Balancing Business, User and Product Priorities

Alex Race, Paul Prior, Josipa Bauser, Noah Levin at UXDX EMEA. Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pujjDLff75E

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

Introductions

[00:00:03] Noah: Hey everyone, good to see you. She said "super energetic"; I don't know what phase of jet lag I'm in from San Francisco, but I'll do my best. It's good to see you all again, and I'm excited to host this panel on business priorities and user needs and the balance between them. I wanted to kick things off with an icebreaker question to the panel, to get to know each other a little better while they introduce themselves. So first, we'll go down the line: share your name, where you work, and if you were in a different industry, what would you want to be in? Either when you were growing up or later, a different possible job you might want to be in. We'll start from the end with Alex and then go down toward me.

[00:00:42] Alex: Hi everyone. I'm Alex Race, and I look after customer digital products for Maersk, worldwide probably the biggest shipping company in the world. I had 20 years in UX, head of UX and design at British Gas, and over the last five years I've been head of digital over at Maersk. If I could be anything else, I'd be a writer. I'd be a penniless writer, but I would still be a writer. So that would be me.

[00:01:16] Josipa: Hi, my name is Josie [?], and I'm global head of research and research operations at SumUp. We build solutions for merchants to run their business and grow their business successfully. A big part of my role is really helping teams figure out how to use research insights to help inform decisions and build better products. If I were something else, my first plan was probably to be a truck driver. I do not know why, but I had a big admiration.

[00:01:49] Noah: Wonderful.

[00:01:49] Josipa: Maybe we could come up with something later. But since that was banned very early on, I believe I would be a vet. I have this tendency to pick up animals everywhere I go, so I would probably end up having either some kind of vet clinic or probably a house full of animals.

[00:02:10] Noah: That's great. I can't imagine what a vet conference would be like. Actually, that would be pretty cool, to see different animals. Go ahead.

[00:02:18] Paul: Paul Prior, and my vocation is about bringing entrepreneurial thinking to corporate environments. My background is fintech, three advisory firms, three continents; that's probably the best way to describe it. And I wouldn't do anything else, really. I love what I do; I'm very passionate about it. I was one of these lucky people who knew what direction I wanted to go at a fairly young age, so I understand that to make me a very lucky person.

[00:02:46] Noah: Wow, that's great. I'll introduce myself really quick as well, and then we'll get into a couple of questions, and I'd like to leave five or ten minutes, if we can, for your questions as well, to keep it participatory. I'm Noah. I lead the design team at Figma. We work on a bunch of products, Figma, FigJam, Community, things like that. I joined about five years ago, and it's been really cool to see that journey evolve over time. If I were something else, and I should have thought of my own answer to this, I would say a teacher of some kind would be fun. I don't know what I would teach, or what I could teach, but something that's interesting. I used to do a lot of theater, so maybe something in theater as well would be fun. But I like the vet idea as well. I have a dog at home and I'm getting lots of pictures from my girlfriend, and definitely feeling like I miss my dog.

Balance or synergy between business and user needs

[00:03:31] Noah: Okay, so enough about that. Let's talk about business and user priorities and that balance; there's no way to really segue from that. I have just a couple of questions here, and we'll make this interactive; we can go down the line either way. To start, these are obviously tricky balances to have in a company. You're dealing with realizing that you need to make money, you need to profit in some way, but you also of course have these customer needs that come up, and they may not always align with what your business needs. So regularly in our positions in UX, regardless of exactly what our industry is, we're probably having to deal with that tension. Ideally maybe it's not a tension and they're complementary, but that doesn't always show up that way. So the first question is just: how do you balance it? Is it a balance? What does that look like for each of you? Happy to start again with Alex and go down from there.

[00:04:22] Alex: I think during the 20 years of me doing UX, it was very much, obviously, customer-driven, totally customer-focused. I lived in that world where I could concentrate 100% on that. Then over the last five years, as I've gained ownership of the full technology stack, it becomes a little bit more politicized, and you realize you have to make compromises. It's part of survival, I think, and it's part of running not only a UX organization but a technology one.

[00:04:57] I think it's fine as long as you're getting a balance over your product life cycle. When I talk about a product life cycle, I mean everything from ideation through to the moment you choose to sunset that product. There should be a balance throughout the product life cycle, but at each stage of that product life cycle your weighting is going to change. During ideation and growth of a product, you're going to have more focus on the customer side. But once you have a product that's fully matured, and you're ready to ditch it, or use it as a cash cow, your customer needs are less important; you run that to get money for the business to reinvest in your new products.

