The rewards of introspection - Katie Hindson

00:00

I'm very comfortable making decisions independently. I also am 100% an advocate for not making decisions alone. There is a difference between deciding something yourself, and coming up with that decision by yourself. And I think that you should never come up with things alone. I think that should always be a team effort, but I don't think decision by committee is a good idea 90% of the time.

00:27

What do you think you would've done if your brother hadn't been a software engineer?

00:31

I studied something called computational ecology. Actually... So I went to university to study women's studies in Latin. That was what I entered university to do. And I wanted to be the first female prime minister of Canada to last for more than two terms. That was my dream as an 11 year old kid.

00:54

Wow! There are not many 11 year old kids who have that dream.

00:57

Yeah. Yeah, I was special. Let's just say that. So, I went to university convinced that I was going to do international law and my two generations of family are engineers. So, I was the first person three generations, I guess, to not be an engineer. And so I went to university being like, "I'm going to study women's studies, be a lawyer." And then after the first year we were forced to take a science class, that's how the Canadian university system works. You have to take sciences if you're in arts. And I loved it and I was obsessed with biology. So, then I ended up becoming a quantitative biologist. So I think that if I didn't have my brother helping me figure out what I wanted to do, I still would've ended up in science stem because it was just something that really interested me, but I wouldn't have gotten into coding as early on. So, I think I would've eventually been forced to learn how to code, but I think that I would be way further back in terms of my kind of experience in software related industries.

02:17

Do you think you would've found it if the Canadian education system hadn't forced you to explore science?

02:26

Yeah. That's a really good question. I'd like to hope so. That would kind of suck to end up 10 years down the line to hate my job. I think that I've always been a problem solver. And so law was... There's still a lot of problem solving in law. I'm not sure I would've gone quite as far into maths and sciences as I had, because I started a lot than I would've expected. But I think I would've gone more into law related to biology or Medical kind of things because it was something that always interested me.

03:15

So how did you make the leap from academia to a startup and Cytora.

03:22

So I was doing my master's degree and about halfway through, I did a research degree, so I wrote a thesis and about six months in, I realized that I didn't want to do that for the rest of my life. I really didn't like research. I loved exploring ideas, but I didn't like the bureaucracy around it and the kind of politics of what research becomes popular and why, and it's just getting funding and things like that, it was like, "Do you use the word climate change in your thesis?" And for me it felt like I wasn't actually making a difference. So about halfway through my master's degree, I started looking for jobs in the industry because I was like, "If I'm going to make a difference, I have to learn how to properly code, not how to code for academics." And I was living in London. So in London you either move into insurance or you move into banking. And so, I did that.

04:32

You're a FinTech now. Yeah.

04:34

Yeah. So I kind of... I basically went wherever people would take me and I looked for an interesting job, and Cytora was somewhere that sounded really interesting. I was more interested in machine learning at the time and I'm not so much anymore, but they were doing a lot of machine learning stuff and yeah, I jumped at the opportunity that I was given and went from there. I think getting the first job is the scariest bit. And then once you have your first job, it's so much easier out of academia to kind of keep finding other jobs.

05:09

How did you go about it practically that first jump? How did you do it?

05:14

Yeah. So there was a lot of research into where to find jobs. I used AngelList, was the company. And LinkedIn as well. And I did a lot of online prep. So, a lot of answering questions in online interview prep. You can find so much content online nowadays. The big thing for me was spending a lot of time being able to tell a clear story about why I wanted to leave academia, because if you weren't able to do that, then you've already lost them at the first stage. Everyone's going to ask you why you're leaving. So you may as well be able to answer it well. And then the other big thing was learning how to communicate data analysis effectively.

06:08

That took me a couple of tries because a lot of the technical interviews that they'll do, but just really practicing interviewing. So, I did online practices and then I practiced with other people in-person. And that was really kind of the big part of getting a job. Then also writing your CV. There's a bunch of resources online for doing that. But really the things preparing for interviews and learning how to interview for non-academic jobs.

06:41

What were the challenges of that transition from academia to industry?

