Strong product cultures are hard work that yield massive results. Product leadership is the hard work of building and sustaining those cultures. In this talk, Saielle DaSilva, Director of User Experience at Cazoo will teach you how to take a lean approach to building and scaling a product culture.
Tried and tested in the field with a fast-growing company, these insights and productivity hacks are a quick way to set standards, cultivate leadership in your product organisation, and distribute the leadership in a healthy and sustainable way. You'll walk away with some practical tips on how you can align your team, net better hires, and distribute your culture in a scalable way.
Saielle will talk you through how to maximise culture, reduce risk in hiring, and build an awesome team as someone who has done it, growing her team at Cazoo from 0-60 in two years.
Auto-generated transcript - may contain errors.
Tap a timestamp to jump the video.
It is super awesome to be with you today. My name is Sael, and today we'll be talking about designing stronger product cultures. One of the things that I think we should keep in mind is that we're all here in a very strange and difficult time, at a time when danger feels very present.
And it's actually not that far from where we come from, the savannah where we grew up as a species, telling each other stories about the things that matter or the things that were dangerous in the bush and the noises that we heard in the shadows.
And I look around this room, and we're all wearing masks as a way to protect each other and protect ourselves as a way to bring each other closer together. And we have a shared understanding of the value of each other's health, the value of each other's bodies, and the value that we bring to each other by coming together.
So in the same way, today, I want to talk a little bit about cultures and the building blocks of cultures, which include stories. And so we'll talk about that, and I'll be building on some excellent talks I've heard today, including Emily Webber's. And there was Andy Ivor, was it?
Sorry, Andy. Can't remember your last name. You gave a really great talk on OKR or Jobs to be Done. So let's get into it. What the hell makes me qualified to talk about this? Well, culture is the fundamental people operating system, and what I mean by that is that culture is how people work.
Animals of all kinds come together to try to accomplish things. You can look at an anthill or a beehive or a wasp nest and understand that there is collaboration and evidence of an output that is greater than the sum of its parts. But the thing that an anthill or a beehive doesn't have that humans do is culture, and so we're going to talk about how to design stronger product cultures.
Culture is what sets us apart, and it's the operating system for the human imagination. So here I am. I'm director of user experience. I've been a White House technology fellow. I am a product leadership coach. I'm taking on new coaching clients, so if you want to hit me up after this, let me know.
There's some details. And if you want these slides, I might go through this a little quickly, but if you hit blossomat. Work, that's my website, my slides, and an add on guide with some extras and like an annotated bibliography will be there. So if you miss a slide and you're like, oh ****, don't worry about it.
They'll be posted. Also hashtag stronger product cultures on Twitter. I'm big on Twitter. I love feedback. If you like something, if you hate something, if you think the person next to you smells whatever, just let me know because I love feedback on Twitter.
So let me tell you a little bit about Kazoo by the numbers. We're worth over seven billion dollars after public listing in just under two years. We've sold over forty thousand units. I've probably done over one thousand hiring interviews, hundreds if not almost a thousand customer interviews at this point.
We've got about sixty UX people. We went from my starting to public listing in twenty three months, and it's one amazing company to work for. But product leadership is not easy. Anyone recognize this? No anachronisms? K. I'm old. So this is from the Legend of Zelda.
Product leadership is hard, and one of the things that I heard us talk about earlier today was how there's not a whole lot. And, like, as product leaders, we've had to teach ourselves how to lead product teams. And I think there's actually some really great resources out there.
Again, if you are missing some books or inspiration in your life, here's a couple. Petrovil has this really great book on strong product people, product leadership by some guys, and then Empowered by Marty Cagan and Chris Jones. Those guys know who they are.
You know their names, Martin Erickson and Richard Banfield and Nate Wong Kingshaw. They're fine. They don't need the plug. Fundamentally, one of the things that these books all have in common is that they acknowledge that software is people. Right? Software, much like culture, has artifacts. Right?
Culture is a series of decisions that are made and beliefs that are held in common so that we can come together and sustain collaboration. Software is people. Software, what most of us do, is the artifact of collaborating with each other and making decisions.
