Christian Idiodi: Telling the story of transformation

Andrew Skotzko [00:01:13]:
Christian, my friend, welcome to the show. How are you today?

Christian Idiodi [00:01:28]:
I am doing brilliant, Andrew, thank you for having me.

Andrew Skotzko [00:01:32]:
Oh my gosh, it's so good to have you. I've so enjoyed, enjoyed our conversations, and I've known for quite a while we needed to get you on here. So I'm delighted we could get you here today. There's so much ground I know we're going to cover, and I already am so excited for the stories I know you're going to share, but one of the things I wanted to ask you was just in terms of getting to know you better and helping the listener get to know you a little bit better. I have heard from Marty a couple times that there's an incredible story that we should try to get from you about the school you went to growing up and how that shaped you as a product person. And I don't know all the details, but I think I've heard him use the phrase lord of the flies a little bit. So I would just love to start with, like, what is that story, Christian?

Christian Idiodi [00:02:15]:
You know, I think the first time I kind of shocked the partners on it was kind of describing when we were hunting snakes, like pythons, and I was a very tiny little kid, and they will stick, you know, wrap my leg up in, like, a little blanket and stick it in a hole, and this snake will swallow up my leg all the way to the knees, and then they'll pull me out of the hole with the snake kind of half of the leg snake to actually. And everybody's like, what? You know, and then, you know, they kind of see a video of it and they're like, okay, backstory. What is going on?

Andrew Skotzko [00:02:51]:
Yeah, what is going on?

Christian Idiodi [00:02:56]:
I went to a gifted and talented school in Africa, kind of a United nations program, where they kind of pick the top percentage of kids in iq and grades to go into this program. And it's. We're talking 8 miles from any form of civilization. You're like, right in the middle of the jungle and things. And these kids are self organized in some ways.

Andrew Skotzko [00:03:19]:
Okay?

Christian Idiodi [00:03:19]:
You don't have vision, so, you know, you're walking to go get water. You probably walk about 2 miles to a class.

Andrew Skotzko [00:03:29]:
Where were you physically? Like, where in the country?

Christian Idiodi [00:03:32]:
Okay. So this was in Nigeria, and probably one of the most defining career aspects of my life because, you know, you have kids that spoke multiple languages, I mean, from different parts, different religions, different backgrounds. And I learned a whole lot how to. A survival tactic was to learn languages quickly and connect people so it became valuable that way. You learn to. I mean, they were very bright kids. I mean, we're talking kids that could hear a piece of music and play back without ones. Kids that were good at woodwork, metalwork.

Christian Idiodi [00:04:11]:
You. You had to learn everything in the school. Like, you exposed to all sports, all subjects. The whole idea is to find your natural gifts and talents and. But you had to test in everything in sports, in music, in art, in math, science, you know, computer science. To put it in perspective, we were the number one school in computer science in all of Africa, and we didn't have physical computers. There were kids that were coding in their head, like, they'll go to competitions and they'll write a whole script and program without ever a physical computer. So, wow.

Christian Idiodi [00:04:49]:
You know, these were in minds of people. I mean, they're mostly doctors and engineers and things today. And I used to feel like I was the dumbest kid in the whole school because, you know, they kind of rank you and everything, and people get this master advanced stuff, and I didn't rank the highest in anything, but the highest iq in leadership. And you can imagine at twelve years old, this is a boarding school or 13. You have no clue what leadership really means. I was. Was the guy that would take the debate team on a trip to go debate someone else. I'm never good enough to make the team.

Christian Idiodi [00:05:31]:
My job is just to introduce everybody, to take the drama team or the sports team, you know, and so you're always, the only time I ever got to play or participate was as a backup. You know, Andrew is sick and you're like, well, you're right here. You be a backup. So just good enough to be a backup. So I kind of went through this entire high school experience of really not understanding the value of leadership. Like, okay, you ranked the highest in leadership as a kid.

Andrew Skotzko [00:05:57]:
What does that mean?

Christian Idiodi [00:05:58]:
And you're just the one leading teams on the boss on trips, speaking up for everybody else. But I found it to be probably one of the most valuable things in my career. Because if you look at my love for problems and problem solving, it was harnessed very early on. I mean, we had no potable water, no potable electricity. I mean, we learned how to cook, how to farm, how to hunt.

Andrew Skotzko [00:06:23]:
All of this life, this was like by design, right? This is part of the, sort of part of this curriculum or how did that come to be?

Christian Idiodi [00:06:29]:
Well, I wish a lot of it were. I mean, the educational program was very extreme. You get university based professors that come in and alleviate a problem and the kids work out how to solve the problem. So the academic aspects were very much by design, but the social aspects of living twelve to 16 year old kids around the room to figure out life and live in, probably not as curated as I think it should be. As much of the experience. There's probably a lot of bullying, a lot of abuse, but talk about honing in a survival mentality and mindset.

Andrew Skotzko [00:07:09]:
Totally.

Christian Idiodi [00:07:10]:
My parents came to see me after my first year and I had probably lost 100 pounds. Of my 105 pounds. I weighed like, my goodness, we're taking you out of here. Like, you just look sickly and dead. And I fought to stay and I said as much as I couldn't really eat, the food was terrible and the adjustment was terrible. I knew what surviving in that environment meant for my mind, my ability, and I told them.

