Empowering teams to be innovative - with Ryan Sousa CDO @Seattle Children's Hospital

Welcome to the Product Bakery podcast. My name is Christian and I'm here today with my co-host Alex, as well as a guest from Seattle, Ryan Sousa. Hi. Before we get started with our interview today, just a couple of information that we want to share because we are really happy to announce that our website is live now, product-bakery.com. So feel free to drop by and if you like to stay up to date with the information and the stuff that is going on, feel free to subscribe to our newsletter. And alternatively, you can also follow us in social media. And we just started adding all social media links into the description. So feel free to look by and share it in case you like this episode, feel free to spread the word. And with that, I hand over to Alex. So Ryan, it is my pleasure to introduce you as an expert in the field of data and looking at your CV, you definitely have one of the longest CVs that we had here from guests in this podcast. You started computer science and from there on, you went through a lot of different and very interesting steps at also some very interesting companies, not to mention, for example, being a CTO at Intel, then also working at Amazon, Starbucks, Expedia. You spent some time at here and your current role is the one of a chief data officer at Seattle Children. So yeah, Ryan, why don't you just go ahead and tell us a little bit like what you're currently up to and how your current job looks like? Thanks. And I appreciate you inviting me here today. And it's great to be part of this new and evolving podcast. And I've listened to some of your podcasts so far. They've been great. And I think what you're doing here is really exciting. Yeah, I have a long... Yeah, you're welcome. Yeah, I do have a long resume and mostly because I guess as you get older, you end up having more things to talk about. But I think it boils down to a lot of what I've done is really focused on consumers and trying to improve the life of consumers and really leveraging analytics to help advance that. So whether it's like CRM was a really big thing back in the 90s and analytics was a key component to that or in the e-commerce space, it just opened the doors to what we knew about consumers and what they were doing. And we could leverage analytics in ways that we'd never thought about before. Traditionally, POS was the big thing that everybody talked about and what was in your shopping cart. When e-commerce came into play, we not only knew who walked through the door, but when they walked through the door, we knew where they walked. We not only knew what they touched as they were walking down the aisles, we knew what they were looking at. And so all of a sudden it just opened up this environment to really create an experience that is highly personalized. And so that's really where I spent a lot of my time over the years, working for some startups or companies that really want to do that. They want to pivot. They don't want to be about products so much in services, but more about the consumer. And then how do we create a great experience for that consumer across these different products and services that we offer? And so it's a big pivot. And so that's where the industry has been going. Industry by industry, you've seen that sort of transition take place and I've followed it, whether it's like telecom or electronic or finance industry or traditional retail, that's just been going on. And that's drew me into healthcare, I think in a lot of ways, except I think the difference here, and especially with Seattle Children's is we're so focused on kids. So all the things that we do here really translate to when we say improve the lives of consumers, right? We're really talking about patients and we're talking about patients who are children, whose families are really struggling at a really difficult time. And how do we leverage analytics in ways that Amazon and other companies have done even 10 years ago to identify where there's issues, target opportunities to improve the quality of care, reduce the time they have to spend in the hospital, and ideally maybe do things proactively that keep them from ever having to go to the hospital. I find healthcare is one of these places you realize that when somebody walks up and says, my child is a regular customer, really for the hospital, your immediate response is typically is when you have a customer and says they use your product all the time, what do you say? You say, thank you. Great. Yeah. And in healthcare, the first time that was said to me, I'm getting ready to say thank you. And then it dawned on me, this is a horrible thing. The fact that this child is in the hospital every week. And so I think that's the drive for me being in healthcare is to take a lot of what we've learned in these other industries, like this product approach to doing things, which is very common outside of healthcare. And can we apply it? Can we apply that thinking and that approach in an environment that is just not organized that way? Because if we can, it could be transformative. And so that was my goal in coming to Seattle Children's was to do that. And in the process of doing that, really helping kids. That's amazing. And you just mentioned it, like you've been around for quite a couple of years, and especially because you mentioned consumer focus and working more on the design side of product development myself. One thing that I've seen is also in recent years, especially the movement towards user-centric design thinking and so on, got much stronger. I'm wondering from your experience in the market, how did you see these things evolve over time? And when did it actually, or when did you see the strong transitioning to user-centricity and customer-first versus purely technology-driven companies? Yeah, that's a really good question. I do think it used to be really hard, right? The beauty of technology is really coming up with something that you want to try out on a consumer to see whether or not it's of interest. When you have it like an Amazon, it's really easy to build a new website or a new concept. You certainly spend time searching around, but if you've got this idea, it's not just about talking and asking people what they want. Because a lot of times, what people say they need isn't really what they want, or even what they need. And Steve Jobs is famous for the iPad. It was one of those things that, of course, why would we do an iPad? They searched all around, nobody wanted it, or better yet, the iPhone. As a matter of fact, at the time they had done their research, and basically the feedback from the research was, people want a separate camera, and people want to separate this, and people want to separate that. They don't want to integrate it into a single device. And Jobs was like, let's move forward. But that was a high-risk environment, right? Because you're making these massive investments in something like an iPhone. And if it works out, life is good, and if it doesn't work out, life isn't so good. But in the business that we're in, it's not like that. I love software, it's so malleable. You don't have to make big investments to really try things out. And so now success isn't about trying to win on one idea, but to really focus on maybe a dozen things, and making small investments on these dozens of things, and then taking that feedback, and really finding out what consumers care about, and then to start to focus in on those few things. But I think that's the big shift, right? It's not about investing everything in one big idea, but really breaking it down into a whole bunch of little things. How has that shifted in the healthcare sector? Because there, you usually don't try something out because you're dealing with people and with lives, actually. So what was the transition there that has happened in the last years? Yeah, that's a great question. I think when you look at healthcare, you don't have to start with those things that are high-risk, because you're absolutely right. Having what they call surveillance, which is really where you're monitoring kids in an ICU, and you're trying to predict things like a kidney failure, or a cardiac event, or something, or interventions, if you do predict it on things that you should do to avoid it, you don't start