one of the key things that I believe is just is critical to get right is to ensure that the whole company understands that in order to develop your career in your organization, you don't necessarily need to become a manager. I think that's absolutely critical. And the reason for that is because if the only way you can progress inside a company and take on more responsibility, increase your impact is to manage people, you end up with a lot of people who aren't energized by being managers and that undermines the effectiveness of the teams that operate underneath those people

welcome to the super managers podcast where we interview leaders from all walks of life to tease out the habits, thought patterns, learnings and experiences that help them be extraordinary at the fine craft of management. Our goal is to bring you the lessons and the insights so that you don't have to learn through your own mistakes, but so that you can show cut your way to being a great leader. This podcast is brought to you by fellow a software platform that helps managers and their teams collaborate on meeting agendas, track action items and turn chaotic meetings into productive work sessions. Check it out at www dot fellow dot app. Hey, fellow managers and leaders. I'm Aiden and I'm the ceo of fellow dot app today. I'm very excited to introduce you to Mike Murchison. He's the co founder and Ceo of ADa and if you're not familiar with ADa, it's a venture backed ai powered platform That's really transforming the way that businesses communicate with their customers. Many of the world's top companies use the product. And what's really interesting about Mike is that he is a five time founder, so he started five separate companies and ada really started from a handful of people today.

It's over 500 people, their digital first company. And what you're going to find out about Mike is that he is very purposeful, very reflective in the way that he manages the business. He is constantly looking for ways to improve the productivity, to improve the culture and improve the business overall. And so he creates frameworks around how to make sure that things happen consistently, not just so that he can do those things, but also other people on the team. You know, one example that we talk about, which when I first heard I was a little bit nervous about because I said, do you guys actually do this? And so they do this feedback session. For example, his whole executive team gets together and they take turns doing start stop,

continue for each person on the team. Each person takes turns listening to everybody else give him that feedback. It's very interesting at first, I was very apprehensive about the idea. But as Mike explained it now, I'm thinking that hey, maybe this is something that, that I should give a try. We talked about that. We talked about clarity for goals, how he's taken his company goals and turned them almost into internet memes and how that's been really effective for communicating ideas throughout the company. And of course being a digital first company, we've talked about the ways that mike and ada distinguish between synchronous and asynchronous work. My big learning here is that it's not about just one or the other, it's about the harmony of these two. And even things that are synchronous parts of those activities can be made asynchronous,

it's all about having that asynchronous first mindset, super interesting, some of the structures that they've put into place. So before we jump into the converse, I did want to give a shout out to two people who have left us reviews. As you know, we're trying to get this podcast reviews, really appreciate them. So the first one is two babies, Oohing and here she says, I started to follow this show from the beginning, consistently high quality content, keep up the great show, thank you for that. And from side who says this podcast has really changed the way I think really appreciate it and if you haven't done so would love it. If you could give us a review,

it really helps us spread the word. And finally, if you haven't done so already the super manager slack channel is, in my opinion, one of the greatest ways to interact and hang out with other very smart super managers, We talk about learnings and lessons from the show, but also we're starting to kick off away for you to be able to get advice from other people who are listening and who are listeners, great community, highly recommend you join if you're interested. Send us an email to super managers at fellow dot app and with that said and without further ado very excited to introduce you to Mike Murchison on this episode of the super managers podcast. Mike welcome to the show.

Great to be here.

Yeah, for I guess for a lot of people who didn't hear which would be actually everyone who didn't hear before. We press record, sounds like we had a lot of commonalities. You grew up in new york. I grew up in new york and here we are recording many years later after interacting a lot on linkedin linkedin has been pretty fun from a, you know, meet cool people with interesting ideas

these days. Two people who both share a new york city connection and an Ottawa connection which is rare

actually you want to know a fun story which is such a random fact. But guess number one on the super managers podcast was David cancel of drift and fun fact. It was so random as we started the conversation. I found out that he also grew up in far sales queens, which was so random. But yeah, I think anyway, I guess great minds travel alike perhaps maybe is something one can say. But yeah, mike, thanks so much for doing this. I think you know, I've been very excited to get in a conversation with you, you've you've been at a quite a few companies mostly as the founder and Ceo and today you are the Ceo and co founder of ADA, which is an artificial intelligence powered platform, which is mostly about business communications, you know,