Andrew Skotzko [00:07:41]:
And how old were you at this time?

Christian Idiodi [00:07:43]:
I started at twelve. So I was like, and it's born in school. So you're away from family. You probably. My family was good, maybe, gosh, 20 hours drive away or so. And so, you know, I didn't get to see them. Maybe but once or twice in the year on some significant holidays, but yeah, so you're kind of inboarding school and I haven't been back home in terms of, you know, I kind of found my independence too early in that way and I left there, started walking, got into college. I never met him back home.

Christian Idiodi [00:08:17]:
But really probably a lot of stories in there that I kind of get the picture of why it probably feels like a lot of fly. A lot of the flies. I watched that movie a little too late. I was like, oh my goodness, look, it's like self governing and going crazy. I had some of that experience in my life.

Andrew Skotzko [00:08:36]:
Wow. Wow. So I'm really curious, what was it about it? What do you think that you took from it that shaped you? You mentioned that they threw you into everything so that you can kind of find your natural gifts, right? Go try it all, see what you're really good at. You mentioned, you know, you came strong in IQ and in leadership, but how did that actually, like, where did you find that traction for yourself? Internally?

Christian Idiodi [00:08:56]:
Yeah. Don't get it wrong, at twelve, you remove from your family, you feel a little sense of disconnect and lonely and afraid. And the fact is the most senior kids are kind of running the school in that way. And as you get to the ranks, you probably become those senior kids eventually and you can kind of see that cycle. But I look back at that experience, one problem solving, you know what I mean? The things that I do freak out my kids in terms of survival skills, what we do, you know, like how I cook, how I, you know, can iron my clothes without power and use coal and stuff and a surface and, you know, what, tremendous amount of creativity in problem solving and natural innovation. I mean we, these were kids that, you know, we're there designing things with wood and metal and just the mindset of it, communication. A significant part for me. Yeah, I discovered very early on, I mean, people that didn't speak, I learned about twelve languages being in there and I was effective in bringing people together because not only can I communicate with Andrew in his language, but I can connect Andrew to somebody else that didn't understand him in his native tongue.

Christian Idiodi [00:10:24]:
I mean we spoke English in the school, but I learned I could accelerate that too as well. And open mindedness. You know, I went to every religious group, I participated in every ethnic group and all of your clubs and societies because I realized that connecting with people on those common factors were very effective and I learned how to win people over in that manner. So a big piece of that. But you learn grit, you just learn these variants, this fight, this hunger. You know, you could, you could take the SAts from the first day you arrive, the school had a minimum, you had to, you know, you had to score to even to graduate. And a minimum pass if you arrive on day one, you could take that, you could leave. You're kind of yourself guided on, like when you could test out.

Christian Idiodi [00:11:15]:
But just the competitive nature of super smart people working together to solve problems and the brilliance of the things we could create when we do work together, people are like, oh, you are self made. I'm like, man, I started super early. I don't think there's anything magical. I started at twelve what most people do not experience to maybe 25 or 30 in their life. The independence, the need for agency, the grit, the idea of being self managed in that way very early. I practiced a lot of things very early in my career that extended to all the jobs and opportunities that I had.

Andrew Skotzko [00:11:57]:
Yeah, absolutely. That tracks perfectly because we've talked about before, the idea that product is basically team problem solving, right? It's get a bunch of smart people together, throw them in a room, go figure it out. And I can't imagine like you couldn't really design a better bootcamp for that than what you started at twelve. Especially like the translation, different languages, bringing people together to solve problems. It's like, wow, this makes so much sense to me that you, you know, you basically went into like the ultimate product boot camp when you were twelve.

Christian Idiodi [00:12:25]:
I do, yeah. And you know, you meet people that want to change the world, you know, when you ask those kinds of kids their vision, you know, like, and I mean, I came to the US to be a medical doctor and if you ask me as a little kid I had the goal of reading the world of Malaria, of cancer. I wanted to cure, like, I wanted to cure those heart diseases, I wanted to be a virologist. Like, I had this, you know, so I've always had this desire to solve big problems. We get problems in that way and I thought I would do it in healthcare, you know, and I didn't understand there was a discipline with inherent permission to do that every day for someone else and, you know, using technology. And so, you know, I actually started my product career by winning a competition in innovation. I didn't have a desire to win the competition, I just saw an opportunity and I just like, why wouldn't anybody take this opportunity? It's like, you know, you get to have it to share and if, even if you make it to the top 20, you get something and that hunger, that passion, that desire to solve problems just always existed.

Andrew Skotzko [00:13:34]:
Yeah, that makes, that makes such sense to me. I'm curious, you know, one of the things I've noticed about you, and this is, I think, a nice bridge from what you were just sharing about your, your upbringing and some of the heart of the conversation that we're going to be exploring around leadership and guiding transformation. But, you know, you're a really good storyteller and I'm curious, where did you learn that and, or did you learn that and, or was it modeled for you? I mean, I think you've mentioned before that your father was an amazing storyteller. I'm curious, like, where did this come from for you?