there. That's really highly sophisticated things. But there's a lot of things we can do around patient flow to improve the quality of patient flow. A big thing in hospitals is census, and trying to predict census, which is really how many kiddos are in beds in the hospital. And that becomes really important because there's a lot of planning you can do if you can predict 36 hours in advance. And so that's what we do. We focus on those things where we can leverage analytics to do these kinds of predictions in areas that are low-risk to patients and families, but have high potential in terms of improving flow and experience within the hospital, or making sure that we're getting payment for those services that we provide. And so that's what you do. You focus on those areas that they're a little more approachable and low-risk, and then over time, you build into some of the other areas. But I think that's true of all industries, right? You focus on those things that are quick wins, and then over time, you develop your proficiency, not just from a technology perspective, but also from an organizational maturity perspective. Because isn't that what we always run into, right? You can only go as fast with technologies as an organization's maturity to actually use it. And that's always the balance that we have to find, is how do you balance those two things? But are you seeing a dependency between the company maturity and also the evolvement of processes and the product, necessarily? I do. This is why working in a startup is very different than working in an established company. Because you go into a startup, there's no rules. And let's talk about, like, we talk a lot about... The wide, wide vest. Yeah. I'm reading a book right now by Reed Hastings, who's the CEO for Netflix. It's called... The title of the book is awesome. So the title of the book is No Rules Rules, but it really talks a lot about what goes on within Netflix. And I have found it really resonates with me because all the things that they talk about in there I find to be so true. And it's easy to have within a small company, and then as you get bigger, how do you maintain that idea of no rules? How do you have an environment where the right things happen, but not because you have rules in place that control what people do? And I find that coming into a healthcare organization or even working for Starbucks, it's almost what you have to do in order for product to take off. It's more of a mindset than an approach. If you don't change the mindset, what you end up with is basically people call it product, but they run it like a project, right? You see it in the planning sessions because you've got the person there assigning people things to do instead of people signing up for things to do. Or people talking about what they did in the product demo and not showing what they did. And you also find that the innovation doesn't come from the people over time who are actually doing the work. It comes from outside. And what we found at the work we're doing at Children's or even in startups, really the best ideas come from the people that are doing the work. But you have to create that environment of freedom, right? Freedom of mistakes and freedom of making choices. And that's really hard to find in existing companies, whereas startups, it's the only way to operate. But you've got to create that world first in order for product, at least I find, to really take off. You do see many companies where it's the other way around, right? So you have a fresh funding, you have a C-level with a clear vision or clear deadlines and goals that need to be achieved, and people just need to make it happen. And I absolutely understand and absolutely agree that freedom is the way to go. But why do we still have this old-fashioned mindset when it comes to, or the moment there's money and stress and deadlines in the game, it shifts everything. And why is that happening? And what can people do to not lose track of the main thing? It's a great question. So what I'm going to share with, what I'm going to say is going to really depress you, but I'll say it anyway. So a lot of what we, it's not just I believe, you know, I've read this in a number of books and there's research that backs a lot of this. Much of how we think and approach leadership in the world today is a product of the Industrial Revolution, right? Where we shift from a world where the idea of, it used to be before the Industrial Revolution, you were measured based on what you did. You were a blacksmith and you did things. It was your product that you offered that you were compensated for. Nobody tracked your hours. Nobody paid you by hour. You basically got paid for what it is you did. That was the world that we lived in. And then at some point it was like manufacturing came into play. The Industrial Revolution hits. And then all of a sudden, like everything changes, right? You're no longer compensated as much by the product that you produced, but by the hours that you worked. And then all of a sudden there's all this management discipline that came into play to really direct an environment like that, where you have hourly workers doing sort of finite tasks. It's a very repetitive environment. And that is basically the foundation for leadership as we understand it today, globally. And so if you're not in a startup environment, which tends to be very different than that, and you're coming into a more traditional company, that is some of the headwind that you're up against, is you have people within those organizations who've grown up thinking that way, as I have. I'm amazed sometimes how much my leadership style has changed over the years. But in large part, because when you work for startups, it has to. Where you worked, like when I was at Amazon, we were a small company back then. And if we were to operate that way, we would have never succeeded. But I think that's a big part of it that you're up against. So the bigger the company, the harder it is. But I've had success at Starbucks, which was established, and now at Seattle Children's and other healthcare organizations. So I think it's doable. Absolutely. It's just really challenging. And what would you say are the steps, especially like thinking of, for example, me as a leader, what are the steps that I would have to take to prepare the company and to set up the foundation for this mindset that you're talking about? I do think some of it starts off with, if I come into an established organization, I always try to look for the core. There's always a large group of people. Like Expedia, I think when I came in, we had 90 people. But there's always like this core. They just get it. Right? They're like, I think Netflix talks about it in the context of talent density, but that's your talent density, where you have some really bright people who really know what the issues have been. They know where things need to go. And they just haven't had that person there to help create the environment to allow them to get there. And I think that's the key. I found the same to be true at Seattle Children's. It took a little bit to find it because they didn't all report to me. But again, there was this core. And then you organize around that. And as a leader, I think you have to seed them with an idea. But really, this is good leadership. Good leadership is somebody who comes in with an idea, but has the ability to inspire people to make it greater. And I think that's the art. When you start talking about doing something like this is the leadership art, is how do you make that transition where that idea becomes an idea that's owned by the entire organization? But I think it starts for me with the core and getting that in place. It starts by finding something very focused that they can all come together and work on and something that is impactful and creates value within the organization. That is part of a bigger vision, right, that you have leadership thought into. And then you start to create that environment in a very small scale to help move in that direction. And I love the product team approach to doing things. Because in a lot of ways, it's like having a little startup within a company like Seattle Children's or Starbucks or any large organization. And then you treat it like a startup, right? They're outcome driven. And so you start to change that