06:48

Yeah. So, the hardest, the biggest difference between being an academic and being in an industry, is that the goals that you have are set by other people and the work that you're doing is trying to drive business goals, not trying to do research for the sake of doing research. And that's a mindset that's a really big shift from academia because you're not just kind of running after ends that might lead to nothing, everything you do has to have an outcome and you have to get really good at figuring out the highest impact outcome from your work. And you don't learn that in academia. And it's this business sense that people talk about, is that was the biggest challenge in the first part of kind of getting a job outside of academia.

07:48

Otherwise, there's habits, things like how to run a meeting. Those are things that you kind of pick up over time, but learning about things like what's a KPI? What's retention and growth and how do we define these things in a business? And who do you talk to if you have a problem. Those were kind of... Yeah, the biggest things were definitely around business goals and tying business goals to your work.

08:17

It sounds like from quite early on, you are picking up the wider responsibilities of things that are around you and above you. You've joined as a data analyst, but the things that you reference are all things that feel mission critical to the company rather than mission critical to being a data analyst.

08:39

Yeah.I think I definitely am someone who likes to get things done. I don't dislike being a participant. I want to kind of be involved in the decision making. So, my experience was quite different to a lot of other people's experiences. I got thrown into management. Not thrown. I got put in place gently into management quite early on. And so I think my experience in terms of how your work impacts the wider business was probably quite different to a lot of people starting out in really big organizations where they're never going to talk to an executive. So yeah, I think that the way I thought about my work affecting the company was I had a big picture kind of image from early on starting and it's stuck with me.

09:41

It must have been quite a rip for you to move to Monzo after Cytora, given that you're thrown into management and it's your first experience outside of academia. When did you decide that it was the right time to do something new and eventually go to Monzo. How did you work through that decision making process?

10:07

Yeah. I am a terrible manager. I realized that relatively quickly at Cytora, I think one of the biggest lessons I learned from leaving Cytora was that great people people... Sorry. Outgoing people don't make the best managers. And I think it's a very easy assumption to make that people who are outgoing and sociable will be good people managers. In reality, there's so much to being a manager that has nothing to do with it being outgoing. And I'm really... I don't enjoy helping... I enjoy helping other people. I don't enjoy being responsible for other people's career development. So, I learned that relatively quickly at Cytora. And after kind of a year and a bit there, I realized that I had so much to learn about how to do my job properly.

11:13

And when you're at a really small company, you tend to be teaching yourself a lot of things. And I got to the point of realizing that actually to be really good at my job, I needed to see other people who were really good at my job. So, that's when I started looking at other opportunities and I came across Monzo's jobs and ended up applying there, which was an amazing decision and a really great experience.

11:43

At what point did you realize that you didn't want to be a people manager anymore and that your outgoing nature wasn't suited to being a manager?

11:54

When I had to help people with coming up with career development plans, I am horrible at planning career trajectories for myself, for others it's even worse. And I realized that it was mentally exhausting to have to think about other people's careers and planning other people's career trajectories, because I had no experience in it. I knew I was going to do a bad job because I didn't know how to do it myself. And so, as soon as you don't know how to do something yourself, you shouldn't be teaching other people how to do it. So, I kind of really quickly realized that this was not the right position for me to be in, because I was, I guess self-aware enough to know that I didn't know how to do it, so I couldn't help other people doing it.

12:50

How did you... It's really tricky balance between that self-awareness that you've developed and listening to yourself in those moments versus kind of doing the Richard Branson saying yes and just going with the opportunity. Where's the line there?

13:09

Yeah. If it makes you happy. I think if it's something that excites you and is interesting to you, then absolutely say yes to it even if you are kind of figuring it out along the way. If it's something that stresses you out more than it makes you happy, then don't do it. I think it is a pretty safe way of balancing on that line. And that's definitely the way that I've approached it. Yeah. If it's not fun and you don't enjoy it, then you probably shouldn't be doing it or it shouldn't be your main job. Everyone's got to do stuff that they don't love sometimes. But it shouldn't kind of be like the thing that you have to do for 80% of your day.

