Episode Transcript
Jim Cuene 0:02
Welcome to business drivers the podcast dedicated to helping you be a more effective digital leader. Each episode we connect you to leaders and ideas that unlock new growth both professional and personal business drivers is presented by Farren and I'm your host Jim Kean. Our guest for this podcast is Scott Allen Scott is the vice president of interactive marketing and strategy at Ameriprise Financial. It Ameriprise, Scott leads a broad team that focuses on creating great digital experiences that drive results for clients and some prospects. disclosure here, Scott and I work together on the same team at Ameriprise a while back. So we've got a working history. I love this conversation for a couple of reasons. One, it's a great example of how modern organizations are dealing with digital transformation, especially transformations that have been going on for a while. Additionally, this is a good peek into how firms and highly regulated industries are working to build agility. We also get into the role of senior leaders and how in this case, they're doing a great job of providing support to the grassroots efforts to weave new ways of working into the org. There's also a super nugget in here about the rationale for moving to product orgs and how it came from the top hint. Your finance folks will get anxious listen to this, and you're gonna like it. So thanks for tuning in. Hope you like this Convo Scott. So Scott, can you describe the work you and your team are doing today?
Scott Allen 1:23
Yeah, so I have a team of about six product owners that are all on my team and responsible for a number of different products that are within our secure site capability. So that's everything from the we call our digital advice, experience, to the corporate to client email channel, to our secure message center and chat capability are statements, documents capability. So a number of different products that we have that were that my team is responsible for as part of the overall clients digital experience. And when we say product owners, I mean, I definitely truly think of them as product owners from the standpoint of setting that roadmap, setting that strategy, setting the priorities, determining what the goals and metrics are, and trying to empower those product owners as much as I possibly can and allow them that that ability and that flexibility to be able to, you know, adjust their their roadmaps, understand their clients and their products best and be able to, again, make the decisions that on how to drive their products and how to maximize the value for, you know, our users and the company at large.
Jim Cuene 2:47
That's a pretty broad scope of work. When you were growing up and thinking about college, is this the work that you dreamed of doing? In other words, can you tell us a little bit of the story of how you got here into this role?
Scott Allen 3:01
Yeah, well, you know, I say that I took the traditional route into this this role, which is I was an officer in the Navy for seven years and then went to business school and then ended up it at Ameriprise so, you know, no, it's when I when I when I was younger me I always had like an interest in sort of All Things technology. I mean, I was there on prodigy and CompuServe and all that kind of stuff, right sort of growing up. So I always had like a, had an interest in interest in technology has to remember being at the Naval Academy on like the big huge sun spark stations or whatever and trying to navigate like the early days of the internet, and back when Yahoo literally was like a collection of, you know, links, you know, to websites across, you know, across the Internet and following along on like, you know, 30 minute delayed basketball scores on ESPN and that kind of that kind of stuff. So I always had an interest in this this area. But, you know, obviously as far as like knowing exactly how things would turn out today, or how it ended up here, like Yeah, absolutely no idea sort of how things, how things will play out. But the cool thing is, I feel like I'm in the right spot.