thinking. You start to create an environment where it's okay to make mistakes. And actually, you look for people who have a willingness to make mistakes. And you start to change that culture at a very narrow level. And then once that small group starts to have success and the kind of success that people don't see elsewhere in the organization, they don't really ask why. What they want is they want their own team now to do the same thing. And then somebody else sees that and then they want a team to do the same thing. And then they gravitate that success. They don't know that you've completely rethought how you approach doing things, that you've created a microculture within this old traditional leadership culture. All they know is they're seeing success, they're seeing high productivity, you're driving value in the organization. And I think that's what you do is you don't try to overdo it. A lot of people have this idea of go big or go home. I see that all the time now. For me, when I hear them like go away, like big things I always find start small. And I think that's the key for any of these things. And then you basically, you cherish those individuals on that team. And you do whatever you can as a leader to give them what they need to make it their own. And that could be a very painful process. And there's a lot of politics that come along with it that you have to navigate in order to create that environment. One thing that I've also seen a couple of times in the past also is these drastic, let's say organizational changes, right? Someone heard something super interesting and probably a couple of years ago, it was the Spotify model, which we already discussed a couple of times. And then the whole organization gets restructured from one day to the other. And I think what I'm hearing from you is actually it should be the opposite of that approach, like creating a small cell and then ideally making that kind of influence the other parts of the organization and then change. What is like your thought if you would compare those? We already heard go big or go home is not something that you're sent behind it. But where do you see the risk, for example, of such drastic organizational change of okay, we know what we're doing is actually outdated. We should have a better or more agile approach just to use some of the keywords and then change the whole organization to it. Do you think that makes sense or could make sense in some cases? Yeah, I don't know how you do that. There's just always what have you found? So when you see that approach happen, where do you spend all your time? On the reorganization. And I think it's just it's like this mindset thing as well. Some people don't have the right mindset. You get a lot of pushback also from within the organization. I think especially when it comes top down, it's again the opposite of empowerment. But it's again going in and telling people what they should do. So I've usually seen a lot of tension and I've usually also seen organizations that try to do something that they were not ready for. Yeah, I think that's fair. And in part because different parts of the organization are in different places in terms of being ready to support something like that. And usually do you find like those approaches too are a bit top down, right? So it's leadership coming out and saying, okay, go do these things. It's not the people at the front line saying we need to do these things. And I don't know, for me, I love product teams and environments like this because I find if you're doing it right, the motivation is very intrinsic, right? In that the structures that you put in place don't direct people. The structures you put in place provide people context. And then based on that context, people do things, right, that help to achieve the outcomes that are needed for an organization. Whereas the bigger approach feels to me much more on the other side where it's more extrinsically as an approach. And what we're talking about here is in order to make something like this work, it's a massive cultural change. Getting to the point where leaders don't see themselves as the folks giving direction, but rather... or what they are, are the people that are all about providing context to the organization and then looking for direction, right, from the people at the front line. Like that big change in thinking is, and it's about less controls, and it's about allowing people to make mistakes. And the minute somebody makes mistakes, you don't put controls in place to keep it from happening again. If it's something because somebody did something wrong that was just ethically wrong, then you let them go. You don't punish the rest of the organization by putting policies in place to try to stop that from happening again. But that's what we do. If you think about, as organizations, they've got this cycle that was brilliantly laid out in this book called Art of Action. But basically the idea is there's an outcome that you want, there's an outcome that you achieve. And then of course, in the process, the steps are you do some planning and you take some action and then you achieve your outcome. But what ends up happening is, with the way organizations think, and it's something about sapiens, right, like as creatures. If you're not getting the outcome you wanted, it's one of two things. Either you didn't have enough data because the plan wasn't good, or you didn't have enough control because those pesky people didn't follow the plan. It's one of those two things. And you've probably seen this play out in organizations, which is basically they spend more time on the plan, which basically looks like leadership asking for more and more data because it's a plan problem. Or they're happy with the plan, and so you see more and more controls going in place around actions, right? And usually it takes the form of things like committees and councils and governance of some sort. Because governance can be good, but a lot of times it turns out to be a control mechanism, and not a mechanism used to help inform and guide. And so that's what happens. You build more controls, and so you become very brittle. But at the end of the day, the fundamental issue is uncertainty. But you've now created such a structure as a large organization, you cannot respond to the certainty on the ground as it plays out, and you miss opportunities. And this is where startups come along, and they do really well because they don't have any of that. So now you've got this little startup, who nobody knew about, and all of a sudden basically, Netflix is the big thing now, and Blockbuster is no longer here. Because they have a structure that allows that organization to be very nimble and capitalize on these uncertainties as they play out. And so then the question is, how do you start to move other organizations, larger organizations in that direction? And I do think you start small and you build out. I find a year to get traction, and two years to really get acceleration within an area. And it doesn't seem to matter whether it's a small company or a big company, that just seems to be the time period that it typically takes. There was one thing that I really liked that you say, because you mentioned that you don't tell people what to do, but you provide a structure that helps them to work with and to grow. And I would be curious, how does such a structure look like? Because you said the first thing you would do if you go into a company is you find the core. So let's say you found your core, you have a couple of people. There are, let's say, six, seven, eight, 10, 20 people that are intrinsic motivated and want to push things forward. So how do you share the structure or define even the structure they can work with to at one point be customer focused and outcome driven, but on the other hand, to not get lost in a too bureaucratical process? I always have something to start with. I do have a product structure and a delivery approach that's evolved over the years. And if somebody is a purist around Scrum, they really have a hard time with it because there's just some things in there where it really absolutely breaks the Scrum rules. But I think that's helpful. You have to give people something to start with without a whole lot of rules around it. I have a few things that I'm pretty hardcore about and I'm not very