Category creation and brand building | Barbra Gago (Pando, Miro, Greenhouse, Culture Amp)

when you're building a category you need to make sure that there is a category that's validated by analysts and directory sites and things like that but also you want to have a lot of traction in terms of thought leadership like why is this the category what are the unique kind of value propositions of this particular thing what are the pain points it solves and then of course getting a lot of content around because when you're generating a new category you're also needing to educate buyers that there is a category that they can now budget for and why they should allocate budget for that welcome to Lenny's podcast I'm Lenny and my goal here is to help you get better at the craft of building and growing products I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experiences building and scaling today's most successful companies today my guest is Barbara Gago

Barbara was Chief marketing officer and Global head of marketing at Miro where she helped build their Global brand and create a whole new software category for the space before that she was VP of marketing at Greenhouse where she brought the product to Market and led their go to market strategy and she was also a head of marketing at culturam where she helped build their go to market plan and close their first 50 customers in our conversation we focus on three topics creating your own category when it makes sense to explore that when to avoid it and how to go about it building your brand and rebranding when it makes sense to you and building opinionated software I've never seen a post or podcast get as deep into category creation or rebranding and I'm confident that you will learn something valuable from this podcast with that I bring you Barbara Gago this episode is brought to you by assembly AI if you're looking to build

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build authentication in-house and the integration process is super fast and super smooth to get one thousand dollars in free credits just go to stitch.com Lenny to sign up in that Stitch with a y Barbara welcome to the podcast thanks Lenny excited to be here just to start off and set a little context for listeners can you give us a 55 second background on some of the wonderful things you've done in your career and what you're up to now definitely so I've spent my pretty much my entire career in ba B SAS tech building and scaling through hyper growth often times with disruptive Technologies kind of at the center of people Tech future of work I would say I helped bring products like culture amp and Greenhouse to Market in the people space before that I did some work in Enterprise social networking and the Yammer days and most recently I was the CMO at Miro where I also left the Rebrand and kind of introduced that

product to the world which was very exciting and you're you've got to start up now so maybe we just mentioned that briefly we'll talk about at the end

again yeah what are you working on now yeah and now I'm uh I'm building a product which we'll see about the category what it ends up being but it's what we call an employee progression platform so basically from the work that I've done as a leader building and scaling teams and also the exposure I've had in the people type space I just have found that there's been a lot of tools lacking for leaders to really coach and develop their team in the right way like creating enough structure and transparency into the process that creates accountability on both sides so yeah we're uh taking on the big goal of killing performance reviews holy moly cool really exciting performance reviews very exciting it's true we'll talk about that a bit at the end more and there's a bunch of stuff I want to dig into you have such a cool background and so many interesting experiences the first is something that you mentioned just now

which is category category creation which I know is near and dear to your

heart and I was reading a bit about your background and I learned that at Miro you invented this category that's now called visual collaboration station and a culture amp I think you helped lead the creation of this category employee experience imagine at Greenhouse you did something similar and I know startups are often trying to decide should I create my own category should I try to win in an existing category and so I want to spend some time talking through your experience there and so the first question just say at Miro or Greenhouse can you just talk through your thought process of trying to decide should we invent a whole new category that we're going to win or should we just try to win an existing category and how did that go they're both great examples because in one we did create a new category and in the other we tried an abandoned ship with Miro I think when I joined the company there was this

concept of an online whiteboard which also is a category but it's a much smaller category and it's wasn't something that a lot of people searched for and I think the biggest kind of motivating factor of thinking about category creation at Mira was how do we become something really big and needed by every company and not just this little thing that maybe product teams would use or maybe engineering teams or schools or something like that when you're thinking about category creation it's really for us it was really about the scope of what we're trying to do and not wanting to be in something too small and I think with Miro the platform that it is there is so much possibility and I used to joke that it was like even as a company lure like the ever extending Universe there's just so much to do there that

