Christine [00:11:07] Yeah. I’d say to clarify, like, the goal of product ops is to build a system so that the team can be healthy.

Sean [00:11:12] I like that.

Christine [00:11:14] Yeah. Product ops is not going to build the product team. It’s going to make sure that the right things are operationalized, the right things are automated, the right space is given to the product manager, the designer, and the engineer so that they can do their components of their job really, really well. So your question still stands, like, how do I ensure that everybody’s aligned and like, how do we measure all of this? I feel like there’s something simple and something so complicated about what I’m about to say, which is the healthiest teams have no surprises. They feel as if they’ve been brought along or have enough context from the business or from their leader to do their best work and to make the best decisions. They have unobstructed, uninhibited access to customers, and they built enough relationships with those customers. And I mentioned earlier those in customer-facing roles to be able to casually chat about something for the product. I’m super lucky. I mentioned, it’s like I’ve got the best access to customers or the most access to customers I’ve ever had in my career here at Pendo so that’s been really fun. So I think that that’s really critical for the product manager to continue to do.

Christine [00:12:16] You know, something to think about too, is change is constant. And if change is constant, there needs to be an environment where missteps because of change happening and absorbing change constantly as a team or as an individual contributor is acceptable. There needs to be this culture of where having retros are normal and failing forward is really okay, right? You know, and think about the types of companies that are out there that are rising and then also have risen over the last couple of years. And I know we’ve seen a ton of companies shut their doors and a lot of layoffs in our industry. But there are still an incredible amount of companies that are growing. And those companies come with a lot of change, right?

Christine [00:12:56] A healthy team consistently aligns their work and outcomes to business goals, and the business goals are going to continuously change in these types of environments, right? A healthy team doesn’t just pick items from a backlog because feature requests are there and they needed to be added to a roadmap because they feel these things are valuable. They actually understand why these things are valuable. And product ops, in my experience, and then what I’m seeing from our customers enables the product manager to have, we call it a peripheral view of what’s going on so that they can make well-informed decisions and they can constantly align their work to that strategy and that vision. You know, it empowers the team to have access to enough tools and people to build the roadmap that aligns to company strategy.

Christine [00:13:38] One other thing, too, with teams in general is how you measure success is how transparent the team is with the rest of the company. Transparency is really critical when it comes to alignment. Without it, you’re faced with people asking tons of questions and filling the silence with assumptions, and then you leave room for misinterpretation. But when everybody’s aligned, you know, I mentioned one of the reasons we started it here was to make sure that the product team was aligned to the revenue organization and vice versa. You want to make sure that there is transparency and what’s happening and what’s not happening and that you’re all working towards this common goal. You feel this sense of like, we’re all marching towards this one thing for Pendo or for whatever company you work for. We need to have open dialog, enough emails or async-type updates so that you can continue to have this transparency across your organization, not overload. I don’t know if anybody uses email much anymore, Slack messages. And then, you know, again, making sure that there’s clear messaging. If you’re not marching towards the same thing based off of your leadership’s vision and strategy, you need to think about whether you’re in the right place, right?

Paul [00:14:40] You said two things in there that I really, really appreciated. First being no surprises does not necessarily mean no mistakes. And I’m paraphrasing a little bit there, but the thing that I picked up from that is there is a mindset of teams that brings this sort of law of no surprises to the table. It doesn’t mean that there’s a law of no mistakes. There’s always going to be discovery, there’s always going to be a misstep every once in a while. It’s the nature of the industry that we’re in. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t clearly communicate. We don’t want to get to the demo and then let people know that it’s not going to be as intended or as written. So I really appreciated that kind of balance.

Paul [00:15:14] And the other thing that I think is often overlooked is product management, product ops, it’s a business-first role. We have to build things that have a core business case embedded at their center. While we care deeply about empathy for our users and experiences that delight, it has to be a viable business case at the core. Otherwise, it’s not going to be a long-term viable solution. And I think while that’s on everybody’s mind, it’s not always at the top of everyone’s minds. So I really appreciated you calling it out in the way that you did.

Paul [00:15:42] The next question that I have, and I wish we had another hour to keep going. One of the last couple of questions that I think we might be able to unpack is just the nature of AI and getting a little bit, you know, into the nitty gritty of how this impacts product management going forward. We obviously are just at the very tip of the iceberg of where this generative AI revolution can go. How do you see these new opportunities and challenges emerging as product management develops?

Christine [00:16:06] The amount of times I’ve been asked this question, I think not just me, but I feel like every product manager at this point is asking or has been asked this question. We have so much to learn before we can make any definitive calls. And I love when companies are not pivoting 100% because of what has just happened and what’s come up for A.I., right.

Christine [00:16:27] I think the right way to approach things as product people, and I’ve written a couple of pieces on this, is embrace it in service of our customers and try to set ourselves up to be able to do this thing really responsibly. I spent time at a conference over in Scotland, and one of the things I noticed was in Europe, they are so much more focused on responsible AI and really setting up guidelines, standards, governance, regulation around this so that it does not get out of control. And I know this is one thing where we won’t be able to police it across the world, but there are already challenges around how people are bringing AI into their companies and into their products.