[00:05:38] Noah: Yeah, it's a really good point. A lot of companies, even Google, for example: Google Search obviously generated a ton of revenue for the company, and they could reinvest that revenue in these earlier life cycle projects you're mentioning. Maybe the balance there is almost like when you receive investment money for something: all of a sudden you have this freedom to explore a market fit, see where it goes, and figure out your business plan along the way. That's super interesting. Feel free to take this wherever you want, if any of you have anything that comes to mind with this balance.

[00:06:04] Josipa: I would actually like to think of it more as synergy, because balance in itself says it's one or the other: is it only user needs, or is it only business needs? But most often we are actually striving to have them be in synergy, where we could use those user needs as an input for what it is that we want to build: what the solution should be, or what solution we are building, and what that solution indeed should be in a way that it's also benefiting our business needs. Of course, it's not always easy to have it that way. But any time I think of a balance, it is like, what do I do, a little bit of this, a little bit of that?

[00:06:42] Noah: I can actually think of an example of that. I used to work at a company called ClassPass, which is a fitness company. You would buy a monthly subscription. One of the things I always found super interesting is that you would think if classes were free, you could just go and it'd be fine; you would just want to do that. But it turned out paying, which the business needed, was actually surprisingly aligned with people, because if they put money down they would actually work out, because they didn't want to waste the money. So it's this interesting business model dynamic. Even a cancellation fee was really contentious: people were like, "I don't want to pay to cancel last minute." But then you would talk more with customers about it, and they'd be like, "Well, you know what, if it weren't there I probably wouldn't have worked out, and if I didn't work out, I wouldn't feel good." So that's maybe a fun example where the synergy did land. But I think it is hard to have that in a lot of companies, where your customers, if they were asked "would you want to pay?", would probably say no a lot of the time. But maybe that's not true. I don't know, what do you think?

[00:07:36] Paul: It's always interesting when you're asked these questions, because you get a visualization that we all sit in rooms pontificating about these kinds of things, and it's great to have the time and space to think about what we do in our daily role. I think there are two things. Firstly, whose job is it to consider all these elements? For me, I think as leaders within organizations we probably carry the burden of the philosophy of each of those three elements.

[00:08:03] If you look at it from a user perspective, the way I like to think about it is psychology and neuroscience: that's human beings. So the first item that I would walk through with the team is to stop thinking about it as an interaction with something that's physical or quantifiable, and start thinking about it as an interaction you'd have in a conversation in real life. That's back to the point of synergies as opposed to balance.

[00:08:28] Then secondly, when it comes to product, we spend most of our time trying to manage the constraints and limitations that we have to work through. I always find it interesting, and I love hearing from companies, by the way, so please reach out, but when they do reach out and say, "I've been looking through your website and I noticed this visual image is slow loading on this page," et cetera, I just think, "Shut up. I've spent 18 months in a boardroom trying to convince them to update the infrastructure so that I can make that change." So for me, for product, the balance is really around the limitations and constraints that underpin that. And then the business is really the circle that encapsulates both of those elements. As leaders, it's probably important for us to have individuals within our teams that have responsibility for each of those elements, and then we play the role of the philosopher, if you want to put it that way, balancing them across the three.

Profit, purpose and legacy

[00:09:26] Noah: With that, though, what is the responsibility to make profit here? What do we have to do? How do you think about that aspect of it in your day job?

[00:09:37] Paul: Hands up anyone who's heard of Elon Musk. Everyone put their hand up [?]. Strange, isn't it? Has anyone heard of Sam Childers? No, I heard no one. The society we live in at the moment is really interesting. Our ability to be influenced by marketing overconfidence is starting to get a bit ridiculous. Sam Childers was a member of the Hell's Angels, actually by birth; he grew up in a family that were big bikers, and he spent most of his early adult years robbing banks and selling drugs, which is really interesting. Probably that's what I should have answered in my first question. But, like most people seem to who move towards philanthropy, he found God. We won't talk about that today. And he started a contracting company in East Africa, in particular in North and South Sudan when it was one country, and he's come to be known as one of the most impactful philanthropists on the planet.

