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"Hippo stands for the highest paid person's opinion." — Steve McLeod
"Delete almost all of your backlog on an ongoing basis. It's good for you. It's good for your team." — Steve McLeod
"Until your product is a lot bigger, you are the product manager, so embrace that." — Steve McLeod
Exploring how humans connect and get stuff done together, with Dan Hammond and Pia Lee from Squadify.
We need groups of humans to help navigate the world of opportunities and challenges, but we don't always work together effectively. This podcast tackles questions such as "What makes a rockstar team?" "How can we work from anywhere?" "What part does connection play in today's world?"
You'll also hear the thoughts and views of those who are running and leading teams across the world.
Dan Hammond 00:00:00 Are you struggling with decision making in your team and worse? Do you think it's the team that might be the problem? You know, you've got pesky opinions flying around and it's really hard to move forward. Whereas if you're on your own, you'd probably just be able to know exactly what to do. Well, of course, the answer is to harness the team. And this episode is for you. We're talking to Steve McLeod, who is the founder of Feature Upvote. And importantly, he's also written a book recently called Kill the Hippo, which is all about decision making in bootstrap startups around product. But actually what he's learnt is useful for any team trying to make decisions in a complex environment with a limited budget. And which team does that not describe? So this is probably for you. So enjoy the episode and we'd really hope this will help you with your decisions and bringing people around you to make them.
Dan Hammond 00:00:53 Hello and welcome back to we! Not Me, the podcast where we explore how humans connect to get stuff done together.
Dan Hammond 00:00:59 I'm Dan Hammond and I'm Pier Li. Pier? Is that the pier Lee and Dan Hammond that are in a new book? We are in a chapter of a new book. Yes, we.
Pia Lee 00:01:08 Are in a book, which is quite exciting. We actually got asked how we met, which.
Dan Hammond 00:01:13 Yeah, it was great. It's great actually.
Pia Lee 00:01:16 Big spoiler. There were no dirty parts to this. It was all very clean.
Dan Hammond 00:01:20 No, no, exactly. It's very, very clean and boringly professional. We have the author on the show today, but we were asked to contribute to this book, Kill the Hippo by Steve MacLeod. And well, it was really a wonderful experience to talk about our meeting and our journey together. But as part of that sort of getting really stuck into this question of how products are developed in bootstrapped startups like ours, and it turned out to be I think this really goes to the heart of how teams can make decisions and how things work, and it's far less autocratic or process driven than we might imagine 100%.
Pia Lee 00:01:57 And it was good to talk about where the friction points are in our own decision making and how we overcome them. And I hadn't had the opportunity to lay out our relationship in that way and really look at sort of the interaction of it. And I felt pretty lucky at the end of it.
Dan Hammond 00:02:13 You know, me too. We do. We get a lot of. Soppy. Same. Same. Same. Exactly, exactly. Lovely. Lots. But before it gets too soppy, let's get over and hear from Steve now.
Pia Lee 00:02:25 Disintegrate.
Dan Hammond 00:02:26 It's a really great conversation.
Pia Lee 00:02:35 It's a huge pleasure to welcome Steve MacLeod to the show. Welcome, Steve.
Steve McLeod 00:02:40 Thank you for having me. It's a real honor and pleasure to be here and already. Pia, thank you for saying my surname correctly. I live in Spain, where no one can say my name, so thank you.
Pia Lee 00:02:49 And what do they call you? Claudie.
Steve McLeod 00:02:52 Yeah. I think that dude was the weirdest I had. There wasn't an official letter from the electricity company.
Steve McLeod 00:02:58 Steve McLean. Dude.
Pia Lee 00:02:59 Wow.
Dan Hammond 00:03:00 The clerk. Dude.
Pia Lee 00:03:01 Clerk. Dude, that's a very good. I looked at my messages on my phone that, you know, you can see the transcript and my name is never the same. It was. Hi, PW. Hi, Peter. Hi, Paris. Not one of them was. The AI picked it up correctly. So yes. You and me together, Steve.
Dan Hammond 00:03:19 I get all kinds of things when I'm talking to you. I see the ones on the phone and I get peer, as in a Brighton peer, then peer as in House of Lords and. Yeah, yeah, all kinds of things. All kinds of things. But yeah. Steve MacLeish. Dude, I'd stick with that.
Pia Lee 00:03:33 I'd keep that one.
Dan Hammond 00:03:34 I can't believe.
Steve McLeod 00:03:35 That was the weirdest thing. I took a photo.
Pia Lee 00:03:37 Well, welcome to the show.
Dan Hammond 00:03:39 Warm, warm welcome.
Pia Lee 00:03:40 We are very exciting to delve into your book. Your newest book, Kill the Hippo.
Pia Lee 00:03:47 First. Before we get to have a proper conversation about that, we will hand you over to Dan Hammond. He's got a very spicy question. I have a feeling to ask you.
Dan Hammond 00:03:55 I have actually this time the question I have for you. It's a green card officially, which should make it easy, but I think this is a little bit of a spicy one. If I were a historical figure, who would I be? This is where we want to sort of give you plenty of time to think about it.
