Growing through the funnel - Dave Lush

00:00

So I guess some telltale signs are, if he's an extrinsic motivator, you will get the nice, warm, fluffy feeling, and it will pass quite quickly. And it will almost have felt... could feel hollow afterwards. And that could be someone's given me a little pat on the back and they've said nice things about me, and then the glow has faded afterwards. Or it could be like a salary increase. And it's great, but by the time the first paycheck's come in, an increased salary, I've probably forgotten about it and I've moved on.

00:31

And recognition of intrinsic is, I guess, is the stuff that keeps you up at night. So, no, maybe not keeps you up at night, but when you wake up and you're thinking about something for work and you are excited about it, and you're trying to work out, "How do I solve this problem?" That's probably an intrinsic motivator.

00:49

What's the funnel?

00:51

Is when you are looking for a job, I guess it's the same as like a customer acquisition funnel. You know, there's a very wide end of a funnel that everything goes into it. And then there's the tip of the spear on the far side, which is for success and is the conversion. But in my head, this is your funnel for a job search. So I'm going to apply for lots of things. Some of them are never going to come back to me. Some of them are going to lead to an interesting conversation. Some of those interesting conversations are I get really emotionally attached to a job and I can't wait to work there. They're never going to come back to me, and it's just going to disappear into the ether. And it's going to become less and less and less as you work through the funnel until you get to the right job and the one that you're really looking for. And that's not necessarily the first one that you get offered on.

01:41

It's almost like don't get too attached at the beginning because the likelihood is the laws of nature mean that thing you are really interested in at the beginning either won't work out or just isn't going to be right.

01:56

Yeah, absolutely. And I'm 42 now. And as much as I say about and I give advice, I still did it last time I looked for a job. I remember... Have you heard of Arrival.com, electric vans?

02:10

Yeah.

02:11

I remember applying there and it just, "Ah, God, that'd be amazing. I'd love to work there." Never heard back. Yeah, it's difficult to do.

02:18

Did you adopt the funnel at the beginning of your time? Or was this something you learned?

02:25

No, like early in my career. Yeah, it's just something that I found myself iterating towards. Definitely early in career, didn't do it all. And it's only probably my last job search I formalised it and structured it in a trello board. So I gave myself a way of organising the information instead of just trying to hold everything in your head and being not as organised as you could be.

02:48

I'd love to go back to the start of Visa. Cause you've got a really interesting background going from Visa to ONZO and then now Mind Gym, the big bit there being your progression at Visa. That must be so different from Mind Gym now. What's the story there?

03:08

Yeah, really. So I actually worked somewhere before Visa as well, but he's just a little further on my CV. So I worked in a place, like a 10-person company for four years before Visa. And then I wanted to go and get a big brand on my CV, just something that was recognizable as the next stage of my career. I had a choice of Lockheed Martin or Visa, and Visa was more varied in terms of the people that were working there and the backgrounds, et cetera. And it was like working for local council a little bit at first. So I'd gone from like this fast pace, 10-person business, into a large corporate, understandably quite risk averse, and just told repeatedly, "Slow down, slow down. Take your time a little bit more."

04:02

And I guess I spent nine years at Visa and progressed from like a junior engineer through into engineering manager roles, and then looked after sort digital development area, and then helped set up engineering for an incubator area. And as much as I say it was risk averse, I think I was patient and I spent time trying to, I guess, trying to get control of our dev environments, first of all, and then the ability to push into production environments. So you have the ability to move quickly, basically, which is the antithesis of working in financial services. So yeah, and it was successful and it worked really well, but it just took a long time to get there. And a really enjoyable journey is your learning not just for technical skills but then learning the management and the leadership skills as well, and then influence in not the fastest organization.

04:58

It's amazing that you were able to have the characteristics to deal with the big company but also the smaller company. What was the incubator part to that? Was there a part to it where at Visa you were dealing with slightly smaller companies?

05:16

Yeah, yeah. So, up until a year before finishing, there was still sort of big, internally-facing, large-product bills. And then the final year was a shift towards setting up more of an innovation area in Visa. And we were building sort of new pilot products effectively. So we were dealing a little bit with small partners, but it wasn't necessarily about... It definitely wasn't like that small startup culture or anything like that. But again, it's history of building new, simple products from greenfield ideas.

05:54

So then the shift into ONZO, if you want me to go onto it, I'll...