13:54

Did you love it at Monzo?

13:56

Yeah, it was incredible. It was a really great experience. And so with Cytora, I learned so much. Monzo is one of those places where you go to work there and you understand why they're so successful. Yeah. I learned a lot about how to be really good at my job because was surrounded by so many people that were incredibly good at what they did.

14:23

What do you mean by when you go in there, you just knew why they were successful? What characteristics were there of the company at that time that told you that it was going to work?

14:34

I think that there's a lot of people who have really big ideas, but have no way of explaining how they'll get there. So, there's kind of these investor pitches that all startups will always give you. And they'll give you these great lofty ideas of this is what the future of AI will look like. Or this is what the future of insurance or banking or art, I don't know, whatever will look like. And it's exciting and it's awesome. And then you ask them, "Okay, well, what are you doing today to get there? And it's really unclear. And at Monzo there was this really clear idea. At any time someone gave you an idea, they had a way of getting there.

15:18

And so these were people that were incredibly good at thinking big, but also executing on what they're thinking about. And in a way that they brought people along with them. So there was always a voice kind of at the company that had these ideas and then they would bring everyone along the rode with them. So, everyone was bought into things and everyone was excited about building the things that we'd talked about. If that makes sense.

15:48

Was that your impression during the interview process from the outside? Was there any difference between the two?

16:00

I think the interview process, I probably didn't get that sense. I think they're just a big company with a big name. And when you're interviewing at places like that, you're kind of like, "This would look great on my resume."

16:17

Yeah.

16:17

And when you get there and you're like, "Wow, this is great for my life not just my resume."

16:22

Yeah.

16:22

So it was definitely... Yeah, you got the vibe of these people are incredibly good at what they do. But you get that at a lot of places I find, especially in somewhere like London or San Francisco, people are really good at what they do. It's whether or not the whole company is good at doing what they do together. That's kind of hard to get in an interview.

16:47

How did that take you to Lightdash now?

16:50

I was at Monzo for almost two years. And by the end of it, I really wanted to leave London. That was one of the biggest things. I was living in London during lockdown and I'm from Canada where I spent a lot of time outside and you couldn't really do that. Or if you did, it was in sidewalk. And I also got to a point at Monzo that I knew what to expect. I got really good at doing my job and I could do my job with a bunch of different teams. And I didn't see how I was going to grow quickly in the next six months. I knew what every day looked like. And I'm not someone that enjoys doing the same thing over and over again. I'm not. I'm not a creature of habit.

17:46

So, I decided that I wanted to change something. And I actually... I wrote out a bunch of things for what I wanted to accomplish and what it was like at Monzo versus kind of other companies that I was looking at. And so, I really started thinking about where I wanted to be, and it was I to be an individual contributor. I didn't want to manage people. I wanted to be someone that had impact on business level decisions, but I wasn't the only person responsible for making those decisions. So, I didn't want to be like a CEO. I didn't want to be head of business development or something. I wanted to be someone who's heavily involved in helping execs make the right decisions, but not actually being responsible for decisions. And so I wrote down a bunch of these kind of a list of things like that, of things that I knew I wanted from my next role. And then Oliver and Hamza chatted to me. I used to work with them at Cytora, and they found out that I was looking for a job.

18:57

So they asked me if I wanted to come join them. And at the time we were actually doing something really different, it was automated data monitoring. So basically testing, making sure that your data tests are running effectively and writing data tests for you and things like that. But when you're joining a company that small, you're really joining the people, you're not joining the product. And yeah, it felt like a good move. I knew that there would be new things that I didn't know how to do and I would learn a lot. So, that was definitely a great opportunity.

19:37

When you say that when you join in, when you're taking a job you're joining a team, you're not joining a product, how do you go about working out whether that team is the right one for you? It obviously helps if you've worked together in the past. But I guess there must have been all different types of people you've worked with in the past too. How do you go about assessing that and knowing whether that team is right for you?