Christian Idiodi [00:14:00]:
Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, most, many Africans are good at stories because this oral tradition supersedes anything we could see with movies or technology or even in writing. And you can imagine people under a tree sharing stories at moonlight being the essence of how wisdom was passed down over the years and stories stick. There are many things I didn't realize I was good at till very late in my life. My kids always call it the lecture and the lesson kind of stuff like that. It's going to go into it in that way right from the little kids and that the idea is that they will always remembered the story, you know, and you don't know how it's effective when, until you see your kids tell the story your father told you and then you're like, wait a minute. You know, like this is jumping going down to generations, you know, the same exact story.

Christian Idiodi [00:15:08]:
And, you know, I see with my nephews and nieces, like, so, I mean, I think one needed a lot of practice because I kind of grew up in a society where that was a communication, that's where knowledge and wisdom was passed. Two, I discovered the effectiveness of it in really sticking to people. So, you know, it probably reinforced my use of stories to communicate over time. Like I tell people, I don't think you get mastery in any of those things by avoiding it. You know, in my everyday life with my kids, my walk and stuff, I, I tell stories because of how effective they are. I think all religions, they are stories all, you know, most of the big things are just great stories that are told. All the great movies we love, whether it's Star wars, almost the same stories, too, in all of these ways, told in different ways. And when you realize the, you know, the effectiveness of it in getting things across to people and if your goal is to actually, you know, not just speak but actually let the message be heard, then you will probably love stories, too.

Andrew Skotzko [00:16:23]:
Yeah, absolutely. One of the coaches I work with talks a lot. He's a storytelling coach. His name's Jay Akonzo, who's fantastic. He talks a lot about resonance and how, you know, when we, when we resonate with people, they. When we resonate more deeply with people through a story, it actually inspires them to move much more effectively than just telling them to do something. And I think it's exactly what I hear and what you're saying. And that strikes me as an interesting pivot point into some of the more obvious topics we might explore here in terms of you and I have had a number of conversations about transformation.

Andrew Skotzko [00:16:56]:
That's obviously top of mind with the new book. Congrats again on the new book. By the way, I know that you spent a lot of your time with leaders, with company leaders, with product leaders, and there's a lot of tactics that I'd love to explore, whether that's pilot teams or transformation planning. But it seems to me there might be a story, might play a big role in that. And so I'm curious, when you're thinking about a transformation, whether it's one that you've led in the past or one that you're helping support, where does story play into that at the leadership level in particular?

Christian Idiodi [00:17:29]:
I mean, stories at the very core are meant to be transformational in the idea. And I actually don't think any transformation happens without the story narrative of it because that's kind of the journey, right? It's. You can pick any, any movie you love, and it is a transformation story in its own path, right? Is when I say, or, you know, everything is great, and then there's the down, and then there's the Awp and everybody wins at the end. And happily ever after in some ways. And I think every business wants a happily ever after. And what stories do, one in two is one, telling a story of a company that looks like you, that has gone through a journey that will look like yours, and ends up in a happily ever after is inspiring. It creates a good time of resonance to act. There are many stories of companies that look like you that have failed to find happiness to as well.

Christian Idiodi [00:18:33]:
And, you know, you're cautious about you being one of those things, too, as well. But when you realize that what you're doing in a transformation is taking someone through a story, you know, through, you know, you are now in their dream, you have to guide them. You know, it's not your dream anymore, but you have to kind of guide them through that story. You are not the producer, the director, but you're participating. You don't actually crafting how that story is written. So, you know, I've never framed with my work in that way, but I think it's important to think about the transformation story that needs to, and the realities of all great stories. The players involved, the actors, the challenges, the ups, the downs, the highs, the low, and, you know, all the great stories with a level of sacrifice and pain and learning that comes across with it. And so a transformation story is a change story, which all great stories have.

Christian Idiodi [00:19:40]:
There has to be something that drives that change. So in our world, we frame it as changing how you build things, changing how you solve problems, changing how you decide which things you do or which problems to solve. But it's all change. You know, it's all transforming from something to something else. And that's a magical story.

Andrew Skotzko [00:20:07]:
Yeah. And that makes all the sense in the world to me. So I'm really curious, when you tell these stories to leaders, right. One of the things that I've seen to be essential in this is that at the end of the day, none of this is going to happen unless the leaders are truly, personally committed to driving the change and to evangelizing the change and staying involved on an ongoing basis. And I'm curious, is there a moment that you have seen where you see the light bulb go on for them? Like, how do you know? You know, because there's, I'm sure you've come across many leaders who, you know, they nod, they say, yeah, it sounds great, Christian, but there's some. Something missing where it's not quite there.

Christian Idiodi [00:20:44]:
Yeah.

Andrew Skotzko [00:20:45]:
How do you know?

Christian Idiodi [00:20:46]:
Great, great question. You know, we say business transformation starts with personal transformation in some ways. Most of my executive briefings, when I spend time with the most senior leaders in the company, I'm actually doing it for an audience of one, which is the most senior leader in the company or the CEO? And you're looking for that person's individual transformation to occur. Now, most people are transforming. You got to think back the motivation to really see where the light bulb comes in. Most people may be transforming because of fear. Like, oh, my goodness, we have a big competitor, Amazon is coming into our business, and so they feel some motivation externally. Some people transform because they are frustrated.