Jim Cuene 4:13
Well, you're in an industry that seems like it's always been in some version of transformation since the transformation since the rise of digital I was talking with somebody the other day about all of the things that financial services firms have had to battle as part of this sort of digital transformation. And having somebody that is a long time appreciator of tech, sometimes someone's been following it for a long time is is a really important asset for a firm like yours. So I guess one of the things I wanted to start with is just sort of setting the table. Without going into too many specifics. Does your firm have a specific or explicit digital transformation program that your work is part of
Scott Allen 5:01
So we were really kind of, I think still leading that, I would say from more of the bottom up and out, as opposed to like a top down, kind of digital transformation. I mean, there's definitely been kind of talk about it. I mean, I know the executive team has had in Deloitte to talk about Agile to them and kind of explain some of the concepts to them. And, but as far as, like, sort of a true program, I feel like that we are still again, kind of leading it and sort of from again, sort of the the bottom up and transforming it that way. Now, that said, I think that our head of marketing our Head of Technology are absolutely huge proponents of like, what it is that we're doing, and they understand why we're doing it, what we're doing, and we've been on this digital transformation path for probably, I don't know, five, six plus years or so, where we started, you know, really small and a sort of part of our business, you know, the kind of started with this transformation side and have sort of been slowly kind of growing it but, you know, it is it is funny, because we I mean, we're at that point now, where I'll be in like, a random conversation with somebody like in the, the training department, and they'll talk about like an MVP, and I'll just be like, Why? How in the world? Did you come up with that. So like, and in some ways, it's, it's kind of, it's kind of cool to sort of hear some of that stuff sort of being reflected back to you. And sort of knowing that the terminology, at least, I guess, is sort of making its way around around the business, I think, the hard part about that, and not having maybe more of a formal program, if you will. And there's an interesting article that I was reading the other day on, on Harvard Business Review, just talking about digital transformation out of maybe, maybe you saw it and about the importance of the the terminology, I think and needing to get that right. And sort of having that consistent is, I think one of the challenges that we're having right now is you've got a case of people saying, Oh, you were a project manager, now you're a scrum master sort of thing, right, and just sort of changing, changing the names. And without really sort of really, truly understanding, like what it means. And I'll tell you one of the things that that we did for our, you know, as part of our transformation for our client program, which is really again, sort of what I'm a part of, and focused on, again, that sort of overall client digital experiences, we had probably for six months, anywhere from like half day to full day sessions, like every single Friday with us and our marketing team, interactive marketing team, along with our business partners and technology, working through it, like, you know, getting down to, again, some of the terminology, terminology type questions like, what does this mean? Or how are we going to operate, or how are we going to change how we're going to operate, it is not easy, and it really took and still takes like that much effort and focus on the work and how to, again, truly transform because you can't just again, wave a magic wand or start sort of bringing in sort of different terminology or sort of saying like it was this and it is that because, you know, as well as I do, again, it is it is sort of end is true transformation is like a an actual transformation from end to end from all the way through and how you're operating to how you talk about it to, you know, obviously the type of people that you bring in as well. And you can't just sort of wave a magic wand. I think that that's the, again, on the one hand where it's kind of cool to hear people talking about some of these terms. On the flip side, I think that that's still a challenge that we have is some people just again, don't haven't done the work to actually sort of transform and really understand like, what it means.
Jim Cuene 8:49
Well, yeah, in the transformation takes multiple transformations, I, I want to, I want to be careful with my own language here. But you have to understand the concepts first, then you have to understand the practices second, then you have to do them and you know, go from knowledge to craft. And then you have to really understand the behaviors and the attitudes in the assumptions and in the values that that really make the new work work. And that does take a lot of time. Again, without going into too many specifics. I just think it's amazing that you've got the leadership team there that is as committed to this change as it sounds like they are investing multiple, multiple multiple afternoons to sort of drive this understanding is really I think, rare. How did the senior leadership there, get it? You know, what was there? Again, without saying too much was Was there an event? Was it a commitment, was it an awakening? It's it's really kind of cool and exceptional that you've got that kind of support
Scott Allen 10:00
Yeah, well, in our case, you know, we, we were, I guess lucky, again to sort of our Head of Marketing and head of technology that we already had kind of regular touch points with them. And I think even at that time, like almost like every, every couple of weeks, just giving them updates on, on work on projects that we had taking place. And really, what we started to do is just start to shift those conversations to kind of start to bring in some of these, some of this agile terminology, some of these agile concepts, starting to talk about the benefits. I mean, I think we didn't just jump in and say, Hey, we're going to be agile now, right? And, you know, hey, you're reading along for the ride, it was more of, like I said, let's start talking to you about, you know, again, what it is, what it means, why we feel like it's important and what we think the benefits are to you. And it took a while again, it was, it was an extended period of time, it was a year or two years of really trying to explain those those concepts to them. But as we shifted, what we tried to start to do is to kind of shift from, you know, those sort of theoretical terms into more tangible terms. So one of the things that I feel like, really, really resonated with him as we went back over the previous, I think, like three years, and we looked at like our monthly spend, you know, with our our investment dollars, and we showed how every year like it's it's zero in January, and then sort of ramps up through the through the end of the year to this spike in December and then drops precipitously. Again, because of our our annual project funding model. And talking about like me, you realize, like this is this is all completely inefficient, right, that we are losing any momentum and because of this artificial into the year, and we're ending projects and teams are demanding, and now like you see this ramp up over the first year and explain to them, Hey, if we had more dedicated, permanent, quote, unquote, product teams that existed through this artificial interview, end of calendar year, you know, sort of barrier, that now the sudden we would, we would level out, you know, the spinning model, and all of a sudden that, of course equates to higher efficiency, you're going to get more for your dollars as a result. And again, sort of bringing in that sort of that tangible example, really helped them start to start to get it and understand it. And also just again, talking about the fact that, you know, it's I don't feel like it's too much of a leap for most people to understand, if you have a group of people that are working together, they learn how to work together, they will learn how to operate, they learn how to, you know, be effective together in with a project based sort of approach to things, you're just spamming those people all the time, and you're having to, like, you know, bring in, you know, new people together, and it takes them a long time to ramp up and to get used to working together. And that was another case where I think they again, sort of taking that in combination with sort of the historical spinning examples really helped them start to kind of get it.