Christine [00:17:09] So my personal thought is, as we move ahead with this: first of all, you cannot go anywhere, you cannot join a company that’s not going to use it. Right. That’s just what it is. It’s not a fad. It’s not a trend. It’s something that’s going to shape the way we build and the way we look at technology going forward. So as we move ahead, we have to make sure that there’s alignment on how any company is speaking about it. So you work for a company, make sure you understand what the messaging is. Make sure that you have some sort of visibility, that there’s transparency into how that messaging or positioning was crafted, like, what is driving your company’s why on their stance behind AI and what they’re going to be doing?

Christine [00:17:44] And then I think more tactically, there should be some form of committee to help establish standards and govern the application of AI into your tech stack or your team’s tech stack to like, you know, if you think about GDPR over in Europe, again to use this because they’re a little bit stricter than we have been, you know, or most places, right? Chief Security Officers, legal teams kind of being there from the beginning to make sure that there are some sort of governance and standards around it, or standards is probably not the right word today for AI. But just look at it in a very similar way. These folks are likely the closest to understanding what’s going on at a macro level across the world and especially within your region. And they can help mitigate risks.

Christine [00:18:24] For product managers, I think, you know, again, a lot of conversations over the last couple of months about this a lot of people being asked about it. Recency bias, jumping on the bandwagon each time they see something new about AI, like we have to really check ourselves. We can look into use cases and we should always be looking into use cases for a lot of different things. But I think jumping on the bandwagon at a time like this, even though this is not, like I said, a fad or a trend, it’s a thing that we’re going to do. Bias can seep into the team at these moments more than others because everybody’s scrambling to understand and implement AI into their tech stack.

Sean [00:18:58] It reminds me of a quote I heard from Radhika Dutt at our conference in June. She used the Shrek quote from Lord Farquat: “Some of you will have to die, and that’s a chance I’m willing to take.” It was hilarious. Like, we have to think about the long-term impacts of AI, for sure. But I love your comment about how our job as product leaders are to embrace it, but only in the service of our customers. Like, it’s the thing everybody’s talking about, but they’re using it for, like, whatever they can think of as opposed to really fundamentally what we’re all supposed to be about, which is our customers.

Sean [00:19:30] I captured a few points, like key takeaways for me. I’m just going to go through them real quick and I want to make sure that we capture them crisply. So the first one is that coaching should be a part of any product management role. Like, it’s such a human endeavor that we’re on to build great software products. The second one is around who our customers are. Like you had said, obviously our customers are the users of the products, but really they’re also our team. And that ties tightly into this coaching concept because if we’re not thinking of our team as a part of who we are here to serve as product leaders, we’re missing something really big. And the next is that product ops is really about creating the space for teams to be healthy.

Sean [00:20:08] And when I asked the question about measurement, you came back with some really profound insights, too, that I think are important to curate here. One is that the healthiest teams have very few surprises. The healthiest teams also have great relationships with their customers. You know, another Christine quote is that, you know, you’re not doing your job if you’re not spending time with your customers, period. Like you’re so passionate about that. I love that. The next is that healthy teams always align their work with the business goals, you know, they understand how they’re playing a role in revenue in whatever context the business has. I think that’s a powerful thing that we often forget. And then lastly, the healthy teams have open candorous dialogs with the rest of the organization. And I think that’s another thing that’s missing. Like, we tend to navel gaze a lot and think about our product, our people, our users, our consumers, and really lose track of what’s going on with the rest of the org, which creates silos. And if we allow those silos to occur, it’s destructive not just for the organization but also for our own teams.

Christine [00:21:07] Something else that is like very tactically, right, I gave you healthy teams, healthy teams, and a lot of people I’ve talked to about this for like, well, how do you actually measure the health of the team? Right. And I’ve given you, “This is what a healthy team looks like.” I think there’s metrics that you can obviously use for product teams in general, and that’s something we should probably make sure we layer in here, which is, like, growths teams, very easy to quantify, you know, their success and how healthy they are or how successful they are. Conversion rate is a really easy one. Usage, time in app, time to value, like, those sorts of things are really easy for you to say, “This growth team is really successful.” Successful in the product sense, successful in, like, they’re getting outcomes driven through the product. There’s the success metrics and then there’s also health metrics, right? And I think most product teams in general will set metrics for each feature or product area they’re working on. So, like, again, adoption, usage, retention. Pretty standard, but I think you cannot underestimate the value of making sure that you’re putting some sort of health metric on your team as well.

Christine [00:22:07] And then I go back to like tactics again, like overall product team itself. If you’re looking at how successful, I’m saying that in air quotes, I know this is a podcast, the team is the percentage maybe of outcomes achieved against your strategic roadmap. So going back to making sure your team’s work is aligned. Whether you said it as a product manager or designer or product ops person or engineer, your work needs to align back up to something that goes into your vision and strategy. So making sure that you’re tracking in some way, shape, or form your percentage of outcomes that are achieved against that roadmap is really important.