keeping touch with customers and there's a lot that I want to talk to you about today. But one of the things we like to do on this show is start from the very, very big beginning and we like to talk about mistakes. So in those early days when you first started to lead a team, do you remember some of those early mistakes, maybe some of the cringe worthy ones that you don't make any

more? Oh yeah, there's many, I'd say the first key mistake I made. Looking back the first thing that I got wrong regularly earlier in my leadership career was a, I felt like I always had to be right, I felt like I had to have the right answers as a leader and I've since learned over time that I think great leaders give themselves permission to be wrong and instead of feeling the pressure to know a given answer, they empower their team to figure out how to arrive at the right solution. And so it's a real shift for me away from the sort of leader as expert to the leader as an enabler of eventual expertise for eventual solution that work and that that shift has been and continues to be I think a really core part of how I lead teams today and how I think about growth of

data, I think that's a really, really good conclusion. I wanted to maybe dig into that a little bit more. So what's really interesting about your background again founded data, probably a handful of people when when you guys first started, you know, over 500 today, would you say that that conclusion is as valid when the team is super small versus when it's as large as it is today and growing?

Yeah, I would actually say at least for me and my own leadership, it's even more true today, so much of my leadership growth today comes from learning from my surrounding team. That's I think the leader's ability to be curious and to be vulnerable in front of their team, their acknowledgement of when they have high conviction and when they don't, I think is a is like absolutely core to embodying a growth mindset and continuing to scale faster than your company is? I think that's a core thing to be mindful of, you know, high growth environment is how how quickly are you growing relative to the rate of your of your company and I think we all want to be in a position where we're growing at least as fast as the company of itself.

Yeah. So do you remember an example or when you first included on, you know, you don't need to, I guess have all the answers and it's much better to be an enabler of a problem being solved? Is there a particular problem or phase in the company where like this really hit home

for you? Sure. I remember when we, when the executive team became a thing in our company's history, which was something I was actually deeply uncomfortable about because we're at this point where, you know, most important meetings happened company wide, everyone felt involved in the core decision making and, you know, I was running really my first executive meeting where the purpose was to make some core decisions about the company and actually not involved everyone and the meeting I think went absolutely terribly, you know, I I thought I knew how to run the meeting. I thought I had the right agenda, I thought, you know, I was relatively clear around whose decision it was to make. I thought I had applied some basic,

you know, rapid like framework that I'm sure many listeners are familiar with, but it did not go well. In fact, I I felt like the meeting was actually much less productive than this, more consensus driven culture we had before that was, you know, involved so many more people. And the learning for me was I simply went and asked every member of my team one on one and I just, I just asked them, you know, how can we do this better? How do we uplevel this meeting and like literally within one week we ran the meeting every week just simply applying that feedback from every individual, just completely transformed the structure of the meeting and lead to just a far far more productive meeting that move the business forward. And I I mean it's it's sort of an obvious statement like learn from the feedback and apply it, but I do think that a lot of leaders and myself included tend to feel pressure that you need to get it right on the first try that you need to have the right framework,

you know, out of the gate. But really I think so much team unity and team productivity comes from consistent, relentless improvement and it's great to start with a baseline. So the, you know, the next thing we we started to institute and every meeting as we rate every meeting at the end of it. And so every exact meeting continues to this day to have an actual score connected to it, that gives some form of data, that feedback to the person who's running it around what was effective and what could be better

for next time, you know, I have to ask, do you remember what was one of the key changes that you made that made it a lot better from that very first iteration.

So yes, there are a few things that were, I got wrong, the first was the agenda itself and I know we can go deep on what a great agenda is and why? And you know, I felt, I think I what I didn't do a good enough job of as I solicited the right topics from the team, but we didn't crystallize the topics into core decisions that need to be made. And I didn't do a good enough job of clarifying for the team and helping the team clarify whose decision specifically it was too. And so we ended up with this meandering, long winded conversations that really didn't end, end with any clear outcome and you know, that sort of one key change and that since by the way has evolved into the system and data where we now actually have these cards that every meeting exists in every meeting. And the physical cards that people hold given to everyone at data and one of the cards is a rabbit hole card. And at any point in the meeting in data you can throw the rabbit hole card and say like we're going down the rabbit hole and it triggers everyone to say, okay, maybe here maybe because everyone permission to call out what they're seeing.