20:05

Yeah. I think at larger companies, it's less about the team and it's more about the product, or it's more about the product than it is at bigger company. I think it's still really about the team, but in larger companies, you can tell a lot about how people work by how they interview you. They should show you kind of the ways that they think through problems by how they interview you. And if you feel uncomfortable or it doesn't go well in interviews solving problems, you probably won't work well together. So you can tell a lot from interviews at larger companies, whether or not you'll work well with the team. You also, I think there's a really big piece of self-awareness of knowing the kinds of questions that you should be asking to see if that company's team will suit you.

21:00

One of the questions I always love to ask is, imagine if I were at this company for three months and you were to kind of say, "Wow, Katie, she's done such a great job. She's being such a great person to hire, I'm so happy we brought her on." What would I have done to have gotten that kind of praise? Or what would I have done to gotten there at Monzo or Lightdash or wherever. And that really give you an idea of what success looks like at that company and if that idea of success matches with your ambitions of success. So, I think for larger companies, there's definitely ways of figuring out if you work similarly. I think if you're joining a really small company, you... When I say small, I mean less than six people. You want to make sure you can have a conversation with them easily, but you also want to make sure you don't have the same skills as anyone else at the company.

22:00

And I think that's a bit harder to figure out, especially early on in your career, but if you're joining a really small company, you want to be really good at the things you're really good at and not really good at the things that the CEO is good at. Otherwise, you're not going to work effectively together because yeah, you'll be good at the same things and you don't need to be.

22:22

You said that you had to develop a deeper sense of self-awareness, and one has to in order to ask the types of questions that already get to the heart of the answers that you're looking for, what did you mean by that when you said developing that sense of self-awareness?

22:43

Yeah. You have to know what you're bad at, because you're guaranteed to you asked that at an interview. What are you bad at? And then you have to be like, "Oh, but it's like this good, bad thing." So, knowing what you're really good at as well, because you should be selling your skills in an interview. You should be making sure that you are making it really clear the things that you're really good at. So, knowing what you're good at is important, because then you can make sure that you're selling that in your interviews. So, an example of that is-

23:24

How do you develop?

23:26

Pardon.

23:27

Sorry, I was going to say, how do you develop that self-awareness?

23:30

Yeah, it's sitting there and thinking a lot, I think. You have to... You have to spend... You have to invest the time getting to know yourself as much as the interviewer is going to get to know you and get to know the company. Because it could be an amazing company, but you could not fit into it. And I think that takes your time to figure out if you are going to fit in somewhere or not.

23:56

Did you do anything specific to help you with that? Were there any tools that you used or experiences that you had that gave you the kind of to self-reflect?

24:06

I don't think there's any specific tools. As I said at the beginning, I'm really bad at planning. My brother is insanely good at this. Every new year's he has monthly, quarterly, yearly plans.

24:24

Oh, he's one of those brothers.

24:26

He's cray... It's crazy. I don't know how he does it. I can't do it. I can barely plan what I can have for breakfast tomorrow. But if you are, I think your career, you spend? What? 80%, 70% of your life doing a job. At least like at my age right now, five days a week of my seven week I work. So, I better like it. And you better set yourself up so that you're the most likely to like your job. So, I think when you kind of go at it with that reality of, "I want it like this, so I better invest the time to figure out what I like. And then I think once you've convinced yourself that it's a good idea, then the next step is actually thinking about it. And the way that I've always thought about it in the past is what are my longer term goals? When I see longer term, I mean two year goals, I can't think five years in the future. I think I'm really impressed by people who can, but it's just not something I'm capable of.

25:29

And then there's kind of the why do you not want to do what you're doing right now? It should be really clear in your mind so that you can look for things that don't exist in the next job. But yeah, I think just sitting and also thinking about what you're good at is really hard. And you should also ask for external input. That's what I found it. It's really hard to tell yourself what you're good at, it's way easier for other people to tell you what you're good at. And then once you've kind of gotten some feedback from other people, you can start seeing themes and things like that.

26:08

It hurts opening yourself up to that.

26:10

Oh, it's so hard.

