Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to Check in to check out the E Commerce Growth podcast from Mobile First.
My name is Justin Ehrenstein and my co host is Connor Burke.
Awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming on Check in to Check out today, Brian. We're so excited to have you. So I just want to start with a check in. How are you feeling today?
[00:00:28] Speaker B: I'm feeling good, pretty good today. We've got a promo going, we tweaked some things, we had some nice boost to KPIs that happened yesterday. The weekend's about to happen so I'm doing, I'm doing pretty good.
[00:00:40] Speaker A: Awesome.
[00:00:41] Speaker B: Awesome.
[00:00:42] Speaker A: And at One Pet, what do you own?
[00:00:45] Speaker B: So One Pet is a brand that owns a few different brands and I effectively own the Honest Pause brand, particularly the acquisition D2C functionality. I mean y' all know how it is. You're wearing all the hats.
I own the website and make the website do all of the stuff better. Generally the kind of the main KPIs that I'm focusing on are conversion rate, new customer acquisition, you know, a lot of those kind of those standard things that every E commerce brand wants to go but that just because that's like almost everything when you're talking new customer acquisition and conversion rate. And so that means I have to work on traffic, traffic acquisition, owning the website functionality, making sure the orders properly go through to fulfillment and make you know, just all of the different things of effectively if it touches the website, I'm directly own it or heavily, heavily, heavily involved in it.
[00:01:48] Speaker C: Awesome. Is there any part of your day that you feel like you, you look forward to the most or any part of your job that you enjoy more than any other aspect that the most?
[00:01:56] Speaker B: As soon as you say that most, it's a difficult question. I, I really enjoy the puzzle of digging into the data and trying to understand what is working and what is not working and, and then creating action items be it lessons learned of what has happened in the past and or plans for what we should be doing differently in the future. You know, kind of that roadmap planning based on, based on digging into the data from our store.
It's a very fun blend of hard numbers, you know, data science, that engineering side of things.
But there's also kind of that vague art form of understanding the customer, the market, the product and how everything all fits together. It's, it really is a puzzle that's like how I like to think about it and it's one that you're never going to complete. There's always new tech changes New market changes, you know, new products. You're trying to tap into new customer demographics. It doesn't matter what it is. There is always some new something that you can either bolt on or you can revisit what you've been doing and try to optimize it, change it, improve it, or sometimes just cut it out and remove it. That's something that a lot of people struggle with, is getting rid of things. But oftentimes that's one of the best things that you can do.
[00:03:23] Speaker C: Yeah, I love that we tell it to clients. Sometimes that, you know, you find that with, you might get like a loss on a new design or a new feature. And sometimes it's actually a win because it tells you where there's maybe like a tech deficit or something, you know? You know, like I don't have to worry about building this out anymore. We now know that this isn't necessary. So people might think, oh, we want to add this feature in. But the, the real benefit is actually don't add that feature at all. Ignore it, quit talking about it, quit spinning your wheels on it, Move on to something else. So that's awesome.
[00:03:50] Speaker B: Absolutely. Every time you say yes to one thing, you have to say no to something else. There's always, there's only so much time in the day and so the more time you've put into something that's just kind of like means you're saying no to pursuing something that could likely will have more impact. And then you've even, you can even see it in some of those AB testing data set websites. Which one was it? Was it good ui? I think they had published this big analysis of all of the tests that they have in their library and the, the tests that had the highest likelihood of increasing revenue was the stuff that remove things from the website.
And then second, if I, if I remember correctly, I know, I know the first one was removing and then remember correctly changing things was second and adding things was the third most likely, the least likely to actually improve your website. Yet that's what everybody focuses on. The new shiny thing. Oh, the new Shopify app that the sales rep totally said that they're we're going to have a 452% ROI.
[00:04:55] Speaker C: Yeah. Yeah, that's funny. I feel like it's a little counterintuitive. But mobile first is, is really big on celebrating like failures and I think that kind of lines up with what you're saying there that yeah, sometimes it's the things that don't work that actually make you the most money. Or you know, that end up being the big benefit. That's cool. That's cool.
[00:05:10] Speaker A: So what does your day to day look like? I mean as a product manager there's a lot of different ways. Are you having to spend in a lot of meetings, are you able to do a lot of customer research? Where, where do you spend your time?
[00:05:19] Speaker B: Man, it always comes and goes in waves depending on what we're going on. There's, it always seems like there's, there's a season. Sometimes the season is a week, sometimes it's a few months. Thankfully we've got a great team, great people, group of people to work with. That means I am able to keep meetings to a minimum even though we are remote first.