And when you look at somebody's software, you can see the decisions that have been made or neglected and what's important to a company. Right? We call this I totally blanked on the law now, but where you ship your org chart Conway's Conway's Law.
Thank you. Yeah. We call that Conway's Law, which is essentially you can kind of detect what an organization cares about by looking at the product and the decisions that have been made. Software is people. So people need safety. I've adapted Maslow's hierarchy just to kind of give you an illustration of what we'll be talking about today, So once you have your basic physiological needs met food, shelter, water you still need safety.
You need to know that you're safe from predators, that you're safe from dangers in the wild. Your logical mind may know that you're sitting in an auditorium, but your DNA doesn't. Yuval Noah Harari, who wrote Sapiens, talks about how your DNA still thinks you're in the savannah.
We have made this massive evolutionary jump as a species, and we still crave that safety. We still have a lot of anxiety as a species and as people because of the ways in which we have evolved very quickly into dominance over this planet.
Right? And so we crave safety, and it happens in our social interactions and our social dynamics. It's something that we value a lot. And then once you have that safety, you can start to build towards these other things, but you don't get hypergrowth or healthy sustainable growth without focusing on safety first.
So we're going to talk about how to build a culture of psychological safety, and we'll get to growth eventually towards the end. So part one is about designing stronger product cultures. Stronger product cultures, surprise, surprise, are designed for psychological safety. What I mean by that is that they are built on values and principles.
Those values and principles are things that are already reflected in the ways that you're working today and right now. So this is a little idea I came up with called the culture stack, which just shows you basically the idea that behaviors and beliefs are fundamentally intertwined.
And what you believe influences what you do fundamentally. And there is a feedback loop of what you do shows what you believe. So in the culture stack, the idea is that if you say you value safety, measure it with your behaviors and show it.
So let's talk a little bit about values and principles and how we can prioritize psychological safety and make it a thing. So defining psychological safety, This is by Amy Edmondson who kind of coined the phrase and wrote the book and did all the things.
But it's a shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking. That's not we as a business should take a risk. It is I as a person can feel safe to put myself out there, to be myself, to share my ideas and to share my input and know that it will be valued.
It is safe for interpersonal risk taking. Now, I think we get this interpersonal part wrong a lot when we talk about psychological safety. And we end up in places where we're not necessarily prioritizing we're not necessarily prioritizing the interpersonal part, and we're not focused on those social dynamics, which is why Emily's talk this morning was so important and crucial because the social dynamics of human culture are so fundamentally important to the ways that we work and to who we are as a species, and you can't get rid of it.
People are just messy. And if you don't prioritize like setting people up for success, they will fail. We will fail just because that's how we are. So here's another thing. This book just came out last year. It is by a guy named Tim something.
It's on my website. This is why I do a write up is because I can't remember all this stuff. Anyways, there's four levels of maturity to psychological safety. This book was published last year, there's a link to it on blossom dot org. So there's inclusion safety, which is I feel safe to share my personality, my ways of thinking without feeling like an outsider.
Another part of inclusion safety is I feel safe being myself. I wouldn't be on this stage right now without a little bit of inclusion safety. Right? As a trans woman who's out living in public, like, it's hard. Not going to lie. But I feel pretty safe with y'all.
Y'all are a good crowd. Give yourselves a round of applause. Learner safety. So building on that, learner safety is the idea that I feel safe admitting I don't know everything. Hi. I have an ignorance. Will somebody please help me? Conway's Law. I have learner safety.
Somebody in the audience pitched in and was like, Hey, that's Conway's Law. Right? I felt safe admitting that and was able to gather that contribution from somebody and make it safe for them to contribute. Right? Somebody knew what I was talking about and was able to help me out by calling it out.
And so somebody was able to make an improvement or a suggestion to my talk just by being in the audience knowing what I was talking about. And then challenger safety, which please don't do this during my talk, but during the Q and A I feel safe or even expected to challenge the status quo.