Pia Lee 00:04:11 Not Keir Starmer tonight.
Steve McLeod 00:04:14 So if, if I, Steve was a historical figure or if you den.
Dan Hammond 00:04:18 If you were a historical figure, if you know, if you were a historical figure I would be this person because, yeah, just there's only one in history that you relate to. You're particularly interesting. As usual, we play with the rules. You don't have to be that person if you're interested in one or someone jumps out for you. Anything like that would do nicely.
Dan Hammond 00:04:37 Steve, just to shed some light on who Steve Dude is or whatever your name is.
Steve McLeod 00:04:42 So I'm a bit shocked with how egotistical the the answer is that popped into my head. I can imagine myself as Aristotle or Plato in a toga or whatever. The ancient Greeks were walking around the agora with the followers, debating philosophical topics for the first time, back when nobody actually knew or had debated these things before. And somehow people listening to me, which is completely unlike what happens in real life, especially at home.
Dan Hammond 00:05:08 Marvel I like that.
Pia Lee 00:05:09 I like it. Tails hanging off.
Dan Hammond 00:05:11 You and these great thoughts coming to mind. And people just, The pearls fall from your lips.
Steve McLeod 00:05:17 Yeah. And then people are not liking what I was saying. And making me drink some hemlock or something to kill myself. Was that Plato? Aristotle? I don't quite remember.
Dan Hammond 00:05:25 It might have been the one I heard I was listening to about recently is about Archimedes, who was killed by a Roman soldier because the Roman soldier disturbed him while he was drawing something in the dust, and he was a bit stroppy with him, so he killed him.
Steve McLeod 00:05:37 It's much easier to be a thinker these days, isn't it?
Pia Lee 00:05:40 As I say, it is. Keir Starmer has nothing to fear. It'll be all okay. He will wake up one day.
Dan Hammond 00:05:47 He will wake up. No, that's a good one, Steve. That does shed quite a bit of light on you. Excellent. So I'm glad we're taking you to that place. But also we're very much hoping that you'll be sharing some of these enormous and innovative thoughts with us on the show today. Tell us a little bit more about you, Steve. Tell us a bit a bit more about you and where you got to this place today.
Steve McLeod 00:06:07 I always find that the first thing I need to explain is my accent. So I'm born in New Zealand, but I partly grew up in Australia and I've been living in Europe for more than 20 years. I've been in Barcelona for the last ten or so. I run a small software company called feature Upvote. It's a platform for managing customer feedback that's found a home in the video game industry.
Steve McLeod 00:06:28 So now no longer young. If you look at my hair, it gets me away. I actually get to spend a lot of my time in the video games industry. The teenage me would be amazed to find out what the adult me gets to do. Yeah, and the reason, particularly why I'm here on the show today, I guess, is to talk about the book that I just published, self-published with my co-writer, which was investigating how bootstrapped software companies go about choosing what feature to build next.
Dan Hammond 00:06:53 Nice. We can't wait to get into it because it's a very human story and I just have to talk about. It's probably a high ego show, but I have to mention that pier and I are in the book. So first of all, thank you for including us.
Pia Lee 00:07:05 Aristotle could not make it, but we could.
Steve McLeod 00:07:07 Didn't get a mention? No, I.
Pia Lee 00:07:09 Didn't get a mention.
Steve McLeod 00:07:11 And I'm gonna say that we were a very, very selective in who was in there. There were some potential guests who we evaluated their company and their story and thought, it's not quite right for the book.
Steve McLeod 00:07:21 So you did pass through a selective process.
Pia Lee 00:07:24 Pass muster. That's fantastic.
Dan Hammond 00:07:25 Wow. That's a first peer. I think whenever we get into selective processes, we never get through them. So this is amazing. Excellent, Steve. Well, welcome to the show.
Steve McLeod 00:07:33 Thank you. It's real honor and pleasure to be here.
Pia Lee 00:07:36 So, Steve, take us into your world. Tell us a little bit about who you are, how you've got to this place, and actually, what inspired you to write a book in the first place.
Steve McLeod 00:07:46 Yeah. I wonder if I should answer that backwards. At first, the book wasn't a book. It was going to be a lead magnet or content to try and get customers for a product. Part of what people use with the data they gathered with our tool is prioritization, working out what to build. And we thought, well, let's work out how it's actually happening. So we'll create stories about our prioritization frameworks, and then we'll try to find examples of people using each of them.
Steve McLeod 00:08:09 And we wrote our first chapter about a framework called rice. It stands for reach, impact, confidence and effort. And we thought this has talked about a lot. Surely we're going to find a story of somebody using it, telling us what they like and don't like about it. So we interviewed a company and it turns out they have no framework for prioritization. So we found another company to interview and ask them about it. They don't have one either. We interviewed a third company and they also weren't using any like specific framework. And we realized the whole premise for the book was wrong. So my co-writer and I sue, and we really looked at this and decided, well, actually, if the premise of the book is wrong, why don't we actually learn from this and write a book about what we're learning, which is that people really, really struggle with this idea in a software company of what to build. People have built too many features, the wrong features, the built things because one loud customer kept asking for it and then got stuck with it.
