From Product to CEO: Leading Beyond Execution

Rhiannon White, Rory Madden at UXDX EMEA. Video: https://youtu.be/gXEUnUn1Dyw

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.

The biggest surprise moving from CPO to CEO

[00:00:08] Rory: I would love to welcome Rhiannon White, who's the CEO of Clue, to the stage. We're going to talk about her shift from product, or chief product officer, to CEO, and how that has happened and how it's worked. So welcome, Rhiannon.

[00:00:28] Rory: I'd like to touch on that, because Cliff just made the point that he intentionally was focusing on the IC channel and moving up and becoming 10x in his craft. I'm going to start with kind of a generic question, but what was the biggest surprise? Because that's what people are often quite nervous about when they take quite a tangential move. What was the biggest surprise for you when you moved from that CPO role into the CEO role?

[00:01:00] Rhiannon: That's a very good question. I'd like to say first, hello everyone, and thank you for having me here today. I love UXDX. I've been a couple of times now and this is one of my favorite conferences, so it's really nice to be here. I was surprised by many things. One of the biggest surprises for me was how it's not that much of a change in the title. Theoretically, we changed two letters in the title, and yet the way the team interacted with me changed quite a lot after I became CEO.

[00:01:29] Rhiannon: We're not a large company. We've all been working together for quite a long time now and been through some real roller coaster ups and downs together. And I just sort of perhaps naively expected things to carry on the way they were. So I thought, well, when I have an idea or a thought, the team will debate things with me. We'll challenge. We'll spar. Instead, people would say, "Okay," and smile and run off and start doing it, or run off and start complaining to the management team member that my idea was crazy and did we really have to do that. Which is totally valid, because often they were just half-formed ideas. But it was a real moment of learning, to go, oh, actually maybe I can't think out loud in the same way that I did before with people who I was used to doing that with.

[00:02:13] Rory: I guess that is a challenge, where with product in particular we're so used to, our ideas are bad. I can't remember who said it, but all of our ideas are bad, it's just over iteration that they become good. So how have you managed that? Personally, how have you changed your approach to limit the impact there?

[00:02:34] Rhiannon: Yeah, and I think that's it, right? I have the starting assumption that the idea is mostly bad, but if we toss it around and if we talk about it and look at the data, we'll find something there. So what I've started to do is try to be a bit quieter and try to not speak up so much. When I have those little niggling thoughts, direct them more narrowly, as opposed to perhaps doing it in a group, or with people who report to people who report to me now, as opposed to people who used to report to me directly. I kind of had this idea, well, we used to have a reporting relationship directly, you know, like four weeks ago, surely we can still talk like this. But realizing that actually that's not the case any more. And so I need to really channel those, just wanting to spitball, really much more narrowly, and not do that in a more public fashion any more.

[00:03:27] Rory: I'm going to ask a question that I don't know. I've been frustrated so many times trying to get initiatives through. Is it not actually nice when people just go, yes, thank you, and run away and do your bidding?

[00:03:41] Rhiannon: Initially there were a couple of moments where I was like, oh great, we should do this partnership with XYZ, and people say yes and smile and go off and do it. And then, because ideas and thought always run ahead of execution, a few weeks later I'd be sitting in a meeting and watching the collision of priorities. This is a real thing that happened three months ago, realizing that, oh, this team is really under pressure and struggling with all these things because I threw all of that into the pipeline when it wasn't there. It was literally my fault, through having said yes and had these half-formed ideas that people ran off to execute on. And so it was actually pretty humbling. At first I thought, oh this is great, life is really easy, it's so good being so small, and then realizing, oh no, it's terrible for the people who I'm doing that to, and had to sort of walk back.

[00:04:29] Rory: That's interesting, because obviously you have a lot of exposure and insight into the business, so how are you trying to balance that? I'm assuming you don't want to step completely back, you still want to have a say, but you don't want to be too prescriptive. So how are you trying to find that delicate balance?

Umbrella situations and bus situations

[00:04:46] Rhiannon: Yeah, and I think the thing that's been hard for me around that as well is that a lot of my identity before, as a CPO, was being the person who was across everything. We have an internal joke that on Slack I'm like the eye of Sauron, right? Like I see everything and I see all the data and I am across, or I was across, everything. And so I still have some instincts and insight around the business that probably are valid, because there's an enormous amount of data that I'm consuming, an enormous amount of context. And honestly, I don't have a pat answer for you on this one, because I'm still trying to work out where the line is between going, "No, okay, it was good that we had a chance to experiment here, but the data is not looking right, we need to make a different decision."