Christian Idiodi [00:21:31]:
Like, we've been spending so much money on tech, spending so much money on trying to do things fast enough. I innovate by buying companies or going outside or someone like, we see all the market cap of all the most successful companies being tech companies or they work differently, I want to be that. So they're like, there's some inherent greed or like, I want to be as successful or big as those companies. I always personally hope people do it because they want to serve their customers better, they want to help people better. But the reality is there's a motivation that has to occur. And while it is a company motivation, it has to be at individual executives true motivation that you're really trying to shift that story to. You want to see what drives them in some ways, kind of how do they get measured? What does success feel like in their world? And you want to try to convince them that the way they are currently doing things will not get them what they desire in a meaningful way or in a meaningful time frame. So I typically look, there is some retrospective, like, I have seen it occur in several instances where an executive almost gets it.

Christian Idiodi [00:22:47]:
Like it's their fault. Like, it's all on me. When there's some humility of, like, I now know what I don't know. And I realize that I have not created an environment for innovation to happen. I have not created an enabling environment for empowered teams. I have not given trust to people in some ways. And, you know, and I have the ability not to make these changes, but to champion it. So, you know, there are two types of people.

Christian Idiodi [00:23:15]:
They are the ones, to your point, that shake their head and they're like, in those environments, they are very complacent. Right? Like, we are winning. Life is good. You don't want to move cheese around. Like, we're going to hit our number this year. Like, who am I?

Andrew Skotzko [00:23:27]:
Yeah, it's all good. What's the problem?

Christian Idiodi [00:23:28]:
What's the problem? What is really the problem? Yeah, I mean, like, sure, we can be better at stuff, but, you know, it's not my problem. It's their problem. Those product people, those tech people need to go get better. I'm great. And then there are some other leaders that you see say things like, what do you need from me? How can I help? What can I support the teams better? How can I make this real? What is my role in this? They move beyond the awareness and the adoption to some sense of ownership, and that's the big shift I look for. It's never, it's kind of the end of the conversation. What question does the senior most person ask? If they say, andrew, yes, you need to go do that stuff. If they say, you know, I've always noticed a problem with the engineering people, or if they find the excuse, you know, I've had people say, you know, the problem here is leadership.

Christian Idiodi [00:24:24]:
And I'm like, you are the CEO. What do you mean by the problem is leadership? Like, who's leadership are we blaming up? Like, where are we gonna go from here? You know? Or, you know, it's. It's. The business is doing well, but it's the tech people, like, so you kind of look for, are they defensive? Do they delegate to someone else? Or do they turn to what is familiar in how to solve the problems? Or do they truly recognize that there are things they don't know or think opportunities for them to support this, and they ask for help?

Andrew Skotzko [00:25:00]:
How do you frame. One of the questions that always comes up in these conversations is you talk about a transformation, and any change journey is a journey. It can be hard to know when the journey is done, and maybe it's never done. But the question I would ask to you is when folks ask you, well, Christian, how do we know when we're there? How do we know when we have effectively transformed? I'm doing air quotes here.

Christian Idiodi [00:25:23]:
Yeah. Oh, it's a great question, and I get it all the time. And typically, people ask me first, how long is he going to take? And then how do I know what I've done? When people ask me how long it takes, I always joke with them. I say, it takes as long as it takes for you to go bankrupt. Because one of my favorite quotes is from Ennis Hamonway and the sun also rises. It's like, how did we go bankrupt? You say, well, it happened two ways. It happened gradually, then suddenly, you know, and you look at every story of any company that goes bankrupt. You know, it's kind of like it's going down.

Christian Idiodi [00:25:58]:
And then suddenly, like, you're bankrupt. Like, you just really. And I'm talking like, you know, blockbusters, what, 6 billion to bankrupt in six years? We see big toys r us. I mean, you look at some of the balance sheets of this company like there is no way on the planet, I mean, you can buy success at this point, you know? And I tell people transformation is almost like that. You know, it happens gradually, and then suddenly you are kind of walking in this way. And the story I always tell them is kind of a chick fil a. You know, if you ever been to chick fil a and you say, thank you, chick fil a, you know what they say, my pleasure. Any chick fil a you go to in the country, if you say thank you, somebody says, my pleasure.

Christian Idiodi [00:26:40]:
And, you know, the order of chick fil a stumbled upon this gesture kind of, I think, at the four seasons or one of this place, and it's like, man, I really love how that made me feel. I like that response. I want everybody at chick fil A to say that. And Chick fil A was smaller back then. Like, just fast growing, but very small. How long do you think it took for that to become the culture of Chick fil A? What's your guess, Andrew?

Andrew Skotzko [00:27:04]:
I mean, he's a CEO. It probably took longer than he thought, longer than he wanted. So I'm going to guess a couple of years.

Christian Idiodi [00:27:14]:
Yeah. It took like six years for this to happen. Six years. Interestingly, the story is like, the son of the founder realized that the best way they could mandate it in the training manual, HR could say, if you don't say that, you're fired. But they found out, like, the leaders, if the leaders started to model that out in their leadership groups of people, it would change the culture. But I see that, because I always look at that as, like, that is something as simple as how you say thank you in the company. You're not changing from waterfall to agile, from on prem to cloud, from project to product, from outcome to from output to outcome. I mean, that's just like saying my pleasure when you say thank you.