flexible and then I'm super flexible about everything else. But I do think you have to get people excited about it. You have to work with people to create a vision that gets people excited. And you're going to always have a bunch of people that are going to roll their eyes and they're going to say, that'll never happen here. And that just happens all the time. I used to bother me a lot and I find that I stay focused on the core. And I keep in mind, the core isn't just frontline people. The core could be executive leaders who are really excited about where you're going, middle management, where you're going. The goal is to really create alignment across, could be a pretty large group of people. And so I have this thing called an action plan that I always start with. But basically what it is, it's like a little business plan where you listen to everybody based on what you hear. You put everything down on paper. You make the rounds again to say, hey, here's what I heard. Is this what you said? You throw your little bits in there based on your experience. Because part of the reason you're at an organization is because you bring in a different experience. And then you bring everybody back in a room and say, is this what everybody wants to do? And at that point, everybody's got their fingerprints all over it. So now you have a vision that really gets people excited. And then you set people loose on a piece of it and then let it evolve over time. But to me, that's the starting point. And so things like SWOT, are you guys familiar with SWOT? Yes. Yeah. Are you familiar with Silicon Valley? The series on HBO? I haven't seen it myself. Oh my God. Please do yourself a favor. Definitely watch those series. But they really get into the SWOT for just about everything in their life. But I find the SWOT to be a really powerful tool when you're trying to assess an organization to get things started because it paints a really nice picture. And then from that, you can start to build out your business plan and then socialize it and get people to sign off on it. But to me, that's the starting point. Like I said, it's about coming to the table with a vision and then basically allowing people to own it and make it something greater. What are your non-negotiables? Oh, there aren't too many. So when it comes to sprints, it's two weeks period. Like everybody always likes to negotiate for four weeks and three weeks and we're just doing two. It's just, it is. Because we always end up there anyway. And I've had people try one week and three week and every other variation you could possibly imagine. We always end up at two. I tried everything. The other thing is these teams, we give them a lot of flexibility in terms of what technology they use and how they use the technology. But we have a fundamental belief that you build it, you own it. Which basically means as a team, you not only have responsibility for building the product, but you also have operational responsibility as well. So idea to iron, you get to own it all. And part of the reason for that is by keeping it all together in one place, engineers do not like being woken up at three o'clock in the morning. And so they end up, yeah. So what you end up with is tremendous automation around everything that you do. So you'll find that the teams that I've managed over the years is as we grow over time, our sustainment footprint does not grow because automation is such an integrated part of what we do in part because people are motivated to automate because they don't want to maintain stuff. They want to build new things. And so I think that was a big thing too, is giving them the flexibility to pick whatever technology they want. We have lots of technology that we use and we've really started to grow into the open source space which is crazy from a healthcare perspective, but they own it. And so there are a couple of the big things at the end of the day. And I love hostile questions. So early on, I really try to get people to challenge everything. And like getting people to be as honest as possible about things, asking hard questions, being vulnerable as a leader is a really powerful thing because it makes you human and it makes you approachable. And at some point they start to realize that you're there for them and that they can trust you to have their back. That at the end of the day, and I'm committed, like I will go out and be fired before I let anything happen to my team. I will take it to the ends of the earth to protect them and the work that they're doing. But they have to believe that and they have to see that. I think that becomes another very important part of this whole process. Very interesting. I mean, they probably know, but I also hope they hear this podcast and they hear it in the wild. But they're fine. Like I love being challenged. Some of this came from my experience at Amazon. Jeff Bezos was so good at this. He'd have these all hands and he'd get up in front and he wanted hostile questions. And it was always the question like, who could come up with the toughest question? And they would. You'd have people ask questions that probably in any other company, they might, that would be career ending. But in an environment like that, it was actually encouraged. But I almost feel like that's also like a massive part of culture of constantly also having people step up, asking these questions and so on to giving newbies or more junior people also the comfort to be able to say these things. Because if I would join a random company and I don't have, I've never made that experience, then usually like people are afraid of leadership. And then maybe not everyone would like. Yeah, no, Alex, you're absolutely right. Like you have to model those things for people. So people have to step forward and you're absolutely right. So what do you do when somebody steps forward? You reward them and everybody sees that. And it's not to feel like, I always worry sometimes, because you know, not everybody is as comfortable doing that because it's just who they are. Some people are much more expressive than others. Like some people you just can't get them to stop and some people you can't get them to start. And that's why I think other ways to approach this too is you have skip level meetings, you have smaller group meetings. So not everything has to be at these big all hands. Groups means four or five people and you go around and ask people, hey, what do you think? What do you think? And people talk about it. And the more they talk about it, the more they wanna talk about it. But yeah, I think, I don't know, isn't it fun? Like as a leader, wouldn't you much more prefer to have just an open dialogue with people than to have them be there at your beck and call so you can just tell them what to do? I don't want them telling me I'm great or I'm doing something right, especially if they think it's bullshit. You want them to be honest with you about things, right or wrong. And fortunately when I came into Seattle Children's, there were a couple of people that have been around a long time and they were very vocal. And so I got an earful, but it was great. I actually really enjoyed it because we can engage in a conversation and to your point, Alex, people saw that they were challenging me and I was challenging them back. and then we were having a conversation, but it was a safe environment. And so maybe that's what it is. Maybe it's about helping to create a safe environment. I saw you also wrote and discussed a lot about innovation in general. And when I look at your approach that you're taking, which is talking to people, bringing them into one room, empowering them and giving them the freedom to own things and thinking in product and customer terms rather than project terms, I see that the communication part and the human relationship are very important to drive innovation in general. So how do you think about this whole idea of driving innovation? Because when you usually hear there are companies who have innovation labs, these innovation labs usually do the opposite of creating innovations, but it's still happening out there on a daily basis. So what can leaders do to empower people to be innovative or to motivate them to get creative? Yeah, it's a great question. So when you're an organization that has an innovation lab, where does everybody wanna