[00:05:31] Rhiannon: What I'm trying to work through is a mental model around, if you think about it in terms of rain and buses, right? I don't know if anyone here has kids, but if you try telling your kids things that they need to do to exist in this world, for example, take an umbrella today, it's going to get wet, they'll inevitably complain at you and argue and say, "No, no, no, no, no, you're being a pain. Stop worrying." Literally yesterday one of my kids, I was trying to put a jacket on him because it was going to rain, he said to me, "I'm not two any more. Don't treat me like I'm two." I'm like, you're only six. But anyway, it did rain and he did need the jacket.

[00:06:04] Rhiannon: But there is a certain level where you just sometimes have got to let them leave the house and realize that they're going to get rained on and they have to learn it that way. But then there's times when they're going to walk out on the street and get hit by a bus, and that's not cool. So at that point you've got to jump in front of them, right, or tell them no, definitely not. And so I'm trying to figure out, where is it?

[00:06:20] Rhiannon: At the moment, this is probably, I hope there's no one from my team here, we're running an experiment around our UA, and I had a different opinion to the team running it. They wanted to structure it a slightly different way to what I had possibly thought. This was one of those examples where I had sort of set the goal, and instead of saying to me directly, which they would have done before, "No, no, no, I think you're wrong on that," they smiled and said yes. And I thought, great, we're going to go do my thing. And then, you know, a day later found out, okay, no, they have very good reason to think this is not the right thing to do. And so we worked through it and looked at what they wanted to propose, and we're running a test at the moment, and we're running the test for the month of May, and then we will see which approach we should take.

[00:07:03] Rhiannon: And so part of me is a little, you know, because every month I'm on the hook for turning up to the board and saying these were the results, and we did achieve or we didn't achieve what we said we were going to do. So if I'm wrong, then I'm on the hook for doing that in June, in a couple of weeks' time. But it also feels like it's not a bus thing, right? If we're wrong in this experiment, well, we'll have learned something, and it's a month, we can live with it not going right for a month. And if they're right, then we'll have learned something very valuable as well. So it's trying to figure out what chunks of time, because the only two things you can never get back are time and money, right? And those are really the only two things that you play with as a CEO, time and money, it turns out, so cash and time. And so this one is saying, okay, we can afford to have this horizon of time for experimental learning, or seeing whether it's an umbrella or a bus situation.

From one lens to the whole business

[00:07:55] Rory: Awesome. I'm going to shift tack a little bit now, but I'm just going to ask if we can put up the holding slide so that we can let people also contribute, because we are going to go to audience questions in a minute. So that's going to let you guys start asking some questions as well as we continue our conversation.

[00:08:13] Rory: So I want to shift from that. Yeah, it's a difficult balance getting that empowerment, and I love the example you gave of the experiments. I want to know how you personally are handling the lens shift, if I call it that, where you have moved from, your sole focus was on product with the chief product officer role, but now your remit has grown. So do you find yourself kind of falling back on your comfort zone, or how have you managed that, okay, now I have to equally divide my attention?

[00:08:45] Rhiannon: Well, I think the overriding characteristic of product is curiosity. All great product people, product managers, product designers, product builders, product researchers, everybody, are curious about humans and what goes on. So I love now that I have completely unleashed curiosity across the whole business. I love that I can spend half an hour with the finance team on what does our cash flow look like over the next couple of months, down to the euro, right? And I love that I can also learn from the marketing team around what they want to ship, and why, and how that's going to have an impact. So I really enjoy the unleashed curiosity, and being able to get my nose up in everybody's business in some way.

[00:09:22] Rhiannon: I do find that I miss a little bit, product is I think a very linear domain or discipline. So every time you ship, you learn something, and maybe the experiment didn't work, but you learned that that didn't work and we should try X or Y instead. There is a sense of satisfaction and progression there. And I'm finding that CEOing is much more like gardening. There's a bunch of bets that we place, or that I have placed, and decisions that we make, and then I just kind of have to sit and wait and see for a lot of the time, because the time horizons, time and cash, are also longer. So it's not like we'll work on it for three weeks and then ship it and see if it works. It's, are we going to invest in this major area, and then who are we going to hire, and then how do we see whether or not either of those bets are right over the coming months?