Christian Idiodi [00:27:52]:
And that took six years for a whole company to adopt culture. And I always try to remind people, like, real transformation is like a perpetual state of doing, but it's a change in your culture and your mindset. It's not an adoption of a process, a framework, a methodology. In some ways, yes, you are changing a lot of how you decide what to do, how you do it, and how you create value for your customers. But the real underpinning of that success is a cultural change. It is the behavior. Because I have seen many companies that think we're there, and then the executive leaves or the CEO leaves, or a new leader comes in and they just go right back to where they were before. Or we talk about the revenge of the PMO.

Christian Idiodi [00:28:40]:
It becomes so successful. What happens is when you start to have that kind of transformational success, what does the board start to pressure the company to do? Protect that. We are winning now. So growth minded, innovative CEO has a great track record. He and his team probably get hired by other companies that want that kind of record. And then the next leader the company brings in is no longer a transformational, innovative leader, but a leader that is a grower, a maintainer of, you know, a scaler, leader. And they start to bring back all the old bureaucratic processes that start to take culture back to where it was. And so you see companies go through this cycle of transformational success and then back into this abyss, and then they have to themselves, you know, like I tell every company, every successful startup was a product company walked into product model.

Christian Idiodi [00:29:33]:
Like that is just, you know, what tends to, you know what it is. Yeah. When you exist, you're like, you're scrappy, you experience experiment, everybody's in a room, you collaborate, like, there's no all of this process, bureaucracy and stuff, you know, but when you start to become successful, you start to create process or you start to protect what you have. And some of these bad practices start to come in, oh, we have to scale, you know, they're going to scale the process. They stop caring about people or the culture or the things that got them there. They try to protect customers, protect revenue, protect their brand and their reputation. Then they start to become reactive, start to respond to audit requests. So you can see this change happening in a company over time.

Christian Idiodi [00:30:18]:
So I always tell companies, the biggest indication that you've transformed is one that you can do things that you could not do before. Hopefully that's the whole point of your transformation. And you start to see like, man, we discovered cool products. We launched on withdraw Valley. Great. But it is a constant state because it's culture. It's not a. Sometimes things like trust, you know, like you gotta blow up and to trust me.

Christian Idiodi [00:30:43]:
So now I can beat him up with a stick every day. Like, you know, you will lose trust if you don't actively walk on it. Same thing with culture, same thing with the transformed state. It is who you are and that is something that you have to practice every day.

Andrew Skotzko [00:30:58]:
Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. I love the point you made about, there's a trap here where a company can think they are there, but it's actually still dependent on the leader that is driving it. So it's not actually into the culture yet. So how do you tell the difference? If someone was listening to this and they're potentially about to make that mistake, how do you know it's actually in the culture, in the DNA of the place, so that it's resilient to the leader who drove it leaving?

Christian Idiodi [00:31:25]:
I love that. Remember my whole stuff with storytelling when I said, you know, I only knew it was effective when I had my children tell their friends my dad's story. It's almost like, is the generation down? That is your indication. So if you're the chief product officer. It's not your direct report. Like, oh, I've got a succession plan of somebody that is going to champion. That is the succession plan of your succession plan. It's the people that report into that being the champion of the culture and the transformation that is the biggest indication that it will stick.

Christian Idiodi [00:32:04]:
So if I'm evaluating a company, I don't come in and say, well, Andrew was the chief product officer. Does he still believe in this kind of stuff like that? Or Andrew's direct reports, do they still believe in it? No. I go to the team that is walking in and see if they communicate the same value as Andrew does, not what their manager does, because that's how you start to know what's in the culture. You know, what the language, the behaviors, you know, the environment, because it's lived out in the people. And when you see the risk of friction, you know, because you see that in companies where they say, well, you know, we've seen this before. We're gonna act, we're gonna play along, you know, and then Andrew is gonna leave. And then some really come with some new process. Sure.

Christian Idiodi [00:32:51]:
Everybody has your favorite framework who just hang around until you leave. Like, you've seen companies that do that. I've been here 30 years. I've seen this over and over again. This one is not going to work. He's going to leave. You know, she's going to leave. So you haven't transformed those people because the language and the behaviors have not changed.

Christian Idiodi [00:33:11]:
So that's a big risk. I tell people that all the time. Great transformations do have champions. They do have evangelists. They do have some serious champions at the most senior level, but the ones that stick, it is a cultural change, and my biggest indication is the layers down in the culture of how people behave.

Andrew Skotzko [00:33:35]:
Yeah, no, I love that. What might be my favorite leadership book of all time, it's really the contender. I'm not sure if you're familiar with it. It's called turn the ship around by a guy named David Marquet.

Christian Idiodi [00:33:46]:
Yes.

Andrew Skotzko [00:33:47]:
And what it reminds me of is why he waited a decade to write the book was he's like, I wanted to see what happened after I left. And the ship kept getting better after he left. And he's like, okay, that wasn't an ego blow. That was like, hey, it worked.

Christian Idiodi [00:34:01]:
Yes, that's it. I love that. I've never framed it in that way, but absolutely, you know, we're getting better. It's a bigger indication. And because you've scaled with people. I was just talking with an executive team prior to this, and, you know, the four founders said, christian, were tired. You know, we've got four exhausted founders, you know, and I said, you know, the best thing you can do for the company is to create, you know, multiple of people. Like, if all of you just took four more people under your wing and you made them better than you, and that's the best gift you can leave the company as founders is, you know, and just give them your all and coach them.

