career working for a building wholesale supplier name stock building supply.they were Ah, rather large entity. They were actually a daughter company of Ah Footsie 100 company called Wolseley. And it was kind of that was a UK based firm. And so that was kind of their foray into the U. S. Was acquiring this business, Um, kind of think about, ah, Lowe's or Home Depot, But selling directly to general contractors and not on the retail side. Um, I worked there until the financial crisis happened. The financial crisis impacted obviously financial services, but it also killed anything that required you to borrow money. And construction is heavily financed, as you can imagine. Um And so at that time I had made a decision that I wanted to go back and get my MBA. Um, while I was with stock had done a couple of different things. So I kind of learned how to run a retail store. Um, I also we have some manufacturing facilities that enabled us to do engineer wood floors to do trust us for homes. And so I had played around with doing some six Sigmund Manufacturing. Um, and then we had this great idea, which waas um, it's hard to sell a stick of lumber because a stick of lumber from us is the exact same as a stick of lumber from somebody else. We have been commoditized, and what we noticed is our customers were saying What's a quote for this? And then they would take that quote to competitors. And then they would say, If you could do it for cheaper little will buy from you And that was kind of the name of the game on DSO we had came up with this idea. I'm sure we weren't the first trip. Invent it had this idea of doing what we called installed sales and we were saying, If you will buy the lumber from us or the sighting or the garage door, whatever it might be, we will also send out fall five workers to install those things for you on DSO. At that time leading up to the crash in 2008 real estate was taking off and going crazy and people were actually general contractors were interested in being real estate agents. They weren't actually interested in building the house on DSO. They were more than happy to buy the lumber from us and by the labour, and that's kind of how we we created a market opportunity that way. Anyways, everything imploded. I decided it was time to go back to school and because I had done some Six Sigma work, and that was kind of a buzz worthy thing At the time, I decided that I was gonna go focus in operations management and really explore stick segments. Some of those other operation management discipline's, um, I didn't know it at the time, but I was getting my India at the University of Utah, and American Express had a an office at the time. There in Taylorsville and G had started to just announced to the world that they were doing Six Sigma and look at all these amazing results that they were getting from Six Sigma. And so what you tend to see in corporate America is once someone is starting to be recognized for a new methodology, it starts to spread out across other Fortune 500 companies. And so American Express was like, Hey, we're gonna do six Sigma to, um, as you can imagine, The G e version of Six Sigma was manufacturing specific. The American Express version Waas how do you translate it? Not into a physical product, but how do you translate it into a service? Onda Digital service at that? And so that, to me, was intellectually stimulating. And so when I was looking for an internship despite the fact that American Express was a financial services company and we're in the still in the middle of this crisis, um, I decided to take the internship with them. My thought waas What's the worst that could happen in eight weeks? I'll learn something there. They're willing to pay me on, Def. It's not a good fit. Then I'll do something else. Right? Um, so I joined with them. I did a summer project which is traditional for a graduate program. You tend to be assigned a single product. I mean project. And then you do that for the amount of time and then you report on what you did and the results of that, um, I was fortunate enough that the results were of such a nature that they extended me an offer and, um, I had evaluated other companies. Operations management was kind of like I said, six Sigma was growing. There was a lot of opportunities. I was very, very fortunate to be in a field where it was growing and not shrinking like a lot of everything else was in the 2009 period of time. But anyway, so what basically had happened in American Express? The problem that I was required to stall? Waas Amex has a very strong brand and we serve a fit folks to feel how you know, to know how they feel about our interactions with them. And we were selling credit cards for Delta at the airport. And, as you can probably imagine, the results that we're getting from those surveys where this is terribly annoying and frustrating, and I wish he had never stopped me. Eso are net promoter score was really, really low and so what they had asked me to do was apply six Sigma principles. Teoh analyze the results of those surveys to understand what we could improve in the process and raise our net promoter score. When I took the product on, it was an unheard of negative 18 which for American Express it was like we take, we took customers. I'm not with Amex and a more so I keep saying we, but you know what I mean. American Express takes customer service so seriously that it was like this needs to be fixed or we're shutting it down even though we're getting this.um it means that led to the full time offer. I considered my options and honestly, I went with culture and leadership, which is a lesson that I've learned.if you feel like you're fighting in the culture and you're like, I just wish the whole organization would change and I know that this sounds done coming out of my mouth, But people get into circumstances where they're like, Well, I'll change it and I'll figure it out. If you're fighting against the waves, it will never stop. They'll never, ever stop. So that point you need to make the decision of doing the right thing and looking for a different culture. The second thing that I would say is if you have ambition and you're hoping to grow your career and everything else over time, your leader will play an important role in that. And when I've also come to look realizes that it almost never your immediate leader who determines that it's always your skipped level leader or above. And so you want to make sure that whoever you're interviewing with and their leadership that you know them, you feel comfortable with them. They know you feel comfortable with you when you're getting a first job for the first time, it's hard to knowBut those are the questions I would ask in an interview. When they say, What questions do you have? I would say