work? Right? Everybody wants to work in the innovation lab. It's really, I mean, when you decide to do something like that, you have to think long and hard about it, right? Like I think there's definitely cases where it makes sense to do that. But at the end of the day, don't you want innovation to be at the core of what everybody does? And it's not off limits to anybody. It doesn't matter who you are, from a janitor to a product developer, designer to a systems architect, to a physician. Everybody should be participating in that process of innovation and thinking. Because one, it's fun and it's a creative process. Everybody has good ideas. Like they're all over the place. And so how do you create an environment that's like that? Right? Where curiosity is just a natural thing that happens. And then as a leader, you create connections for people with curiosity to work together and talk about things and try different things. So I think creating space for people to innovate in a lot of different ways, I think is really important. And then, yeah, I think there's probably a case to be made where there's labs that do things that are way out there, require big investments, things along those lines. But it shouldn't be seen as the place where innovation happens. It's an extension of what's going on all the time within an organization. So I don't know, how does that resonate with the two of you? I'm totally with you of having innovation at the core. And I think it's also much easier than to get things live and to get actually hands-on innovation and develop innovation. Because one thing that I've also seen with innovation labs is that then you have these amazing concepts. And until they really find their way into the day-to-day business, and into the teams that develop the things, they just get stuck there. And then you have this discrepancy of, okay, what are we actually building? And what is the innovation that we're doing? And I've also seen, we were saying, everyone wants to work in innovation labs. But at the same time, I've seen many people leaving innovation labs because they've just been like, okay, we developed so many amazing concepts, but they haven't been built in years. And it's unrealistic that they will ever be built because the day-to-day delivery teams are focused on many other topics. So I think that's one of the bigger issues that I've seen. I think that's actually one of the biggest issues. And you see, you're absolutely right, Lenk. I know that Microsoft has ran into that issue and other organizations like that. I think there's places from Xerox Labs where they were building things that were like, maybe in 10 years, you might use this thing. And eventually 10 years later, somebody like Apple comes along and starts to use graphical user interfaces. And so I think those labs are very special. And I think much in need in the world today. I think we've gotten rid of a lot of those labs. And so I always worry about, what is that thing that we're not inventing right now that's gonna be important 10 years from now? But you're absolutely right. Like a lot of the shorter term things never actually make it into the environment. Yeah. I do have to say, I believe these short-term ideas and innovation come from a team that is embedded into the company, in my opinion. Or alternatively, what I'm a big fan of is if you have the startup in a startup, so a small group of people who build a complete new product from scratch in a very lean way, try to compete with what you have. But these projects or departments can fail if you don't get the buy-in from the rest of the company. So you need to have, again, this culture and this understanding of, hey, here's a group of people who try to go one step further. But I have to say, I love it when it comes from the teams because this is where you have the ownership of the product and there the magic is happening. So trying to outsource it into a separate department is usually not the best solution, in my opinion. Yeah. So one of the things that I always find is when we're working on things like innovation, if we're gonna invest in something, it's something that aligns to something that's strategically important to the organization. I think organizations generally have, they have good strategic plans in terms of where they need to be. It's really more a challenge around execution to those plans if they don't get there. And so like for a good example, Seattle Children's, we did a software spinoff. Like who would have thought an organization like Seattle Children's did a software spinoff? And it literally all happened in the period of about a year. And it started with basically a conversation that I was having with a physician over coffee at Starbucks. And he had this idea. Opening story. Yeah, it was great though. Like, and remember, this is true innovation and what you want in an organization. And so yeah, he was an anesthesiologist and they do quality improvement. So the idea would be if we make a small protocol change, what would be the effect on nausea and readmission, length of stay and a variety of sort of standard measures. Because the idea is we want the surgery to go as smooth as possible. We want high quality and we don't want patients to have to stick around any longer than they have to. Because who wants to stick around in a hospital any longer than they have to? But the process of doing the analysis when they were trying to make these protocol changes, these tweaks, it was very long. It took weeks and weeks because it was all very manual. And so the idea was, could we build a tool that would allow physicians to do the analysis themselves? So basically a lot of out of the box experience. And so we scraped together some money and we pulled together a really small team and we did a 90 day proof of concept. Oh, wow. And after 90 days, they looked at it and like, what are you gonna get in 90 days? If you get everybody looking at it going, yeah, there's a possibility there, that's success. Okay, great. So we got the kind of, ah. So then we said, okay, great, let's pilot it now. Let's get maybe a half dozen or a dozen physicians who can use this in six months and let's see what happens. So three months later, we rolled out the pilot and they used it, got great feedback. And so then we decided to invest more in it at that point. And then at the one year mark, like everybody was using it. It was all the rage within the clinical setting. And the following January, we basically rolled it off into its own startup and it's called Empty Metrics. And I'm on the advisory board of it today and they're continuing to expand and leveraging that technology in other areas. But this is from an organization like, if I had suggested that three years earlier, people would have just thought I was nuts. But that's what you do though. It was focused on something that really mattered to the organization. It was something that didn't require a lot of upfront investment, but some. We invested as little as possible to get started. And then when we saw that things were working, we doubled down, right, on the investment for it. And I think that's how you approach everything. Like I can probably point at a dozen projects at Seattle Children's that basically started out that way. And some of them didn't work out and we basically threw it away. But the ones that did have had a massive impact. As a matter of fact, this product has been used to basically create a surgical center that's opioid free. So it's the only opioid free surgical center in pediatrics in the nation, in the US. Maybe in the world. There's papers out there that have been written on it, but it was all a product of actually using this tool to identify ways in which we can deliver the same quality of care without using opioids. Jesus. So- And all that from a 90 day- Yeah, right? It is, right? It is, absolutely. That sounded to me like a innovation project from a higher level coming, from a strategic point of view. How about the other way with innovation coming from the bottom? Is there a process that you are following to validate ideas, discover them, pre-evaluate them, and then adding them on the strategic agenda? Or how does it work at Children's? Yeah, it varies. That's a great question, Christian. I don't know that there's one approach. Like in this particular case, it was pretty bottom up. It