online whiteboard was really small Greenhouse is in the ATS category which is applicant tracking system and at the time applicant tracking systems had a really bad name I don't know if folks that listen to this know a job fight or remember job bite and there were a lot of systems before that job fight had come in like the mid 2000s as like the new and improved ATS and it was all about like social recruiting but it was very transactional and it wasn't very strategic and so we we wanted to steer clear of the ATS space even though we were an ATS we can talk more about what we tried and what we ended up doing but I think the main factors when you're thinking about category creation is really what budget companies have if they have a budget if they don't have a budget companies did have a budget for ATS for example until now I don't think companies had a budget for visual collaboration for example what's the

language and the words that people use to describe their pain points and their situation the things that they need and then is there competition and sometimes competition you would think like oh we want to not have competition so let's build a new category but ultimately you're not building a category until there is competition like it's not officially actually a category until there's more companies that do that and that was like a big learning for me in this whole process of category creation is that it's actually okay when new companies come in that say they're that category because it's just validating the fact that there is a new category so I think it's really if and when is really about what the overall objective is and also what the current situation is with competitors and the space the ATS Market is still you know the ATS market for example and Miro has created visual collaboration as a category but

also ticks off boxes for other categories as well I have a thousand questions I want to ask to dig deeper before we get in there can you just

Define what is a category folks that are just like what the hell are you been talking about what is a product category what's like the high level way to think about this when we talk about category I think it's really what would be a good way to explore your space and your relevant categories would be to go to G2 crowd or software advice or any of those type of review sites or directory sites and learn about how they use categorized products based on feature sets and So within each industry there's going to be a bunch of different types of categories those categories are typically products that solve at least in B2B products that solve like a certain pain point or set of pain points and they can be very wide like all in one and big Solutions or they can be narrow there's like this all-in-one versus Best in Class for example and I think that's where the granularity of category comes into play

and then how big the market is obviously maps to granularity versus more Broad and when are you granular versus when you go abroad but I think ultimately it's just a set of features or products that are solving a specific pain point that customers most likely have a budget allocated for and then the category ends up the way you use it is it's the way you pitch your product often it's like the big part of the headline part of the way you sell it it's like you come back to this we're the leader in visual collaboration for example or that's how it's like practically ends up being used exactly it's interesting because I would say that if you're building a category as well you can sometimes be selling into a category while you're still building the appetite for a different category which is kind of a Nuance which is all about like where's the budget and how do customers describe their pain points this reminds me of

just trying to pitch my podcast in this little documenting and initially I was like oh it's like a top 100 business podcast and I'm like no it's number one product and growth podcast in the world yes it's true but it's I created my own category about that yeah there you go was that a good idea I think so the thing is it's like when you talk about ICP for how you're going to sell your product and really build a repeatable sales process to scale that piece of your business and the more specific the thing is that you're selling initially obviously you're gonna have more relevant users they're gonna spread Word of Mouth et cetera Etc you can always expand and that sculpt later right the category can also evolve you mentioned a culture ramp earlier the category now is people experience actually when I was there it was more about people analytics platform or people intelligence platform because we were providing a deep set of

data that companies didn't have before but that category has since evolved as their go to market has changed as they've added new products to their platform and new features and things like that to make it even more concrete

for people what are other examples of categories just like that come to mind that are either invented recently or just generally in the early days I was working on Market automation for example so Marketo now HubSpot fits into that even though back then they were more of this inbound marketing platform slash category Performance Management which is the area of Pando we've talked a lot about people products I think games I did a great job with the customer success platform so this is like a different problem that they were solving within the organization for a group of the customer success team basically how are they going to make their customers successful awesome okay yeah customer success so well Nate yes okay so the there's many benefits to try to create your own category right we're number one that's one main category two is you can lead the charge on understanding or just like defining what's important and I

imagine there's other benefits maybe you could share but there's also probably a lot of downsides you mentioned oftentimes it doesn't work and just like ends up being a lot of wasted money maybe just talk about what are the reasons to pursue trying to create your own category and then some of the reasons you maybe shouldn't Greenhouse is a great example to talk about a failed Approach at creating a category so I mentioned before the ATS or the applicant tracking system category at the time was just it carried so much disdain like people had such bad experiences with that whole category of products no matter what they were strategic they didn't help people be good at recruiting it was just like a pretty terrible very transactional experience and I came in it was like okay let's reposition ourselves we're going to create a new category we tried several things one of the main things that we zeroed in on was recruiting

