eso I waas. I'll just give you a kind of a brief, brief biography or sort of sketch, uh, grew up in select city Utah, went to the University of Utah. Um, I graduated, uh, in 2011 and my first job out of there was that a company that they were called Spillman. They're now part of Motorola, and I worked in the support or gig there. Um, sort of learned, learned how toe work in support work with customers. I really liked that job, but I kind of felt like I was maybe a little bit trapped. Um, on the sort of the advice of one of my mentors at the University of Utah, um, went and got a graduate degree from Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh. I completed that in 2013. I did. In the middle of that. I did an internship with General Motors. Andi didn't plan on returning to Utah, but the sort of the the tech scene here was really good. And so I decided I had an offer from a company down in Provo called else dot com, which turned into Zandt about a year ago or so. Um, and that was That was where I got my first product manager job. And so when I worked there, I had the chance to take product sort of from research phase into, you know, into being a real product sold to customers to profitability. Andi, that was that was a great opportunity. Um, that, you know, you don't have all that opportunity too many times when you get to kind of be through the whole product. Lifecycle e have lots of thoughts about kind of that that process and how you go through that. Um, And after about two years of inside sales, I was contacted by a good personal friend who worked at my current company called the Desert. And I was invited to be sort of the initial product manager there. Um and and so I came over in 2016. My time of digital has been very interesting. I was brought on as a product manager after about a year, give or take, of being there. We purchased our largest competitors, ER, which was five times our size by revenue headcount on DSO. We had a challenging, um challenging in front of us to to try toe, integrate our systems and our people and our culture. Andi, bring that all in. And that was No, it's still going. Honestly, this acquisitions take a long time. Um, it was a little more complicated by the fact that we didn't buy the whole company. It was part of the company, Symantec. Um, take has now been purchased by a company called Broadcom. So we purchased a piece of them, and so that comes with lots of legal things where, you know, we could use their intellectual property for a period of time. We could use eins data centers for a period of time. And so over time, we just had to end each of those, you know, stop using. We used web security dot symantec dot com. We had to stop using that. You know, etcetera way could go back there if that's useful. But about a year after the acquisition started, um, I was given the opportunity to become the director of the product group. Um and so I've been doing that since about two years ago, August 28 Teams when I took on this role and my current team is, um, nine product managers, um, distributed a few in Mountain view. If you only high on that. I have one in Germany, one in India, one in Japan. So we have a very spread out. Yeah, very spread out group. Most of them came from the semantic acquisition. There are air. We acquired a number of offices. Did you say it was just a company that had offices in Salt Lake, Utah, and Saint George, Utah? Uh, he got a number of other offices. Um, but that's that's basically that's That's a brief sketch. I can you know, I think a lot of the other questions sort of zoom in on, uh but that That's kind of me. That's where I'm at. And it's been exciting. Ride chasing, Yeah.