[00:10:13] Rory: And I guess that's a common refrain from everybody in product, that you're making bets and you're hoping that they work. So, I guess as you were saying, it's probably longer time frames. Is there anything you can do, because there's always, oh, we can't test super quick, even in product. Is there anything you're doing that can try to squeeze those, using some of your product skill set to squeeze some of those corporate bets?

[00:10:39] Rhiannon: You asked me this earlier and I thought, oh gosh, I haven't thought about this. Largely I would say actually it's not so much a product discipline as more of a standard management discipline, in the sense of, are the signals coming through? So, okay, if it's a completely new thing, is it starting to get organized? Is there a coherent thought forming in the team about what we're doing and why, and what is the hypothesis, and do they have clear ways that we will judge the hypothesis as we go? So it's more looking for those markers and those things which remain the same no matter what discipline you're working in.

Numbers up, people down

[00:11:14] Rory: Great. We'll touch then on the skills, because what do you think are the skills that you developed through your career that are now the most useful to you? I don't know if everybody, or if anybody, has the aspiration of becoming a CEO out there, but it'd be interesting to see what skills you think were the most valuable through your product career.

[00:11:36] Rhiannon: It depends about if you mean in the CEO role, or getting the CEO role.

[00:11:42] Rory: Let's talk about both. Let's start with getting.

[00:11:43] Rhiannon: Yeah. I think the most valuable thing, and it's going to sound very reductive to say it, but this mantra that I learned years ago and I'm still practicing, because I don't get it right every time: numbers up, people down. And this actually comes back to what Cliff was talking about in terms of influence and trust, which I thought was a brilliant talk. The board doesn't care about how great your relationships are in the team, or how great your collaboration, or what's happening. They care about the language of capital. And so learning in product to speak about capital first, or numbers up, whenever I was speaking up to the board or anyone else, was really what helped me move from middle management to then management team roles, and then I think into the CEO role. Because the board could see and had confidence that I could understand the business and was going to represent and drive their interests as capital shareholders, right?

[00:12:39] Rhiannon: And then I think in terms of the role itself, I think that curiosity thing again, about just being genuinely interested in every part of the business and in what every team is doing and excited about. I'm just as excited about the finance team. This is actually genuinely exciting, it's going to sound boring, but we got our audit done 12 months earlier this year than we ever have done before, because our tiny but mighty finance team took it in-house and did it. And I'm really excited by that, and I'm really happy for them, and happy to learn about that. Because it's all learning, learning about what is it that makes the business tick, and how do we turn this into a system that will continue to deliver value for our users and for us as a business. And so I think that curiosity is the main thing.

[00:13:22] Rory: Great. I haven't heard anybody else say, I love sitting with finance talking about cash flow.

[00:13:27] Rhiannon: So I do. How can you not? You can't do anything without money, right? What have we all lived over the last few years? Cash flow really matters.

[00:13:36] Rory: Great. So yeah, it's a great example, when you're managing up it's all about the numbers, but when you're managing down it's about the people and how to ensure that the people have the support to provide the numbers.

[00:13:47] Rhiannon: Yeah, because we can't do anything without people. The point about how we are building for humans, and we are humans building for humans, and yes we use lots of tools, but at the end of the day it's all about that connection and that spark between each other, and in a company that creates these moments of value. So it's all about the people, but a board doesn't want to hear you say that. They want to hear you lead with, it's all about the numbers, and here's what we're delivering and why.

Unlearning, and what she kept doing

[00:14:13] Rory: Excellent, that's great. Like your curiosity, your approach. Are there any skills that you found you've had to almost unlearn, because they're no longer helpful to you?

[00:14:26] Rhiannon: I think that little bit about, when I was in the CPO role, Clue, we're not so big as a team, and just as I think many people have gone over the last few years, we've had some ups and downs. We're in a great place now, but that has meant that we got smaller as well, and that meant getting closer to the work, right, and getting more hands-on around various areas. And I enjoyed that a lot, actually. And so unlearning has been sort of walking back from that and going, actually it's not as helpful as I thought it might be in this role.

[00:14:58] Rory: So you're not going to turn founder mode.

[00:15:02] Rhiannon: I have thoughts on this. I don't like founder mode. I don't like the whole thing about taste. They're all just more words that people come up with to make us feel that somehow we're not good enough. I'm not a fan of these types of frameworks.

[00:15:18] Rory: Fair enough. We've talked about the skills to get you there. We've talked about, okay, so you've had to learn to maybe delegate a bit more, and we've already talked about that balance, which is a difficult one. So instead of start and stop, what have you kept doing? What do you think are the skills that you're happy to keep running with?