Christine [00:22:37] And then, you know, we go back again to the health you can then partner with, like, how healthy are they across the whole organization and how quickly are they getting word out to the rest of the organization on outcomes so that customers can make more use of the thing that they just built? So I didn’t want to like just talk about the health in la-di-da terms. There’s also things that obviously product teams are measuring.

Sean [00:22:58] Yeah. Paul gets sick of hearing me say this, I’m sure. But another big key metric for me in terms of team health is, are they learning?

Christine [00:23:05] Yeah.

Sean [00:23:05] And if you can figure out how to know that you’ve got some incremental learning about the customer, about the product, about the space, and even the domain, like, people that aren’t growing and learning are going to struggle with motivation. So I think we need to keep a handle on that as leaders, making sure people have the space to grow and learn. And you can measure that.

Christine [00:23:22] You can measure it through failing. I mean, you fail forward, you learn. If you keep failing and making the same mistake you’re not learning.

Paul [00:23:28] So we just have two last quick questions and they’re questions that we ask of all of our guests. The first might be a little bit of a curveball, but I’m curious to know how you would define innovation.

Christine [00:23:39] You are throwing a curveball my way. I think if I think about it from sitting back in a product manager seat or somebody writing a product team, innovation is the way your team is looking at delivering a new experience to an addressable market, to a customer base that you may have already or you’re trying to go after.

Sean [00:23:59] I like how you used experience, like creating a new and different experience for your customers.

Christine [00:24:06] Yeah, and to double down on the word experience. I always remember this point early in my time here where there was, you know, in Slack you’ve got a competition channel or whatever, and somebody was mentioning one of our competitors and I was Director of Product here at that time, and they said something about the competitor. Everybody’s like, oh, you know, whatever, they’re not doing that well… And my response was like, “Are they delivering a better outcome and experience by giving that same feature that we just released to customers? Because all of that also needs to weave into the overall experience of the platform.”

Christine [00:24:41] And so the thing itself, the one outcome, is not what the customer ends up feeling, it’s the entire experience with your platform. And so the best teams innovate with the entire platform in mind, not just that one area of the product or that one feature. I think that they’re looking at it from, “Will this enhance overall perception of our company, overall perception of our product? Will it overall enhance the experience that they’re having, not just with this one area of the analytics side or something, but is it going to give them additional value as compared to what they were getting before?” So, I don’t know, innovation can be very simple, like, “This is brand new and nobody has done this before.” And again, you can bring that back to a thing. But I like to always make sure that you’re not just looking at it as a thing, you’re thinking about what you’re building as a new experience for your customers, not just a new feature.

Sean [00:25:33] I love that answer. Thank you, Christine. One last question. What are you currently reading that you would recommend to our audience?

Christine [00:25:39] Currently reading, oh, my goodness. What am I not reading? I’ve been picking up a lot more books because part of the strategy role, too, is looking a bit more macro at what’s going on to help not just the business understand what’s happening out there in tech and product, but also our customers. And I kind of take a look at, well, how does your business fit into the overall environment and how is the overall environment actually going to be impacting your business? But anyway, I read a lot of books that help me think differently. I actually recently, only recently, and people have told me to do this for a long time, I read Thinking Fast and Slow, which I’m sure people have said before to you guys as you ask this question.

Christine [00:26:13] Because I became so inspired by the way the European market is attacking AI and embracing AI at the same time, I started to read more journals on AI over in Europe, because I think we can really benchmark and take a couple of lessons from that. So I think that’s another area I’m spending a lot of time in. I also like to read a lot about growth, like product-led growth in general. I fell in love with it a little while ago and then I started to really just embrace it a little bit more because there’s little tactics in there on like how you can get people back in and how you can kind of, you know, earn the trust of your users. And I think that’s really important is gaining the trust of your users, so I read a lot about that. And then in moments where my brain needs like a little bit of a break, I’ll download one or two things on Audible and just listen to, like completely fake stories and just like, you know, all the drama and all the suspense and all that stuff.

Paul [00:27:04] Yeah, it’s not an afterthought. Very necessary to give your brain a break.

Christine [00:27:08] Yeah.

Paul [00:27:08] Give yourself some space to think divergently. Christine, I’ve learned a ton just talking in the past minutes that we’ve had to share together, and I really appreciate your insight and transparency in sharing your journey and the things that you’ve learned. I’m sure it’s going to inspire a lot of folks in our audience. So thanks again for taking the time.

Christine [00:27:23] Thank you both.

Paul [00:27:27] Well, that’s it for today. In line with our goals of transparency and listening, we really want to hear from you. Sean and I are committed to reading every piece of feedback that we get. So please leave a comment or a rating wherever you’re listening to this podcast. Not only does it help us continue to improve, but it also helps the show climb up the rankings so that we can help other listeners move, touch, and inspire the world just like you’re doing. Thanks, everyone. We’ll see you next episode.

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