optimization platform and it was really like we are doing that like we're helping companies really structure the process identify where they have gaps where people are falling through the cracks where they're flying through the process and really tweak and iterate it and improve it and we spent time getting content out there talking to press about it positioning it in this way and ultimately at the end of the day like the budget that customers had and the way that customers talked about what we did no matter what we called it was applicant tracking so it didn't really make sense to continue to go against the grain of no we're gonna be this new thing or we're going to call it this if everybody even seen the value and seeing the differentiation of our platform to others still called it an ATS we abandoned that process but I think the main thing that we understood then was instead of spending the time and money

to build a new category we're going to spend the time and money to elevate the value of this category so rather than changing the category to something else which we could value at whatever it was we were just going to spend all of our resources to make this whole category much more valuable to the users to companies and that really was along with what culture it was doing at the time in the same space what kind of set off this whole trajectory of like really good strong people practices and and people organizations that were really doing cool stuff on the recruiting side as well as employing engagement you mentioned a few components of when it makes sense to come up with a category one is there's budget already against it too is people use the words associated with that category I imagine with Miro

and this idea of it was a visual collaboration there wasn't like budget for that yet right so how does that work that is more of the vision piece I would say like sometimes you can have a vision that customers aren't they don't have it yet or they don't share it but they can grow to share it and they did in that case and I think that with Miro we still worked to optimize where we could in terms of the categories that we did fit into or how people talked about us but it was also such a new format and it was really kind of a disruptive product that didn't exist before in the Enterprise so that it was called a lot of different things so it was much more like fluid and people talked about it in different ways and this was our way of hearing the feedback about how people talked about it as like online whiteboard or lots of jobs to be done were framed mind mapping platform or diagramming or whatever like all of

these little things and so visual collaboration was our way of kind of like putting a nice bow around us thing that could then be an Enterprise product that solved a lot of different problems for a lot of different use cases and different types of users so like we started out selling and having a lot of users that were in product and in engineering and teams that were used to using whiteboards anyway and then needed to do it in a distributed way but very quickly kind of packaged different types of jobs for like HR teams or marketing teams or design teams and pretty much anybody in the organization but it needed to all come together cohesively otherwise it was like everybody in the org just calls it a different thing because they use it in a different way part of what I'm

hearing is that you don't stop working on the other kind of categories that it already sits within and just keep optimizing those but in parallel start to try to pull together hey there's this bigger Vision where this could be does that sound right I think so and it's really where you get the inputs from like your customers and your users we heard all these things Miro had a big like we did a lot of content marketing that's a big piece of doing category creation generally I would say but there's a lot of different ways that people talked about it and so that's an opportunity to actually come and say okay here's what it is because no one knows and it's all of these things and all of these things together equals this now and then that kind of created momentum where other companies started thinking like that and then they started typing themselves as that category as well and then you had a category of

multiple companies now that were doing similar stuff yeah absolutely how do you know when it's probably a bad idea to try to create your own category this sooner the better if you're gonna try and fail and iterate I think if you already are well established I don't think category creation is really a meaningful effort if you know you already have it's not going to be necessarily a way to just all of a sudden generate new business by creating a new category once you've already kind of gone far enough down the path I think that if you're not getting like with the greenhouse situation as much as we use this other language and it did get picked up a bit in terms of context that people would use to talk about Greenhouse it really just wasn't sticking and so I think it's good to try things and also abandon them and that's okay like you can always sit back into the category if you really don't fit

into any other category then you probably do need to figure out what the category is and package that and that's going to be done mostly by continuing to talk to customers and listening to how they talk about things and it all comes from what you hear from them ultimately and what will resonate so I think yeah if you're already established if you really aren't differentiated from other categories in your space than you probably are in that category and doing category creation is a lot of work that is not going to be fruitful if you're pretty squarely in something already and then if you really aren't but you need to figure it out you're just gonna have to keep iterating until you figure out what makes sense to your customers for