[00:10:37] The reason I'm talking about this, and I am going to come back to a point, is that I was listening to a podcast, because he's someone I'm very interested in, where he was being interviewed about profitability. The interviewer said something like, "I'm sure you don't think about money; you're there to save the world." And he said, "Are you joking me?" He said without money he wouldn't be able to create the level of support that he's able to create within that environment. He put it down to: if I tried to do this on a budget, I wouldn't be able to affect 90% of the children that I'm able to affect. Sorry, I should say what he does: he works with former child soldiers and reprograms them to have a more realistic view of life, for want of a better phrase.

[00:11:33] I think that's a really good way to think about your organization. At the end of the day we're human beings, and if you see my talk online, if you get the chance to look at it, I talk about how organizations are the only place where you take thousands of people that probably don't even like each other and would never hang out with each other, and get them all to row in the same direction. So think about what we do in very human terms. One of the interview questions I often ask, and my team are here, so they'll know, I've probably asked this to some of them, is: what's your legacy going to be? Because you're going to leave your job; many of us move on from the companies that we're working for. So what do you want to be able to say about yourself and be proud of in the end? I think as long as you remain grounded in that, you'll make good decisions for the organizations that you're working for. That's my opinion, anyway.

[00:12:22] Noah: It's not like you'll be on your deathbed thinking about what you did in the world and be like, "Well, I made a ton of money." It's probably more like: what did that allow you to do? How did that change society? What were the outcomes from that? It's just a means to an end. That's a refreshing perspective. I think a lot of times in our field we're like, "Oh, does it need to make a profit?" But it's a huge part of how we interact every day.

[00:12:44] Paul: If it's a good purpose [?], it will make a profit. It's a byproduct of having the right mindset.

[00:12:52] Noah: Any other thoughts on how profit shows up in either of your jobs, or how it comes into the conversation, either directly in something that you're doing, or in a trade-off you had to manage through at your company? Anything that comes to mind?

[00:13:02] Alex: I work with trucking, basically. I go out to places like Mobile in Alabama, and I try to persuade 60-year-old Chuck, who's been driving to the same terminal six times a day for the last 30 years, to use a new mobile app to check in and out of the terminal, when his mate Bud is waving him through regardless of whether he's using the app or not. He's got his blood hound on the passenger seat, and it's good stuff. But in my head it's operational efficiency. In the trucking and logistics industry it's operational efficiency, and it is about being able to get shipping containers out of the port and onto the road as quickly as possible. That saves the people shipping the goods money, it saves us money as a corporation, but increasingly it helps decarbonization, and that is massively important to Maersk, because we are on a decarbonization journey as one of the world's biggest consumers of fuel. So whilst everyone else talks about profit, I like to say we've got to increase operational efficiency, because that will have so many other benefits to society, over and above just money, that are still quantifiable.

[00:14:23] Noah: That's a good point. It also makes me think about how it's not just generating money for a company. You also have resources in your company, and if you're more efficient, whether through your processes or other kinds of things you're doing, that's another way to profit, in the sense that you're enabling yourself to do more. It's just a different trade-off. That's a good point. Any other last thoughts on when that shows up for you at work, if at all?

[00:14:45] Josipa: Something I've observed quite often, especially in the research field, and in design as well, is that we get so focused on user needs: we need to do what's right for the user. And for the most part, yes. We just talked yesterday about how companies that are really customer-centric are actually, in the long run, much more successful than those that prioritize financial gains in the short run. But something that, from my experience, we really don't give enough attention to in the research and design communities is that ultimately we need to make this product successful. We need to either get paying customers, or we need to have another way to monetize, because otherwise we as a company are not going to continue to exist.

[00:15:29] So it's really about keeping attention on that balance. Although we can be working more on the user side of things, we should not lose sight of what we actually need in order to continue existing as a company. Because at the end of the day, we're all humans, we all need to get paid, we have our hobbies, we have stuff to do. So it's not that I'm saying we should always necessarily prioritize it, but we should not lose sight of it.

[00:15:57] Noah: That reminds me of what Alex said in the beginning, about the timeline or the context of the conversation you're having. In the early stages, it's like you're saying: what are we actually trying to accomplish? What does the product need to be successful? That is a lot more important at that stage. Making money on day one may not be it; it's finding, whatever people say, your first 1,000 customers that are really excited and passionate about your product in some way. That becomes the goal. Whereas sometimes in mid to late stages, maybe pre-IPO for some companies, the conversation does have to shift to: is this the most profitable product for us? Will the shareholders believe in it? There are these changes that happen depending on where you are in that cycle. Super interesting stuff.