We're literally all over the US and we have no physical or not the US the world and we have no physical office. We've got a, we've developed a culture of ownership and trust and I'm able to provide goals to the team with some technical guidance, some specific guidance. You know, I try sometimes I, I do have to be specific and it must be done exactly this way. But I try not to, I try to be. This is the goal, this is what we're trying to do and what, why we're trying to do it. I think these, you know, this code structure, this path, this whatever is probably going to get us that way. Go, go forth and do it, get us, get us there.
I find that that really helps the team flex their, their muscles as it were, and come up with new creative ways, ideas and the more that they understand the goal, the better that they can contribute to the company. Everybody loves to contribute and so that helps.
Meetings are minimal, thankfully.
[00:06:40] Speaker A: That's awesome.
[00:06:40] Speaker B: It goes. And so as far as my day to day, you know, there's, it ebbs and flows usually it's kind of a little bit of a flow of some analysis and trying to identify what's the next big thing, where are we going to be spending our time, what, what has worked from our most recent bit, bits of, of projects and the like and then building up plans and then going out and executing. I try to give my team as much, like I said, as much ownership so that they can run and that allows me to not be just constantly worrying about what they're doing. I've got great trust in them to just go forth and do which allows me to really focus in on then whatever it is my task. So it's a nice blend of team leadership, analysis, project planning and then executing on things. Things myself. Yeah, that's probably the flow but you know, and then sometimes I'm in Shopify managing stuff. Sometimes it's lots of research on apps and solutions and competitors. So much competitor research. AI is definitely helping out a lot more. A lot of shortcuts. You know, what, what are people doing for this? What are apps that can do this?
What's. What's the latest trend on such and such topic? It gives me a great 80% solution with like 2% of the effort and then I can then just shortcut and focus in on, on whatever, whatever lead it, it takes me down. Totally been quite a great. Yeah. Quite a bit of. A lot of fun learning and, and these just growing and changing so fast. My goodness.
[00:08:15] Speaker A: Yeah, it's incredible.
[00:08:18] Speaker C: Every seven months I think AI is basically evolving into twice the, you know, it's what, what do they say? Iterating, I think exponentially every seven months or so. Yeah, it's wild. Hopefully that does reduce more meetings though. I think that's, that's my goal. There's never been a meeting that I wanted the other guy to show up for. I'll say that. Not a big fan of meetings here, but they're necessary. I get that. So do you feel like when since you, you have a good grasp on managing a team that you've curated, it sounds like you've got a group of people who have a lot of really good skills, they're very competent, you trust what they do and you want to minimize meetings. Do you feel like there's ever an issue with burnout? Do you feel like that's something that you manage yourself pretty well or that maybe your team might struggle with and you might help or do you feel like they do a good job with it? You know, is that something maybe that just doesn't come up at all? What are your thoughts on that?
[00:09:09] Speaker B: It definitely comes up. I was having a conversation with my project manager about that just a few weeks ago. So, you know, sometimes it happens, especially when you have those flare ups of those urgent projects or those projects that just keep on going and going and going for whatever reason. There's definitely a risk of that happening. I try to be proactive to keep that from happening and make sure that the team has a lot of variety. And when I and I structure our project board in such a way that we have our main tasks and our fallback tasks and so that that provides a clear owner and they're, they're fully separated out in a different, different group clearly labeled as active projects. Main active projects. Fallback and with that, that I give them a level of ownership of this, of, hey, this is the main thing, this is why we're doing it. And this is the timeline of, you know, if there is any urgency beyond just the sooner we launch it, the sooner we make more money. And I give them a level of flexibility to take on some of those fallback tasks which are usually kind of the smaller things that they can, they can slip in.
And that I've found provides a nice big benefit of avoiding burnout because it gives them enough variety, particularly when they have these longer tasks. So that way we can. Sometimes it's just avoiding burnout is as simple as just doing something different. And then we also have a fun feature Friday every other Friday where it's just like, hey, what do you want to work on? You know, you know, our goals, you know, our KPIs, you know, what we're trying to work towards.
It doesn't matter if it's on the list or off of the list. What do you think will will have an impact and you will enjoy working on it doesn't have to be the most maximal optimized, highest priority. If you think it'd be fun, then, then go for it, try it. So I try and that gives them an opportunity to come up with something. I'm not telling them what to do. They tell me what they want to work on, I'll give it a thumbs up and off they go. And that's produced some pretty unique and interesting ideas that I definitely wouldn't have come up.