Founders who are listening to this and they're just like oh this sounds interesting I want to try to think about a new category maybe for my product you

just talk about kind of the mechanics of going through this process of trying to decide what category it should be called how to roll it out anything you could share about just like the tactics of creating a category the main thing which we've talked a little bit about already is really understanding your customers and their pain points and how they talk about things all of my best marketing and positioning literally comes from having a million conversations with customers and listening to how they solve problems and how our system helps them solve problems and what they're doing and how they talk about stuff so I think that's step one is really understanding who those buyers are how they talk about the product what's the unique differentiator and selling points one thing that's really important in category creation as well is actually like PR you need to get this category and positioning out there

at a high level in order to test it out and see if it makes sense and if it's resonating and then the other piece is really those directory sites which the analysts like Gartner and Forester and all these guys at least in B2B and Enterprise they really shape for customers what the categories are and you need to build relationships with them you need to work with them to create your category as well so with the visual collaboration for example we weren't ranking we weren't categorized in visual collaboration on G2 crowd and we had to meet with them and explain what it was and talk to them about the differentiation of this category versus other categories in terms of features and all of that kind of stuff so that they could understand how they would differentiate this category from another category so I think those are really good sort of channels to look at and then tactically it's a lot of content

marketing and a lot of thought leadership when you're building a category you need to make sure that there is a category that's validated by analysts and directory sites and things like that but also you want to have a lot of traction in terms of thought leadership like why is this the category what are the the unique kind of value propositions of this particular thing what are the pain points it solves and then of course getting a lot of content around because when you're generating a new category you're also needing to educate buyers that there is a category that they can now budget for and why they should allocate budget for that sounds like a hell of a lot of work I'm curious what percentage of say B2B companies do you think should pursue creating a category is it like almost none or is it like a meaningful percentage it goes in waves with like the tech Innovations so for example when

there was the whole first web wave and then there was this whole social Enterprise and like consumerization of it was like a big kind of change in how technology occurred in the workplace and a lot of new categories came at that point so I feel like it's less about a raw percentage and more about General kind of inflection points that are happening that are causing the need for this and I take covid for example and this very quick shift to distributed work was one of those type of inflection points that has changed a lot like a new category that has grown extremely fast is and I don't even know exactly what they call it but it's these employment platforms like deal and oyster that have propped up and grown significantly fast and also have created a new category where there was already the ability to hire people in all of these distributed places but you had to find a company in that place that would then hire the

people and then of course they created these platforms where hey here's a system you can manage it all here we'll go and build all those relationships on the ground and Maya has a new set of a new category with four or five companies just in the last three years that have cropped up so I think it's more yeah it's more about what the market demands and what's happening in the market rather than whether or not one company it makes sense for if that makes sense yeah makes sense depends on where the tide is pulling everyone I think that makes a lot of sense exactly yeah maybe one last

question about category creation so on the surface there's this binary choice either try to become the best ATS platform or we're not ATS we're employee recruiting automation these are Middle Ground do you have to go one or the other or is there some kind of in-between route maybe a positioning a little bit differently or how do you think about that there could be some Middle Ground I would say for Pando for example Performance Management is a very established category that we technically fit into and also there's a line item on the budget and people have money to pay for Performance Management but we're sort of introducing this concept of employee progression which is more of a long tail strategy so while we want to educate the market and build this new category of employee progression because it's related to the differences between what we're doing and traditional Performance Management we're

still gonna rate ourselves in directory sites for example or categorize ourselves as Performance Management and talk about Performance Management and sell to companies that are looking for Performance Management But ultimately we want to shift everybody's mindset and change the category so it's not necessarily one or the other but I do say the investment is high if you want to build a new category and we're committed to an investment of time and thought leadership and content and all that stuff but it's also not our strategy right now to go and create employee progression and own and dominate this we're going to work our way up to that over time got it that connects to what you talked about with Miro it wasn't like we're switching we're now visual collaboration it's we're still white boards we're the best whiteboarding tool but let's also start building this brand of visual collaboration so that people start to

learn exactly and I think it's like a bottoms up mentality much like our business model was there because with marketing automation it wasn't a progressive kind of build up it was marketing automation like that's what the category was and we just had to I was working for a company that was doing Market automation there was like eliqua and Marketo and several others and we all were just like telling everybody educating the market on what that was and that was very top down awesome this episode is brought to you by vanta helping you streamline your security compliance to accelerate growth if your business stores any data in the cloud then you've likely been asked are you going to be asked about your sock 2 compliance stock 2 is a way to prove your company's taking proper security measures to protect customer data and builds trust with customers and partners especially those with serious security