Steve McLeod 00:09:03 Or they've found that they've spent a year building something they thought was important and nobody wanted it. And we thought, well, these are good stories to tell, so why don't we just tell these stories and forget about the framework for prioritization? Forget about the idea that it wasn't going to be a lead magnet. It's now got nothing to do with my product. And we actually learned a lot from the stories ourselves.
Dan Hammond 00:09:22 That's brilliant. I must say, Steve, I'm mightily relieved because you know our chapter. We commend the book to anyone. But when we went into that, I sort of thought we are not nearly as fact. We're not not fact driven, but we're not as data driven as we like to be, but we don't have access to as much data as I like to be. So when I got on the call with you to be interviewed, I thought, this is a slightly sad story. And then you wrote Pia in, which was an excellent idea, but we really sort of zoomed in on the human side of this, but it's quite a relief to hear that there are others out there just making their way, doing the best they can, and dealing with the complexity of a rapidly changing situation.
Dan Hammond 00:09:57 So that was a relief just for the listeners who don't know about this world. Talk about a little bit like, what's the life of a product owner of a bootstrapped startup? What is that? For a start, I'm sure some people are thinking, and why is this topic about decision making so worth writing a book about, actually?
Steve McLeod 00:10:15 So you ask a very important question about the bootstrapped aspect. So a bootstrap business is one when there's no external funding, there's no investor taking a part of the business. We stretch that rule a little bit. It's like some people get a bit of money from friends and family or so on, but generally you're in charge of it day to day. There's no one telling you what to do. You own most or all of your business, and you're always cash strapped. And why that's really important for this book is that there is actually a ton of information about how to go about building products and choosing what to build in it. It's almost always built on the assumption that you have lots of money that VC backed, venture capitalist backed, and that you have teams of people, teams of product managers who are able to go and conduct interview after interview and debate this stuff.
Steve McLeod 00:10:59 And actually in a small bootstrap company, in our case, they were generally about 10 to 30 people in the company. It's actually the owner of the business or a founder or a co-founder that has to make these decisions. And then they don't have ample data, they don't have the ability to talk to customers all day, and yet they still have to choose what to build. And it's one of the most important decisions in the software business is what is actually going to be in the software product. It's hard to do and everybody struggles with it. Everybody who doesn't have the resources of a VC backed company.
Dan Hammond 00:11:29 Yeah, that's an interesting one, isn't it, that the funding can change that picture a little bit? How does that change? Because scarcity really tunes you in. We certainly feel this, and I'm sure everyone in your book felt this was that with scarcity. These aren't things. Oh, well, yeah, let's just do that. And oh, it didn't work. Doesn't matter. It does matter.
Dan Hammond 00:11:48 And so we really zoomed in on this. So is that the case. What does this look like in non bootstrapped companies. So when there is VC funding are these decisions made differently or are they just bigger decisions with the same amount of weight.
Steve McLeod 00:12:02 There's this specialist role that's come to assist in the software industry in the last 10 or 15 years. Call it a product manager. These are people who now are responsible for choosing what to build. They're kind of looking at the backlog of customer requests, and they're looking at what the development team has available and sorts of resources and saying, well, we should do this thing for this reason. And that's the thing that we discovered doesn't actually exist in these small bootstrap companies. We're kind of surprised, actually. I think there's just one company in the book that actually has a product manager, and they were the biggest one. That was balsamic. There are about 30 ish people in another case, which I can't really tell too much about this because they asked us not to.
Steve McLeod 00:12:39 They had a product manager and it didn't work out. And they kind of had to say, we're too early for a product manager. We're still at the point in which the founder or founders have to be not necessarily making the decisions, but taking on that that mantle of being product manager as well as everything else they have to do. And PR and den as founders yourself. You know, there's so many other things you're trying to juggle this with. But the thing is, you understand the customers better than anybody else in the company, and you understand the product, the product's history, what it's supposed to do and what you're trying to do with it better than anyone in the company. So actually, you are the people who should be the product managers at this stage in your company.
Dan Hammond 00:13:18 That's the nub of it. Isn't it that in these situations, in a way, in a tech company, the product is the company's strategy in a way is I'm exaggerating. It's sort of this is our representation. So it is like someone in a consumer goods company deciding what to put in their range.
Dan Hammond 00:13:35 I guess it's the same thing. So it's quite a senior position to be in. It's not just a side issue isn't it. It's a it's central. It's what I'm saying.
Steve McLeod 00:13:42 Yeah, it is essential.
Pia Lee 00:13:43 I think an interesting thing is, is whether you see your future inside running this organisation, predicated on the fact that you do receive funding, because if that's part of your rationale, then you may be quite bitterly disappointed. And it might then also account for the stats that I think is sort of like nine out of ten startups fail within seven years. And then the ones that last beyond seven years, another nine out of ten don't make it to ten. It's a pretty steep drop off curve and getting funding, it's always like that's eulogised, that's, you know, that's the way and that's what you do. And there's this formula. Well, many, many people are bootstrapping compared to actually raising.