That's been fun. So yeah, just try and keep a little bit of variety. You know, with remote work we have flexibility where it's, you know, make your meetings, work your hours and if you need a break, you know, just update your slack status, make sure we, you know, we know or something like that. So just trying to get a little bit of flexibility, a little bit of ownership and variety. I feel like that helps avoid burnout. Gets people to come up with new and creative interesting ideas that we otherwise wouldn't have had. And then of course, you know, when you get burned out, the quality and speed of your work goes down. So it's just, just seems like a nice net benefit for, for everyone.
[00:11:57] Speaker C: I love that. So it's, it comes down, it sounds like to prioritizing what's important again, trusting your team that you've hired and who you trust, their skills, letting them decide and, and delegate their own tasks and then just giving them that opportunity to be creative and do what they do best without Feeling maybe, you know, hindered by project goals and timelines and deadlines. So that's awesome. I love that idea. The Feature Fridays or the Fun Feature Friday is a great idea.
[00:12:23] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:12:23] Speaker B: Yeah, I. I stole that. I can't remember. There was some big company during their early tech days where it was every. I think it was like, once a month, then they could work on whatever project that they wanted, and it came up with some big creative ideas. So, yeah, and it's. It's fun. Like I said, fun Feature Friday. Whatever you want. You know, the goals, you know the priorities. So you tell me. And that just like, the whole, like, hey, you tell me what you want to work on just gets people excited.
[00:12:50] Speaker C: Yeah, I love that. I don't want to take up too much more time on this, but just if you have one off the top of your head, can you think of any features that maybe y' all came up with during that time that was really useful and maybe out of the box or. I mean, not out of box, you know, I think. You know what I'm saying? I can't get those words out, but.
[00:13:05] Speaker A: Out of the ordinary.
[00:13:06] Speaker C: Thank you.
[00:13:07] Speaker B: Yeah. Let's see. I think it was a few weeks ago, our designer, what she did was just a kind of an impromptu creative analysis and just did a whole bunch of looking into the competition.
It was a fun read, very interesting read to just see what's going on.
Star competitors, and there wasn't any one big thing that came out of it, but what did come out of it was just a whole bunch of little tweaks to our pdp.
Just like, hey, they had this little, you know, little copy messaging. This. You know, their buy box is structured like this. And so we then just put a whole bunch of those small little things into the pdp and that. That worked. It was nice. It was a good batch of changes.
Those. It's those details, those small little things that add up for better or worse. One of the things, the perspectives that we like to have is all we need to do is be a tenth of a percent better than our competition, and then we can outsell them and outscale them. But if we just do that a tenth at a time, over and over and over with all of the different KPIs, suddenly we're several percent better than them on conversion rate or our CAC efficiency, et cetera, et cetera.
SEO rankings. You just need to be 1% better than the competition in your SEO optimization, and boom, you're unbeatable in page one or slot One.
[00:14:41] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:14:41] Speaker B: That's awesome.
[00:14:41] Speaker C: That's a great answer. That's cool. Little spring cleaning, it sounds like from a design perspective.
[00:14:46] Speaker A: So as a product manager, it's impossible to be great at everything. So what's some of your strengths? But really, almost more importantly, what are some weaknesses that you rely on others for?
[00:14:56] Speaker B: So with my career, I started out in web development and I did the agency rotation for some 12, 13 years. Small business. Small agency. So small businesses wearing all the hats. Agency wearing all the hats, small business, you know, small agents, my goodness, it's all of the things all of the time. So that, that path in my career gave me a very, very broad range of experience and exposure to industries, tech stacks, strategies, you know, all of the different stuff. So that gave me a broad range, but I was still able to have some specialization on that. That was mostly what I did throughout my career was building out the UI side of things with front end development and lots of SEO optimization.
So that gave me a good exposure into conversion optimization and copy optimization and marketing optimization and a lot of those types of things. So even though it was specialized, it still gave me a good broad exposure. That I think is definitely one of my strengths. Even though I had been writing hardly any code these days and my, my code capabilities are, are, they're, they're, they're slowing down. I can't write as fast as I used to and I'm not keeping up with the, the ever changing tech stacks anywhere near like I used to. But I can still have those conversations. I can still have highly technical conversations with reps for apps or you know, new services with development team. I can then use that knowledge to help prioritize, you know, we're talking about every tenth of a percent makes a difference. Code quality, all of that matters. Site speed matters. Everybody loves to give lip service to the importance of site speed. But then they're just like, oh yeah, just add this extra script and that one and that one and that one and that one. Why is my site so slow?