05:58

Yeah, yeah. When did you know the right time?

06:01

Well, yeah, so again, leaving Visa was a choice between ITV and ONZO, which ONZO is like people won't have heard of. It's a little thirty person start-up focused on smart meter data and data analytics. And again, I was very much, "I'm going to go work for ITV. It's going to be brilliant. I can't wait." And then had a last-minute wobble about a week or two before being due to start and just said, "Actually, I don't want to go work for another massive company." And I flipped across, went to take a head of engineering role with ONZO, which was in a mess as well, to be fair. It wasn't like an amazing sales pitch of this glorious company on the hockey stick growth. It was, "We've fired all the engineers. We're down to two engineers. The technical system's a mess. It doesn't achieve scale. The single tenant need deployments from different card branches." But it was just a really intriguing mess with a lot of potential and a really interesting product idea.

07:04

So I spent over three or four years there, I think four years actually, rebuilding the team, rebuilding the platform, and I guess actually trying to quash imposter syndrome. So, the successes I've had at Visa, are they really my successes? Or is it other people around me that have achieved that? So let's go start from scratch again and see if you can repeat some of the things that went well. Yeah. And I guess, yeah, get the confidence for the long term. And again, it was successful. Punchline.

07:37

What was it about ONZO that helped you get over that imposter syndrome, and have you got over it?

07:41

Yes, definitely got over it. So we went from two people to about 17 engineers there. We rebuilt this sort of scrappy, single tenant, what was basically a prototype, rebuilt it into like a multi-tenant platform that did, I think, about a hundred times more scale when I left than when I joined. And it was hard and it was difficult, but then I guess if you start from that curve and you help build it up, you're like, "Okay, I definitely have the confidence now that I can achieve that. And also I've learned a bunch of lessons in the things that went wrong again in this most recent experience," because obviously it didn't all go perfectly. And as I've moved on into my latest role with Mind Gym, that was starting with zero people and we're up to about 30 engineers now. And again, it was no platform. So I build up that all from scratch, and I think I'm becoming a little bit addicted to that early stage of growth.

08:46

Why? Because it's so hard.

08:50

I've asked myself that as well, because yeah, you're right. You find yourself on a conveyor belt of hiring and sort of riding a wave of complexity, I guess, as you're trying to make those early decisions and those early bets to try and place the right bets. Maybe I've got another 10 years in me of the energy to enjoy those early stages. You know, I quite like not being able to achieve everything you want to achieve. It's just impossible and therefore you sort of need to accept it and just go after the things that you think are most important.

09:30

Sorry, [inaudible 00:09:31]. There we go.

09:32

You've just gone through that same journey as well, right, like about four years ago?

09:38

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

09:38

And did you enjoy it? Have you come out thinking, "Oh my God, never again"?

09:47

I mean, I'm still in it, but I mean, I can really empathize with your thought on I quite like the pain of it in some way, in some odd way. If you don't have tasks that you haven't been able to complete, then you know you haven't challenged yourself enough and it hasn't been hard enough. But yeah, I think there's definitely an addiction to that, to that hard work and doing things that are so difficult that they just seem unbearable at times.

10:27

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think an important part of it for me is the product idea and it being something unusual and something that's not quite like another eComm platform. It's not another financial services messaging system. And because of the product idea, then it's something that enthuses me and gets me excited about going on the journey, which then makes it easier to get other people to buy. Because I'm enthusiastic about it, it makes it easier to then get other people to come on the journey with me.

10:58

Mm. What was it about ONZO that was so exciting?

11:04

Something different. So I guess actually just to explain what it was and still is actually, the company still exists, is taking a stream of smart meter there from different energy providers and providing analytics on the smart meter there, which is then given to the analytics parts of the company that's given you a data. And it was just unusual. It was completely different to the other jobs that I'd seen advertised. Quite a small sector as well. Even as you get into it, there was not a huge amount of companies that are doing it well. And the other thing interesting with it was that bit of check your imposter syndrome and it's a mess, and it needed sorting out. So, as you talk about addiction of sort of different sets of challenges, I really enjoy taking something that's a little bit broke and getting it back on an even keel.

12:01

Do you find that you have the same tendency to like the really, really hard challenges and do things that are a little bit painful outside of work as well as inside of work?