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I know another area that you spend a lot of time thinking about and you've done a lot of work around is branding rebranding even and just go to market in general I know at Miro you led the charge on rebranding Nero it used to be called I think real time board with two capital letters and no space and with Greenhouse you basically led to go to market plan and so I want to spend a little time here I guess just around rebranding so the mirror is a Rebrand how do you know it's time to Rebrand your product and it's worth investing there real-time board was interesting I almost didn't join because it was called real-time board honestly I was like oh my God this is so literal why I was walking the dogs with my husband I'm like am I really gonna join a company called real-time board like this can this be a big company with that name like I was really concerned about it and ultimately I spent more time with the

leaders there and I was like okay I think they'll be open to changing the name so I think there's like a mature to be peace like a lot of companies are started and you just come up with a name and you don't put a lot of thought into it and then you grow to a certain level at that time I think we're a million users maybe like a couple million in Revenue so it was very early days you had a name you came up with it you got the website and then the business grew and at some point it's can it be as big as we want it to be as we think it can be with that name and I think that was my biggest thing with real-time board specifically it was so literal and matter of fact and the product itself had so much more potential than the name was doing Justice for so I think at some point it's common for companies to do a Rebrand like once they go into scale mode before you have too many people and before you invest too much obviously in

building that brand so I think the sooner the better like Rebrand before I even joined it will they let me change the name was my criteria for joining and I would say in general the sooner the better but obviously after you know that you have product Market set and you have something to scale so you don't want to invest too much in a brand that isn't going to get you as far as you want to get if you're gonna obviously scale I was gonna ask you what it took to convince the founders to Rebrand because that's often a big challenge but it sounds like that's part of your employee agreement I will join if we give me the right to exports they were pretty receptive to it the company was not us-based I had spent my whole career in Silicon Valley a lot of time with brand and kind of inbound and Community focused Brands so they were pretty receptive it was not that hard to convince them which was great I think

the scary part for them and many people was just there was some Equity they did have Advocates like how would this impact the people who really loved the product right now and so one of the things that was really important as we sort of transitioned was that we kept as much of the essence of the initial brand before the logo was like a Post-It and then real-time board and so that posted for example that yellow became the new M that we used and we actually proposed a hot pink M initially and the yellow M was the okay we don't want to go too far from the real-time board with the yellow Post-it and this was a way to kind of Knob to the early base of customers and keep something that was pretty standard and pretty core to the initial sort of brand and name looking back do you think that was worth the effort and time to worry about those folks yeah okay yeah oh the early folk we definitely got feedback

from along the way like we did case studies throughout the process we got feedback on logos we got feedback on brand and designs and there were plenty of people who were like I like real-time board it's straightforward they loved their product But ultimately we kept many of them informed and we really involved them in the process to the degree of not slowing us down but still getting feedback because we did all of this in a very short period of time on top of it and I think yeah it was worth it because they felt really good about outcome as well and a big part of rebranding also means that you have to bring the whole company along too and make sure they feel really good about the outcome and that was probably one of my big takeaways is just at that time we were already about a hundred people so it wasn't like super small company and everybody had thoughts and feelings and the company had been around for

quite a long time before that so it was like a big change for many people any other learnings from that experience about just going through branding or rebranding maybe just focusing on rebranding and either learnings for future rebranding efforts so rebranding is just like the visual aesthetic and I think that's important to make sure you can transition in a way that you're still nodding to the original things but you've reinvented it or transformed it in a way that's makes more sense for where you're at or where you're going if you're changing the name it's way more complicated because everybody has to be involved legal all the contracts the website the product like all the links we changed our URLs like everything changed and so I think it's really important that you have to mobilize and align and have a very clear Vision about the process and the steps and be very transparent about it I think