Steve McLeod 00:14:25 Oh, definitely. In fact, that was also one of the motivations for writing the book, although all the information or most of the literature about what to build about feature prioritization and is targeted at VC companies.
Steve McLeod 00:14:36 The reality is, almost all software is made by small bootstrap teams. Maybe not almost all, but I think the vast majority of software is made by small bootstrap teams. Sometimes I'm shocked to discover that some product I use and love is just created by 5 or 10 people. You just kind of think, well, it's a really glitzy website and the product's polished. It must be a massive team behind it and it's usually not the case.
Dan Hammond 00:14:59 Yeah, it's so interesting. So Steve, take us into what did you discover about this knotty process?
Steve McLeod 00:15:05 Well, the book's called Kill the Hippo. I should explain what hippo is here. That's h little IPO. It's a fun acronym amongst product managers and software teams about the highest paid person's opinion. So Hippo stands for the highest paid person's opinion. You know, you can do all the work working out what to build, and then someone just comes along and says, oh, I think you should do it this way. And then walks out of the room and everybody's thinking, oh, I guess we got to do what the person said because they pay a salary.
Steve McLeod 00:15:28 Okay. What I learned is actually that doesn't happen as much as we thought. It turns out that the companies we talk to, they actually generally do bring in their whole team or important people in their team to discuss these things. They actually put a lot of thought into it about what to build. And I'm happy to say that it's not that people just generally say, well, I'm the owner of the company. I think it should be this way. So that's what we're doing. And maybe if that does happen, your company fails. So maybe there's a selection bias going here. The companies we found got to the point they did because they do actually listen and bring their whole team in to talk about these things. Sometimes the owner or the founder. They also know about the financial constraints governing the business. They know that we actually do have to do this thing that we maybe don't want to do, because financially it's very important. Maybe we have to add this new feature that the big company is asking for, even though we don't want to do things just for one customer, because that's what's going to enable me to keep paying you.
Steve McLeod 00:16:23 So sometimes the founder does have to be the hippo and say, we are doing it this way. After listening to all the input, I had hoped they wouldn't actually express it that way. I hoped they would express it in a more generous way.
Dan Hammond 00:16:34 It's sort of a piece of high pressure decision making, isn't it? And in a group. And it's quite a relief, actually, to hear that you didn't find a lot of hippo activity. Yeah. Particularly with everything we hear about founders. You know, because to be a founder, you have to have a little bit of boldness, a bit of ego and a strong vision. And so it would be quite easy to imagine that. Yeah, that actually that would turn into my way is going to be the right way. That's interesting. But it means it's a sort of a human group dynamic that's creating these decisions, isn't it, that you've discovered.
Steve McLeod 00:17:06 I think you wouldn't keep people for very long if you weren't listening to them. And it's the key people that build a company.
Steve McLeod 00:17:11 Another thing I learnt is that there's some very similar stories in the early days, when you're happy just to get any customer, you tend to build too many features too quickly because you can, you know, your product hardly has anything in it. And then somebody says, hey, I love your product. I just started paying for it, but it'd be really great if it could export the PDF. And you think that's a great idea? We're going to do that and you rush. You drop everything. You do it in a day later, you tell them, look, it's there already. Because also in the early days, you can turn around features very quickly. And, you know, you do that too many times and you start getting this really cluttered user interface, and then everything slows down because of the technical debt and UX debt. That was another thing I discovered. It's not just technical debt, but people also start finding that they have nowhere to put things in the user interface anymore. And it gets really confusing.
Steve McLeod 00:17:58 And that thing that in the early days, the customers were praising because I love how simple your product is. That kind of just stops one day.
Dan Hammond 00:18:05 Yeah, it's.
Steve McLeod 00:18:06 Sort of I learned that this is a really common story. It probably five out of the ten stories we heard. People talk about this in the early days.
Dan Hammond 00:18:13 Really interesting.
Pia Lee 00:18:14 And I think that you're very easily flattered by your customers because to get a customer is so hard. Then when you do get a customer, you are flattered and that what you can end up happening is, is that you're creating the next feature based on that flattery. Not necessarily being the right strategic choice for the product, and the best way that it's actually going to grow in the market. You're a younger person as an organization and you're more easily influenced, and it's not always to the betterment of the long term strategy of the company.
Steve McLeod 00:18:45 I 100% agree, but I also got to wondering whether that willingness to pander to every single piece of customer feedback in the early days was part of what actually led to success, and the people who were ready with them when they only had 3 or 4 or 5 or 10 customers said, thanks for the feedback, but we're doing our own thing.
Steve McLeod 00:19:03 Maybe they never survived. So maybe you kind of, in the early days have to do that thing. But I'm hearing you about how great you feel with those first customers.
Dan Hammond 00:19:11 I so yeah, yeah, I say early on, wow, someone wants what we've thought of. It's like falling in love, isn't it? You sort of think, wow, we created something. Someone wants it.
Pia Lee 00:19:21 Amazing.
Dan Hammond 00:19:21 Yeah. Incredible for me. Steve, as I approached talking to you about this, I thought quite a bit about that. Customer centricity is so crucial and also this balance with your company vision, what you want to create. And that seemed to me the sort of yin and yang of this that I might be oversimplifying, but how do people sort of balance those two? Because I could see those two sometimes come into conflict with the people you spoke to. How do they balance those or maybe other forces that I'm neglecting?