12:12

Yes. Sorry, this probably doesn't come through on a podcast. I was silently grinning. I'm just thinking about what my wife would say about me. So yeah, but not like in a hiking the three peaks in 24 hours sense. More in the slightly mundane. So taking on jobs at home that are way too big. I'm shoveling 40 tons of soil to landscape my back garden by hand, that sort of thing.

12:38

That doesn't sound like what a typical CTO does on the weekend.

12:47

No, but it's exercise as well. It's exercise and it's something that is constructive and you can see the fruits of your labor quite quickly instead of it been a multi-year project to sort of change the direction of a company.

12:59

And what does that look like now at Mind Gym?

13:01

Yeah, so again, Mind Gym has been an interesting one. So I've not really spoken about it. I've been there for two years come this April. So yeah, nearly two years now. Started with no team, so like no engineers, no data team. We're up to 30-ish engineers and data people putting new products together from scratch. And it's, as a business, again, an unusual domain. So, again, not another eComm platform, not another sort of financial services thing. Oh God, it's like behavioral science backed management and leadership, so like driving behavior change inside businesses. And that behavioral science part of it, completely different demands of anything I've done, is what part of what's brought me into this one. In fact, as I was looking around in the last set of opportunities, it wasn't even a decision. It was like a really easy, "Yep, that's definitely the thing that I'm going to go and do."

14:06

So it's my first CTO role as well, which is where I've stayed. So, leading up to this, everything's been sort of head of engineering type level and lower. So it's been interesting in that there's like a new layer of complexity or multiple layers of complexity. So, add to the things I've needed to worry about before and look after the corporate IT, because we're a 350-person company. So I look after the corporate IT team at the same time as engineering and data, which again brings its own challenges. It's completely outside of a realm of anything that I've been responsible for before. And I guess you can bring the management and leadership skills to bear and a little bit of the technology, but it's completely different because it's about service management and stability rather than changing innovation, for example.

14:57

Mm. I'd love to dive into what position you were in as you were leaving ONZO, and how you were making the decisions there. Sounds like there were almost two things that were happening. One is you used that funnel for the first time. How did you go about doing that? And then the second is, given that this is your first CTO role, did you proactively choose to only go after CTO roles there? Or did it just come up?

15:25

So yeah, I guess the answer for question two... I'm going to answer the second part first. I didn't intend on moving into a CTO role. It was the role that caught my eye rather than me consciously going after one. I think I always thought I'd like to be a CTO at some point, but in terms of applying, I was looking at everything from senior engineer through quite a lot of head of engineering roles. I think this was the only CTO role on the list. And yeah, it was absolutely the role in the company that called my eye.

16:00

In terms of using a funnel to track my applications, I guess I've been using trello reasonably heavily in the day job before I moved. And it just made sense. It was an easy way to add a few columns and keep track of where I was in terms of stages, but then just found myself on the actual trello cards as well. I guess in a trello, I can't speak for people that have not used it, you can go in, you can add a description, you can add comments, et cetera. So it was a really easy way of keeping track of my background research on each company before I went into an initial conversation. Maybe links to the profiles of the people that I was due to speak to, any questions that I wanted to ask. And it was a dead easy way of adding my notes off the back of those different interview stages as well, and just keeping track of it all, and then either moving it across the board or just shutting it down and getting rid of it.

16:53

How did you do your due diligence on Mind Gym?

16:53

Sorry. Again, you can't see me smiling. So part of the due diligence was my dad has been a financial director for years. So part of it was using his knowledge of understanding the, I guess, commercial structure of a business and, as a company you're about to go and work for, a sound and good idea. So that's one part of it. And actually, so my dad's an accountant. My dad's wife's an accountant. My brother's an accountant. So I guess leaning on that side of the family to help on the financial side. Yep. But I guess that's like hygiene level. That's not the, you know, "Is this for company you really want to go and work for?"

17:40

So, alongside that, I guess I'm trying to think generically, how do I go about researching any company before I go and start there? So I'd start with... Interestingly, I don't start with the company's website. I'll maybe have a quick little look just to see: Do I understand what you do? Or can I understand what you do from your website as well? Do you communicate clearly? If it's a certain size of company, take a look at the Wikipedia article, just to sort of get a look at the history of what's shared out in public. Start looking on LinkedIn, just to understand how many employees do you have on there? What's the size of a company? Do I recognize the profiles of people in there? Do I have mutual... Do I know of people that were there? Or are there things like second-degree connections going on? So do I know people who know people who work there? Glassdoor reviews as well. In Glassdoor reviews, there's always going to be some positive and some negative, but taking a look through the detail of some of those to really understand are there common grievances or are their common positives that are coming out of it? If it's...