So I'm able to, to still get into the details of the product because I've been there, done that on the direct contributor side of things.
And then I'm now broadening my exposure and my interactions so I can keep a level perspective on the broad, you know, the full, the wide picture, whatever words, hard.
[00:17:12] Speaker A: You're good.
[00:17:12] Speaker C: I know what you're saying though. Yeah. And that's, that's really, this is a good, good point.
[00:17:17] Speaker B: So because I've interacted with all of these different departments, all of these different types of people, Clients, technical, non technical. Even though I was just fumbling all over my words right there, I'd like to think that I do a good job of bridging the different topics, explaining, you know, what are the implications. I've got a whole repertoire of all sorts of analogies to try and translate different concepts to convince people of what's important.
And then I always try to go back into the data because even if they don't fully understand the analogy of why the tech of the code, of the API, of the yada, yada, whatever, you know, it's all Greek to them. Like, well, you know, when we turned it off, our data got hurt and you know, conversion rate was this. And you can speculate it out to this many hundreds of thousands of dollars year. Boom, now they get it.
[00:18:06] Speaker A: Yeah, that makes sense. So those are some amazing strengths. I love the technical side. I understand that. I've come from that. Where do you rely on others?
[00:18:16] Speaker B: Where.
[00:18:17] Speaker A: What are some things that you have to rely on? Teammates. Because that's not a strength of yours. It's something that other people are better at.
[00:18:25] Speaker C: I want to say this before you answer real quick. I did like what you said a second ago about how difficult it is to stay and this might be what you're about to go into, but how difficult it is to stay up to date with things when you're managing teams and like, you know, like you said, not knowing exactly what's new, what new tech stacks everyone's using, but, but knowing where to go to get that information, knowing how to communicate that to people.
And it sounds like kind of what you said earlier on in the, in, in the show here, it's about relying on the team that you've hired and knowing that they have the skills to do that. Even if you don't fully understand the skill needed, you understand that you've hired them to do it properly and you trust them to do it. So I, I love that and I think that's something that I would hope and I, I personally and I think our listeners might, might agree with that too. So it's a cool sentiment.
[00:19:10] Speaker B: But yeah, yeah, there's, there's a weird duality as a product manager and e commerce manager where you're running the website, where you are highly specialized and focused, but you're absolutely a generalist at the same time. And so the weakness is, yeah, I'm not as into the weeds of any specific topic. Like a direct contributor is on knowing the code, knowing the code base, knowing the Copy the graphics, the graphic tools, all of the different things that go into building a website and running it. I can have great conversations with the teams. I like to think that I'm really good at asking questions for us to then collaborate and work together towards it. But I very much need their help on all of these different topics because I'm not as much of a specialist as they are in whatever that that is, be it development, design, be writing, whatever, whatever the case may be. And so I, you know, I can't do each individual task to the skill of my team. That's why I have to be able to trust them. And that's why I try go so out of my way to share the big picture, because that's my specialization. You know, that's, that's what this seat does. I have to be aware of all of teams. You know, this is e commerce. Every team flows through the website. So I have to be aware of all of the teams, all of the priorities and all of those different things and be able to bridge the gap. And so that's what I have to be able to do, is be that bridge, even if I can't go down into the specifics. And so that, that is ultimately my, my weakness with where I've been taking my career is I can talk with everyone, but I can't do anyone's job, not as well as they can. Sure, I could, I could. My code editor, I could build out another Shopify theme. Yeah, I've. I've written, you know, I've written a lot. I could, I could write a listicle and whatnot, but I can't do it as well as everyone, but because I know what goes into a listicle, I know what goes into the UI of a good page, I know what goes into really good code. I can get all of all three of those people into a room and work with them and talk with them and be like, okay, we need to make sure we don't forget about this. Don't forget about this.
How do you think we should solve this and get everyone all very cohesively working together? What I love to say is, I can come up with a good idea. I'd like to think I have a good track record at coming up with good ideas. My teammates, they're really good at also coming up with good ideas, but they're just good ideas. It's when we work together, we can turn our different good ideas and combine them together into a great idea. And that's how we can create a multiplicative effort out of what we do. We can't do it individually, but as a team, with the right focus, with the right cohesion, with the right direction, that's, you know, we can be 1% better than, than, you know, 1/10 of a percent better than any of our competitors if we pick that focus and go at it.
[00:22:20] Speaker C: Yeah, I love that. I think a lot of people in this industry suffer from imposter syndrome. And I think being in a position like yours where you don't get to specialize in things day to day and you're put in that position of being a generalist, you start to feel that a lot more because you think like, oh, I'm not up to date on these things. Right. I don't know the de details of this project or, you know, the specific skills that are needed for it.