And unfortunately, most of us are kind of here, maybe. Honestly, probably not even here. And actually, we kind of have to go to an uncomfortable place, but buckle up. Challenger safety is a climate in which raising a dissenting view is expected and welcome, and a tolerance of dissent allows for positive discussions and early detection of problems.
Right? Challenger safety. Raise your hand if you've ever posed a challenge at work. You've ever questioned a decision. You've ever had a confrontational conversation with somebody about a decision that they were making. Cool. Lots of hands. Did that feel safe? Okay. Okay. I see lots of men's hands for that felt safe and not so many women, which is really interesting.
And I know I just assumed your genders, I'm sorry, but like just looking out over the crowd, have to make some assumptions. But workplace culture is the behaviors that we affirm and challenge. So who did that feel safe for, that challenger safety? It kind of shows in the hands that stayed up. Right?
And that's okay, but we should talk about this. We need to talk about sexism at work because it does play a factor. When we look at who felt safe challenging and who didn't, the numbers are there. I I can't give you an exact reading, but, you know, ninety percent of the audience has had a conversation that challenged a decision at work and about thirty percent of you felt safe making that challenge, which tells me that we have a problem.
And then when I look at the gender split of that problem, that tells me that we've got a bigger problem. So I looked at this survey when I was putting together some research for this talk, and only about forty six percent of men in one survey of almost fifteen hundred men would try to directly interrupt a sexist event in their workplace.
Where the **** are the other fifty four percent of you? Thank you. That was a mic drop moment. Where the **** are you? Where the **** are you? What are you doing to make it safe for people like me to work with you?
What are you doing in your role as a cisgender person, as a person with power, as a leader in product, as a leader in marketing, as a leader in business to make it safe for people to challenge the status quo? Not just in your product and not just so you make more money, but so that I don't have that fight or flight when I'm thinking about should I go to work today?
So there were three big factors that came out of this survey about interrupting sexism. One, these are the three things that hold people back from speaking out or challenging sexism directly. One is a climate of silence. So we don't feel safe saying things.
Some of us have these cultures. A combative culture is a different kind, where maybe we're overtly aggressive. But in overtly aggressive cultures are cultures that are very sales heavy or very status dominated and focus on power or authority, you can end up with less safety for people to raise and challenge issues.
Or a climate of futility. Hey, I've said something a couple times, but nobody really ******* listens to me and nobody cares about my opinion. So why would I do that to myself or put myself out there? Right? That's not healthy. That's not fun. Nobody wins.
Don't do that ****. Just don't do that ****. Have you ever seen or heard something sexist at work? Okay. Like seventy, eighty percent of the audience. Okay. Men, specifically. Men, have you done something about something sexist at work directly? Oh. Yeah. That's like twelve percent of the people who raise their hands.
I want to tell you that that's okay. I'm not here to shame you for that. Thank you for speaking out. The others of you, I'm not going to shame you either. I've already done that. What I'm going to do is say, you need to let your leadership know in other ways that you don't feel safe to challenge things and that you could build a culture where it is safer to challenge things, where it is safer to have meaningful conversations about the ways that we're working and how it's not working.
Because if only about twelve percent of you feel safe challenging sexism at work, what about racism? What about prejudice of other kinds, right? People like me. Interviews can be hard. People have a lot of assumptions about me, my life, who I am, what I do, what makes sense, what doesn't about me.
And I'm here to tell you like I probably don't fit most of your stereotypes, but you wouldn't know and you won't find out unless you make it safe for me to work with you. If you can't get the basic inclusion right, why the **** would I want to work with you?
I'm awesome. I built a seven billion dollar company in two years. You're missing out if you don't hire me and it's not safe for me. You're missing out, not me. If people are worried about whether they're going to be judged for who they are or ridiculed for challenging things, they're not going to give you their best work because their brain and their DNA is still in that fight or flight mode of the savannah.
And they're going to go back there and they're going to be stuck in fight or flight, which means that they can't do the creative thinking that's going to move you forward. And I know that this is kind of like, Oh ****, she's like really intense.