And so there's, that's been, that's been very effective for us. And now most meetings today, I don't involve physical cards, more metaphorical car that people are signaling.

That's a great story and very clever to have those cards you talked about, you know, briefly just now you said when executive Became a thing at the company, when was that in the company's growth? Was it when you were 30 people? 50, 100. When did you first add on executives and maybe tell me a little bit about what that felt like as a founder?

So we had for maybe the first year to an ADA we had heads of department, department heads and I don't think we really had an executive team until probably three or four years in or about a six year old company today. So executive team is relatively relatively new. And the distinction for me, the core distinction between having a collection of having, you know, a series of leaders who are heads of department and an executive team I think is best reflected in the answer to any individual team members. Their answer to the question, Who is your first team, like which, which team do you belong to? And if your head of marketing says that I belong to the marketing team, then you don't have an executive team. In my opinion, the answer to the question is I belong to the executive team, this is my first team which is of course the peony concept that we embody in data and has been I think very, very constructive for us That didn't really happen until ADA was at least 150 people I would say.

And for me, in terms of how that felt was really was the first time for as a leader where it really started to feel as though we had a decision making apparatus that worked, where there's clarity around the decisions that are being made, there's clear ownership of those decisions and clear rationale around why they're being made. And that to me is just so core to what makes an executive team function and what leads to successful decision making in a company. For me, my experience so far, I sort of think you it's one of these things where you kind of know it when you actually have it and it feels qualitatively different than a team dynamic, where folks are really making decisions on behalf of their department, they're not making decisions, you know, in service of the company first and they feel true ownership over this executive team first and foremost.

Yeah, I think that's a really good way to put it. So it's the first team becomes the executive team and I really like the term that you used, it felt like, you know, you had a very strong decision making apparatus and I think all of that is very indicative. Some people find this stage of when you first bring on that middle management layer to be a very difficult transition to go from, like you said from heads of departments or to adding a middle management layer. And, you know, part of it is maybe because of relinquishing control, maybe sometimes it's it's really difficult and you know, as a company, you might have misfire, would you say a difficult transition for you or it was smooth sailing and you hired some great people and everything just went to the moon.

No, it's definitely, definitely challenging. I think it's challenging in every company. I think one of the key things that I believe is just is critical to get right is to ensure that the whole company understands that in order to develop your career in your organization, you don't necessarily need to become a manager. I think that's absolutely critical. And the reason for that is because if the only way you can progress inside a company and take on more responsibility, increase your impact is to manage people, you end up with a lot of people who don't aren't energized by being managers and that undermines the effectiveness, the teams that operate underneath those people. And so I think that the core thing to get right initially is a make it really clear to everyone that there are at least two tracks here. There's an individual contributor track where you can grow your expertise and your impact without managing people. And then there's a second track which involves increasing your impact via managing folks. And so I think in the early days of ADa there was definitely some ambiguity about that, that we quickly identified and sorted out and had encouraged everyone who's in a similar stage, we were back then to make that clear

to Yeah, to build the different career path so that, you know, people understand that. It's not that the only way up is to manage people and then so on and so forth. Yeah, that is a definitely an important step to take while we're talking about this concept of productivity, maybe to set the stage because I want to shift the discussion into how you have built systems at ADa to keep people productive, to set the stage. What is a da's form of working today? Is it all remote? Is it hybrid maybe you can kind of describe how you go about things these days?

Sure. So ada is a digital first company for us, that means that our north star is that anyone's geography. Geography cannot confer anyone a career advantage of data. That's our core belief around how we work. So meaning in ada we build the systems and communication infrastructure so that you can work from anywhere in the world and have as big an impact as anyone else anywhere else in the world. Working to data now in order to enable that were very intentional, default communication style that everyone has the data and the default data is asynchronous. So you and I are collaborating I'm working with you by default via google doc via a asynchronous video, I'm recording and sending you with you via slack message or an email and secondly we provide very clear guidelines around when synchronous communication or synchronous were actually makes sense and for us synchronous work defaults to being virtual and the guideline is to in a meeting and virtual meeting to make a decision, that's the sort of default. Our default view should only really, we should meet up in real time if we actually have something to decide and we should be familiar with what we're trying to decide well in advance because we're defaulting to communicating and working synchronously now we also regularly meet up in person but we are very intentional about the cadence at which that happens and how we make use of our in person experience. We just recently had our, our first post pandemic extravaganza, which our company wide offsite in Toronto, we brought everyone in for three days of planning, high energy, team building values alignment. Just such a great in person burst of energy that we all experienced together and then we all went back to our respective homes around the world and continue to back into our default

and also just for some context. So how many time zones would you say that the employee base spans

Believe we're across four or 5 time

zones now. Okay, so I guess are there a lot of time zones that are maybe you know, 12 hours apart or more or do you have some of that

too? We do. We have folks in in Singapore for example and Cool.