[00:15:39] Rhiannon: One thing I've kept doing is, I'm very passionate about continuous discovery and user research, and I do a long form user interview every week. I did that as CPO and I still do that as CEO. When I was moving into the CEO role, I was really surprised by how many people said, "Why are you still going to do that? Shouldn't you be doing something else? You shouldn't do that, it's a waste of your time," blah blah blah. Which I found deeply weird, the idea that spending time with our users would ever be a waste of my time.

[00:16:10] Rhiannon: But I've found that very valuable and very helpful still, for actually the same reasons that it was helpful in the CPO role. Spending that time with the people who we're hoping to serve gives me an enormous amount of confidence. Not that I know exactly what we should build, because I don't, and I never did actually as a result of that, but that I understand their problems, and that I'm passionate about their problems, and that I can describe them. And so when an investor calls me and says conversational UI is the future, you need to shift the whole product to conversational UI, I can talk very coherently around, maybe there's some place for that at some point, but these are the problems we're solving for our users right now and here's why those problems are valuable. And be able to give concrete examples, because nothing changes a conversation away from opinion to something more real than being able to say, that's really interesting, I was speaking to this user last week and she said blah blah blah. Because it's real at that point.

[00:17:03] Rory: But how does that keep you, because doing those interviews, the whole point is that it's sparking ideas, and you're saying that you're trying your best to balance. So if every week you're talking to another customer, I'm sure you're coming up with plenty of ideas. So do you find yourself veering a little bit too much into sharing your ideas because of that?

[00:17:22] Rhiannon: For me it's never really come up with specific ideas around what to build, speaking with users. It comes up with insights, or problems, or understanding their jobs to be done and expressions of it. So for example, it's all good practice, you write up the interview afterwards and link to it, and then I pull out, and I guess maybe this is a bummer for the rest of them, but now that they all report to me, I do things that I did before as well, but I can really now tag marketing and say, look at how they phrase this benefit, look how the user talks about how she discovered the app, and tag various parts of the organization so they can hear. Because I think there's nothing more valuable than hearing directly from our users, and I think everybody in the organization should, not the product org only.

[00:18:06] Rory: And do you go alone, or do you bring a team when you're talking to customers?

[00:18:11] Rhiannon: This is where the folks who are in the audience who are researchers, I really like just doing them on my own. There's very intimate stuff that we talk about, right? And the women who are willing to speak to us are very generous with their time, but there are things where it's very intense, things come up in these interviews, and it's often easier to get to those places when it's just the two of you.

What she'd do differently, and falling in love with the P&L

[00:18:32] Rory: Brilliant. What would you do differently in your career now that you've made it, I guess the goal, to make it to CEO? Is there anything that you would change, or are you happy about it? Because as Cliff was saying, it's not a linear path, it's a meandering line.

[00:18:46] Rhiannon: It's definitely a meandering line. I mean, you can't really do anything with regrets. I think there are two things that I would have liked to have learned earlier and that I'm still struggling to learn a bit. I think the numbers up, people down, I have to repeat that to myself constantly as a mantra, because my instinct is always to lead with the people, and so I have to work on that quite a lot. I think I would have, earlier in my time, done more on the finances side and tried very actively to get to own a P&L earlier, which I think would have been interesting.

[00:19:27] Rhiannon: And then the second thing is, a lot of the time we're literally paid to have an opinion, and for very many years in my career I sort of self-censored. I just didn't think my opinion was worth much. I think we're often, especially as women, we often get a lot of feedback about being too something, too loud, too this, too whatever, and I always took that to heart. And I often have thought things very orthogonally to the rest of the business. I don't like founder mode. I think taste is a bunch of crock. I think north star metrics are full of it as well. There's all this stuff that we talk about, that sort of mantra, that I just don't think works in real life. I've always thought, well, nobody wants to hear that from me. And maybe they don't, but a lot of what we need to do is have an opinion. A lot of the time we're literally paid to have an opinion, because a lot of the other stuff can be done. So I would start experimenting with that earlier, I think.

[00:20:27] Rory: Yeah, I love the point on finance, because I noticed a kind of a step change in my career when I learned a lot more about finance, because it's a driver for so many people, and it's why you can understand, okay, so that's why they reacted in a certain way, when you really understand the finance behind things.