a lot of times marketing teams just go and do their thing come back and it's like here we go with the Rebrand at Miro it was very much like Rebrand as a product approach it was a very much a product development process with Sprint teams and agile coming back and you had owners for different parts of things and all reporting back and it really required everybody in some way to be involved as I mentioned we did it in a very condensed period of time I think we kicked off the naming process and end of October and we launched publicly at South by Southwest with a fully three-dimensional booth in March so it was like very short to get a name and then once we had the name to do all the actual brand and then not only that but produce an entire booth and event collateral and all of that stuff so I think mobilizing having a really strong clear process and delegating and letting go and in the marketing role not trying

to own everything like it has to be owned by everybody else because you need sales decks and it's just everything I think there's also like look involved with any success and also in rebrands because a million things could go wrong we got our domain name change to miro.com I think it was like 48 hours before the event like all the material had been printed with the new URL like we had to just make a leap of faith super stressful but thankfully we have luck on our side but ultimately team process clear structure transparent for everybody getting feedback from customers and making sure stakeholders feel like they're involved I think ultimately it's really powerful way to create defensibility for a product and a brand in the market but it's also a lot of work related to category creation I was just gonna say that sounds like everything you do is just a hell of a lot of work it's fun I love work me too I always

joke that I work for workaholic which is myself yeah I do I know I mean I just love it so I really I get into this stuff and I think yeah rebranding and category creation and brand in general I think you know what our goal with Miro was to create there's this concept of like a love Mark rather than a trademark it's like how do you build a brand I think Airbnb has done a great job with that as well but like how do you build a brand that people really love and feel committed to and invested in and that you have to put a lot of thought into it and it needs to be authentic for it to really work but if it does it's super super powerful yeah I was I was there during the Airbnb Rebrand it took I think a year and a half for them from start to finish to get to something they were really excited about ready to launch and there's also actually a similar story to The Domain story shared with the font I

don't know how much I could share but they like didn't have the right to use the font until the last day or something and yeah it was a close call yeah but you have to just like it's gonna happen there's some Blind Faith right helps closing like we're launching I wanted to talk about just branding in general

you've worked on such great big successful Brands and you've helped craft these Brands and I'm just curious what advice you have around just building a brand a lasting brand a global brand what's important when you think about creating a brand for your startup I think it's something that companies should think about as early as possible and have it not be an afterthought the product and the brand are the main things that will get customers and keep them and also keep them loyal and engaged so I think you have to have both you can't have one or the other like you could have a great brand and if the product sucks there's only so far brand can go and you also can have a great product and maybe not that thoughtful of a brand but what I've found is that the more the brand is interchangeable with the people at the company and the company itself the stronger it is the more authentic it is like when you talk

about Google you also talk about it's people like they're one in the same googlers and a lot of companies have that same approach and I think with Miro we definitely incorporate our values into the brand our whole mission was to help companies build the next big thing like this this is what we want to do we want to be the platform that helps companies build the next big thing we also had to be a big thing like we need to show what big things are and so your company values for example can shape how big and how deep you go with your brand how authentic it is to the experiences that people have because ultimately values play a big part because values are foundational to how people behave at the organization how they work together how they work with one another how they work with customers how they talk to customers the best way to kind of incorporate your brand and how people are interacting with people that you are

selling to customers or whoever Partners is to have those values Incorporated because then it's every touch point isn't something that you have to like train people okay these are all the touch points and this is how the brand needs to manifest it already will because it's part of the DNA of the company so I think really integrating the values can help with that and also of course make the brand itself human and authentic and something that people really feel emotional connection to with

an example of value informing the brand or change or helping you make a different decision maybe a mirror or call or Greenhouse to make that a little more concrete authenticity as a value Candor as a value thoughtfulness as a value if you have a value around like a bias for action or something like that these days can translate to how the brand manifests in terms of the language that's used the colors the objects with Miro for example we had each character of the word Miro in a different shape and each shape had different characteristics and those were kind of tied back to different values so they each kind of represented something different well it's an example that like what were mirror's values while we're diving into there one of them was around agility and so one I don't remember which letter it was maybe the I it's like it was shaped like ugly and then we also have a visual manifestation of it so they all behaved

differently they all had their own kind of behavior and one of the things that was really important to us is that we were creating like a visual system or a visual language so that people that were from different parts of the world working together could understand each other without necessarily speaking the same language and so this was a way to invoke this connection of different perspectives and different languages in a way that kind of got all pulled together got it cool because there's a lot there like the way you all visualize the values were using the name Miro and I imagine there's four values then yeah and then agility as a value informed the product needs to be agile make sure people can be flexible in how they use it definitely how we build the product tell people around the product act and then that shape itself was like agile and moved that's awesome yeah I love