So this is really interesting. So I guess the, the default that you would start with is a sink. So everything is a sink and there select reasons why you would have something synchronous. Obviously the, you know, the extravaganza as you called it, you know, it was a really good energy boosting way to get everybody the whole company together. But other reasons why you might get together at the exact same time is to make decisions, Are there certain types of decisions that warrant that? And you know, for example, my question is for for your executive meeting, how often do you have that? And is that always synchronous or are there times where it might not be? And I'm just curious how, how you would further distinguish that and and also teach people at data which mode they should default to

a lot of decisions, it turns out can actually be made asynchronous. That's why it's really valuable that they default to the a sync communication. One way this manifests for us is in our executive team, we meet weekly and we have a weekly synchronous, like real meeting over zoom and prior to that meeting, two days before we all commit to filling out a essentially a we hold our exact team notebook, but it's a list of we call them staging decisions. So these Decisions that are sort of in the staging environment, waiting to be pushed to production and everyone, if they have a decision to be made, they are putting it in there and they're soliciting, they're making it really clear the outcome that they're looking for from that, from that decision that's in staging and they're often soliciting input from the rest of the executive team. Now, it turns out that I would say about 30% of all decisions in the staging environment actually end up getting made before the comment couple, google notes and they actually don't even need to be discussed live,

the rest of them end up being typically debated, but we're able to, there's very little information gathering in the actual meeting itself, were able to hop right into everyone, has the context, able to hop right into the crux of the issue and it's much more productive, very clear on what we're trying to achieve because the outcome is clearly articulated, You know, so much of the effective meeting I've learned really comes from, I would say like 90% of what makes a meeting successful is actually the out front work and preparation for it. The meeting itself is really just like the, it's the push to production, like that's the easy, you know, the hard part is writing the code, hopefully not not pushing into production.

The same thing I think is true in when it comes to effective meetings, so the suggestion of data is to default to that way and we really try to encourage folks to do that. Now we're not so Prescriptive as to mandate that everyone work this way 100% of the time because there are exceptions. There are sometimes where you know you and I were working on a problem, we just feel right that we actually need to get together. We may need me absolutely need to hop on a call just to work through something. I think everyone should be empowered to do that, but we approach it from most of the time you don't and so the productivity unlock and the collaboration unlock and the equity and accessibility unlock comes from

changing the default state. Hey, there just a quick pause on today's episode to let you know that we'd really appreciate you helping us spread the word about the super managers podcast. If you're enjoying what you're hearing so far, dial into your podcast app of choice, whether that's on apple or android or Spotify and just leave us a quick review now, back to the interview. Got it. And so I think that the value then is a lot of people have the context and or most of these decisions, things like I intend to do this or go about things this way. What are some thoughts or objections? And you know, do some of those objections arise even before you get together or is it that by hearing someone else mention something that basically triggers other people to have ideas that would basically add to the discussion. And then do people make the decision right then and there Or did they say thank you. I have my information. Let me think about it. And I'll report back

where we go. We aim to make the decision in the meeting and literally cross it off. There's a feeling of accomplishment when that, when that happens and often the meetings, rating is connected to how many things we've actually accomplished together. I'd say, you know, there is a there is a a desire to move forward and an example of this might be our dan R. C R. O might put a recently put a staging decision and around making this up right now. But something like I'm proposing, we move sales enablement into product marketing. Today lives in the sales organization. It should live in product marketing. I think this is the right reason why. And in order for us product marketing as part of our product organization in order for this to make sense. Like,

you know, my car CPO needs to be brought in to this, I'm supportive of this. Everyone else's supported this mike. What do you think? This is? Clearly this is even though, you know, ultimately our Ceo mike is the decision maker on this, on this organizational move clearly the core person who needs input and buy and from is is our CPO So that's an example where the discussion will happen a synchronously before the meeting and well, by the time the meeting actually happens, there's often very little I need to be discuss unless it's on earth another related problem or something we need to tackle

in advance. Yeah. And so that's interesting. And so a tactical thing here. So the rating of the meeting, is this a 1-10 score? And do you go around and ask each person what is your rating or do they write it down?