When customers show you the business opportunity

[00:16:35] Noah: I'm going to shift gears to another question here, but related in other ways as well. Are there ever moments where any of you have had to actually deal with a trade-off, where you were advocating for a customer need and someone else in the room either had a different perspective or wasn't able to internalize that customer need? A lot of our jobs is advocating for some experience we think should happen in the world. Is there anything that comes to mind, a moment where you needed to position that customer need? It could be presenting research, it could be whatever comes to mind.

[00:17:13] Alex: There's a great example. We were looking at the stats on our website, and we were seeing huge amounts of traffic coming into a page that allows you to track and trace a shipping container, like an Amazon parcel. But we couldn't make all the different metrics fit, and it turned out that our customers were creating bots. They were creating these scripts to basically pummel our website to get back all this information on containers. It was trucking companies, dispatchers, people like that, scraping our site for data. And we were like, hey, there's customer demand here. They don't want a user interface; they want our data. So we have got an opportunity here for a commercial product, because if we can produce monetized APIs that people pay a subscription fee for, they can take our APIs, integrate them with their systems, and they don't need to scrape our site. They get what they want, we get revenue, and it's great.

[00:18:19] From looking at that data, and being able to cross-correlate what the behavior was and who was doing what, we were able to take that and create a really innovative product, which is now our paid-for APIs. There was a downside to that, though, because the traffic to our website crashed completely, and then I had to answer why we'd lost a quarter of our website traffic. And I'd say, "Oh, it's a good news story, honestly; it's because we're now selling them data." I'm not sure they bought it, but it was good news.

[00:18:56] Noah: That's an interesting example, where the customers are telling you what a business need might actually be, maybe not directly with words but through their actions. We had a similar moment at Figma, where the pandemic hit and we were seeing all this behavior of people using Figma for things that we didn't expect them to use it for. We thought most people would be using it strictly for product design: making wireframes, prototypes, whatever it might be. But all of a sudden people were having meetings in Figma, and we were like, "What's going on here?" Everyone was starting to draw and create these custom sticky notes, and from that FigJam was born: this whole other product that we didn't expect or plan to build showed up because our customers came and showed us what they wanted, by literally drawing a tool that didn't even exist yet. So it's definitely fun to think about when your customers are a couple of steps ahead of you, or the market itself is revealing some trend that could actually also be a business in itself. That's cool. Any other anecdotes or stories that come to mind for either of you, a moment where your customers did something interesting, or taught you something that you had to advocate for?

[00:19:59] Josipa: One very early example from my career, working as a user researcher a long time ago, I think it might even have been my very first job: I joined this startup in San Francisco, and we did a lot of research to figure out who they are, what they want, what we build, where the opportunities are, and what solutions are to be built. Then we went to the CEO and said, "Hey, these are the solutions that we need to build; this is what they want." And they were like, "No. This is not exactly what is going to get us where we want to get as a business."

[00:20:34] How we actually get that message across, given who the stakeholder is on the other side, is something that really resonated with me, because I was trying to use a lot of the approaches that I would normally use: here is where this need is in the customer journey, here's what they do, here's why, here's how it's going to benefit them. But then I realized that depending on who is on the other side of the conversation, we really need to tailor how we bring this up, because the way you build a case can resonate in a completely different way. In this case I was talking to someone who at that point was very much focused on: we need to get from point A to point B, this is what we can afford, this is how we do it. All of that makes sense, but let's really talk about business. So thinking about how we get that message across, and what sticks the most, is, I would say, one of the strongest learnings I had as a researcher.

[00:21:33] Noah: There are two things I liked about that. One is that you're almost talking about two customers. You've got the actual customer for the product, but then there's the customer who is the person you're talking to, who's trying to make a decision about something. Hopefully, as designers, or whatever we're doing, we have that skill set, hopefully that superpower, to actually learn about them and their own needs as a co-worker, as a stakeholder, and leverage that empathy, or whatever it might be, to help them understand something through their own lens.

[00:22:00] The other part I liked about the beginning part of your story is that a lot of times in conferences and panel discussions, we're always talking about moments where this thing happened and it went super well, or we learned this one customer insight and all of a sudden everything worked. What we don't often hear is when the customers are like, "Nope, that didn't work": a big failure, a moment that we didn't expect, where we had to pivot. I've been a part of plenty of projects, both at Google and ClassPass, where we had this hypothesis, we were super excited about it, we launched a product, you celebrate it, you have your launch party, whatever, and then your metrics go flat. Maybe day one it goes well, and then all of a sudden it doesn't stick. Those are actually, to me, some of the more interesting stories: what happened there, and when do you need to bring a customer story that's like, "Hey, I don't know that our customers are happy," or "I'm not sure this is working"? Those are hard conversations for sure. Has anything like that happened to either of you? Any stories?