Steve McLeod 00:19:49 No, it's a really good question. One company we talked to that's balsamic, the founder.
Steve McLeod 00:19:54 Howdy. Or Giacomo. So it's a low fidelity wireframing tool. But he also had a high fidelity option where you push a button at risk into high fidelity. And he was really just wanting to do the low fidelity thing. Because when you show somebody a wireframe and it's low fidelity, then they don't get caught up in the small details. And the initial feedback was, hey, we want more of this high fidelity stuff, let's do that. But he went back and talked to his mastermind and told them and they were saying, no, you just have to do one thing and do it really well. And he had to decide on that low fidelity thing. And it was hard ignoring or not ignoring, but really not doing what some of the early customers were doing. I admire his bravery because I didn't have that in my own product, and I chased after what everybody was asking for. So this is a case of somebody who really did have a very strong vision from the very beginning and kept to it, and it led to a very successful company.
Steve McLeod 00:20:45 But there is also a story of another company you can book me or CBM who actually strayed from their vision. Their vision was a booking tool, scheduling tool for small operators, companies of one, two, five, ten people and they let themselves get drawn upwards towards the enterprise thing, towards teams inside larger organizations, and it end up becoming kind of a me to tool. Like there's lots of tools that do this and eventually after many years, they after talking to as many customers as they could, they realized that their true heart, their true vision was for back to those small operators, and they completely made the decision to do that and get rid of the features that were aimed at like big teams, because it sends out a mixed message. Right. And it's better just to make sure you're only doing those features that are 100% for your target audience or for the people you really see in your vision as being the users of your product.
Dan Hammond 00:21:39 I suppose that, yeah, that's where those two sides, I mean, we've certainly had when we presents qualified to people, they will often ask if it does x, y, z.
Dan Hammond 00:21:48 And there are things that are already exist in the market. And actually it's that that we're trying to disrupt, if you know what I mean. So we have to hold to our vision. And I can see why customer might ask that, because that's another bit of a feature that would be useful to them, because it's already exists. But that's not us. And sometimes that's clear, but sometimes it's not so clear. And it's that a little direction we need to take. So talk to Steve. Dive into the human dynamics of this. Could you. So what's the why not me bit of this is because you've got a complex situation, multiple inputs, but it seems to come back to these humans trying to do their best.
Steve McLeod 00:22:21 That would be a good time to talk a little bit about the chapter in the book that's about Spotify. Actually, ultimately, all software is for humans. Or maybe not in this day of AI, but I still like to think all software is for humans, but people are the ones using it and the ones you need empathy for.
Steve McLeod 00:22:37 But what I really liked about the section of the book where we talked about what's going on at squad ify, is how I think you're the only company with this two founders, and there's a dynamic there, like, who makes the decisions there? Who makes what decisions? What if you disagree? How do you understand in advance what to do when you disagree? Because whether it's people code running a podcast like this or co running a company or even in a marriage, right? There's always going to be times where people disagree on things and you can just go down the very egotistical path getting back to being egotistical and just say, well, I think I'm right. We're doing what I want and we're I'm not going to budge. Or you're already talking in advance about working these things out? What are we going to do when we disagree? Who ultimately makes the decision on this part of the company, and who makes the decision on this part of the company? And that's what I really liked about the chapter we had with you.
Steve McLeod 00:23:28 I think we talked to you about product decisions, feature decisions. And ultimately, I think in your case, Dan, that's your responsibility. So if you can't come to an agreement, then it's like, okay, well, because that's Dan's side of the business, we will go with that. And if I understand correctly, there's also sides of the business where you would ultimately, if you can't come to an agreement rather than getting stuck on it, you would be the one who would move forward.
Dan Hammond 00:23:50 We definitely have our own areas of the business. Also. We've worked together for a long time and we're quite complementary. We're good friends, but we also approach things quite differently. It will definitely have these periods where there's sort of a thing that we're not agreeing on, but we will maintain the relationship through that and keep talking about and try to seek the other view. I think that's something we try to really work on that. I think at the heart of this is really being transparent about that as a point of contention.
Dan Hammond 00:24:21 You know, should we do this or should we do that? Okay. There's a thing here. We're not really agreeing on it. So let's keep gathering information. Let's try to understand each other's point of view. There are all kinds of ways of avoiding that fact, or just I could go ahead and probably get things developed as I want them to be. But, you know, that's not ultimately going to nurture the relationship that's at the heart of this and holding that, because actually, the best solution is going to come from both of our brains together and the brains of our team. So you'd hope that we, as leadership consultants, would be able to take that balcony view and say, actually, I've got a viewpoint, but it's not whole, and how do I do that? And it's not without its sort of frustrations and challenges along the way. But I think we've really consciously held the fact that we have to decide this and that we're going to work through that and make the calls.
Pia Lee 00:25:13 I would 100% endorse that.