was a physician who came in and then somebody on the team partnered with him, and they built it out. But you make a good point. So one of the things that we do is we actually, teams, when we organize these different teams, so we started with one. I mentioned we had the one. Now we have basically 17 teams across all of Seattle Children's. So it's all of a sudden now it's all the rage. But the teams get funding. So they actually have funding that they can use to try different things. And so do they all turn out to be like this? No, sometimes they're more incremental improvements. Sometimes, like they had this crazy idea that they could use discrete event simulation, which is basically something very common in manufacturing, to basically use that to streamline and patient flow within the hospital. And basically use that to style. And the foundation for all of this is being able to predict census. So instead of using machine learning or some of these more traditional approaches that you would use to build these predictive models, they used discrete event simulation. Turned out to be a really big deal. Remember, they had come across a company that was looking for somebody to partner with on this. And so we partnered with that company. And now that has become like this big thing that has really helped to streamline flow as patients move from the surgical center into the PACU, into the ICU areas within the hospital. And it saved us a fortune as an organization and improve the quality of customer care. And now this company is taking that product and now they're starting to roll it out. But that was all like somebody on the operational side in the business, talking to somebody on one of these teams. They had this idea and they took it from there. So still in such a big organization, it can grow from the bottom without getting stuck in processes. Yeah, I was fortunate. I think we were fortunate, I guess, in general, because when we started, we had no money. So the first year was pretty rough. Because we had to prove ourselves. And so it was like a bake sale to get money. So I guess maybe some of this is, sales is a big part of all of this. Whether you're in an organization or out of an organization, it's sales. I was on full out sales mode, right? On getting people to buy into this idea, which could have been the end of me. If this hadn't all worked out in the first year, I wouldn't be there anymore. But that's always a risk that you take when you dive into something like this. There it is. And as it turned out, though, people really bought into the vision. We got enough money to do our early successes that first year. And then the following year, we got some really good money. We had enough successes that we had really good money. And we had the latitude to use it as it made sense. So we didn't have to go through some big committee for everything that we decided we wanted to do. There's no better way to kill small ideas than to have them go through a committee structure. Because what makes it through a committee structure? The big projects. But like we talked about, the big projects are fine, and maybe they can be incremental. But the truly transformative things usually start small and become big things. And so when you have these big governance structures in place, you almost like automatically filter out all these small ideas. So we're able to operate outside of that. And that made a big difference. I actually have one other question, because we've now talked about different models also to drive innovation. So I wouldn't want to miss out on, for example, the one that Google drives also with giving employees these not sure if it's the 20% time to come up with their or to work in their personal projects. And we've seen Gmail coming out of that, and so on and so forth. Like, how do you feel about that approach? Yeah, I like that approach. Now, my understanding was Google has moved away from that a little bit. So you don't they don't have that like they used to. But you're right, like Gmail is a product of that, right? There's a lot of things that Google's known for today that are their product that 20%. So I think we accomplished the same thing, Alex, but a little bit different approach. So one of the things that we focus on a quarterly... Sorry, the team gets together every quarter. This is a part of our thing, and basically blocks off an entire day. And they basically lay out what the plan is for the next quarter. So that's about as far in advance as we plan out anything. So you do OKRs, yeah? Yeah, we do OKRs. So we landed on that as a framework, which has worked out great. I like it. It's almost like management by objectives on steroids. It's like agile applied to strategic planning, you know? And there are mixed feelings about it. So people either love it or hate it. But I do have to say, once you've understood it, it's amazing, because you can always shift directions, but you're still heading towards the right goal. Yeah, okay. That's good to hear. Yeah, because it's not really a bottom-up or a top-down. It's everybody participates, which is part of the reason we went down that path. Yeah. The spirit of it is it's not top-down. Like MBO tends to be more top-down, and everybody's like, we're waiting. And it's like, with OKRs, it's like, you don't wait, you just go. Alex and I, we had it at SumUp that we had company goals that were obviously coming from the top, but really vague and really high level. And then the teams were up to decide together with the tribes and the department leads to form the objectives around that. Okay. To make sure you hit the goal. How'd that work out? It worked out really well, because the teams had, so let's say like this, where we're coming from was quarterly leadership planning, where the leadership team defined high-level OKRs and a couple of key results, pitched it to the company. And then the company, the teams were doing offsites to discuss plans. So it was a huge investment in terms of traveling time, et cetera. But this three or four days that you spend on the offsite to sit down with your team members and the people you usually don't see that often as well from other departments, from other countries, helped a lot to align with them and to come up with a plan for the quarter. Did you find those to be really stimulating discussions? It's sometimes very emotional, and you definitely need good moderation. You need a good moderation. But those to me, like, aren't those meetings priceless, right? Like people are saying what they have to say. That's what it's all about at the end of the day, right? Is people getting excited about something they believe strongly in. They say what it is they need to say, and you mix it up. And you just have a phase in front of you. Once you're flying back home and taking back your airplane, you think different about the person you've met. You have a complete different picture. And that's what was always super exciting. And it has a huge impact on my intrinsic motivation and also how the quarter will work, because my cooperation is very likely much better with the person than before. Especially if you're such a distributed team like we were. But at the same time, I feel like one thing that we improved over time and that didn't work well at the beginning was the actual planning and coming up with the OKRs. Because I think when we first decided to go for OKRs, this was a super lengthy process. We had multiple alignment rounds and so on. It almost felt like the second we were all aligned and we all agreed on the OKRs, the quarter was already over. I remember that too. And it really took a couple of quarters to really get better. And I think at the end, we had a pretty good pace and also level of to which extent do we need to align, especially if we want to empower teams? Do we need to have this big alignment meetings for weeks to make sure everyone is on the same page and agrees on every single objective and key result? Or what is the right level of detail? And I think that's something where it definitely took us some time to get to the sweet spot. It's funny, because unlike your scrums, which every two weeks you get feedback and you can refine every two weeks, your opportunity for refinement with something like this is more quarterly. So you definitely have to be more patient. We've been doing it now for a couple