that were you there for coming up with the values people always want wondering just how do we come up with our company values do you have any insights into just developing company values we did iterations of it while I was there they already had a stake in the ground what I have done in the past with values is we just did an exercise with my leadership team for example where we did a workshop format we actually used Miro where everybody just like brain dumped their ideas around values and then it was okay from there let's group them into themes and then from there let's vote on the most important things and then from there how do we start to articulate and Define these things ultimately coming up with the definitions is not really something you can do as a group because it's just not very productive it's better if somebody who knows how to write well can come up with the first stab of the sentences if it's operating

principles of its values and then get feedback on it but you can get everybody's input and kind of make the process pretty structured by doing some something like that where it's like brain dumped group vote and then you have like your short list of things that you can then work to Define awesome

maybe one last question around brand people that aren't saying marketing your brand and okay it's like this fuzzy thing that I feel about our company when you think about creating a brand what are the bullet point things that you come up with there's like a logo there's colors palette you just talk through what is a brand when you're creating a brand and building a brand what are the elements of it so all of those things that you mentioned I would say the logo the colors the fonts all the kind of General aesthetic do you have photography do you use illustrations is it all illustrations all Graphics whatever you decide those things you need to understand like what the voice is of the brand how the brand sounds when you write things when you Market it how people talk all of that stuff is part of the brand if you want to build a brand that's really like scalable you think about it more as a system like a

brand system so this is creating things that like with Miro for example we had the letters and we had the colors and we had these concepts of agility and I I don't remember all of them off the top of my head but all these different concepts that then were represented by different shapes or different colors that could be used in various forms so it's really like how does it become an extension of all of the different things that you're going to be doing visually or when you talk to customers or how you present the product Etc and all of that combines to this feeling you get eventually from the brand right like all these things create that fuzzy feeling yes yeah it's interesting you to remember all the values that Miro if they're being B I'm just like I will never forget that there being values they've been so drilled into our heads yeah it's because they were too long it was something that we were constantly

working on because they were like too long and there were too many things in them to remember that was the problem that's a great learning there make them simple yeah but also don't make them generic yeah it can't be generic but also can't be too much that nobody knows what they are like they need to be some bone straightforward and easy to remember yeah potentially Illustrated with your company name that's a really cool idea exactly yeah last topic I want

to spend a little time on is something that I know you're really passionate about which is this idea of creating opinionated software that has clear opinions about how you should be using it and how you should be doing your work and so maybe as a first question just what is opinionated software what's important about it opinionated software is basically software platforms that essentially have either best practices or maybe some rules integrated into the system you have systems that you can customize any which way and however you want and then you have other systems that enforce a certain way of Behaving or doing work as you said and so I think probably a pretty well-known example for your audience especially is atlassian really building tools for like agile workflows and agile teams and Greenhouse is another example from a recruiting perspective in terms of what we call structured recruiting and there was a

very specific sort of way to create a pipeline build an interview kit and all of that was important because it made recruiting better and more transparent and obviously less bias and all those things so it's principled I would say it's anchored in some values and because of those values there will be certain rules that are built in that you can't

really work around do you have any advice for when it makes sense to be very opinionated about how you make people use your product and do the thing they're trying to do versus just like optimize for flexibility I mean I think at lasting kind of built around a process that was already happening and grind momentum and it was like okay let's build a solution to enable companies to do this with technology so there was already a process that didn't have a technology integrated and then with Greenhouse it was like there's a better way to do it and this is how it should be done so I think there's two different approaches either find a process that just doesn't have technology that is a best practice or growing best practice I think the same thing happened in like devops with many different tools and then Greenhouse which is more like what are companies missing how can they do it better how can we train them and teach them a