Crossing the chasm and trusting your team

[00:22:54] Paul: Yeah, all the time. I found your point around crossing the chasm is what you were talking about: where you're either venture-capital-backed or angel-backed, and it's all about customer acquisition and getting to a certain stage, usually around 300, 350 people, then moving to, which Maersk and I [?] would be very familiar with, a highly regulated industry that now needs risk and control and a significant amount of governance around it. You typically find most startups, and scale-ups [?], fall off the cliff around that stage. But equally, companies like ours find it really difficult to take what's good about those organizations and bring it forward.

[00:23:36] I promised the guys I'd mention this this morning, so here's an example of where I was influenced. We were writing a BRS for the next release of a digital transformation program, digital transformation, what a word, that's coming up. When I had written it, I just put global search in it: we need some kind of global search. And my team were telling me we shouldn't do it this way. The data is telling us that we should have a filter system within the shop. For me that's a very straightforward conversation, because of your qualitative and quantitative information, but more importantly, I trust the competency of the team [?]. We spent three years building their competency [?], and at some stage you have to go, "Okay, I'm just going to trust what you're telling me," and move on. What disappoints me in that conversation, though, is that I'm the bottleneck [?], and they're actually waiting for me to make a decision. So that's something that I know I need to work on.

[00:24:25] I think the concept of the customer within organizations like ours is a really difficult one. I entered an organization where their concept of the customer was: is the regulator kicking me in the ass? Are people complaining about our organization? We've worked really hard to get them to understand the benefits of having a customer-first approach, and customer meaning in the broader sense: employees are your customers, users are customers, and people external to your company are customers as well. The way we did that was we brought in frontal effectiveness [?], which is our board-level metric, and then 35 KPIs underpin that, which go everywhere from brand health through to advocacy, and work through from their perspective.

[00:25:06] Noah: Wow. I'm realizing I had a bunch more questions here, but we only have seven and a half minutes left. I'm looking at the timer, and I want to make sure that we have a chance to talk to all of you and answer questions that come up for you when you're thinking about this balance of what you're hearing from customers and what you think the business needs, these trade-offs that come up, or anything that we talked about so far that you want to learn more about. We've got room for maybe four questions or so; usually that's about how much time you get in seven minutes. Unless there are any other anecdotes you wanted to share before we jump to that?

Winning on purpose

[00:25:43] Alex: I just think one of the things that's worth talking about: there's a book called Winning on Purpose by Fred Reichheld, I think it is, and this guy talks about companies that chase profit, that are in a relentless pursuit of the bottom line. They are short-term companies at the end of the day. And it's those customer-obsessed companies, those companies that focus on customers: he drew a correlation between customer-obsessed companies and how they performed on the stock market over 20 years, and then he took the ones that focus on the bottom line and tracked their stock market performance over 20 years. And the customer-obsessed companies beat the profit-obsessed companies hands down. Because you make people sticky, you build up brand loyalty, you build up customers by focusing on them, and that is your ultimate bottom line. It's a point I've taken away. When you're challenged by leadership, when you're challenged around "is it the customer, is it profit?", I think that's really worth taking away.

[00:26:58] Noah: Yep, it's great to hear. So we'll take it to questions, if anyone has anything that you're curious about, or even want to share. We'll pass the mic around, or throw it; I don't know, it looks spongy, maybe we can throw it. We can keep sharing anecdotes if there's nothing, but I was told you're supposed to always wait at least seven seconds in this scenario. I don't know why, but I'm going to just do that. You'll see how long seven seconds actually feels. These lights are so strong, we just think they're getting a ton.

[00:27:31] Alex [?]: That's true, it's kind of nice. Just one other thing, in terms of strategy and hitting the mark with your stakeholders: don't think of the person you're delivering a deliverable to. Think of the person that they're going to take your deliverable to and communicate it to. That was probably the biggest lesson I learned, because if you start thinking not of the person above you, or your direct stakeholder, but of their direct stakeholder and the person they are going to communicate it to, you have a much better chance of making your deliverable resonate. The moment that I started doing it and thinking, "Okay, I'm not delivering to my boss, I'm delivering to his boss, so how do I make this deliverable easy for my boss to communicate to his boss?", I think that gave me a higher success rate.