And of every meeting, I ask, what do we write this meeting today? Our ops leader Bronwyn runs our our exacting meetings and she asked everybody at the end of the meeting how what do you mean? 1-10? And the outlier has to

explain why am I like that? That's pretty awesome. So as we're talking about feedback, because I think this is a this is interesting and also similar. You recently had, I think, I don't know if this was part of the larger company offsite or if this was just an executive off site that you had, but you did a very special type of feedback session with your executive team. Maybe you can explain why what you all did and and why?

So this was a our exact team off site about a month ago and we ran a what we call a start stop continue exercise, which is the common framework. We use that data to give and receive feedback to one another. And this goes way back to David, my co founder and I's very early days of our partnership where every week, the end of the week we sit down with one another and we do this S. S. C. And what S. S. C. Is, is it's structured way in which I give you a clear feedback around one thing I want you to start doing, stop doing and continue doing to improve our working relationship and increase our our impact on the company. And in return I ask the same from you. And the rules are very simple. You can only respond in one of two ways when you are receiving the feedback,

you can either say, can you give me an example please or please share more? You're not allowed to engage with it, you're not allowed to debate it, You have to receive it and accept it. That ensures that you don't go down rabbit holes and that there's a true forum for the feedback provider to to share what's on their mind. And we do this both one on one within our teams and we do it collectively as a team. So recently we did this as an executive team where each one of us, as a member of our executive team took turns receiving S. S. C. S from the rest of the team openly and the val while you're doing it openly, was it provided a way for other team members to essentially up vote other people's feedback. So if you were giving me feedback that hey mike you just really finding I need you to start being clear with your priorities. You know, you're giving me like eight priorities right now.

I need to be more mindful of how many were actually working on. Someone else might say. I totally agree with that. By the way, my, my experience too. So you got to use the receiver, get the sort of like real time up vote, you get to see from your, your peers and that's just, that's super valuable from a feedback. In terms of receiving feedback. It has a secondary value of really feeling, I think increasing the unity of your team, at least that's our, our experience.

It's a very vulnerable state to put yourself in on the receiving end. It's also very challenging to share difficult feedback publicly. But it exemplifies the first team mindset. It demonstrates very clearly that hey, we are also committed to make operating better as a team. We recognize that each of our individual relationships need to be strengthened. That needs to be a, a robust lattice work for us to actually operate effectively as a team and sir. And in turn execute in the best way for the company and we're going to put ourselves through this exercise to be able to do that. And it becomes much easier over time. It's a, it's a muscle, you strengthen anyone who's trying it. I highly encourage you if you're, if you're leading the exercise to go first. That's the only only tip I offer.

Yeah, it definitely can be very, especially if you receive feedback and everybody else also votes it. It's why didn't anyone tell me this? But I am curious what would you say is like the main benefit, A lot of what you're saying, I get to understand that it promotes the first team mindset, it creates stronger bonds and really allows everybody to think that, hey, this is one team and we're in this together. Why in person, one of the reasons that, you know, I asked this question in person in real time time is I guess, you know, part of it is is it harder for people to ingest the feedback and be able to say something about it or or maybe that's the part that I'm unclear on. So you can only do things you can ask a question you can maybe ask for an example,

you can't respond. So at the end you just say thank you, what if you and this is a funny question to ask, but what if you go home and you're like, you know what, I think that doesn't make any sense or you have, you know, for further things to discuss. What about the follow up to these things? So is it just about hearing and ingesting?