Jim Cuene 13:09
So I would love to actually have like an hour long time, I might be one of the few people in the world that want to have an hour long conversation about how you reset the way that you find product teams. But I'm going to acknowledge that I I've probably talked to 75 different leaders in the last six months about how they're leading product transformation, or product changing this move to product teams. And I don't think I've ever heard anyone say that. The thing that kind of accelerated the transformation was clarity on what the current funding model is doing to the teams. In other words, the folks that I'm talking to generally are only realizing how bad the funding model is, once they've tried to put the product teams in place. I don't think I've ever talked to anyone that said, you know, what we realize what this funding model was doing to our efficiency and quality and our, our morale. And in order to fix it, we want to move to product teams, I just think that's a really powerful and frankly courageous leadership from someone some group inside your org That's amazing. Again, it was
Scott Allen 14:17
it was just a it was a way that we hit on just in the course of our conversation is trying to figure out how to how to shift the, the conversation that again, just felt like it was a really tangible way of working because it's so nebulous, and it's hard to describe for people like yeah, we're going to be more efficient or we're going to move more quickly or whatever, like, here's a way that really sort of proved it. And again, you can see now, you know, it's not it's not perfect, there's definitely still a bit of a dip at the beginning of the year, right just sort of naturally people sort of shaking off those, those, the post vacation cobwebs and that kind of thing. But, you know, again, our our spinning you know curve went from, you know, sort of a 45 degree angle through the course of the year to you know, more of a you know, 1020 degree kind of angle through the course The year so it definitely had a huge impact.
Jim Cuene 15:02
Well, that's really great. Um, so in sort of round numbers, how many quarters? Or how many years? Have you been working on rolling out these product teams? In other words, how long have you been doing product teams versus project teams?
Scott Allen 15:17
So I guess, you know, kind of me, me specifically, like within our client program, probably four years or so something like that.
Jim Cuene 15:28
Okay, so you're in, you're in, you're moving? You're,
Scott Allen 15:32
we are absolutely, yeah, that Adele.
Jim Cuene 15:34
So I'm,
Scott Allen 15:36
I'm sorry, just one thing I, you know, I want to go back to what you were talking about. There is no one transformation, there's a series of transformations or stages, maybe a transformation, however you want to talk about it. And I think, especially for a company like like ours, and because many out there that have been sort of working in waterfall for so long, and you're making these transformations, and you're making these huge sort of leaps forward. One of the things I always love about spring new new people, and you know, even if it's, in some ways can be kind of kind of frustrating us at the time is like, you feel so incredibly good about like how far you've come and you got some new person who comes in and says, what about this, that and you know, this is too damn hard to do, like, why is it take this long to do this? You're like, oh, but you just you don't get it? Like you don't know how far we've come. But you know, that, again, there's that sort of brief sense of, again, kind of, you know, frustration, but that that's what continues to kind of drive us forward, right? Is is that sort of new way, that that sort of fresh thinking and that sort of fresh perspective on things without sort of historical baggage that that you have yourself? And, and this is one of the things and actually, we're struggling with this a little bit right now, which is is exactly that, like we're kind of trying to push some of our mid level leaders. So like, what's next? Like, what are the next things we want to do? What's the next part of the transformation, they're saying, we're still trying to implement what we've said we were going to transform like, we've still got teams that are still kind of ARDS to the maturity level that we want them to. And you're trying to ask us to think about like, what's next and ritual trying to implement what you've already said we wanted to and so that's one of the things that we're we're kind of struggling with right now. And again, it just goes back to I think, what you're talking about around these sort of stages, and it's it is messy, these stages of transformation.