Pia Lee 00:25:15 And the other bit I would add to it is that the customer really is king. So it doesn't really matter whether Dan and I think it's X or Y, but what's going to have the biggest impact on the experience for the customer? What's going to make the difference? And that's where we've both got really close to the customer. We've made that our mission is not to sit behind anything but actually get in the trenches. Yeah, because we didn't realize that we slightly naive about this. We didn't have what's called a category, so we didn't have a known category for the product that we had.
Steve McLeod 00:25:47 That's hard.
Pia Lee 00:25:48 Apparently, trying to build a category and trying to build a product is actually probably quite stupid, but we managed to do it. It was naive optimism. We didn't know, and we made assumptions actually, which were totally wrong. And then Covid hit. So we really walked into a bit of a firestorm, and that meant that we had to accept that the way that our customers viewed our product was evolving in a workplace that was evolving, was evolving in an economy, and was an evolving in a almost like a sort of leadership maturity that was evolving.
Pia Lee 00:26:25 You know, you can't make too many assumptions in that. You've got to kind of eat quite a lot of humble pie, learn a lot, and just go, okay, we're going to serve some white water here. And so having a buddy to really bounce those ideas is the best thing. I think if I'd been on my own, I think I would have pulled all my gray hair out.
Dan Hammond 00:26:43 Both of us would have been doomed. Yeah, I think that's right. The only thing I would say is for anyone who's in product or any decision making, I think you're right about, yes, the customer is the lead. But then which customer? Oh, yes. You've got conflicting views from different customers. And are those customers aligned to that vision of the company? You know, a customer might say, oh, could you do us an engagement survey or something? Yes we could. But actually we're against that really, because we're much more about action than insight. I think you're right here that sort of seeing this as a whole is the key.
Dan Hammond 00:27:13 So you caused us to reflect on all of this, Steve, actually. So see, what else did you find that we haven't talked about yet that you want to say about Kill the Hippo?
Steve McLeod 00:27:21 So there's one chapter that didn't make it into the book. So we've written the stories, and then the next step was to write what we learnt chapters. And I felt that they were actually weakening the book, that the stories were so good and that people can just get their own message from the stories based on where they are, and that we didn't need to spell out lessons, so we took them out. Now, one of the chapters we took out was about saying no, and it came into my head just hearing what you were saying about, for example, a customer wanting a survey tour or something like that. And one of the things you do have to get really, really good at and running a small bootstrapped software company is saying no a lot, but you have to say no in a way that it's nice.
Dan Hammond 00:28:00 Yes, yes.
Steve McLeod 00:28:02 Find your own way of doing it. And one way people do that is like, look, we'll consider that for the future. and you throw it on the back log, and then before you know it, you've got a backlog that's so big you couldn't get it done. Even if you had a team ten times the size of your team working on it for five years. So the first part is saying no a lot, and the second part is regularly deleting your backlog, getting rid of anything that's more than a year old or anything that doesn't fit into your top 25 things of what you might add to the software. Because this is just such an ongoing course of stress to every week, go ahead and look at your Kanban board or JIRA or whatever you're using, and see there's an enormous list of all the things you're never going to do, and try to think of ways you might prioritize it. So just delete most of your backlog. Or if you want a nice quote, delete your backlog.
Steve McLeod 00:28:50 Oh, right. Okay. I wouldn't actually say delete all of it. But in general, yeah, delete almost all of your backlog on an ongoing basis. It's good for you. It's good for your team. You may actually feel like you're getting things done. And it's kind of helpful with this whole say no thing.
Dan Hammond 00:29:05 I know that's really good. I think that, you know, we've used agile, Kanban and all those things. Of course, at a business level, not just at the development level. And it's been hugely powerful for us for getting things done and also for knowing what's in progress and what isn't, because that's a stressor. But actually your backlog can then start to stress you can't it? Yeah. And I think we do that fairly frequently. And we do it because the lens through which we see the product direction does change with all that customer input and the learnings we get from everything, we will suddenly actually know we've now got these different swim lanes, we're trying to achieve different things, and then some of the backlog becomes totally irrelevant because it just falls out.
Dan Hammond 00:29:44 So that's there. The things to delete. No, that's a top tip for actually at a business level, it's not about just product development. I think any business leader can do that.
Steve McLeod 00:29:53 Yeah like any to do list delete. Yeah. Three quarters of it.
Dan Hammond 00:29:57 Like it's true.
Steve McLeod 00:29:58 So I've actually set up our companies linear as a response to what I've learnt from the book. I've set up our company's linear issue tracking to automatically delete anything or archive anything that's more than a year old. I can't bring myself to actually delete it, but archiving it's the same. You know it's out of sight. But I tell myself, oh, we can still fetch it if we need to.
Dan Hammond 00:30:15 Nice.
Pia Lee 00:30:16 Just in case.
Steve McLeod 00:30:17 Just in case.
Dan Hammond 00:30:18 Yeah. Fantastic. Fantastic.
Steve McLeod 00:30:19 I think the final lesson I really need to emphasize, though, is that what we put in the final chapter, until your product is a lot bigger, you are the product manager, so embrace that. Don't try to avoid it, except that you're the one who knows the product and the customer is better than anybody else, and that you have to make these decisions.