better way and then by the way our software helps you do that with the product and Company you're building now are you looking to make it very opinionated and here's how you should be doing performance reviews or are you thinking about it yes we are it is opinionated and it's opinionated because the current way that performance reviews happen are full of bias and there's a lot of problems with it it's like the best thing that companies can do and therefore they continue to do it but that just perpetuates a lot of issues the reason that companies have to go and look at compensation data and fix pay gapses because they have systemic problems with how people are promoted and progressed in the organization so they're recruited in a certain way they may or may not be developed and then they're evaluated on their performance which ultimately results in compensation and what people are paid and that as we

know there's plenty of problems so companies are fixing this compensation issue by like updating the comp every year but that doesn't fix the systemic problem and so yes we have opinions about how to fix the problem and therefore our building a system that when it comes to performance evaluation employee progression we require companies to be more transparent about the levels that the company the expectations for different levels and competencies and we create accountability both on the employee and the manager side but it's also like the right thing to do employees should feel that they're evaluated fairly and without a system kind of enforcing some of these things it's just there there's too much subjectivity in the process to make it good unless you really do a lot of work which most companies don't do to create the right system you don't have to use a platform to do it but if you don't do the work anyway

you won't have the outcome that you want which is people feeling good about their career and paid fairly yeah I found performance reviews to be one of the maybe the most powerful tool as a manager to change the way people operate help them improve make them fulfilled and happy with where things are going it feels like that's the core of management it's the performance review cycle and giving people feedback on how they're doing and then continuing to come back to here's where you're underperforming here's what it'll take to get to the next level so I'm excited about what you're working on thank you we've

reached our very exciting lightning round where I'm gonna ask you five rapid failure questions and you just tell me what comes to mind we'll go through it pretty fast does that sound good yes okay awesome first question what are two or three books that you recommend most to other people definitely radical Candor we give this out to customers it's really good for management and best practices around giving feedback I love The Art of War just as like searching thinking and then not work related a book called kafta on the shore it's one of my favorite murakami books that I highly recommend what is that one again kafta on the shore coughed on the shore well cool I haven't heard of that yeah awesome we'll link to these in the show notes what's a favorite other podcast than the one you're currently on I love cautionary tales I don't know if you know this one but it's a great podcast that basically identifies and tells

stories about the mental mindsets that we're in and the biases that we have and then like historic events that have happened and just crazy things that have resulted from things that we do as humans because we're biased irrational humans it's really good yeah what's a favorite recent movie or TV show that you watch I watched Sandman I don't know if you've heard of this it's based off of it's based off of like a eight-part graphic novel series by Neil gaim it's really good the TV version of it isn't exactly about the books but it's about the characters and I feel like the way that they portrayed the characters was really interesting and super diverse it's a great show awesome that's more plus one for that show what's a favorite interview question that you like to ask when you're interviewing people everybody hates it but I like asking like what someone's top 10 accomplishments are they hate it because

it's like oh God but it's really interesting to understand the level of quantitative versus qualitative in their accomplishments like what they value and also yeah if it's a little I ran 100 miles or I have a great family whatever it is it's really interesting to kind of get to know somebody and also what they value wealth in the industry do you respect most as a thought leader or just influence on your career like early days I really appreciated Nancy Duarte she's based in the Bay Area she has a agency called Duarte agency she does a lot around storytelling and digital communication she's been really great for me just in my career as a mentor I've worked with her a couple of times but also just following all the work that she does she's amazing awesome I remember learning about her when Al Gord get his Ted Talk and her old agency was it yes yeah yeah and if she's done like an incredible thing with her agency

because they started as making presentations more visually appealing and then it migrated to storytelling and then it's evolved to like change management and how to use story for driving change and she's also involved the agency so much over the years as well so it's really yeah she's done a lot of impressive of work Barbara thank you so much for being here this was amazing two last questions where can folks find you online if they want to reach out and learn more and how can listeners be useful to you LinkedIn is probably the easiest place to find me forward slash Barbara bow though and for me we're building a product in employee progression so anybody who wants to share their stories or feedback or insights around their experiences there or if they're interested in getting product feedback we're really interested in like actual user feedback even though we're selling to HR teams and what's the

URL pando.com awesome Barbara thank you for being here thank you so much Lenny thank you so much for listening if you found this valuable you can subscribe to the show on Apple podcast Spotify or your favorite podcast app also please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast you can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com see you in the next episode