Jim Cuene 17:22
Yeah, I want to put a tack in this idea of the pace of transformation, I want to come back to it a little bit. But I The other thing I was going to ask you about is we see very frequently that the move to product teams comes from generally the software dev or the delivery side of organizations, as a way to improve the delivery efficiency, or the delivery quality or the consistency. And so it's exciting to see these teams moving to a product model. But what I see a lot of product teams struggling with is how do we stay close to the consumer? How do we make sure that we've got the best practices and the right approaches and the right mindset and the right openness, as we're pursuing what could be broadly described as discovery. And I think that's especially tricky. In organizations where you've got a B to B to C, or you've got a third, you've got either franchisees or you've got reps, or you've got advisors? What have you all seen to be successful methods or tools to get good at Discovery in this model?
Scott Allen 18:33
Yeah, no, it's it's a good question. And I think that, you know, I think that this is, this is and of itself is our long, long conversation. But I think for for us, what we are trying to do in the way we have things set up is with our with our product teams is paired up with our product owners, we call them SEL software engineering laser, essentially, like our senior engineering, sort of head of both front end and back end, and really in charge of both the transformation as well as delivery. And so what we are trying to do as a result of that, and certainly though the product owner still sort of overall responsible for, you know, the the product roadmap and you know, delivery, but having that SEL there allows them to focus less on that and focus more on Discovery, just as you said, that's definitely the the path that we've taken, we started on on delivery, we started on trying to deliver more efficiently. We started on trying to implement sort of broader standards across the different different product teams, but now we're really trying to shift more of our focus to discovery. So one of the things that that I did along with several of my colleagues is we created this discovery maturity model. And so basically what we did was we went through and kind of created this this maturity model and you know, created it in sort of a kind of three levels and other levels. necessarily, you know, number of levels mean anything, but really with this idea of like, okay, like what are the the core tactics are things that you need to make sure that, you know you're doing from a discovery standpoint before you start to focus on, you know, that second level, and that that third level. And so those are things, you know, anywhere from Hey, like, do you have, again, sort of a, you know, a written down product strategy? Right? I mean, is it actually sort of written somewhere? Do you have, you know, monthly metrics meetings, where you're reviewing all of the the various metrics, and you have all these different tactics? Because I think the challenge and it's frankly, I think it's, it's easier to implement delivery transformation than it is discovery transformation, because discovery in and of itself is so squishy. Yeah. And so we've tried to kind of bring in a little bit more of a formality to it, we're again, sort of saying, like, hey, here are some of the tactics that you need to be doing. And so what what we've done is we've said, Hey, we want you each of the product teams to go through this discovery, model, self assessment, have the teams you know, where it's like, hey, know, your product, you know, know your users, you know, your users challenges, you know, all these different categories, have the team self assess where it is how well they're doing discovery, and then to kind of pick out some of these different tactics as part of their transformation roadmap that they're going to focus on for the next six months. And then within six months, do another self assessment and sort of create this kind of ongoing cycle where they're focused on, on Discovery. And I think it's been, it's been pretty successful so far, but it is still hard. I know, like, you had some stuff, I think, you know, that you're putting out there on Twitter, like, how do you? How do you create sort of curious people? And it's an interesting question, because so much of discovery is really about curiosity. It's wanting people to understand, you know, more about their users more about their products. Like, I wonder why I wonder why why does this happen? Like, why does this? And so, you know, that's one of the things I think we're trying to work on, is to get people to ask some of those questions. But it's a process.
Jim Cuene 22:10
Well, a couple quick reactions. First of all, Mike, my sense is that you're probably ahead of the game with your focus on Discovery. You know, as we talk to product teams, we rarely are talking to them about here's how you level up your work on the discovery side, I mean, I, you know, you get a gold star for making that a focus, and then you just sort of hit the point that I was going to make, you know, on the, on the delivery side and on the the rituals and the routines of being a product leader, you can teach that. And you can help people level up by making sure that they're good at the steps and good at the process. And, you know, good at the, at the, you know, the teachable behaviors. But the hard part on the discovery is that curiosity that that openness, and I think the other piece that we see as being tricky is being able to put up the deflector shields on the internal politics on Discovery. So in other words, we're, you're you're not going out to validate what your boss is telling you to put onto the roadmap. But you're going out to really listen to how is this thing being used? How are people receiving it? Is it really working? Are the outcomes happening in the way that we want them to? Or are they are they happening for reasons that we should know about? And that, that curiosity is really important, but also the experience that drives intuition is really important, too, which is tough to teach.