eso my responsibilities are they kind of span between, you know, deciding strategic direction for the product working between, you know, kind of interdepartmental e working with sales, working with support, trying to understand what they need. Um, in my current role, I spend a little bit less time with customers than I used Thio. Uh, the thing I've learned about product organizations is that sort of the more you ascend or get promoted, the more you just get sent. Thio go deal with problem customers. Or so I tend to. I tend to mostly work with large customers or something where we have a problem and they want to have somebody with a cool title, doesn't there? I actually don't have the answers, but but but it helps. So I guess in short, my job is a lot more about relationships and strategy, whereas previously it was much more about sort of execution. And, um, you know, defining a road map, I now own sort of the total roadmap, which is I need a lot of help from from the individual contributors. Thio kind of bring that together a Z can imagine with with a product managers globally distributed we have a lot of dependencies on, but frankly, that's a problem. We're still trying to kind of wrapping your head around and becoming, um, efficient at, but But that that's, you know, a lot of my role is owning the roadmap and then sort of driving strategy and, um, cross the departmental agreement on on the things we might dio assed faras my work hours. Um, it varies. Um, it's almost never 40 hours, but Digital does support a pretty, pretty balanced work life. So what I find is it's is usually sort of the normal work hours. I have little kids at home, so I try to break away about five. And then I usually kind of touch base. Um, either with my boss, who's local or with one or two of my one or two of my reports who are somewhere else. That's kind of my hand or India time. Get on slack. It's usually not as intense, uh, but it's sort of email slack And what not a little bit later on, um, typically for for work for work travel, um, it's it averages to probably one or a little bit more. One week of the month that I would travel. Um, probably three quarters of that is to one of our other offices. You know, I'll go to quarterly business reviews or, you know, to kick off a product, visit one of our offices and just kind of be present. Um, and then and then the rest of the time is meeting with customers. You know, 25% you know, a few times here traveled to customers. Um, whenever I travel, I guess I should say, when I Whenever I travel toe into an office, I do try to talk to sales and say, Hey, who can I meet with? I usually do work in a customer visit or two, usually one day at a time. I could go visit some customers because, you know, if I'm in Australia, I mean as well, you know, I may as well go visit customers because I too expensive to visit. You know it's too expensive to visit one customer there, then working from home pre pre coded was usually 11 or two days a week. You know the nature of my team. So many people are outside of my office that it doesn't matter to them whether I'm in the office, but I like I like to be in the office. The so much my job is managing my boss, who's the chief product officer or sort of working with executives who are mostly in Lehi. So there's a lot of value to me being able to go and you knock on their door and talk with them. Um, so that's that's the main reason why I go into work. If I If I look at my day and I just have zoom meetings all day, I just stay home is kind. But But, yeah, it's, you know, did Assert is fairly flexible that way, mostly because we're so distributed. We were when we were on Lee High. I was in the high every day. Oh!

Yeah, as you alluded to. My challenges are mostly sort of relational. Um, they're two fold without, you know, maybe getting too far into it. You know, most of the executive leadership is not very technical. And so, um, you know, working on product, we are very tied to sort of. We try to be agile fall scrum principles. Um, but we have an executive group that wants to talk about dates and when we're going to release things and those two things don't mix together very well. So one of the biggest challenges is correctly setting expectations for for when we can release things when marketing or press releases or, you know, think about anything like that. You know, when we might time things, Andi, we're getting a little bit better, but we still find that we get sort of arbitrary dates created that that I think you know, I think sales just wants a date on day. Don't want any gap between when we release and when they can talk about it. So we have some challenges there, but mostly it's it's sort of relational and dealing with sort of sales expectations. Uh, there's always a balance between making the customer happy and trying to, you know, increase revenue. Um, those two things are aligned. If you build something great, um, the customers want, then you're gonna have great revenue outcomes. Um, in our in our current situation, we're still trying to sort of transition systems customers. It's a little bit more strained because customers want more things, you know, your expectations from the old platforms and products they had versus the new ones. So that that's really the challenge is trying to keep the customers happy while keeping sales happy. Um, the best tool I can, I can say generically is data. Uh, you know, if you're approaching, you know, a product sort of product decisions, especially. You're always going to struggle to balance between what the CEO or, you know, they often talk about the hippo, the highest paid person in the room. You know what that person wants? Um, you will. You will never be successful in telling them No, unless you have good data, good data, customers, or or whatnot. So, you know, in any product or guy believe should be some sort of you X or US researcher, especially to help get that information in a small or that will be the product manager. Aziz. We've grown a little bit. We have a few researchers and their their data and the research and serving they could do of our customers is so valuable because it lets me go to executives and say, you know, explicitly customers, you know, this is what they want, you know? And we can even support it with or to the extent we can support it with you ex diagrams or wire France or, you know, some sort of experiential idea. Um, that makes all those conversations easier. Otherwise, I'm just saying no to the CEO, which is bad. You know, it's it's very good. It's never good conversation when you just say no, you're wrong or whatnot So that's what I yeah,