So I think great, great point. So one thing I think is absolutely core to set the expectations around if this exercise is going to be successful for you is making it very clear that feedback is just input, you know, feedback doesn't, it doesn't need to be acted upon you as a feedback giver should not expect that the feedback you're giving is necessarily followed and that's just an important condition I think to set for this exercise to work. And I think for feedback cultures in general to flourish because the expectation that is that every time I give you feedback you're gonna do exactly what I say. Like I'm just not going to give you feedback over time because you're not going to listen to everything I suggest. And that that I think exemplifies another form of trust. Like I'm trusting you to be able to take the signal out of what I'm sharing, knowing full well that there's gonna be some noise and what I'm sharing with you and and trusting you to calibrate that across your team and or a company and and make the necessary changes to up level. So that that's the first thing I think the second thing is that you asked about, hey, does this need to be done in person? I don't think it does. We do this regularly regularly, digitally synchronously of course,

but I don't think it needs to be done in person. I do think there's added benefit to it being done in person within a team context, mainly because you guarantee that there's no distractions. You know, everyone's fully present. There's not another window on the screen and you get much more data, you get that the in person body language is I think provides such valuable data in that kind of exercise. You really do learn a lot. That's a finally, you get the experience of in the room sharing this all together that I think is a little more visceral when you're doing it in real life than when you're doing it on a call. Not to say that it can't work on a call. I think it's still effective and you know, well how well this can work synchronously this kind of feedback to the, you know, fellows 3 60 product. So I think that um they're definitely different ways you can do this and you're just trading off the, you know, the like friction versus the maybe the like the impact.

So it's really in interesting. So you, your tip on, you know, if you're facilitating this, go first, I really like this tip and it sounds like, and it's very interesting, it sounds like you've been doing this with your co founder for a long time, which is which is admirable because generally speaking, I would say that structured forms of feedback exchange or maybe not a thing that most, you know, co founding teams do. So it's it's very admirable that you have done that. But since you've done this a lot of times, talk to me about the energy in the room. So is this the sort of thing that eventually when you do enough times,

you know, people can be very positive about it or depending on what's communicated, you know, it's it can go in any direction. I'm just curious like what it feels like to sit in that room as this is happening.

So I'd say if you haven't done it as a team before the first time, absolutely, there's a nervous energy and a lot of folks speaking of body language will have their arms cross and they're really uncertain about this and that's why it's so critical that I think you set the expectation of going first on the receiving end and I'd go so far as to say is I would set the expectation that you go first and and actually meet with one of your team members and ahead of time and work with them on the feedback that they are going to share publicly. Make sure that the first example that is shared is a really good media example of hard to hear feedback that shared publicly. And so that I think is a critical sort of precedent setting that you you do. And so I think once you do that, like what I I tend to notice is, you know, your the team starts to realize whoa, that was an intense thing to here, nothing bad happened because all all mike did was respond with a simple question, can I have an example and moved on to the next feedback and said thank you for the feedback. And so the there's a clear demonstration that really, you know, there's, there's rules in place here. There's a celebration of the feedback having been shared and there's an acknowledgement that like it's input,

it's not going to be fault necessarily follow blindly. And then, you know, people tend to open up and start to perform it themselves, you know, and suggest people, you don't mandate that everyone perform to get into the hot seat, so to speak. I tend to be my experience that everyone ends up wanting to do it and then finally you touched upon this earlier, you know, while in the moment, I think it's important to not to set the ground rules that you can't respond to the feedback in real time. What I do like to perform is a, is a sort of debrief exercise where after we've all done it, we say, how was that for everyone?

Any reflections and folks do tend to come out and say, well, it was so interesting to hear from you and that you felt like, you know, I've been not a good partner to the marketing organization and I need to step up and I'm really grateful for that. So I'm really just want everyone, I'm going to work really hard on that. I really appreciate you all holding me accountable, top level in there and Jessica is so valuable for you to hear that like you just, you get that real time debrief that you hear people sort of clear their thoughts and it's it's quite unifying. It's a really, it's I think it's a very powerful experience.

Yeah, this stuff is really starting to I think our whole conversation is really starting to come together. I'm getting the sense that it's really important for you and your executive team to just form this very tight bond. And one of the things I know about relationships in general is that there are things that strengthen relationships. I forget what book it was that I read this in, but basically it's a few things, its frequency of interaction, you know, if I only see you once a year, chances are we're not going to have strong relationship. So frequency is important, but also intensity, and what I would say is this is probably a very intense hour or two hours spent. And so this stuff really, really adds to the mix. The other thing I've noticed about, you know,

some of the discussions that we've had so far is that you also care a lot about clarity. You know, you talked about it in terms of, you know, meetings as decision status as a way to stage decisions. You've also talked about being very clear about who has different roles. I also know that when you think about goal setting, you think about clarity a lot and you've likened business goals or you encourage people to think about them in terms of memes would love for you to elaborate how you do that at ADa and you know how it works