18:46

Sorry, I'm going into quite a lot of detail here, but if it's like a funded business as well, I'll start looking at things.

18:53

No, it's really helpful.

18:53

I'll start looking at things like Crunch Base to understand the funding rounds the company's going through. Do you have any public GitHub profiles? Sorry, not GitHub profile. Do you have any public repositories in your GitHub organization, especially if I'm going for a technical test as well? I shouldn't say this because if people are going to interview, remind you and they'll go and they'll look at our public repositories. So, for example, are there any coding challenges that are out there, and therefore, if I'm looking for a technical role, can I pre-prepare? Because you've already got your profile over. I'm going to have to hide ours now as I come off this.

19:28

What else? You use articles as well. They tend to be quite interesting. It only gives you one angle because it's what's driven by the press releases, et cetera. But look for any big and significant news, especially around things like acquisitions. So, has the business I'm looking at acquired other companies? And therefore, should I expect that there's this mixture of people and technology that's come through acquisitions? Or similarly, are there rumors of you being acquired as a business, or have you recently been acquired? Because then you're part of a bigger whole.

20:01

This is a lot of stuff that a lot of people don't do.

20:04

And I would then ask why? I don't think that's an unusual set of things to do because you do that in less than an hour. You know, if you really just crank away and rip through the different sources quite quickly, it doesn't take a long time before you sort of get into that conversation with the company. I'd maybe do 20 minutes before my very first recruiter call to help be plausible as a candidate, so you've got a bit of insight. But not waste too much time because it might not go anywhere. And then I guess do like another half an hour before you get into speaking to the hiring manager. And then only do a little bit more if I'm really then trying to answer my questions on do I want to work here or not?

20:48

I'm sorry, all I was going to say is I'd find it shocking that other people don't do that.

20:54

Yeah. If that's your due diligence before you go in, before you meet them, how do you go about doing it when you are in that conversation?

21:10

You mean like in terms of interview preparation?

21:12

Kind of like there's almost this layer before you go in, do the due diligence in the way that you did. But there's also parts where all of that information's like publicly available information. What other information do you try and garner that's not public?

21:41

I guess having that information turning up to an interview helps you prepare with the right questions so that you can sort of push buttons with interviewers and tease away the things where you think there might be challenging areas. You know? So, if you think there's struggles with funding or particular relationships in the business, that sort of thing... So that's one aspect, is help me to ask the right questions in an interview situation. And even if I don't get a direct answer, I'll be able to gauge comfort levels to understand whether I've touched on a nerve or not. And actually, what I'd be looking for in terms of the people that I want to work with is really good candour. So, if there is a challenging area, I want them to just talk about it and give me a reasonably straightforward answer.

22:28

Another aspect is that piece of are there second and third degree connections? So, do I know someone who knows someone who works there? And can I get in touch for a bit of a conversation? Or even better, if I know someone that I trust, that currently works in the company, I can get into a couple of conversations with them.

22:49

So yeah, in my last round of... Actually, there was one in particular, but I knew two people who worked in there, like a senior data role and an engineering role. And he gave me really good insight into the way that things were working at ground level. And then also in the senior data role, the direction that the company was taking in the future. And I typically just ply them with food and drink as a bit of a bribe.

23:12

What things do you look out for that are nonverbal that give you a taste of what it might be like to work there?

23:19

You mean in terms of whilst you're having the conversation, with cues in terms of people's responses? That's interesting. I don't know that I'm necessarily conscious. It's more of a subconscious. My intuition tells me that you are not comfortable with that line of questioning. Actually I really don't know. I guess there's like a shift in body language of did you move from quite a relaxed posture to sort of turning up and closing in a little bit? Do you go from sort of quite free-flowing conversation into struggling for the words to come out and to find the response? This is verbal, but I watch out... Do you know what I mean by weasel words?

24:14

No.

24:14

You know, the business fluff language as somebody starts trying to fill the gap, as we try to think about how do I answer this, and start saying a lot of things. Start speaking a lot without saying anything is the best way of putting it.

24:36

Yeah, it's become harder as well, right? Because a lot of what you do now is remote. So, as much as we're talking now, it's almost like we're talking through a camera a little bit because it's really pixelated. I can see you moving around, a lot vice versa with me, but it is much harder to pick up on like a shift in energy in the rooms it would've been when you'd have been face to face in the past.