And so you find yourself thinking things like, oh, maybe I'm not qualified for this, but I think in a lot of ways that's, that's a normal way to feel. And I think the message that I'm hearing from you, in all honesty, I really resonate with that. I think it's, it's good to hear that. I think a lot of E commerce directors and people in this industry need to be reminded of that. You don't need to know everything, especially in the world of AI. It feels like you should, but you don't need to. And as long as you're inquisitive and you're trusting in the team that you have, you're going to end up doing all right. So that's awesome. It's really cool.
[00:23:15] Speaker B: You have to be able to admit when you're wrong and you have to be able to listen to the team and let them convince you. And that's, that's with egos and well, I'm the such and such title. Like, it can be so difficult and that's, that's when things fall apart. I've seen people come in and trying to pound their chests and be, well, I'm the, the CEO, I'm the owner, I'm the director of whatever. You know, I'm in charge of these things. So therefore my way is the way.
Are you sure? If I could guarantee that I was right 51% of the time, I could be, I could make infinite money on Wall Street. I can't truly 100% guarantee that I'm right 51% of the time. I'd like to think that I'm right at least 51% of the time, but truly guarantee it. No And I have to be able to let go that and recognize that and let my team, let my subject matter experts convince me of things in their area of, of expertise. That's, that's why they have the job and why I'm not in that job. After all, why hire them if I'm not going to listen to them?
[00:24:25] Speaker C: Yeah. God, that's so important. I, I love that.
[00:24:27] Speaker A: Yeah, it's awesome. Oh, now we're going to look back your career a little. We've gotten some really some great insights how you got started in E commerce and maybe some of your critical kind of points are, was there anyone that kind of really helped you along the way to help you learn e commerce, how to analyze website, analyze users, analyze behavior.
[00:24:47] Speaker B: So when I finally left Agency Life I hopped into an E comm team that was pretty small, pretty tight knit, pretty collaborative and helpful. And that's where I was first flexing a lot of my team leadership muscles and making lots and lots of mistakes, particularly around communication and collaboration. They gave me a lot of grace, a lot of support and a lot of, a lot of patience as we worked together towards building out this team, building out this brand, building out the website and that was, that was instrumental. I had some leadership people above me that worked with me and helped coach me and teach me in how I can work with, with others and what's, what's important to them. What is important to leadership. I mean that's, that's kind of an important thing. If build out the most amazing thing ever, but leadership doesn't care about it, then you're in trouble. So that, that was a good time for me to be able to look upwards at what leadership is at the more senior levels and how to work across departments. And then the team that was assigned to me then was doing a similar thing in the opposite direction, going upwards and how I can lead down to them and how I can work with them and help them do their best work so we can create the best output. It was, it was very much a lot of communicate a lot of growth in communication and collaboration. I very much thought of myself as a blunt person and for I was starting to realize that that isn't always the best way of being. But for many years I was proud of how blunt and straightforward I am. Oh I just say it how it is. Well, you can say it how it is and be a complete and total jerk and you can say it how it is and help everyone in the same direction and it's a very subtle nuanced difference. At times, but it's a very important one.
[00:26:52] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:26:52] Speaker B: And I definitely kind of burned some bridges earlier in my career because of how amazingly greatly blunt I was. Just worst. And so they, they definitely kind of, you know, I was able to work with them and through them and learn, learn from my interactions with them towards becoming a better communicator and collaborator. And that team was so incredibly tight knit and I almost kind of stumbled upon, stumbled into the importance of having a team that is I can trust in and teach or you know, not not teach as a teacher or guide them towards the right direction of. This is what's important to the team. Because I had the leadership coming down, down to me, showing me what's important and then I was able to then help the team get that focus and that's, that's where we hit top 1% for, for conversion rate. We were able to focus in on what's important.
I was able to trust the team to build out a very, very polished, very tuned website. We were split, testing all over the place and just really getting those details going and yeah, that. So it was, it was definitely very much.
If it had been different people in different circumstances, I wouldn't have lasted at that job. But that would have turned into one of my most successful times in working for a company as well as some of the biggest growth that I had. And so everybody won, I'd like to think. Yeah. Out of that.
[00:28:22] Speaker A: That's awesome. Yeah, I, I can very much relate. Actually recently wrote a LinkedIn post about dressing someone down and the CMO coming to me quickly after, like I should be firing you right now. But they didn't and it did last and it was successful on all parts. I completely hear that.