Scott Allen 23:33
Yeah, no, exactly. And I think you, you know, you hit on one of the most important things that we did like as far as that discovery, maturity model, which was having the team's ask the question, do your discovery efforts have a direct impact on your product roadmap, right. And that could be either way, right? That could be, hey, we're adding things as a result of discovery, or we're taking things away as a result of discovery to your point, like, Hey, we've done the discovery on this, this idea. And like, there's actually nothing there, we shouldn't actually make some sort of change. But one of the things that we've really been focused on lately, we actually had a really good discovery training from MG from Nielsen Norman Group that we brought in on Discovery, and one of the things that they hit on a lot, which I think has been really good that we've been really trying to focus on ourselves is just actually just articulating the problem up front, like what is the problem that you're trying to solve? I mean, it's just, it's so easy and and it was good for me too, because like, I found myself sort of, you know, as they're talking about, like, some of the leader examples that are bringing in solutions and I'm like, Oh, my God, like, that sounds so much like me, I've got to be careful not to not to do that, you know, but really trying to get super crisp on like I said, What is the problem that you're actually trying trying to solve? And it's just, it's one it's one of those trainings that on one hand like I loved on the other hand, I hate it. Because now like, like, on any given day, like I'm being barraged by these people bringing these solutions are like, Hey, we've got this great new vendor tool like Let's find a use case to be able to use it. Like, what's the problem that we're trying to solve? Oh, well, we've got this great solution that we're trying to find a use case for. And it's just, it's like one of these things, like, once you've had your eyes open to it, it drives you, you know, completely bonkers. But I think that that, like I said, that is that is one of the keys. And it is easier, it's easier said than done. And it goes back to again, I think a lot of the transformation stuff is just sort of shifting the conversation and trying to create that sort of common language and getting having anybody on a product team be able to say, what is it we're trying to do here? Right, like, what is it we're trying to solve? Like, what what is the user challenge? Or what is the user benefit that we're trying to drive with this? Or is, again, this is some sort of solution that's in search of a problem.
Jim Cuene 25:41
Oh, my God, there's so much in here, we're gonna need a second second conversation, or we're gonna have to go up for a growler of beer to talk this all out. But um, you know, on the last point that you were just making, you know, teaching, you're giving people the courage and the freedom to say, hey, wait a minute, you know, are we solving the right problem here? What is the problem? You know, I, I wish every product team essentially had their version of God, what did What does Toyota call it that the Tandon chord you know, the red lever that you built? You know, exactly. Stuff the assembly line and say, Hey, wait a minute, there's a quality issue here. You know, I'm glad that you came back to the point on the language and how important that is, is you're trying to teach the intuition, the curiosity upfront, you know, sometimes people will grab on to their understanding of the language, and they will then try to use that to drive a change. And they might misunderstand it, or they might not really get the actual usage. So for instance, we've got an engagement right now, where there's an excited team that is taught themselves the jobs to be done framework. And now everything is the job to be done. And, you know, the challenge is like, Okay, well, show me the data that in show me the research that shows us that the consumers are really saying this is the job to be done. Yeah. Yeah. So exactly. That commitment to ongoing understanding and teaching in support of the language development, I think is really important.