out. Sure, I love thinking about business goals as memes because a meme is something that just travels that people want to share that is lightweight and very memorable. And I think so much clarity is the way clarity is achieved in an organization and a team is when it's really easy to digest and you know what you're actually going after and why. And so I like to think about goal clarity as a goal of goal clarity being a meme or a meme like state in some ways that we, we certainly try to embody this are through one example is what we call soaps strategy on a page and this is a concept I learned from Samir at Sangre Twilio now at at Bessemer and what a strategy on the pages is a single slide or picture that includes your company's mission, your company's values, the core health metrics that tell you your company is working well and then your core company objectives and key results and we try to circulate that across a to digitally all the time. It's pinned to the top of every key slack channel. It's a zoom background that could change to it right now. You wanted, it's something that's easy to digest and easy to share and we try to make the actual goals themselves snappy and short and succinct and easy to remember for similar reasons do. So

that's one example, So I really like this concept. Is there an example of, you know, a time where you did this really well, like a goal that you know, you know, was a meme and do you remember what you used and you know, one of them more effective times that you've done

this? Sure. So one of the goals that comes to mind for me was what we called 30 and 30. That was the goal at eight and the goal was we're going to automate 30% of our customers customer service inquiries in 30 days or less. And the sort of drumbeat of our company was how are we doing on 30 and 30? What's the track to turn 30 and 30 right now we're like 50 and 30 now we're 48 30. How do we get to 30 and 30? Or I guess we were 30 and 50 I guess would be the other way around. And that sort of simple to say, it's almost just like calms exercise. But the internal momentum that came behind 30 and 30 ended up translating into an X external go to market motion for us. That continues to be part of how ADA sells its software today. You know, now it's something that our clients often repeat and becomes part of prospective client conversations. Oh 30 and 30. That's cool, that sounds like quick results and that are easy to achieve your software must make that relatively easy. So there's a, I think you start to see the impact of goal clarity actually manifest in your customers if you do it right.

That is really cool. I have to ask was there like an image or a graphic that also came along with this or I guess the catchy nous of the goal itself allowed

it to spread in this case just like the catchy nece I think you could take it. We could even done it better. I think you could imagine some like literal memes that you could create with it. We did see like a bunch of, you know, 11 thing that's so cool. I think about digital first cultures or 11 way that they manifest. I'm sure this is true and fellow is the custom emojis.

Yes custom emojis

for sure. You know, so you start to see 30 and 30 custom emojis for example, let's say, you know it's working and traveling people are responding to stuff with 30 and 30 and there's, you know, some funny image that someone has come up with for 30 and 30 so that sort of stuff is happening all the time. And I think it's a, I think that's a good indication that the goal is clear enough and is mean like

that's so true about digital cultures mike. We've gone through so many interesting interesting topics today. You know, we talked about synchronous versus asynchronous. You talked about you know how you use cards for meetings like the rabbit hole card and how meetings are meant to stage decisions. We've talked about memes, we've talked about strategy on a page or soaps, so many, so many interesting discussions. One final question that we like to end with is for all the managers and leaders constantly looking to get better at their craft. Are there any final tips tricks or parting words of wisdom that you would leave

them with to level up as a leader? Look internally first, that's my one, my core learning that continues to be something that I try to do to continually level up. And what I mean by that is I think so many of us assume that the way we grow as a leader is to seek outside counsel outside advice from how, you know, others have led companies before and without a doubt, like that is super valuable and there's so much, so much great stuff to learn. But I think we regularly how much we can learn directly from the people who were managing and so much of my knowledge and growth as a leader has come from truly soliciting the feedback from the people I work most closely with and I think that that is the first source of feedback is a great place to start if you're looking to level up.

That's great advice and a great place to end it mike, Thanks so much for doing this.

Great to be here. Thanks

for having me and that's it for today. Thank you so much for tuning into this episode of the Super managers podcast. You can find the show notes and transcripts at www dot fellow dot app slash super managers. If you like the content, be sure to rate, review and subscribe so you can get notified when we post the next episode and please tell your friends and fellow managers about it. It'd be awesome if you could help us spread the word about the show, see you next time.