Steve McLeod 00:30:37 You can't just rely on somebody else doing it. So to some degree you have to be the hippo, but do it in an informed way and it sets that.
Dan Hammond 00:30:44 That's quite reassuring, actually, because as you tried to scale, you sort of think, I'm still doing this. Yes, it's good to still do that. And I do think actually products, if you really extend it, you know, we're doing a lot through our scaling of our service at the moment, through our coaches. It all falls into product essentially, and we've got a tight grip on that in terms of how we do it, the quality it's delivered, and we spend a lot of time with clients and we're shaping what that looks like. So yeah, you've helped us to feel comfortable with that. Steve. We're not yet sitting on a yacht just watching the money coming in, which will never happen. Steve. So fantastic. I know that there's a book waiting for me at home, which I can't wait to read.
Steve McLeod 00:31:23 There's two copies for you, Dan, but I'm hoping you can somehow get one copy to Pia.
Pia Lee 00:31:28 Oh, yes, please.
Steve McLeod 00:31:29 Because it's really hard organizing to send a book from Spain to Australia.
Dan Hammond 00:31:33 I will get it over there. Don't worry, don't worry. That's perfect. So one's coming your way as well here. Out of all of this and sort of zooming out a little bit, you've run businesses. You've worked with businesses. What would you say for any team that you've seen? What's the sort of seed of truth that you've seen that would cover any, any team or group of people that you've learnt in writing the book?
Steve McLeod 00:31:55 I guess that your story is not unique, that you are going through things that people have done before, and it's just coming into my head right now. But I'd say like, find those people, talk to them on a regular basis. So you'll realize that actually, these are common experiences, the problem of what to build, how to build, who decides, and so on, which customers are the right customers to listen to.
Steve McLeod 00:32:17 Other people go through these stories, and I'm actually hoping that the stories in the book founders will read them and go, oh my goodness, I'm not alone. Oh, that's my story. Oh, that happened to me. And in fact, the beta readers we had before the book was published, that was very much the feedback I was getting is, oh, this is exactly my story, which was great.
Dan Hammond 00:32:35 That's really good.
Steve McLeod 00:32:36 I'm really happy with the decision we made not to spell out lessons in concrete form and just let people read them that way.
Dan Hammond 00:32:42 Well, that was a product choice that you made, which is that it is very smart. Yeah.
Steve McLeod 00:32:47 It is a product choice. You're right whether it's smart, but I don't know. But yeah, so much creating a book. It's creating a product this I wasn't prepared for. But in product management because you're managing like in our case, the people pre-interview. And then my co-writer and I and how we worked about the tasks together, we worked really well as a team, but we had very well defined tasks and we never like, had conflict.
Steve McLeod 00:33:09 But there were times in which I really didn't like the way something was going, and she would do a really good job of helping me work out why it was that I wasn't happy with some chapter, and then work out a plan with how we could improve that, which was really bringing in different skill sets. She was also much better at the research side of things. I think I've gone off on a tangent there and I forgot what I was initially saying.
Dan Hammond 00:33:28 No, you answered the questions to you, but you've actually gone off on a good tangent because I think you've described how good teams and teammates work is, that you might have different roles, and you're willing to engage in problem solving together in service of the book. Whereas you see people who constantly fight or don't go along or, or whatever. So yeah, I think from your mini team writing the book, you've given us some more, some more insight. So Steve, leave us with a media recommendation. We always ask our guests for this.
Dan Hammond 00:33:55 What's your media recommendation. Yeah.
Steve McLeod 00:33:57 So I was glad that you prompted me in advance for this because I needed time to think about it. That one I came up with is Desert Island Discs. I'm putting it under the podcast category. It's a long running radio show, but it's also in podcast format, and I think it's important to regularly engage your mind and things that have nothing to do with your work. And for me, that's listening to diverse podcasts and this one in particular. It is so good. It is so professionally written. The interviewer is world class, but the people they interview are the best in their fields at stuff. And to hear people talk about their life and their business or their field of specialty, I find really inspiring. It's stuff that I also often bring back to my own business. Without exception, these episodes are excellent, and if you want me to say one very particular episode of Desert Island Discs, it would be the one with George Michael, who unfortunately passed away.
Steve McLeod 00:34:50 So it's quite an old one. And there's so much about his story I had no idea about. And it's a fascinating listen.
Dan Hammond 00:34:57 Super great recommendation. Yeah. Love the program. Love the show. But I haven't heard that one. So wonderful. And I like your point about deliberately doing things that are away from your work. It's so all consuming now, isn't it, that being conscious about that, it's great. And that wafts you to a desert island with the even the music takes you away, doesn't it?
Steve McLeod 00:35:16 And it's a founder. You're thinking about your business all the time. You wake up at 4:00 in the morning because there was a noise outside. And what did your brain start doing? Thinking about some business problem, you know, and it's really nice to find some way to completely get your mind absorbed and engaged into something. Nothing to do with the business.
Dan Hammond 00:35:31 Yes. Wonderful. Great recommendations. Steve. Thank you. And for particularly, I think, non-British listeners, that might be a new one.