[00:20:46] Rhiannon: 100% agree. And I often think that you have to fall in love with the P&L. The P&L seems scary and like it's this foreign thing, but if you find a best friend in finance, finance people are so happy if you turn up and you want to talk to them and you ask them about what they do, they'll always explain to you what happens. But the really critical thing that you'll learn, and particularly in large organizations this is very interesting, is that the P&L is revealed strategy, right? The company always has our stated strategy over here, but the P&L tells you what really makes money for the company, what users really value. And so that revealed versus stated strategy is a very interesting split. The P&L is strategy in its most pure form, actually. Once you can see that as a source of insight, just like a user interview is a source of insight, then I think that's a really powerful position to be in.

What she misses, and what she's excited about

[00:21:29] Rory: Great. And a last, or a second last rather, question. Do you miss anything now that your role has changed? Because as Cliff was saying in his talk, he intentionally wants to be an IC because he loves the craft. Is there anything from your career that you miss now that you're in the CEO role?

[00:21:52] Rhiannon: I honestly love CEOing. I don't really know what it is yet, and I don't know if anybody does. But if you'd asked me a year ago, I would have said I don't want to do that job. It's lonely, you don't get to be close to the work, you have to do all this weird horrible stuff with investors. Actually, it's great. It's not lonely. It's only lonely if you make it lonely. I think the thing that I would have missed would be if I was not speaking to users all the time, because I think that's still very important to my sense of just why we're even at work and what we're doing.

[00:22:24] Rhiannon: And then maybe, I do sometimes feel like there's an act of restraint, I'm having to relearn, in being a CEO, in the sense that the stuff about delegation, and about not getting in there with your half crackpot ideas. You have to keep them under the surface so that people don't run off with it. And there is a kind of a restraint. You can't just sort of burst out and say, oh how about XYZ. And that is, I think, a little, that's hard to learn, and sometimes I miss that a little bit in terms of the free flow of a meeting.

[00:22:57] Rory: I'm sure every so often there's just too good of an idea.

[00:23:02] Rhiannon: I mean, they're all bad, right? That's the point.

[00:23:03] Rory: Yeah. And I guess just the final question before we'll open up to questions from the audience, but what are you most excited about, whether it's Clue, your career, or just the future of the industry?

[00:23:20] Rhiannon: Well, for Clue, I'm incredibly excited for us in that, I mentioned several times now that we've been through a bit of a roller coaster, and I think it's been a cold winter in tech since 22, and really a long evolution for businesses to get focused on efficiency. It's been really exciting to be, we're paying our own way. We pay our own bills. We don't need to take investors' money any more. And so that means we're in a position to really, I think, flex our wings about what we want to do and how we can have an impact in the world. So that's very exciting. For me, I'm just grateful and happy to be learning new things, and that I'm getting the opportunity to learn new skills.

[00:23:58] Rhiannon: And then I think for the future of technology, I think AI is very exciting, and I think that we will come through all of it and realize the skill involved in creating human connection, and the insight, and the need for human to human work and discovery to find that insight. We will come out the other side of this current obsession with it and realize how valuable that is and how that's not going to go away. You can't generate from nothing, you know, the whole generative AI thing. Without us and the connections that we form between ourselves and for the people who we want to serve, it's not going to be useful. And so I actually think that'll be exciting, once we get through this sort of hype bubble that we're in and people start to realize the value of the tools, but then realizing how valuable our contributions still remain will be great.

[00:24:45] Rory: Excellent. So coming out of the cold winter, your personal curiosity and just the continuous curiosity, and then the human connection and what we can achieve with AI and human connection together. Brilliant. So thank you very much. That's the end of our chat, but we're going to open it up to the audience now. So if we can flick to the audience questions, please.

Q&A

[00:25:08] Rory: Yeah, I'll just jump straight in. I love Clue as a product. It's so empathetic and user-driven. Can you tell us about the research and design process behind its main features?

[00:25:20] Rhiannon: Thank you, that's very kind of you to say that. Yeah, we're pretty obsessive about speaking with users continuously, so that's obviously a big part. I do it, but I do it because it's important to me, not because it's important to the team, but the rest of the team continuously speaks with users. We obviously test everything extensively. We have a lot of data, but the data tells you what's happening, and then the deep qualitative insight and time with people tells you why, and it's the marriage between the two that I think always sparks the great moments.