So that's, that's awesome. So it sounds like that that bluntness may have been one of your biggest failures of kind of learning that helped you really grow into a leader.
[00:28:54] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. That definitely held me back for, for a very long time. Longer than I realized and until many years later. Yeah.
[00:29:01] Speaker A: Was it something that you dealt with only in the office or is this something that you then were also working on outside the office, working on yourself?
[00:29:11] Speaker B: Well, in the work environment it's so much easier to quantify everything.
You've got the impact of your work on your job and all of that. And it's easier to quantify it on your impact on your relationships when they're so clearly defined with hierarchy and all of that and kind of like, you know, forced. So how it impacted beyond that's definitely very, very Hard to say.
It. It's hard to. Hard to quantify. I know I'm a drastically, drastically different person than I. Than I was before. You know, it's just hard to. I know it impacted people, but I, you know, it's not like I'm going to have a, you know, one on one with. With people and they're going to tell me how I. Yeah. So. Yeah, I don't know. That is definitely something that I have thought about and thinking back on some of my earlier friendships, younger friendships, you know, people that I kind of lost touch with from high school, college, that type of a thing, how much of it is because of these. These failures of mine and how many bridges that I burned without realizing it? I don't know. It's. It's definitely.
It's a guarantee. And just to what extent, I don't know.
[00:30:21] Speaker A: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And. And I think a lot of people deal with this problem, probably especially young males. I think it's just to be frank. So I want to take it one step further. What work did you do on yourself to get over that? Like, it. It takes real work to. To make that change, and it takes you wanting to make that change. But what was that work that you had to do?
[00:30:43] Speaker B: Well, the trigger was definitely some very uncomfortable conversations with bosses.
And it took me being at a point where I could hear it, because in hindsight, I could look back at conversations that I had had with bosses at previous jobs and be like, well, they were kind of touching on these things, and it was not what I was capable of hearing. You know, sure could. Maybe they could have phrased it better or different or whatever, but ultimately I was incapable of listening to that. Remember, I was proud of how blunt I was for so long. And so they were trying to tell me, like, you need to be stopped doing this. Like, what are you talking about? This why I'm so awesome.
[00:31:23] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:31:25] Speaker B: And so the. The collaboration, the trust and the relationships that I had built with some of these bosses. Well, I mean, gosh, it was. It was everyone. It was teammates and people on my team, people on other teams, and. And just the people at that place was. Was so good at the time. I. I definitely miss working with them. So it took that triggering of a. Of a conversation to kind of start realizing some of the it. And just kind of that light bulb was a step forward. It was a recognition of I shouldn't, you know, shouldn't be talking in some of these ways. Some of it came.
Came from reading you've Got the, of course, classic how to Win Friends and Influence People.
Definitely was a big influential book on me, as some people, like, oh, it's just common sense. Like, well, for some people, maybe for some people, they kind of need a slap upside the head. And because of my kind of analytical, you know, coming from that engineering background, it was taking obvious concepts and putting specific techniques behind them, which, when you're learning something new, it's unnatural, it's uncomfortable, and you kind of need a checklist of a little bit of a formula to follow to adjust yourself before it then eventually becomes comfortable and second nature. So that was definitely a big one.
And then, of course, we've got extreme ownership. That's another classic. That was a big one for some of my leadership growth and communicating and collaborating with others in a. In an actual, actually collaborative. Collaborative way, as opposed to a dictatorial way.
That was a big one.
Yeah, that. So there's definitely quite a few books that helped me in moving in that path and reading stories and techniques and kind of realizing, like, that's a. Shouldn't be talking to people that way and all of that. The end result is me moving very, very much into focusing on positivity. Like, for example, deprecating humor, be it towards yourself or towards others.
I use deprecating humor on myself, and I'd make jokes about how I was bad at communicating with others and so don't let me talk to them. I wouldn't do well. And then there was a point in my career, after I'd been making those jokes for a while, I thought I had gotten pretty good at it. But the default was, oh, you're not good at talking to people, so let's not, you know, let you talk to that person about that. And like, I thought I was doing pretty good at this point. In fact, even my annual review a few months ago, you said I was doing a good job. And so that that just was holding me back. And then deprecating humor towards others. Like, okay, at best, you get a laugh, probably a cheap laugh, kind of just a little bit of a chuckle.