Christian Idiodi [00:34:42]:
Don't scale or process or framework or. This is our secret to success in that way. Create more use. Yeah, that's the one.

Andrew Skotzko [00:34:51]:
Yeah, yeah. 100%. Yeah. I had a huge celebration moment about this, like, just like this recently with one of my clients. He is CEO of a growing startup, and it was the first time he was able to take a proper vacation, and he came back and things were better than he left. And I was, and he's like, this has never happened before. And I was like, congratulations. It's working.

Andrew Skotzko [00:35:12]:
He's like, oh, my God. You saw the light bulb go on for him. And he was like, oh, yes. Oh.

Christian Idiodi [00:35:18]:
And so, anyways, people with insecurity will have their ego hard by that. You know, in some ways that actually see it as an indication of good leadership.

Andrew Skotzko [00:35:29]:
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. It's like, if you can make yourself. It's hard for leaders because, you know, leaders often got to where they are by being the best at what they do, by having all the answers. And I don't have this perfectly. Like, I haven't written about this or really framed this out, but it strikes me that leaders themselves have to go through several transformations, and a lot of those are like, well, it's this question of, like, what's my value as a leader? Where's my source of value? And I got to my job because I was super good at the last thing, and then I wasn't doing it anymore. But then I was the one who had all the answers, and then there's a certain point where there's too much going on. You can't have all the answers.

Andrew Skotzko [00:36:06]:
So now you have to make sure that the answers happen and that you're almost leading through questions. You're almost making sure the right questions get asked. I'm curious, like, how does. How does that track with what you see?

Christian Idiodi [00:36:15]:
Oh, absolutely. You know, I was. I was just telling Mari the story of one of my best CEO's ever in my career, and he used to give me a ton of biographies to read, and he pissed me off, like, you know, every single time. Like, yeah, it's Ben Franklin's biography. Yes, you know, Lincoln's biography. Like, read this. I will talk about this. Like, in all of our, and there was a time, you know, I was in the middle of a crisis with work and I was like, man, I'm struggling with this and stuff like that.

Christian Idiodi [00:36:45]:
It's like, oh, did you read the Lincoln biography? I'm like, dude, stop the biography stuff. Like, I read the whole story of him and I don't even know what that's going to do to help me in building my tech business or my product. And he said, you know, he went back and, you know, he said, oh, remember the battle in Gettysburg? I want to get like, do you remember what happened? Yes. Like, yes. What was the impulse he had on the decision and how did he think about it? And you struck me, the clarity in my decision making. And he says to me, he said, the benefit of a biography, the single biggest aspect of leadership, he said, was decision making. And, you know, the benefits of biography is that we can see the decisions people made and we know what happened after. You don't know what's going to happen with the decision you're about to make, but you could look back and see the inputs, the story that what that person had to make that decision and what happened when they made certain decisions or not.

Christian Idiodi [00:37:40]:
And he said, that's the learning I want you to have in your career. And it kind of always struck me kind of as a leader, you know, it's kind of like the biggest leverage you have in the work you do and the decisions you make every day. People kind of argue with me about like, you know, the imbalance between, like, the CEO and the lowest person in the company. You know, oh, they make 300 times plus more than that person. And when you start to understand what the real job is, it's kind of one decision of a business strategy, one decision on who to hire, who to fire, what markets to go into, the impact it has on a giant ecosystem. The higher you go up in a company means it has to be informed with tremendous insight and data, but an intuition that comes over time that you can only grow in some humility of knowing there are things you don't know. But recognizing that your job is no longer to do the job but to create an environment for others to do good work and to get other people better at doing their job. When that hits you, man, you know, just changes your mindset.

Christian Idiodi [00:38:53]:
People ask me, you built a lot of products in your career. What are you proud of? I said, none of the products. I am proud. More of the people.

Andrew Skotzko [00:39:01]:
People. Yeah.

Christian Idiodi [00:39:03]:
I am proud of Andrew, who came to me as an intern in 2005, who I coached up to this, who is now CEO of a Fortune 500 company. I am proud of Esther, who was working as a customer support person that started as a associate product manager, became a director that is now chief product officer at one of those. And that's the magic, because they are building better products than I could ever build, solving more problems in the world than I could ever. And I hope that resonates with people.

Andrew Skotzko [00:39:44]:
Absolutely. So it's funny. I'm so glad you brought that up because I actually want. I listened to that episode, which is great, by the way. We'll link to the podcast. Everyone should check it out. I was listening to that episode last night, getting ready for this conversation, and I wanted to ask you which of those biographies most impacted you in your decision making. Like, tell me the story.

Andrew Skotzko [00:40:02]:
What was the book and what was the decision? How did reading this book change you as a leader, the decision you made?

Christian Idiodi [00:40:08]:
I probably have several of them here. You know, I've got Ben Franklin. Walter Eisenston is probably my favorite.

Andrew Skotzko [00:40:16]:
Yeah, he's great.