things like, What's your leadership style? What do you do to develop people? Do you invest in your people? What does that look like? You know, what are the most important things that you can think of? Um, for a candidate to exhibit personality wise, is there something within the team that you're missing? And you're hoping a new hire conf ill, right? Like, Oh, the team is a little bit boring. We need a fund.kinds of questions that I would ask to get an understanding of both culture and leadership. Anyways, I was with and Max I moved from Salt Lake to New York, which is where our headquarters is is that and I was able to continue to grow my career and everything was great there. Um, about a year ago. No, actually, is probably two years ago, e I got to a place where my life had just kind of, you know, I have four Children, I have a wife, but, you know, home. And we were getting to a place where I was starting to really kind of say I leave. I leave these things that I love so much every day for 10 12 hours. Am I really being fulfilled? Um, I really enjoying what I'm doing. And so I started to talk to my leaders and say, I want to do you in different things and I want to be intellectually engagedand I started to talk to them. And what I realized is is all the opportunities that were coming to me is kind of like, OK, these are the 10 people you need to talk to. This is what you need to dio like. I was kind of Oh, you know, like, give me something good challenge. Um and I don't want to say that I had mastered, you know, credit cards in the U. S. But I have felt like I really had reached a place where it just was not grabbing me and holding my my intellect the way that it used to. So all the other stuff was good. The culture was fine. People were fine. But I just wasn't feeling like I was being fulfilled intellectually. And I wanted any challenge on DSO. At that point, I actually started to look at Innovation Labs. That was a new cool thing. And I guess what I would just say is my career has been defined by understanding what the next thing is that's coming in my field and let me give you a very concrete example of that. When I first started, Six Sigma was all the rage right then Six Sigma transformed into PMP. And then PMP transformed into agile and then agile, now is transforming into, you know, design thinking, plus agile together. So in the product space, when you used to say, Oh, how long have you been a product manager? It's like I've been a product manager for as long as it's existed. But I've been doing this kind of work for, you know, 15 20 years, right? And so you'll notice that. But like if I had said No. Six Sigma is it? I'm not gonna figure out PMP. Then I would have been left behind, just plain and simple. And when PMP started to transform into Agile, if I had ignore that, I would have been in trouble. And instead I took the opportunity to educate myself, get certifications and things like that ahead of the curve, and that always put me in a position to be able to take on unique projects and teams and transformations, which in my line of work, has led me toe wearing that anyway. So then innovation was kind of the next big thing, right? Everyone wanted to differentiate with innovation and eso. I started to look out there and through that activity I got connected with, uh, with lows. Who's my current employer, and I do product management with lows and our innovation labs or trying to define the future of retail right?

So in product management, I defined product management in one word, which is alignment. Eso. My responsibilities really are to make sure that, uh, initiatives within the organization are aligned with our stakeholders are aligned with our shareholders, and what I consider to be most important are aligned with our customers. Um, and so what I try and do is facilitate. I don't actually do. I don't ever write a line of code. That's not what I do. If I have a digital product, I don't write the line code. But I make sure that the objectives or the requirements that are being produced by the business is communicated in such a way that the best line of code can be written right on DSO that it's kind of like Think about a hub and spoke. There's all these spokes out there in the product manager sits there at the Hub and make sure that everything is aligned and that you're marching forward. In addition to that, on product management is responsible for understanding, knowing and defining the customer and the needs of the customer. And so I consider myself a customer champion and I always start there. Um, there's a lot of things that you can dio a lot of thingsI'm all the time. But most of the time you can kind of define success and define whether something will work based on how closely aligned it is to the customer's needs. And so I try and be a champion for the customer, and I try and use data to influence people that may disagree with the direction that we're taking to help them to understand. This is why we're doing what we're doing.I talked Teoh. At the very beginning of my career, I had an opportunity toe talk to somebody who worked for G E and at the time was responsible for billion dollar plus capital projects. So these were the biggest projects that G did. And I asked him, what was the one thing that you wish you had done in your career and his response to me, which I thought was very interesting. And I'll qualify? It is, he said, I wish I had learned how to use brass knuckles better. Um, and what he meant by that was not literally going out and intimidating. People were beating people up or whatever us. But what he meant by that was being aggressive in ensuring that you are being successful in your project, your product or whatever you're doing. And a lot of people are uncomfortable with asking the next question. Right. So, like are being on track? Uh, yeah, we're on track, but I Why did you have a hesitation there? Right? People have, ah problem asking. Why did you have a Hezbon. Do you really dive into it and really understand what's happening right? And if you don't, you don't take no for an answer. And that's really what he was trying to say was. Be aware of what's happening. Be aggressive about making sure that you're on the right kind of path. And I think that product managers do that through that alignment process. They have to ask really tough questions. They have Teoh push people to places that their uncomfortable sometimes to make sure that they're well informed and that the right things are being done because there's nothing worse than revealing a product. And you think it's going to do one thing and the code does something else right? Or you think it's gonna do one thing and the code does that. But you're stakeholder. Thought it was gonna do something else right? S. So it's just