24:58

Actually, that does touch on one more thing that I guess if there are two people interviewing you to watch for the little looks between those two people as you say something or ask something. You know, that look of discomfort as one person looks to another, as if to say, "Am I allowed to talk about that?" Especially when it's a little bit hierarchical. That can tease one more thing here as well, actually, especially if you have like a hiring manager and a direct report that are interviewing. Something I try and do when we're interviewing is if somebody asks the type of question about, "What would you change about working here?" I try and explicitly say to the people that are my direct reports, "Just be really candid. Say it clearly in front of the interviewee as well." I'd almost want to see that in any place that I'm looking to go to as well, for the manager or the leader to be trying to break down the hierarchy a little bit and to push for candour with candidates.

26:03

I'd like to switch gears a little bit and ask how do you know when you're doing your best work?

26:10

There are a few indications. There's the happy feeling of I have a list of things I was trying, you know, like a list of impacts I was trying to have for this week, of this month, of this quarter; and I've achieved the things I was aiming towards. There's the secondary effect of and I can see the impact that this has had." So this has moved the needle in terms of some key numbers move, for example. I can see the evidence of a shift. You have a team that you can feel the sort of buzz with that people are happy. Your attrition's low. People are sticking. And I guess that's partly a facet of my role as well. It's all about creating that happy environment that people... Actually, happy is not the right word, but creating the environment where people are enthused and want to stick around and want to carry on working there. So, yeah, therefore low attrition, and it makes it even easier to hire in and to bring new people in, because we see it in the people that are interviewing them.

27:21

And as much as I've said that happy is not word I'm looking for, for me, I need to be enjoying it. I need to be motivated and excited about the things that I'm doing day in and day out. Someone said to me quite recently as well, actually, that there's an important bit that your values tend to be quite stable, and your values don't tend to change even though you move across different companies. And therefore you need to be in a company where the values of the company match your own. And if you find those two sort of incongruent and not matching each other, you'll be quite unhappy quite quickly. I think I've probably not known that, since I've been lucky that the last three groups of people I've worked with have all been quite well aligned.

28:03

And have you made a proactive, conscious effort to understand your own values?

28:09

Nope. No, unfortunately. I just gravitate towards the things that I enjoy and try to do a decent job of the things I don't enjoy. And by putting lots of effort into the things I do enjoy, and just good enough into the things that I don't enjoy, has sort of led me down a certain path. I realise that's not about values as well, though. I guess as much as I say no, I have reflected on them a little bit in the past. And definitely things like my moral compass is very important to me and my integrity. And I guess I've been very... And I mentioned it a few times in this conversation actually. I've been very open and candid with the people that are around me because then it allows me to not wear masks for different conversations. And it just makes my life easy because I can just be me as I sort of bumble along, basically. Bumbling is probably not the best way to describe a career path for a CTO though.

29:16

And that's a great point. If you can find somewhere that aligns with your values, then you don't have to wear those masks in any circumstance.

29:31

Yep, yep. Completely. And therefore it needs to start right with the initial interviews of just sort of being yourself, and the event either works or it doesn't.

29:40

How do you know when you are being motivated in your career by decisions that you are making intrinsically versus decisions that are kind of you worrying about whether you are in the right place or not and those external parts of that seeping into your motivation?

30:01

It takes time to start recognising. And when I say time, like genuinely maybe 10 years on my part. And I guess because I've not stopped and introspected about it and thought about where are those motivators? So I guess some telltale signs are, if it's an extrinsic motivator, you will get the nice, warm, fluffy feeling and it will pass quite quickly. And it will almost have felt, could feel hollow afterwards. And that could be someone's given me a little pat on the back and they've said nice things about me, and then the glow has faded afterwards. Or it could be like a salary increase. And it's great, but by the time the first paycheck's come in and an increased salary, I've probably forgotten about it and I've moved on. And recognition of intrinsic is, I guess, is the stuff that keeps you up at night. So, no, maybe not keeps you up at night, but when you wake up and you're thinking about something for work, and you are excited about it, and you're trying to work out, "How do I solve this problem?" That's probably an intrinsic motivator.

31:08

Thanks so much for breaking it all down, Dave. I've loved chatting, mate. Thank you so much.

31:13

Yeah, thank you. It's been an enjoyable conversation.