[00:28:26] Noah: Even if you're talking to a stakeholder who needs to present something to a customer base, or at a launch event, whatever it is: how are we going to talk about this aspect of it, or how would you? Changing that frame a little bit is a good way to bring up some more conversation. That's a good one.

The Netflix story

[00:28:39] Paul: Do you want to hear a story about where the customer was part of a major change in an organization?

[00:28:44] Noah: I love stories.

[00:28:46] Paul: Okay, I have three minutes, so I'll talk fast. Back in the '90s I was in Dundalk College, actually, which is on the border between Northern Ireland and the South; no man's land, basically. At that time I wasn't really going to college much; like most young college students, I was spending most of the time in the pub. But I was also working on this tool called Mardi [?], I can't remember the name of it, but it was basically an agile requirements tool for distributed teams. And this guy from Silicon Valley, I didn't know what Silicon Valley was, Dundalk was called [?] Silicon Valley [?] or something like that, turned up. I was dragged in to give him a demo of the product, because I think I was the only one doing something like that, and he invited me over. If I was younger I'd think he was a pedophile, but he wasn't. He brought me over.

[00:29:34] So off I went. The first morning I was up at half six; I hadn't been up that early in a long time. I was invited into a Great Western hotel, which you'd know pretty well; they always smell like nursing homes. He brought me into a room and said, "Sit in the corner here and just be quiet." And I don't blame him, as you can probably tell from the amount of time I've spent talking today. So I was looking around the room, and I recognized one guy, and then there was a woman who was about, I'd say, a year younger than me, and I was pretty young back then; I was in my early twenties. Then there were two people in suits, one that was definitely an auditor, you could see them a mile away, and then three other people.

[00:30:09] People started making presentations. The first presentation was about this community tool, because Facebook was really big at the time, and "we need to create a community around our user group." I still didn't know what company it was at the time. Then this lady got up. She's very impressive, and she still is a very impressive woman, and she started talking about a recommendation engine. She was like, "Look, we're about to default on our commitments to our investors, and the DVD market isn't working for us anymore. We need to move into something else." Ultimately, I managed to sit through the first presentation of the Netflix recommendation tool, and it was all from the perspective of "we're about to die as a company." It's really interesting what happens when you put that type of pressure on an organization. And here's me: I'd never even heard of Netflix at that stage. That was at Harvard later, and I learned lots about them. But it was an amazing moment that really cultivated the thinking that it's not always customers that drive that pressure into your organization to make new decisions. Sometimes it's how shitty the organization itself is.

[00:31:15] I remember when I met my CEO, when I first joined the company, I asked him what his legacy was, and he gave me the political answer. So I had to ask him again six months later, and I got the real answer. I won't say his name, but you can probably look it up on the website; a very good CEO, excellent guy. It was a similar kind of thing. We're an Asian-owned parent company, a large power distance relationship, massively profitable, because if anyone knows private equity, it's all about asset value, and asset value is on the basis of having really low operating costs and really high revenue streams. He spoke a lot about hearing no in an organization and then trying to find new, innovative ways to still make it happen. That's why I talked about entrepreneurial vocation in a corporate environment, because you need that. Having the resilience to see that through can sometimes be equally as important as a customer focus group, or having a really objective viewpoint of what your customers are talking about out there. So there's a story.

[00:32:13] Noah: I love that. Netflix, that's wild that you got to hear that, because I love that example in general, of a company that had to make a massive change in what they were doing. That seems like a hard thing to do, especially if you're one of the hundreds of employees who are all of a sudden seeing that number tank, debating if this is a company that's going to last. I don't have an MBA, but I was told that a lot of the things they teach you are about building lasting cultures, because markets change so quickly, especially now, and because change in general in the world happens so often. I think about this a lot with AI and design and things like that. The lasting companies will probably be the ones that know how to make these big pivots when their profit is tanking or when their market is tanking. I think that's really inspiring when it can happen, and it does require a different kind of skill set. It's not just how do you make a great mock or present nicely in a room; it's how do you pivot to an entirely different world with over 100 employees, or whatever it was. I have a lot of respect for companies that have done that.

[00:33:09] We are, I think, at time, or over time a little bit, so sorry that we won't have time to get to the one or two questions that might have existed somewhere. But thank you so much for tuning in. Thanks so much to our panelists. One round of applause for everyone.