Scott Allen 27:10
Yeah, no, exactly. And it's funny to talk about the child speech on thing, because I think, again, that's the other thing that we are talking about, from a from a discovery standpoint is like, Hey, we've got this great discovery maturity model that we've developed, and we're using, but what we've said is we need like a companion rubric, that sort of gives people a sense of like, like, when and to what extent to use that discovery, because every last little thing doesn't need like six months of discovery, right? How do you, you know, enable people because, right, there's, there's some people, you know, obviously, who loves discovery, and some people who don't love discovery. So again, how do you? How do you strike that balance between, again, kind of the right level of discovery? And it's, it's been interesting, too, because I think one of the other things that we've talked a lot about, as we've rolled this model out is, how do you know that you're doing discovery? Well, right. Like it again, it's an it's also like kind of a bit of an amorphous you know, kind of concept. But to me, the way that I've really tried to talk about it a lot, I think there's, there's a number of different ways you can you can approach it, but to me, I feel like that, one of the ways you can, you can tell that you're doing discovery is if your predictions about how user behavior is going to change as you make changes, or become more and more accurate over time, right, um, you have a good, you have a good sense of, alright, well, if we, if we do this, like, we're going to have this much of a, you know, reduction and Fallout to this process or something like that, or, or if we roll out this, this particular, you know, new feature of the product, these are the type of people that are going to immediately adopt it, these are the other people that it's going to take more time that that's the way that you know, as you start to predict it, and I think that's one of the things that I'm challenging my teams on a lot is, as they're rolling these things out, is forcing them to have goals, or again, I had these predictions. And right now, like we're in many of my product teams, like they're still kind of immature enough to where they don't really know, like, what's going to happen, I'm like, make your prediction, I don't care if it's wildly off, I don't care if it's, you know, it turns out that you say it's going to have a 10% impact and has a 90% impact or vice versa. But you need to get into the habit of like making those predictions and, and also coming up with like some sort of rationale as to why you think it's going to happen. So then, after the fact, you can go back and you can look at okay, your here's your hypothesis, what was gonna happen now look at the results and figure out okay, where were you writing? were
Jim Cuene 29:34
we wrong? Yeah, you only get smarter if you have a hypothesis or or prediction to test against, and you're understanding what assumptions are underlying that. And yeah, and then lastly, you need the data. And so if you're trying to teach your team how to make better choices, or better, you know, do better work on the discovery side, you're ultimately looking at the user outcomes. Those are a little bit of trailing indicators on on how Effective your discovery work is. But the data really becomes your your friend here, you know, as a person that is leading a transformation of these product teams. And you're it's really it's kind of a great setup for a question about data because you're teaching both efficiency on the delivery side. And you're trying to model and encourage the right kind of discovery work in in the middle, is the data around? Is any of this making a difference on the outcomes that we care about as a leader? How are you making sure that the right data is available, and then the data is being used appropriately by your team, because you want to make it available and you want to democratize it, but you also want to make sure that it's not being used to justify the wrong things in the rearview mirror? So how are you guys thinking about data is a is a leveler?
Scott Allen 30:57
Yeah, it's a good question. And I think it's something that we're still still evolving with, I'll start from the standpoint of for each of my product teams, I make sure that they have, you know, monthly metrics, reviews. And so within those monthly metrics, reviews, what I try to get them to focus on is, you know, a couple things looking back at, like the changes that they've made, and like what the impact has been, and that could be over the past month, that could be over the past quarter, however long it you know, some of these things might just by nature of our business might take a long time or a longer time to kind of show up what the impact might be. It's not always instantaneous. Then, of course, focus on like, what's the current kind of health of the product? Like, what are the what are the various sort of metrics that we're looking at? To understand what's working well? And then then also to look at, okay, like, what are the what are the changes that are coming up? And how are we actually going to measure, you know, those those changes, so it's looking across, like, in each of these monthly meetings, those three things and really trying to, to, you know, again, look back and look forward? Because, you know, it's a little bit of a tangent, but for me, like, it's just, it's, it's so and motivating, or it's, I'll flip it and make it make it positive. It's incredibly motivating, like, for everybody on the team to see the impact of their changes. And they never know, like, what happened and right, like, why is it that we're doing what we're doing? So Right. So it's really important to make sure that that's being communicated from the product owner down to everyone in the product team. And those those metrics, meetings, have everybody on the product team, that's just not like a subset. That's not just like the the PEO and the UX person, the content person, it's everybody on the team? Because I want all of them to understand, what are the product goals? You know, again, what are the impacts of those changes. So again, they also hopefully, feel good about the the changes that they make, and plus, like any one of those people can have an idea as you're looking forward on how to actually measure the changes that are going to going to be made in the future? That's sort of you know, to me, that's kind of like the the heart around sort of where a lot of this data stuff flows from I think beyond that, in terms of like, how do you how do you make the use the data in in the right way, one of the one of the challenges, of course, I think for the product teams is that the data is coming in from so many different different sources. And I think it's trying to understand which which of those data sources are, I guess, kind of like the most important and which ones are kind of noise, or which ones are maybe more kind of just leading indicators, as opposed to like actual things that you're gold on, that you can actually sort of influence or actually make some sort of change. And so, you know, that could be coming from other internal systems, it could be coming data coming from vendors. And it could be data coming from like our digital analytics team. And so I think we'd like for us with our digital analytics team, what we're trying to do is to understand, what are the were the basic was the basic data that a product team needs to have, and to be able to have kind of like that direct access to what's the level of training that they need to be able to pull themselves not always have to go to like a third party not always have to go to the analytics team? Yes, there are some things that they want to do are sort of more complex analysis that are they're going to necessitate more of a data scientist, if you will, versus like maybe one of the product owners capable of but there's some basic product ownership metrics that I believe that it's best served if a product owner actually has direct access to that because in my experience, so I used to run the digital analytics team. What we found was as if you gave the gave people that basic information that direct access to knowledge, they actually asked better questions as a result, they have deeper insights, you know, as a result of having those basics are they ever have access to the basics, and they're just always kind of like in the dark around, like how the products actually doing?