Christian Idiodi [00:40:17]:
I mean, he, Elon Musk, that just came out. He's kind of next to me. But Steve Jobs, all of those things in here. And you get, you will get some insights into some of the books. Like Tony Fadal wrote build and something. There are stories in some of these things that, you know, people read it for. Like, oh, I'm gonna get product sense by reading how somebody built the nest of that. But I read them looking for, they made a decision on how to do it.

Christian Idiodi [00:40:46]:
How did they get to that decision? Because that's what I need to get better at as a leader. You see, if I were like an individual contributor. Yeah, I want to know what techniques did I use to build something? But, like, if you're a leader, that's no longer your job. Your job is like, how did he make the decision to do it this way? How did he make the decision on where to invest? So I actually love, I love Lincoln, the movie. I love the books on it. I love, I love the jobs book. What is the big one? I was just referring to somebody. There's a story in the Walton family, there was a story, the Virgin Atlantic person, the Dyson one is also another fascinating one, too, as well.

Christian Idiodi [00:41:37]:
And people look at, they summarize it with all they went through a lot of failure, and then they had success. Benjamin Franklin had a lot of. He tried a thousand times. They summarized those parts of the story to inspire in some ways. But when I discerned that it was all about decision making, I started to read the stories a little differently.

Andrew Skotzko [00:41:58]:
Yeah. Yeah, I bet.

Christian Idiodi [00:42:00]:
I didn't want to know what they did. I kind of wanted to get back to why they did it.

Andrew Skotzko [00:42:06]:
Yeah. What's an example of one of those. One of these stories that actually changed your approach?

Christian Idiodi [00:42:11]:
It's kind of the Abraham Lincoln war story, the kind of the Civil War story, and even the emancipation story. With that decision, which was a very controversial decision for him to do in kind of this kind of freeing the slaves and the legacy and the history there, I was kind of looking at the input, but you kind of balance out what was good for people, what was good for a political career, what went against your morals and your values. And I found these very simple decision making frameworks that I used to use for my team back then. And I said, okay, we're going to make a decision. You know, I like the idea of you asking for forgiveness than permission. But when in doubt, go through these three questions in your framework. Is it good for our customers? Or how is it good for our customers? Is it good for our business? Or how is it good for our business? Would it stand against your values, your morals, your ethics, in some ways, if somehow you can answer yes to all of those things, make the decision. We can talk about that afterwards, because that's what I will ask you first to defend.

Christian Idiodi [00:43:19]:
You know, it's like, you cannot be like, well, you know, I didn't really believe in it, but it was good for the business and good for the customers. But I just thought it was morally wrong. Like, I will challenge you on that.

Andrew Skotzko [00:43:29]:
Yeah.

Christian Idiodi [00:43:29]:
You know, in some ethically wrong. You know, so you. You know, I said that, you know, Amazon has their, what do you call one way door, two way door decisions in that kind of way. Can you reverse this? But many people have discovered decision making frameworks that they can live with that enables innovation or going fast. But I saw, like, patterns in behaviors of leaders in tough situations, and you can see the ones that end up in disaster and the ones that don't. You can see the ones that ignored data, and we're still right. You know, like, you look at some things with Netflix, that's what they think, but they had tested value. And you look at some things that what people say is different from what they do, or customers don't really know what they want.

Christian Idiodi [00:44:14]:
And you read the stories of, like, you know, I don't know if you. The first Walkman, when people were asking kids, you know, they designed a yellow Walkman. Like, you know, all the kids were like, this is awesome. We love that. Yeah, that's cool color. That's swag. We love it. It look great now and then, you know.

Christian Idiodi [00:44:32]:
Thank you for your participation in this focus group. You know, we have yellow Walkmans and black Walkmans for you to take as a gift. Take anyone you like. All the kids took the black. No one of them. It's kind of like what they say, very different from what they do. But, you know, people look at the stories and the focus group failed. You know, I look at some of the behaviors and the insights behind them, and you start to see consistent principles across hard decisions the closer you are today.

Christian Idiodi [00:45:01]:
Like, intuition is actually something that is trained over time. Like, the more time you spend with customers and data, the stronger you got, the more reading and studying you do. And you look at leaders that have made fantastic intuitive decisions about stuff. I read the background story of the killing of Osama bin laden. Fascinating. Just the real time decision on when to go in, what to call the troops to call, but the number of security briefings that had to be digested to quickly make that decision and approve certain things. You know, some people ignore all of that. You know, whether they see it for the surface, the politics, the nice inspiration of it.

Christian Idiodi [00:45:43]:
You know, I studied all of these things early in my career for the decision making.

Andrew Skotzko [00:45:47]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. One of the things that there's a saying I love, and I can't remember who originally said this, but this came up with a group of friends I was having dinner with last week. We were talking about intuition and decision making. And there's a line, if I could find who said it, that intuition is compressed experience. Oh, yeah. And since this idea that we got into this conversation of, like, okay, so at the end of the day, often we make the call with our gut, right? We go with our gut. But then there's the. The question you've got to ask at some point was like, well, okay, well, how well informed is my gut? Right? Like, does my gut have a lot of data that it's just synthesizing and giving me, like, a nice download, or am I just not.

Andrew Skotzko [00:46:29]:
That is, you know, maybe I'm just kind of going with what my. What I feel today, you know, that matters.

