Five Guests, Five Takeaways
Last month at Qualtrics, we launched the Breakthrough Builders podcast, shining a light on people whose ideas and efforts are behind the world’s most amazing products, brands, and experiences. I was intentional about making sure that our First Five guests embodied the kind of leader we want to profile on the show: accomplished yet humble, deeply expert yet always learning, intellectual yet personable.
My reflection is that our guests delivered on this promise in spades. If you disagree, or even if you agree, go ahead and send me a note – I’d love your perspective.
Five guests, five takeaways. Here are the lessons I learned from this first series of conversations about how to make progress toward becoming a breakthrough builder.
1. Build with your purpose at the center. This was the primary focus of my conversation with Robert Chatwani. Robert had built an incredibly successful career at eBay, and had played a leading role in creating many instances of the company’s marketplace model for connecting micro-sellers with micro-buyers. But as the company shifted its strategy to compete more directly with Amazon, he felt a reckoning coming on: “Companies and cultures change. But that didn’t mean that I had to change.” Despite having recently been named Global CMO of eBay, Robert made the difficult decision to move on from the company when its strategy no longer aligned with his personal purpose of “creating businesses that create hope and opportunity in the world.” In the conversation, he also reflected on the efforts he and several others made to stand up a national Bone Marrow Registry when he found out his friend and startup co-founder Sameer Bhatia was diagnosed with leukemia in 2007. In Episode Two, Geetha Murali spoke about her spectrum of values, ranging from individual and day-to-day (wanting to feel joy and fulfillment in all she does) through life goals (achieving “serenity; viewing life through a lens of optimism to get beyond the daily cycles of pleasure and pain to get to a state of permanent peace”). And Farhan Thawar framed his purpose in Episode Four as always wanting to learn more. He believes that learning is an “infinite game” while all other professional pursuits are finite. Geetha and Farhan each talked about specific career decisions they made because of their personal purpose and values, and noted that even though these were some of the biggest and far-reaching career moves they made, they were in many ways the easiest to make because they knew what felt right. If you build with purpose, you will always be building in the right direction, even if you can’t be certain of the destination.
2. Build your skills relentlessly. Geetha talked about the value of developing as many skills as possible early in one’s career. She had no particular ambition to become a CEO when she was young, but she had a sense that becoming adroit at mathematics would be useful in any field – and when she became CEO of Room to Read, her math skills turned out to be exceptionally important in every aspect of the role, from fundraising to budgeting to growth planning. Geetha believes that “planning too far ahead can sometimes make you lose sight of opportunities right in front of you” and that, given the acceleration of our economy, there are so many career options that will exist in 10 years that don’t exist today that it’s best to build a broad base of highly transferrable general skills. For her part, Kristine Chin offered in Episode Five that, for the second chapter of her career, she wanted to go to a company that would offer her “tremendous training” on how to “create products people want” with “product management best practices.” And, of course the implication of Farhan’s “infinite game” of learning is that skill building never stops: “You can always learn more. You can always be around more exceptional people. How do you just follow the smart people and the hard problems?” If you commit to always building new skills, you will continually open yourself to amazing opportunities.
3. Build your community. In Episode Three, Charlie Sutton of Facebook talked about how, though software and hardware designs have a finite shelf life, the design communities that create them always endure. He is convinced that “one of the most important things in design is to acknowledge that the persistent value we bring is, in fact, the design community” and that as successive generations of designers look back, they will “not be reminiscing about a more efficient checkout flow for a delivery app, but about the people [they] worked with and the communities [they] built.” Geetha, in discussing her personal success and Room to Read’s growth, said that her secret sauce was the “relationships, the people [she’d] been fortunate to meet, work with, laugh, and play with.” And the reason Farhan sees a very clear through-line in his career despite working for nearly ten companies is that he sees himself as someone within a larger community of builders, makers and doers who push themselves to learn ever-more skills and solve ever-harder problems. If you build in - and build up - your community, you will find yourself surrounded by people who support you, push you, and help you discover, learn, and grow.
4. Build for your customer. Kristine was able to build growth businesses and stand up successful CX programs at eBay, Ten-X, and Twilio by focusing on “the customer at the heart of all three companies – an Enthusiast.” Her view of how to drive sequential growth: “If we think about customer maturity, you have Enthusiasts as early adopters. Then as the company needs to grow, you go to new customers that might need a bit more help…but you start with the Enthusiast, learn about the similarities between them and newer customers, and build from there.” Charlie talks about great design in a profound way as “a dialogue between maker and user.” He firmly believes that products and services should be designed in service of what he calls “peak human agency” and thinks that “as a designer, [he has] a responsibility to make the affordances and interfaces clear” but that “the user has responsibility to be learning” to feel mastery and control, which Charlie believes is “often when we enjoy and get the most out of the things in our lives.” If you build with customer needs and outcomes in mind, you will have a chance to build things that are inspiring, innovative, and important.
5. Build the unplanned into your plans. Charlie spent seven years at Apple, and never fathomed when he was in Australia that he would get an opportunity to do product development at a global scale – but an opportunity with Nokia in London came along. Charlie is “attracted to the romance of changing culture and proving things can be done,” so to fulfill that attraction, he decided a great next step would be to build a line of services at the then-“800-pound gorilla” in phones. And it was several years later at Nokia’s Advanced Design Studio in the US that he began to learn the types of design skills that would become invaluable in VR design a decade later and lead him to Facebook. Kristine planned to go to law school, but while taking time off after college, she discovered – by taking on a business internship with a newly-privatized insurance company in Slovenia (!) – that she had a penchant for systems thinking and technology innovation, and followed a telecom and tech career that eventually led her to lead CX at Twilio. And Robert’s early-career startup, a B2B barter community, put him in touch with investors who eventually turned him on to eBay, where he rose to become CMO, the same position he now holds at Atlassian. If you have some flexibility and you believe in yourself, you can go on adventures that will pay dividends down the road, even if it’s not the road you planned to take.
So that’s what I learned. I really like every one of these people and got a ton of energy from each conversation. Their teams are fortunate to be able to work with them and learn from them day in and day out. I’m staying tuned to find out what breakthroughs they build next.