It's okay. Take a deep breath. We're on a journey together. It's going to be fine. I promise. It gets better. So let's talk about what we can do about some of these things. Well, first, we can design for clarity. And what I mean by that is this guy named Antoine Santezubere said that if you want to drum up people to build a build a ship, don't teach them to chop wood.
Give them an endless yearning for the sea. And in the same way, if you wanna teach people to build inclusive cultures, to be the best ******* product team that they can be, to do amazing things at work and in life, don't tell them what to do or show them the microcopy of like this one small thing.
Teach them to long for justice, teach them to long for inclusion, teach them to value each other, and put their values out there. That's how you're gonna succeed. Look, here's the thing. Human cooperation is governed by myths. Right? Myths of all kinds. The stories we tell ourselves about who we are, what we value, how we work.
And we can change the behaviors in a system by changing the stories that we tell and the myths we adhere to. That's just fundamental human design. Right? This is why culture is the human operating system. If you want to change behavior, you change your Right?
That's the fundamental theory underlying cognitive behavioral therapy. So if we look at the culture stack again, we're talking about vision, objectives, and mission. We're talking about values and principles. But we're going to get into talking about designing the working environment and designing decision making that's clear.
Your role, no matter who you are, is to make sure that you're clear about the things that matter most. Leadership is clarity. You can't have leadership without clarity. If you're an unclear leader, you're not leading. So I love software. I love software so much.
And I think that the agile values have served us well. Have you ever seen this before? Okay. About less than a third of you. Cool. That means that everyone else gets to learn something new today, which is great. So these are the agile values.
They were written in like nineteen ninety nine by some folks who went away to a ski cabin that most of us probably couldn't afford. Anyways, they had some pretty cool insights about how we should work and why we should do the things that we do in software.
And they chose to value individuals and interactions over tools and processes. They chose to value working software over comprehensive documentation and some other things. And I think those are all cool. But I would suggest that in this data saturated age, we should probably make some updates.
I would suggest that we add human conversation over data interpretation and that we would add diverse perspectives over unmitigated assumptions. And what I mean by that is like talk to your customers. Or in the case of designing culture, internally at work, talk to your employees.
Don't just settle for a survey and go, well, survey says seventy four percent of employees are happy, so we don't have a problem. No. Talk to people. People will ******** you because you own their livelihoods. You've got them by the proverbial balls, ovaries, whatever you want to put there, right?
You've got their paychecks and their livelihoods in your hands. People will lie to you to keep things stable. People value stability. Have human conversations over just interpreting data. And then value diverse perspectives. Can't tell you how many times I've seen a product that ships without people really thinking about, hey, maybe we should talk to, I don't know, a gay person or a person of color or a trans person about some of these issues.
Recently, the BBC ran an article saying that people like me are predators, sexual predators specifically, because they did a survey of like eighty people who were all essentially like this very far right subset of people who are very anti trans. And they ran that story and then defended it.
They didn't value diverse perspectives. They didn't go out there. And like that hurts people like me. Right? That sucks. Turns out that the person that they platformed who was one of their main sources for it last night was ranting about how trans people should be lynched.
That sucks too. But I'm not here on just a social justice crusade. I'm just saying gather your ******* perspectives because I have an opinion and it matters, and I have lived experience and it helps. When we're clear about the things that matter, we can rely on teams to be autonomous because they have the right infrastructure to make decisions.
And when you're growing a team from zero to sixty in two years, you have to give people a really clear compass because you don't have the bandwidth as a leader to give them turn by turn directions. So let's talk about setting up that compass.
I want to quote my friend Lily Dart here who said, as I was preparing for this talk, clarity creates the autonomy necessary for stronger product and design cultures. I really love Lily. She's amazing, and she really helped me set up this talk and worked with me on it, and I really, really appreciate her.
And, like, this compass idea, right, you can't give turn by turn directions when you're scaling that quickly. And a lot of you are probably stretched too thin as leaders or contributors in your own company, so it's really clear to overcommunicate your values and how to think about things and where true north is because you don't have time to be Google Maps for everyone.