[00:25:55] Rhiannon: And insight can come from anywhere. We shipped something at the end of last year which I'm particularly proud of. It's not a huge thing, but it's called just Clue tracking, because it turns out there are an enormous number of women out there who have hormonal cycles but who don't actually have periods, and they were struggling. They're in all of our competitors as well, they're in all of our products trying to make their way. And we saw this in the data, we could see it in the insight, we could see it in support, we could see it in the qual. You can't see it in the quantitative data, because they're having to put fake data in the products. So we shipped that, because we realized this was something really important, to recognize and validate these women's experiences. And that's been really powerful in terms of, it's not going to change our trajectory as a company, but the adoption has shown that these women are like, yes, you're seeing what I'm experiencing, thank you for doing this. And that's very meaningful to us.

[00:26:44] Rory: Is that across the entire organization, so all teams are doing it? So you're personally going out and doing research, but are all teams, is that a part of your process?

[00:26:56] Rhiannon: It's not perfect. I'd like to say that every team did it every week, but it's not, I wouldn't say that. We're getting there. There are some teams that do it more than others. Obviously product development does it, the science team does it a lot. Marketing is starting to, which I'm really excited about. And so we'll just keep going from there.

[00:27:15] Rory: Excellent. As CEO, how do you decide what to do versus what not to do, especially when everything feels important and you have so little time?

[00:27:24] Rhiannon: Yeah, this is a great question. If anybody else knows the answer, please jump in. I have to say I've had to learn, and this is something that I'm still learning and I haven't got this right yet, but trying to, I think it's a very nice world when you can be incredibly internally focused. I was obsessively laser focused on our users and on our teams, and I just spent all of my time on that before. And now I have to be much more external as well. You know all those annoying times when your CEO goes out and talks to partners and comes back with crazy ideas? I'm realizing, oh, I have to go out and talk to the partners, and maybe not come back with the crazy ideas, but start finding that context and bringing that context in from the outside.

[00:28:09] Rhiannon: And so I'm slowly shifting the balance of my work. If there's an internal meeting that I get invited to that I think you don't actually need me for, I don't go any more, so that I can spend some time on the outside part, and try to trust the team. They don't need me. It would be for my comfort, not for their benefit, so I shouldn't be there. But finding outside context from the world that will help us, that is for their benefit.

[00:28:38] Rory: I love that phrasing, bringing context in. Instead of the ideas, it's the context. I love that. As a C-suite leader, what do you think UXers are missing when they feel that the business is not asking or listening to the users?

[00:28:53] Rhiannon: Yeah, well, this is exactly what Cliff was talking about. It's really important to reflect back to the business what the business needs, and to reflect back why the business might care about XYZ. In our case, I just said we're able to pay our bills. We're not printing money, but we're able to pay our bills, and I really care about that because there are these people who are on payroll and I want to pay them every month, and I want to make sure that they have meaningful jobs that they are rewarded for. And so the revenue really matters. It's not like it matters because we want to buy a jet. Nobody's buying a jet. It's because we want to make payroll, right? And so understanding what the drivers are and why the business cares about XYZ is really important. And being able to bring those two together is the bit that drives and builds trust.

[00:29:44] Rory: Brilliant. And I guess we can't get through a session without talking about AI at teams, so we have to ask. One of the benefits of AI that I've seen with CEOs, and why a lot of CEOs might have personal assistants or something, is to try to cut through the noise of maybe their email or something like that. Do you use any AI to try to streamline your personal processes?

[00:30:07] Rhiannon: I feel like I should give an answer that says that I do, but I don't. I'm not a super early adopter on really anything, which I used to feel really embarrassed about for much of my career. I was like, I'm not an early adopter, and I would be quite quiet about that. And then I was like, oh, neither are any of our users, so I don't think that really matters as much.

[00:30:29] Rhiannon: I have a pretty old-fashioned view around doing the work. One of the things I was quite militant about in product was doing the work of turning up and doing the interviews with your users, and the work that it takes to communicate internally. And while it's a real pain in the head to go through email or whatever, my job is to do the work around the people who are trying to communicate with us as a business, and communicating with the board, and communicating with investors. There are no shortcuts on that. And I think that taking the time to do the thinking, sure the tools could help, but I also value the time to write the paper that outlines what is our view on the category and where that's going to change over the next few years, because that's really important for our investors. And what is our point of view on XYZ. Doing the work is pretty valuable there.

[00:31:20] Rory: Brilliant. Well, that brings us to time. So I just want to thank you once again, Rhiannon, for sharing your story.

[00:31:24] Rhiannon: Thank you for having me.