At worst case, you step on the toe that you didn't realize, well, you were pushing too far, and you can cause some very serious pain. So why. And so that. That perspective and just a lot of those different things of focusing on positivity, that turns into supporting each other, that supporting others, that turns into trusting others, that turns into being collaborative and selling them, you know, saying like, this is why we're trying. This is the goal, rather than do this thing Complete this task. No, this is what we're trying to accomplish. That helps people out, that makes, that gets rid of some of the bluntness in my communication. That gets rid of negative self talk towards myself. It's just one of those things that then spirals into spiders, into a whole bunch of other areas of life. And so I try to really, really push forth on any form of positivity and cut out negativity, especially towards others because again, you never know when you're going to go too far and send someone home crying. Like I watched that happen. Somebody tried to make a cheap joke and it pushed a little too hard on some hard times that that particular guy went through. And just. It's not worth it.
[00:35:29] Speaker A: That it's amazing insight.
Go ahead, Connor.
[00:35:33] Speaker C: Sorry. That really is, it's important. It's amazing how important good morale is, is you don't realize one, how many little things go towards encouraging good morale and how many little things go towards encouraging bad morale. And I mean I, I come from the, I had waited tables when I was much younger and basically got into tech, you know, after waiting tables for five years or something.
And it was a different kind of feeling where you're used to that kind of environment. And I was used to kind of over delivering on people and being like, too not nice and having to realize like, oh, I can say no more or I can, I can push back a little bit. But when you're figuring those boundaries out for yourself, there's also that, that duality of like. But I also have to like kind of continue to be positive, continue to make sure that I'm, I'm, you know, injecting positive things into the work environment and encouraging everybody. And it's, it's something I think a lot of people struggle with and I, I love to hear your side of it.
[00:36:30] Speaker A: I think that's, that's amazing, amazing insight, Brian. Thank you so much.
So take a deep breath now we're going to start the checkout and you alluded to it, but what is your process for building high converting sites?
[00:36:43] Speaker B: Well, the very thing. First thing we need to do is we need to do a massive redesign. It's going to take 12 months, it's going to cost us a ton of money and the website might be slightly better at the end of the project.
That's the way to. No, I'm just kidding. Incremental changes, you have to go on those small things bit by bit. Every time you launch something new, you gain lessons learned. Every time you take twice as long to get something done.
You don't know if it's going to make any changes until it's launched. Amazon has never redesigned itself, but it still looks drastically different today than it was, you know, when it originated. It's just lots of small tweaks. Meanwhile, Dell did this big, big redesign. I was at a CXL conference where Dell talked about this. They spent over a year and millions and millions of dollars making the perfect website and they launched it and they, they, there it was. It was massive. It was millions of dollars per day in lost revenue because it just completely tanked. And within a week they reverted the entire website back to the old site and they lost all of that work and they don't know why it didn't work. It could have been the header, it could have been the, it could have been anything in, but they don't know any of the pieces of the puzzle that worked and didn't work. So the iterative approach, you have to give a crap about the details. You have to really focus in on each little piece. All of those things add up over time. Every new script adds a tenth of a second to your load time.
Every new element on the page adds more visual distraction and more potential friction. So every change has to have a positive impact. And so you have to launch changes, be it a split test or a launch and see what happens. You have to measure the impact you need to have your goals of what do you think is going to, what do you think this change is going to do? What's my theory? And then how am I going to measure it and then actually measure it after the launch? You know, I've, I've heard a leader say we don't have time to split test.
So you can guarantee that you are right 51% of the time. You, you have to let the ego go. You have to slay the ego and you have to be. So you can determine, give up on tests you know, you can't get hung up on. Well, this, this was the most brilliant idea ever. It's, it was the perfect idea. Why isn't it working? It must be them that's wrong. Wrong. And if I do it harder then no, just give up, move on. You can't be attached to those things. You have to care about the process, but sometimes you can't, you can't care about the results. You, you care about progress, but you can't have to, you can't put all of your focus in your, in your self worth as it were, on the result of these things. You have to trust the process and go through it and iterate, iterate, iterate.
So piece by piece by piece on the website, look at it one at a time in isolation and in the big picture and find ways to iterate on each one. Launch a change, watch the data, see what works, make note of what worked and didn't work, share it with the team. You know, if you are the, the gatekeeper of all of the knowledge of all the different stuff, you're not helping your team out. And if you're not helping your team out, you're not helping the company yourself.
Them, you know, just, you have to create avenues, especially as a leader, to share these as well as these lessons as well as letting your team share with each other. Because they're the director contributors, they're the ones actually doing the direct contribution to the work and so they can come up with insights that you necessarily can't. So I give my team access to data related to their area of responsibility. They, I sometimes I'll even prompt them, be like, hey, write a little bit of a lull, take a look at the data for PDPs and give me some suggestions. Empower them to be able to contribute. That gets them invested. You know, I said give a crap about the details. Well that, you know, there's two pieces of that. The people have to give a crap and then the details have to have impact. So it's two sides of the same coin.