26:11

That external feedback.

26:12

Yeah. It's so hard. And I think that it's something that... Asking for feedback is a skill and not a lot of people have it. And asking for feedback and not reacting is like an art form. I definitely try to ask for feedback. I'm always offended if someone says something not nice, but you just have to like... They're not saying... And then I think one of the things that I've realized, or that I say to myself whenever you're getting feedback, is they're saying this to try to help you, they're not saying this to try to hurt you. And if you go at it that way, then it's, even if they're saying constructive things, it's with the purpose of helping you, not with the purpose of putting you down. And I say that to myself, but it still sucks. But yeah.

27:10

It is like the way that you phrased it there, it sounds like it's a skill to accept the feedback as well as a skill to ask for the feedback.

27:18

Yeah.

27:19

Yeah. Yeah. Because people won't give you feedback if you ask for feedback and then they give you feedback and then you react to it and you're like, you start giving excuses or reasoning why you don't do the thing that they're saying, then they're not going to give you feedback anymore. So, there's this kind of accepting constructive criticism with grace is a skill that you need to develop, especially if you're going to progress in your career.

27:47

Hmm. How do you ask the specific questions of an individual to ask them for feedback? So what would you say to someone around you? How would you phrase that question? It probably isn't going to be, tell me everything that I've done wrong over the last seven days and just kill me on it. How would you go about asking those questions?

28:12

So, it's way easier to give feedback if you're asking for specific feedback. So, what I mean is asking someone what am I doing that's good is going to lead to much fewer helpful insights then asking someone, oh, we just worked on this project together, how do you think my approach to delivery was? Or how do you think my time management was? Because then you have examples of why something worked or why it didn't work. And it's way easier to answer. It's way easier to give feedback on specific questions. So, if someone asks you specifically for your experience working with them on X, it's way easier for you to answer than giving kind of really generic feedback that takes a long time to think about, especially if you're going to give good feedback. So, asking for feedback on specific tasks or projects that you worked on will tend to give you better feedback faster.

29:25

It's funny how your working relationships, maybe one of the only types of relationships in your life where you can ask for that really specific feedback, because you've been through an objective experience in some way that you've shared. I can't imagine asking my family for example, for specific feedback on how I did at the dinner with this family member and it's almost like we have this opportunity under our nose with the P people we work with to understand ourselves if we can ask those questions.

30:05

That'd be such an awkward family holiday.

30:08

I know.

30:08

Okay-

30:09

Yeah. Especially with your brother [crosstalk 00:30:11]-

30:11

This is our family tradition feedback time.

30:14

Yeah. Let's-

30:15

[inaudible 00:30:15].

30:15

There's so much in that. How our parents think about us and how they're thinking is like it's almost maybe working relationships are some of the only relationships where we actually can truly take their feedback on without it destroying our kind of Freudian mind.

30:33

Yeah. The best is there's this thing that I do sometimes with people. And I think Hamza and Oliver do it too. I think we've talked about this. But when someone asks you for feedback, but they don't actually want feedback, they just want you to tell them that they're great?

30:49

Yeah.

30:49

That's like, you have to... I've gotten good at asking that when someone presents you with a problem and you're just like, "Okay, before you go any deeper in this, do you want me to give you solutions? Or do you want me to just be here to talk?" And then they're like, "I just want to talk to you." And you're like, "Okay, that's fine." But I think that it's really easy in life to give feedback where people don't want it.

31:15

Hmm. It's interesting how getting this feedback throughout your journey has changed quite substantially your working definition of what it means to you to do your best work from academia to outgoing, but not people manager to individual contribute to person who wants to have a say in those big decisions without having to be a people manager. What do you think... That's a very difficult question if you can only look out those two years, but where do you think it goes next? And how might your definition of best work change? Will you ever go back to managing people?

32:02

I think it's kind of ugh. I hate to say it, but it's kind of inevitable. I think that I would love to manage projects. So, I actually am really enjoying product management. It took a while to get used to, but it definitely fits a lot of my skill sets. I'm really good at thinking about business impact and it's something that I realized that a lot of people can't do kind of naturally, or it's something that comes quite easily to me. And I think that inevitably if you end up in a higher role, you're going to have to work with other people who are in your team.