So if you give people a compass, I ask people to think about it as like indicative versus exhaustive. Right? So like think about a compass. A compass is indicative of what the right direction is. It's not going to tell you go here, go there.
But it will tell you that's true north. You should probably keep going that way. And so in the same way, that's how we should think about the ways in which we set ourselves up for success. Stronger product cultures are designed for clear decision making.
If you articulate your values, you can give people the room and the tools that they need to make clear decisions. So in the workplace, our our behaviors come from our values, both stated and unstated. Remember? Remember the culture stack? Yeah. So running short on time.
We're going to talk a little bit about decision making and how it works. So here are some tools. There is a whole write up on this. I'm not going to spend a whole lot of time here, but these are some clarity tools. If you've never seen these before, there is a write up on my website.
Also, like co design, participatory design, user research, make room for these things because they are behaviors that demonstrate your values. If your user research team is always fighting to go do more user research, your values are probably not in user research. Surprise, surprise.
So let's talk about scaling stronger product cultures. I don't know what happened to my slides there. Deal with it. Stronger product cultures are designed for feedback, And this feedback is not just interpersonal feedback. I think we hear feedback, and we think, oh, like one on ones.
One on ones are not going to solve core fundamental system level issues in your company. They're just not. You need to design better systems of work. You need to design working conditions for people. And we tend to do this with product and design, scrap everything you know, challenge your assumptions, but then like with culture and people, especially as leaders, we get busy.
We're too busy for culture. It'll sort itself out. Please just like keep your hands and feet in like weird little ideological social justice ******** to yourself and like follow the dominant paradigm at all times. Right? And this is kind of how we think.
This is a myth, but it's a myth that's powerful and that's sustained and that we kind of adhere to. And it sucks because there are marginalized people in our companies. There are marginalized people in our workplaces, people who don't feel comfortable challenging things, people in this room who don't feel comfortable challenging things, like sexism, which is really bad.
We all hate sexism, but if people don't feel comfortable, they're not going to do it. The other thing I want to talk about very briefly is resilience. We tend to think of like, oh, you you just need to buck up and keep calm, carry on, grit, just be a little bit more resilient.
What can we do to make you more resilient? No, no, no. As a leader, that's not your job. Design better systems. Resilience is not enough. You cannot expect people to be well adjusted to toxic environments. That is not healthy, and it's not good, and you're not getting the best out of your people because you're not setting them up for success.
So design the ******* working environment. Here's how you're gonna do Feedback cultures are being allowed to fail and make mistakes. If you expect one hundred percent product success all the time and you never make room for failure and you never plan for failure, you don't have a healthy culture of feedback.
If you, as a leader, don't collect feedback from your people on a regular basis, you don't have a culture of feedback. If people escalate feedback to you rather than going to somebody directly, you don't have a culture of feedback. If you don't get critical feedback from people who are the lowest ranking members in your team as a leader, or if you, as somebody, don't feel safe challenging your director, your CTO, your CEO with some critical feedback, you don't have a culture of feedback.
The other thing is if you do happen to control the purse strings, focus on team based rewards. This can really mitigate a lot of those toxic behaviors around competition. Do compensation based on team performance rather than individual performance. Make diversity and inclusion part of your exact bonuses.
Put your money where your mouth is. That's the most important thing because ultimately people care about money. And that's not a bad thing. It just means acknowledge it and work with it. Stronger product cultures apply design internally to achieve better customer outcomes. I've got about a minute. So I don't have a minute.
I've got like twenty seconds. John's already up. So long story short, here's your thing. Your team is an organism, not an object. Think about it that way. It's like a greenhouse. Every plant has individual needs, but those needs all work together to sustain each other, and they all thrive in a healthy and similar climate.
There's a bunch more **** on my website. If you really like this talk, you can see how we did this with hiring, and I have a hiring scorecard which you can see. There's a debrief and some really cool **** that I didn't get a chance to get to, but that's okay.
Thank you so much. I hope you all have a great day. Thank you Turing Trust.