And empower them to be able to contribute and trust them to be their subject matter experts. If you don't trust them to be the subject matter experts, why did you hire them like you hired them? You are giving them a paycheck to do things within their area of responsibility. So, you know, give them room. You know, don't expect them to be right 100% of the time, even 90, 80% of the time. Because I'm not right 100% of the time. 90, 80% of the time. So don't, don't get upset at them if things don't go well. Well, give them, give them an area of trust.
Secure. What's the word? Safe zone. Whatever you want, whatever, however you want to label it, you know, as long as we have lessons learned out of it, that's the win. We launched a split test and the, you know, it didn't win. No, just means we were right the first time. That, that's great. It means we were making money sooner rather than later. Make a note, this idea didn't work work. Move on to the next one. Don't get mad at the team for suggesting a bad idea for, for implementing it improperly, whatever it is, Lessons learned, that's the solution focused and move on to the next one. And you do it over and over and over again and you add on a tenth of a percent, a tenth of a percent, tenth of a percent and you get that massive exponential growth over times.
You know, to try and quantify it down to a process, I guess you have to create good data. So you have to be able to analyze the impact of your work, come up with a theory on a particular KPI of I think I can improve this KPI with this interface, make the changes and actually care about the details. Yes, we want to move fast, but we can't move sloppily. What we do launch does need to have a level of polish, but keep it narrow enough in focus that you can still move quickly. Quickly. You can be polished by still even moving quickly. Speed doesn't have to be sloppy. Just keep it. If you just keep that element and that change small enough, now you're mitigating risk while still working towards those, those tenths of a percent here and there and getting those improvements. Launch the changes and monitor the data and share the lessons learned and don't hang your pride, your ego on success and don't, don't discipline your team for having an idea that didn't pan because that's a guarantee. It is guaranteed that our ideas won't work all of the time. So why would you get upset about a guarantee? Give them that safe space to be able to not have to worry that they're going to lose their job because their idea wasn't good enough. As long as you are intentional about the balance of risk reward, then that's fine and that's on you. That's the extreme ownership that it's my job to balance out risk reward, not the team's. And so that's on me. If I, if I approved a project that was very risky and didn't work and caused serious problems, that that's, that's my fault, not them for suggesting the idea. And so, you know, if it's too risky now, I say no and we try and find something more, more simple. But then I make an effort to explain why. Be like, I like the idea, but I think it's too risky because of this reason, reason that opens up the conversation of, well, oh well, if we tone it back in this way, then it won't be as risky. You know, we can find that balance or just stick it on the backlog and slot it for a time where we can take bigger risks.
[00:44:31] Speaker C: I love that. I want to minimize everything that you're saying because there's a lot of good, it's a lot of good in what you're saying but I love the idea that you've been consistent with throughout this call that it sounds like when you embrace failure, either your own failures or your team's failures years, that's how you grow. I think a lot of people are afraid of failure and that tends to be when you, you keep yourself from evolving and growing and iterating that 10% or that you know, 1/10 of a percent that you need. So I love that, I love that.
[00:45:01] Speaker A: Yeah, you're absolutely right. And Brian, I, I love the embracing experimentation obviously at Mobile first that's what we do every day for our clients is we experiment on their sites and, and bring iteration for revenue growth and, and it sounds like you're doing the same thing for, for, for your company which is awesome and, and really well done. So I just want to thank you for your time. This has been very enlightening, just very enlightening in your process and your self growth and kind of talking through how you've failed and how that's then really taken you to the next level. So really appreciate your time and your energy towards this Brian. And is there anywhere where people can find you and, and find what you're working on and get to know you more?
[00:45:42] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, you can find me on LinkedIn. Brian Purkis on LinkedIn and I post some stuff there. I'm not, I'm not one of the posting, posting every day but I try, I try. I always fall out a little bit but I try and keep posting with somewhat, some regularity and I enjoy connecting with other professionals. I am, you know, somewhat available for consulting work but awesome for the most part is you know, I just kind of like, I like talking with other like minded professionals and you know, find those opportunities to learn.
[00:46:11] Speaker A: Well, thanks again for your time time. We'll chat soon and have a great weekend.
[00:46:15] Speaker B: Yeah, you too.
[00:46:16] Speaker A: I'm gonna stop.