33:02

I think that the nice thing is that I have had this experience of managing people and know that I'm not very good at it. So, when I wouldn't... I'm not going to say if, I will say, when I end up having to manage people, I will definitely get help from someone who is much more skilled at the things I'm not skilled at. So, career planning and career development. And I think that it's... Yeah, I also I'll have to learn how to do it eventually, but I think as I said before, if it's not something that you like doing, then you shouldn't do it. So, I'm going to make sure I find the things that I like about it and kind of excel in those and get other people to help in the things I'm not good at.

33:54

If you put the management of people aside, is there still a tension for you between doing your best work as someone on their own and doing your best work as part of a team?

34:15

Do you mean as part of a team like in a company or do you mean?

34:20

It's like as you spoke about that last bit. It was the first time during our conversation where it sounded less about the management of people and more about working alongside other people.

34:33

Hmm.

34:34

And the natural tension there is when we pursue our best work. And we inevitably do come in contact with other people, but we can make conscious choices to limit that. And actually, maybe we do our best work completely on our own. And I wonder where you fit on that spectrum and do you know how much contact you want with others in order to do your best work?

35:03

Yeah. I think that I'm very comfortable making decisions independently. I also am 100% an advocate for not making decisions alone. I think that there's a difference between deciding something yourself and coming up with that decision by yourself. And I think that you should never come up with things alone. I think that should always be a team effort, but I don't think decision by committee is a good idea 90% of the time. That's like a totally ambiguous temper, but I think that decisions made by independent people tend to be much more quick and you have a person responsible for it. And they just... They tend to be more effective in a business. But I think that coming up with that decision should never be an independent person or very rarely, because I think that input from multiple people makes the best decisions. Diversity of information gives you the best decisions.

36:17

So it's almost like you want as many people engaged at the beginning as possible that you want less people engaged at the end when there's decision making, which tends to work the opposite way around the way that you would typically expect it, where you expect people to come up with ideas to solutions to problems. And then you make a decision on that, but you are worried about it so you don't have a single point of failure when you have multiple people make that decision. It seems like the opposite way around that you go about it.

36:47

Yeah, I guess so. Yeah. I think that... I also think that there's effective ways of coming up with information as well. You can't just tell people brainstorm, you have to give them ideas and structure. But I think that some decisions should be made in a committee, but if you have all the information and everyone's given you the information you need to make a good decision, then you should be able to make a decision on your own. So, I think there's this skillset around collecting the right information from the right people. And you should get good at that instead of getting good at like, I don't know. Making committee decisions.

37:35

Could I extract this out even further? When we are creative, being creative is often an individual pursuit. It's something that we kind of use the experiences that we've had around us to build new ways of the world. And that doesn't necessarily happen in a team environment. The difficulty is that for truly creative people, when they have those ideas and they need to see those products come to life, they do inevitably bump up against needing to build a team to build it. And it's almost like it requires two different types of people, one person who is creative enough to be able to see the world for the truth of what it is and come up with that idea. But then secondly, the type of person who cannot find it painful to go through that experience, I personally find it really tricky to balance those two, the kind of the pain of taking this idea that you've had and it being worked on with other people who might not do it in the way that you want it to. And how do you go about balancing those two parts in your working life?

38:54

Yeah, it's really hard to let people do stuff and you're like, "I know how to do it the best." But no, I think that that is something that if you're working with people who always have the best ideas, then they probably are lying to you sometimes. And the way that I've learned to get better at this, it's, there's something that someone told me actually, I think is Amy Chen from DBT Labs. And at DBT, they have this thing called strong opinions loosely held. And that resonated with me so much because that's absolutely the way that I strong I to work, which is, I will always have an opinion for you or 90% of the time if you ask me a question, I'll have an opinion. But if you give me a good reason why that opinion isn't the best one, then I'll absolutely agree with you to build the better option.