of years and it's still not where it needs to be. But you know what helped me, at least for myself, to get better in defining OKRs? It was to leave the objectives really as open as possible. To give the team the ability to think about solutions. And whether you define an epic or a feature or an objective, I think it's very important to transport the value that you want to achieve by the end of the day or the problem you want to solve instead of saying, hey, this is what we want, because then you force already people into thinking in boxes. One of the things that we did, and actually I started it and then just to put a stake in the ground and then it's been refined, is we have this kind of high level set of strategic objectives for our area. And it's again, a very high level framework around what are the things that matter to us? What are our big rocks? And if this gets back to you a little bit to your question about the Google 20%, because it's very high level, but it's the framework. And then within that, we create OKRs. But at the end of the day, the OKRs are our big rocks on a quarterly basis. And those big rocks shouldn't take 100% of everybody's time. And so we try to give people flexibility to do whatever it is they want to do. Just make sure the big rocks get done. We don't really care what else happens within that. Come hell or high water, the big rocks need to get done. And you know what, whatever time you have left, do what you want. And so that's something that we've done. We also do hackathons. And that's been really exciting to do those. We didn't do one last year. It was a little crazy last year, but for a couple of years going, it's the thing that everybody looks forward to. I got all kinds of people wondering next year, are we going to do a hackathon? When is the hackathon going to be? But it is also another place. As a matter of fact, some of the products that have come out of there really ended up in production. I ended up funding those out of the pool. And so that's one way that innovation happens for us as well. I used to work for a company that was doing a three-day hackathon four times a year, every quarter. That was really crazy. But it stopped being good until we decided to go away from innovational projects to company projects. So don't do that. This is usually how you destroy the idea of a hackathon. Just overall. Cool. We have four days to fix all the bugs we haven't fixed over the year. Go hack away. Go hack away. Have fun. We have enough coffee for everyone. Ryan, we really enjoyed the conversation, but there's one last question that we have. If you would have the chance to talk to your 10 or 20-year-old younger version of yourself, when you started making your first steps as a leader, building up teams, becoming a team lead, etc., what would be the two most important things you would share with yourself as learnings that you made over the last years? It's a really good question, Christian. I think one is patience, because I do think as time has gone on, being patient and not feeling like you have to rush in with the answers and allow conflict to play out. I'm a pleaser and I'm a peacekeeper. I think early on in my career, I worked too hard on trying to make sure everybody's happy and trying to please everybody, but I wasn't being honest with myself. And I wasn't giving people a chance to work through issues themselves. So maybe it comes down to don't underestimate the potential of people, you know, and don't underestimate what they're capable of doing. I have been surprised so many times, even things that I didn't think were possible, and giving people the latitude, all of a sudden they made the possible impossible. And I think I learned years ago that ignorance is truly bliss. And just because something didn't work before doesn't mean it won't work now. And I think that is one big thing. And probably the other thing is with the people that you work with, building like teams of people that you like to just be around, and people that are really good at what they want to do. And they're really compassionate about it, right? They really own the things that they do, because it's important. And not to kill their spirit with rules, but really try to figure out ways to work rules out of the equation, so that people can come forward and do their best work. And I think those are probably the two big things is that for me. And fortunately, I was lucky. I worked for companies that really helped to encourage that. Early in my career, Amazon was like that when I went there, startups were like that. And so to be able to take that into companies that are more traditional, and trying to figure out how to create the same thing within those companies, it's encouraging, because it is possible. And you can create that kind of culture within cultures that may not work that way. Awesome. Very interesting. Ryan, maybe as a final question for everyone who wants to learn more about you, your work and your thoughts, where do people find you? Where can people follow you? Oh, I work for Seattle Children's, I don't have any any place to follow me. But I love to have these conversations. Matter of fact, I just started up a book club with a number of different people across the world. I do a lot of reading. So to me, maybe that's the other thing is you never can stop learning, especially from a leadership perspective. I want to do more of these book clubs, and for another reason, getting like minded people together to talk about what it is they're doing, what's working, what's not working. I think what you're doing here is just fabulous. I think I've listened to a number of the podcasts now, and I just love listening to the different perspectives on things. And there's just no right answer in this world. Every time you listen to somebody, and they come to the table with an idea, it's oh my God, I never thought of that before. I am such an amalgamation of all the people I've been exposed to over the years, whether it's through reading their books or... Yeah, something I want to share, not sure if we can see it here. No one can see it, but we are in a call. So that's my big bookshelf. So I would love to join your book club. Anyhow. Awesome. So yeah, no, seriously, like, like, yeah, I've been listening to your podcast. You do a lot of reading. So it sounds like Lean was the last one, right? The last podcast, which I thought was great. I think branding is so important, and like product marketing is such an important part. Whether you're building a company like you are, which by the way, you were very clever to use that as an opportunity to figure out how to build a brand around the work that you're doing. That was brilliant. But yeah, I thought that was really great. The one question though, like you'll have to answer at some point, is product is... I was going to ask you this question and you can choose to edit it out. But the question that I had is product development. Is it baking or is it cooking? And you know, so, so, so, and the only, what was going through my head was this. So I was making, so I have this bolognese recipe that it goes back many generations. So my family on one side came from Italy, many, you know, and, and this goes way back many generations. So when you look at the recipe, and I'm sure Christian, you'd appreciate this, like it's not very precise, right? It's like a dash of this and it'll say all these ingredients, but it never really says how much of anything. And so it's more like an art, right? Where you're trying different things to see what the effect is. And at one point I realized it's like, oh, this is all chemistry. What's going on here when I'm cooking, it's like chemistry. And I never have two batches that are the same. And they're all really good, but in different ways. And I feel a little bit like, like building out teams that do product development, it's a little bit like that. No two, never, no two are ever the same. And you're right. You look at them, like the ingredients are all there, but how they're mixed is a little bit different. And the quantities are a little bit different. And so anyway, I don't want to take things off track, but I just thought it was an interesting perspective. Absolutely. But I think to what you're saying, the ingredients are the structure. Yeah, totally. The structure is giving you the direction and