Pia Lee 00:35:39 I'm going to love that.
Dan Hammond 00:35:40 Yeah, they all love that. So enjoy. But Steve, thank you so much for being on the show. It's been really enlightening and we've really enjoyed having you here. And best of luck with your book. Primarily, thanks for being on with me today.
Steve McLeod 00:35:51 Thank you. I've loved being here. If I could just tell listeners that if they're interested in the book, the website has killed the hippo. Or you can just search on Amazon for Kill the Hippo.
Dan Hammond 00:36:01 Brilliant. And that link will be in the show notes of this show as well. And we'll be out and about promoting the book as well as we can.
Steve McLeod 00:36:07 Thank you. And thank you for the chance to talk about it and to talk with you guys. I've really enjoyed it and I really enjoyed that. You let me ask you a couple of questions. I appreciated that too.
Pia Lee 00:36:16 Yeah. Well, and thank you for involving us in the book. That was a real pleasure. And it was really a lovely experience to recount our sort of getting together professionally and how we operate.
Pia Lee 00:36:27 So you don't often get a chance to do that. And it was really well written, beautifully written.
Steve McLeod 00:36:31 You're welcome.
Dan Hammond 00:36:32 Thank you so much, Steve.
Steve McLeod 00:36:33 Okay, bye.
Multiple Speakers 00:36:36 A lot of what Steve was saying then, what we talked about there reminded me of the work we're doing at the moment on adaptive leadership. We're doing a lot to help.
Dan Hammond 00:36:45 Leaders in teams to adopt the right leadership stance and skills in times of change, which they are now. And part of that adaptive leadership is about holding that tension. I think we talked about in another show, but the point here is not to be comfortable when you're making decisions about the company product doesn't matter. The goal isn't smooth comfort. I think we're supposed to have different views and we're supposed to hear different views, and you can sort of think, oh, okay, so this is tricky, you know? But actually that's the point. And what you want to do is hear those views and get the optimal thing for that optimal outcome. But comfort isn't the goal.
Pia Lee 00:37:20 Actually, comfort sort of sits in you because you're sort of repeating from what you've done previously and you sort of rinse and repeat going forward and adaptive leadership. When you're trying to create a new innovative product, you're trying to bring it to market. Steve talked about you're an up and coming startup. That's a very different kettle of fish. It's called disequilibrium, which I don't know that's ever going to catch on, but that's the word, which means it's just maintaining that right amount of tension that it feels a little bit uncomfortable, but not to the point where everyone's stressed off their heads or feeling very uncomfortable. So it's just the element where you're stretching your own thinking and pushing it out to a different edge to go. How does this work?
Dan Hammond 00:38:02 Yeah, absolutely. And consciously making yourself listen to others around the table and not having all the answers, I think, you know, it's really tempting to be the lone genius or to think, okay, I've got the answer. Yes, everyone agrees with me.
Dan Hammond 00:38:17 Let's move forward. This is so easy. But actually, you've got to really make sure those other voices are in there. And I must say, it was a great relief to find that loads of other people in the same boat, I sort of feel as a product owner, you know, when you read about that, it's all using loads of data and it's all very scientific and actually people are being as scientific as they can, but they are genuinely doing what we've done, which is to that a lot of that data can be qualitative. It's just observations and senses of things in meetings, and you've got to be able to bring that in as well as just your logging data or your tracking data on a website. There's a lot more to it than that, and I think that that's where actual innovation is going to come from, because there's actually a danger, isn't there? If you do too much, you know, the data is another voice, but you can't just hear that because that's what people are doing now and it doesn't tell you everything.
Pia Lee 00:39:05 And that's not a holistic sort of representation. And we have a bias. So we have a bias towards the fluffy and the quality of all. We have a bias towards the very fact based, more dry stuff. And actually it's a balance because you need both. So I think being able to see it and ask the right questions around it and not stymie the conversation because you're the person with the best ideas or you think you are the best person or should have the best ideas, rather than being able to really draw that out from the greater number of people around you.
Dan Hammond 00:39:35 Absolutely. You're right. That's the key, is that I'm doing some work with a senior team at the moment. On decision making. This keeps coming up in the squad office. Obviously if they were individuals, they'd probably make a decision, but they get into a group and they they've got certain patents that they're following. But the key is to really track and bring these things into the light and have ways of bringing those voices in and transparently sometimes say, no, we're not going down that route, but here's why.
Dan Hammond 00:40:00 But I'm going to move forward experimentally and make this happen. I think that's the other thing. As you can put things in play rather than intellectualizing, you can put things in place. It's quite moving to go back and think about that whole journey and how we actually work together. So thank you.
Pia Lee 00:40:14 Right back at.
Dan Hammond 00:40:14 You, it's a big message from me, but that is it. For this episode, you'll find show notes at Spotify. Net and if you've enjoyed this episode, please share it with one person who benefit from it. And if this has sparked something for you, you know the drill. Take one small action with your team this week. We don't mean it's brought to you by squad of AI helping organizations to transform through teams. Thank you so much for listening. It's goodbye from me.
Pia Lee 00:40:36 And it's goodbye from me.