39:53

We're not building a company to show off how great our ideas are, we're building a company so we build a successful company and a successful product and an amazing community. And if someone else's idea is better than mine, then absolutely we should build their idea, but I do not have ideas and I think that's the key balance is you have to be able to not get precious about your ideas. And I think there's so many ways that you do this, like mental models, deciding on impact of things, but you have to be comfortable in almost making it not about... Not almost. You have to be comfortable not making it about you and making it about the business and being like, "Why would this problem be better solved this way?" So, yeah. Strong opinions, loosely held, I think is the way that I approach that, where... Yeah.

40:54

What are those, one of those mental models that you use to see it beyond your own self? You mentioned it being bigger than you. What mental model do you use in order to enable that?

41:07

Yeah. I think that there's a couple of things. I think there's... I mean, they're not really mental models per se. I think they're more just like intuitions that you develop, but the amount of effort something takes, if I have an idea and then an engineer tells me a different idea and it takes half the time and it reduces the product impact by 25%, then I'm probably going to do it anyways. Especially if it's like not a really important part of the product. So, it's kind of more an art than it is a science, but other people are really good at certain things. Engineers know really well technical implementations. Designers are incredible user experiences and telling you they actually know this will fundamentally change user's experience. So, I think it's knowing what other people are much better at estimating than you are and understanding if the trade off that you're making by doing it their way is worth it in the long-term impact of what you're going to build.

42:15

And so, it's being really comfortable with kind of, when you come up with an idea, you know approximately estimates for technical feasibility, how long it will take, how much of an impact it's going to have. Things like that. And then when you have other options that are brought to you, you're able to quickly kind of estimate in your head how different the impact would be if you did it this way and whether or not it's worth the trade off.

42:43

It's almost like you haven't personalized what success means to the project, but you've made it more of an existential thing where what you see as success is something that can be clearly objectively defined that everyone else can work towards rather than it being your own thing.

43:01

Yeah. I think if you've defined your company's success as your own success, then you're probably not going to be a great person to work with because you'll probably think that you're always right. And no one's always right. Or if they are, then kudos to them, because I've never gotten there. But yeah, I think that the best people to work with are the people who will give you their opinion on things, but also respect that sometimes other people have better opinions. It's a hard balance definitely.

43:38

Hmm. How much skin in the game should you have in that moment? The balance feels like the right word because you want someone to hang the hat on the success of the company or the group or the team. And you want them to have some skin in that, but at the same time you don't want it to be so much that it overwhelms them and that they just think they're right the whole time.

44:03

Yeah. I think you can have skin in the game and just not think you're right all the time though. I think it's a personality thing as well. You should know you should have skin in the game, especially at a startup. And I'm very aware that the success of Lightdash would lead to my success too. But I also am very aware that I don't have all the best ideas and all the right answers. And I think that it's a personality thing as well, or a way of working that some people have much more confidence or not necessarily confidence. I think some people are falsely confident that they know everything. And so they also have a lot of skin in the game. So you end up in this horrible situation where you think you're right and you're really relying on this thing to succeed. So anyone else's opinions that are different to yours are just going to get shut down because you don't want to be involved in their future. And I think that that's a toxic work environment that you should really avoid.

45:17

And my last question is how would you define your best work now?

45:21

I think that as... So I do data, but I also do product stuff. And I think for product things, my best work would be when you've made everyone else's jobs really easy. When you've made an environment that everyone else can do their best work in, then you've done your best job as a product manager. I always say this, that one of the hardest things about being a product manager is you're only told when you're doing something wrong, because if you're doing really well, no one should notice that you're there. And I think that your best work is almost when no one notices that you're doing a job, it's just that their jobs are so easy.

46:13

Perhaps it's not a surprise that the dichotomy of being a product manager is often that you don't have any line management responsibility and so you can have no influence, but perhaps on this occasion it sounds like it was deliberate.

46:28

Yeah. Yep. Yep. Maybe. Little do I know.

46:32

Katie, I loved our conversation. Thank you so much for sharing your story.