really important to ask those questions and to be well informed, let me talk a little bit about my work. Uh, work week, um, work life balance is an important thing. I think every company is really trying to achieve work. Life balance. There's probably some that are, um, if that's important to you like I don't work all the time and have no no distinction between life and work. Then hey, great of where. But I think in Fortune one hundreds, which is where my experience has been work. Life balance is a differentiator, right? And it's something that they talk about. And so I I personally and I get up early and get to work. Person. I do 10 hours to the day. Sometimes I need to do the 12 or 14. I try and avoid that. But I definitely don't do an eight hour job and I almost never take lunch. Onda reason why I do that is because I want to get done and I want to be present for my family once the work day is over and I want to spend time with them before kids start going to bed and all those kinds of things. So to me, that's what I've done on DSO. I start my date early, do work through lunch, finished my day and I'm done. There's a lot of people who will sign off and then they'll get back online and the work later at night or something like that I also don't do that because that's the time I spend with my wife. And it's way more important for me to have that relationship with my wife on, spend that time with her and enjoy her. Then Teoh be answering some more emails. And so for me, I've done that. Now what I will say to you is organizations will push on that. They'll say, Do you really need to be off at five oclock today? Right? And you could kind of say, Well, I could do 5. 30 But every time you compromise on the boundaries you're trying to establish and just causes confusion for your organization and for the people that work with you, and I have very seldom very seldom run into these air the boundaries I need to make my life of my family work where someone has said, That's just unacceptable. You must do something different, right? Eso just have those open, transparent, candid conversations with your leaders and let them know, and it depends on what stage of life you're in. You may be more comfortable working until seven and you want to come in at 10 o'clock right to me. I could never think of starting at 10 a.m. But for other people, that might be the work life balance that they want. Right. But just be open about it. Talk to your leader. And where there is truly a problem and not just like, Well, could we, um, you know? Then then that's where you have to make decisions. Is this worth it or not, right?as I was traveling a couple days every month, it wasn't it wasn't over overbearing.working from home. I've been working from home since, uh, since I guess it was march. Um And we are We don't have ah specific date that we're targeting to come back. We're trying to make the right kinds of decisions, but what I would just say is that I don't think work from home. This is my personal opinion. I know some big names out there have would go against us, but I personally don't think that worked from home will become a permanent thing for the majority of the world.But you know, we'll come back when the time is right when things make sense.

most of the time, the challenges that I face on building off of kind of some of the things that I said before, most of the challenges that I face or really identifying the right people, the right experts getting time with them. Uh, one of the things that I tell everybody when agile first came around as I'll give this example. When actual first came around, I was really nervous about some of the things that I got rid of. And I'll explain so before when you're doing Sclc Waterfall, which was kind of the PMP style of project management before agile. It was very documentation heavy. Um, and people kind of said, We're spending so much time writing and that we're not spending any time doing. I totally appreciated that. But what they had basically come up with Waas. Well, unless you think it's important to write it down, you shouldn't do it. That was kind of like the earliest A dial principles, right? And guess what people did, even if it was important to write it down. Did they write it down? No, because they were told, unless you think it's important right down and they kind of, um, adhere to their natural human sideAnd so I was worried about not having a certain baseline standard. But that fell on me as a product manager, Right to say, Hey, I do think we need some documentation and this is the documentation we're gonna dio. And then when people would say why that's against the methodology. Are you not on board with going toe agile as they would tell me where it says you're supposed to eliminate all documentation, right? We'd have those conversations and we would get there but finding the right person and then getting time on their calendar when they're like, could this just be done by an email, which is the easier way for me where I don't want to keep my calendar free from meeting after meeting after meeting and being like, No, no, no, I do think this one, we actually do need to talk, you know, and then getting that stuff written down and recorded and getting that expertise out of their brain in a way that we could action is one of the bigger challenges. Right? Then I think communication, um, letting everybody know what they need to know in a large organization. So safely, quickly is really hard on. I can't tell you. How many times have you been sent updates and people have said to me I didn't get your update and you're like I send it at Thursday at 3 59 PMthose kinds of things happen, right? And you've got to understand that. I think that leaves toe a comment that I would make here, which is when you're trying to think about how to be successful in an organization you can either do one of two things. You can either try and improve yourself and become the best that you can be, or you can take it personal. And when I very first started my career, the first piece of feedback that I had gotten I was like, so angry. I was like, I took it as a personal offense that they thought that I didn't do this amazing thing right. And what I've learned over time is even if someone goes to meeting and you know, they've got the update in their inbox and they're like, I was never updated, you can either take that personal or you can handle it and just say, What can I learn from this scenario? This stakeholder I probably need to connect with briefly before and say I sent you the update. Can you read it right? And does that require a little bit of extra work? It sure does, but I'd rather do that than have an acrimony in its relationship with this individual or seethe over here that that person never reads my updates.