Jim Cuene 34:39
Yeah, if they don't, if they don't have access to all the data, they never really learn how the machine works.
Scott Allen 34:45
Yeah, no, exactly. And and even I guess I would even say, it's not even they don't even necessarily need all the data, but it's like, what is it what is the what's the right data they need to have and, and how do you again, sort of coach them, teach them and such a way to understand, you know, how to how to use it and how to use it in the right way. But I think the the challenge is we have this with a lot of what we call like our various enablement teams that are kind of around the product teams, the who are, you know, need to kind of shift their way of thinking on how they support our product teams, but being less sort of protective think of the work or in this case, kind of the data can be kind of scary, because like, I know, they come at it through with the best of intentions, right that, you know, they don't want the product teams to make the wrong decision with with the data, but kind of figuring out okay, well, that doesn't necessarily mean that the answer is to hold it all. And you always have to go to the analytics team to be able to get that information. So
Jim Cuene 35:40
Well, Scott, these are great insights. I want to be sensitive to your time here. I just want to ask a couple of questions that we ask all of the folks that join us on business drivers. So outside of work, what is your favorite non work book or podcast?
Scott Allen 35:58
I don't know. I guess I guess it would count as being sort of non work but there's, there's this guy Jocko willing Have you heard of, oh, yeah, right. I love him obviously, former Navy SEAL being a, you know, Navy veteran myself, and I've known a few seals, I just, I just love listening to that guy. And he's the kind of kind of thing that I got to listen to, I'm on my, on my bike in the basement and sort of listening to like, you know, a combination of like, just sort of war stories. And like, I love that, that sort of stuff. And again, obviously, we'd like more of a practical applicability of some of those things. And, you know, sort of bringing me back to my roots in some way. But I love listening to that guy. Um, the other thing is, you know, not necessarily so much even book or podcast, but just, I've been was for a long time, like, you know, sort of drinking up soaking, not as many sort of videos on building your own PC as I possibly could, because my son and I built built his, his gaming PC together several, several months ago. So like, I'd never actually built a computer totally from from scratch. So I loved not just doing that, but being able to do that with him and kind of sharing it with him. And so it was a it was a blast to go through. And I am still to this day shock that we hit the power button, and the thing turned on, like the very first time, like I still don't understand how we managed to pull that off. But we did and it was it was a blast. It was just it was great. Watching him like geek out over.
Jim Cuene 37:20
That's awesome. Hey, I got a book recommendation for you was that this is fiction. I don't know if you're a fiction guy. But um, I'm about halfway through a short story collection that came out in 2018 by a guy named wil Mac, and he has a short story collection called bring out the dogs. It's his first collection of short stories. He was a joint attack coordinator attached to a SEAL team in Afghanistan. And he's just an exceptional writer. Some of some of what he goes through. might be familiar to you. It used to be a pilot in the Navy. And I was thinking about you actually, when I was when I was reading the book, but just an incredible talent. So I'll definitely check that out. Last question for you is what is the kindest thing anyone's done for you?
Scott Allen 38:14
My wife married me. Does that count? It? Definitely counts.
Jim Cuene 38:17
That's, that's my go to answer to is like, yes, my wife. My wife said yes.
Scott Allen 38:24
Yeah, no, he's exactly. I'm, I'm a very, very lucky man from from that, that standpoint. I always say that I I married up. So my wife's a wonderful person.
Jim Cuene 38:36
Well, Scott, that's a great answer. It's a great place to wrap up. Thanks so much.
Scott Allen 38:41
Yeah, no, thanks so much for the opportunity. Really appreciate it. I enjoyed it.
Jim Cuene 38:46
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