you need to figure out how much you need of each of them to do it in the right way. I think most important is once you have understood, and I'm happy to hear your feedback from both of you. Once you have understood the basic foundation, the basic structure of organize yourself, plan projects, communicate to people, you will be able to solve every problem in the world if you like. And these things are applicable to, let's say 99% of the use cases out there, in my opinion. I love how we tend to always like get back into this metaphor of like baking and cooking and so on. But I think, yeah, you need to have these ingredients. And I'm not saying usually when you just simply weight them and you follow by book, the result will never be great. And I think it's there is also like a lot of what comes with the time is like this feeling for the ingredients, how you use them, and then like the texture and the consistency and all these sort of things. And when you're baking and when it's the bread, it can depend on even like the humidity that you have in your room or the temperature that you have while you're waiting for the dough to like kind of mature. What's the English word? To grow. Yeah, to grow. And I think it's about like also forming and getting this understanding. And in cooking a little bit more than in baking, you still have this possibility to iterate and to adjust by like the bolognese sauce. You just simply try it over and over again while cooking and you optimize it. I think like with baking, it's a little bit more complicated because once it's in the oven and it's getting like prepared for the release, like. Exactly. The model is fast and perfect. Yeah, it is. Yeah. Fast, fast and perfect. But you know what the most important thing is, Alex, because you just said at some point you start knowing what kind of ingredient you need and the temperature, etc. What's most important is no matter if it's food or human beings, you are talking about living organisms. Yeah, very good. The one that's bigger, the one that's smaller, but you're working with something that is living and therefore you always need to adjust. There is no one receive. And this was something that I've learned when I was becoming a baker back then, when my master told me, hey, Christian, you're working with living things, so make sure that you always keep an eye on it and always stay close to it. I love that thought. I think that's just such a great way to think about it because you are and it's so varied and it's about listening and observing and then taking your experience and making the best step forward. And if it works, great. And then being forgiving when it doesn't, because often it doesn't, right? And then you have to learn from it. Demonstrating humility is so important and you learn from it. And then what do you do? You go back and try it again. And you probably, I'm sure like, do you ever achieve mastery? It's you get better over time, but do you ever feel like you finally achieved mastery in baking? No. Absolutely not. Do you know what's the best living example for this? I'm a huge fan of Gordon Ramsay. The best chef on the planet. Whether you like him or not, doesn't matter. At least the one with the strongest brand, definitely. But when I was following his vlog, when he was traveling around the world. But something that you always see when this master cook learns something new, you should really observe him in his videos because he's acting like a child, ask thousands of questions to fuel himself into this food and the culture behind it, etc. So there's a real passion and dedication to what he's doing. And I think many people can definitely learn and get inspired from that. Yeah. Curiosity is at the core. This is what you love about kids. Like kids are infinitely curious about everything. And it's not just about the things you agree with, right? It's about being curious about the things that you don't agree with. Like if something just strikes you the wrong way, it just makes you curl. You almost have to work to ask questions. You really want to dig in and understand like, why do you think that? Like, this is like politics in the States and I'm not going to get into politics much. But this is the challenge is when somebody says something you don't agree with, the response should be curiosity. What is it that they're thinking and why do they think it? And having an honest dialogue with that person to really understand where they're coming from. I don't know. You always find that you learn something through that process. Kids have it all figured out. The other thing kids do a lot of too is kids laugh 200 times a day on average or something crazy like that. Whereas adults we do like maybe 12 times a day. So I think laughter and curiosity are certainly things that we all can work into our lives to make things better. Yeah. Unfortunately, it's all these things that we learn as kids and then we somehow lose as we grow. And I think maybe also a little bit like, and we started a podcast like with the industrial revolution and the way we moved like into shift working and like, this is, I think this is also a little bit like where we lose this intrinsic motivation, where we lose like the curiosity and where we simply follow clear rules. And so I think we need to try and get back to the roots. I'll tell you what, there's a, what's that Christian? Sorry. I was saying that is the part of the game, right? To finding it back and to getting it back at some point. I'll tell you that I came across a book recently that I would highly recommend called Think Like a Rocket Scientist. Have you heard of this? Nope. Yeah. But definitely read it. I think it really. Scientists tend to be a little bit like that. They're like these curious kids because in a lot of ways, that's where their heart is, really trying to understand these things. But the book gets into a lot of that. And if you can work that into your personal life and your work life, it's a really powerful idea. Some really powerful ideas. I apologize, gentlemen. I really actually so enjoyed this today. And I can't thank you enough for inviting me to join this conversation. And I'd love to keep in touch. And I certainly will be a regular in terms of listening in and learning from these. Amazing. Ryan, it was a pleasure. And I think it couldn't be a better end than talking about curiosity of kids and cooking. Stay hungry, stay foolish. Yeah, that's right. Hungry and foolish. I love it. I'm gonna have to use that. Great. Ryan, thanks again. Hopefully we can have you soon as a guest again. I think there's still a lot of like other topics that we could discuss and a lot of things that we could learn from you and also share with everyone else listening to this podcast. So have some beautiful days off. Yeah, you as well. And thank you again. And yeah, anytime I'd love to join you again. Amazing. All right. Thank you very much, Ryan. Take care. Do we need to summarize the conversation today? That's a very good question. And I think probably we can even skip the debrief for today. I think it was such a lovely and smooth conversation and the key takeaways I think are pretty well summarized at the end. So probably we just use this final minutes and seconds to tell everyone where they can find us and how they can give us feedback. As I said at the beginning, our new website is live product-bakery.com. Feel free to sign up to our newsletter. We will keep you regularly posted on news, new episodes, key learnings we've made and want to find a way to be even closer with you. And alternatively, you can also follow us on social media like LinkedIn or Instagram, as well as Twitter. We have added all links into the description. So feel free to follow us and share. If you like this episode and share it, if you think it will be helpful for your colleagues, friends, or someone else. Yeah, and if you like the format, one thing that's super helpful for us is if you subscribe us on Spotify, if you subscribe us on iTunes and even leave us your rating or some comments. And additionally, you can obviously always find us under hello at product-bakery.com. Feel free to drop us your feedback or any recommendations of speakers that we should have in our podcast. With that said, have a beautiful day or evening and talk to you soon. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.