Christian Idiodi [00:46:35]:
Yeah. Because I have not met a good. A good gut decision that was not informed. Like, you know, it feels that way. Oh, yeah. I just made that decision. But then you read the history of the person. You know, you read the, like, you know, I just gave you my background of my high school experience.

Christian Idiodi [00:46:56]:
You know, my kids see me out. We go hiking or something, and I do something crazy out there in the woods, or I respond in killer time. Oh, my goodness. You know, how, you know, I just felt like I just had. But then, you know, if you think about it, you were informed by your nature and by your nurture in your experience and the things you've gone through that shaped how you respond to the world. Just like all knowledge is recollection, all gut is trained on folk. Yeah.

Andrew Skotzko [00:47:23]:
So I want to go ahead and start to wrap up here. One of the things that I wanted to ask you about, though, and this is something that I've also come up in other conversations I've had around dinner tables with other folks who have gone through this journey that we're talking about, from being an individual contributor to a manager to a leader of a company to then advising or supporting other leaders. And I'm really curious, as you think about your own journey, like your own story arc that you've gone through from when you started in product to where you are today, what were those big mindset shifts or internal transformations you went through? And in particular, I'm wondering, of course, there was IC to manager and to company leader. But then I'm also curious about one that where you went from being an operator to now coaching and advising and doing the work you do today.

Christian Idiodi [00:48:09]:
Oh, boy. I think I had the benefit of starting young, which, you know, the benefit is not how much time I've had in it, but I was reckless and careless. I made a lot of mistakes. You know, I will probably credit my ability to be a good coach today to a tremendous amount of massive failure and a tremendous amount of mistakes and errors. And I didn't. You know, part of the luxury of being young is it can be excused by people in some ways, like, they are young. They are naive. It's perfectly okay for a baby to miss their mouth while you're trying to eat, but it looks awkward when an adult does it in some ways.

Christian Idiodi [00:48:51]:
But the hope is that you're learning all through that there are people that go through some of these things and still repeat the same mistakes. So I had the benefit of doing a tremendous amount of IC jobs, whether it's from working at a gas station or it's kind of a 711 convenience store and stocking to being a store manager there and seeing the difference in that rank to being in an operational role in tech and going individual contributor and being a manager in that rank and seeing the difference in those environments and realizing a couple of things to be very true that you had to develop over time. Emotional intelligence, being one in the big shift into product, even more so than any of the technical skills I look for, collaborative problem solving. I learned a whole lot that, you know, there are many sports, you know, can be great at golf as an individual and be great, you know, but at soccer, you can be great on a terrible team and you never win in some ways, no matter how great you are on a terrible team in that way. And that's a shift you mentally have to make in your mind, like, am I playing an individual sport or a team spot? You start to understand what it means to play as part of a team and why the culture trump stuff and the dynamics, the fact that you're working with different people, different backgrounds, skill set, expertise, that means there'll be dysfunction. That's part of it in that way. And you start to realize the role of leadership when you become one in a team sport, and that you recognize that a team is actually made up of individuals. So they individually have to get good at their job and then collectively have to get good at working together as a team.

Christian Idiodi [00:50:46]:
These are significant shifts. I think I had the luxury of failing a lot of these things and probably enough humility to reflect and learn from them. So in every one of these things, I got better next go around, I think I was fortunate enough to be given another opportunity to try and do it rapidly, and I felt a lot and quickly in the mistakes I made. So I embraced it very well. I don't think I see failure anymore in the world because it's just like, aha. You know, that's just Tuesday in my world. Like, let's go. There's growth that comes from it.

Christian Idiodi [00:51:31]:
So from an individual contributor all the way to coaching, I have carried a set of principles throughout. Some have been consistent, some have evolved as the role has changed. You know, I am a fundamental believer in what my purpose is today in giving back in the work I do in Africa, in the work I do to help people get better at their jobs or as a coach. And, you know, I used to coach my kids in soccer, and we won the championship, like, eight years in a row. I mean, I've coached eight years, coach my son, coached my daughter, you know, and I didn't know, you know, I thought I just had a great set of kids and, you know, you kind of step away from coaching and this team sucks and loses and becomes the, you know, and then I took on the worst team in the league, and in a year, they won the championship again. And you realize how powerful coaching is. Important role of getting people better does not exist within a team, actually exists in the people that are able to watch a team and create an environment for them to work together. Because, you know, as individuals, we come into a team environment very differently than in a team, individual sport.

Christian Idiodi [00:52:42]:
We don't see the dynamics, the impact of walk, our play, our positioning. We don't see the strategy. We cannot see the whole field. We, we cannot get feedback. We cannot practice. Well, these are all the things coaching does. And I have seen the impact, you know, in little league teams or small teams, the impact of big teams. So I recognize the power of good coaching in transforming individuals, transforming teams, and transforming companies.

Andrew Skotzko [00:53:09]:
Absolutely. What is, you know, what is the first thing you do as a coach when you, whether it's with a little league team or a company, you know, because coaching can feel like this mysterious thing to many people. But, like, concretely, what do you do when you, when you get in there?

Christian Idiodi [00:53:25]:
I seek to understand before I'm understood. I was, you might know nothing. So I, I do an assessment. I do discovery. You know, the same way you want to solve a problem. You want to learn, you want to. So I want to understand individuals, their motivation, their goals, the way I describe it to people. Like, I need to know, you know, where all the players are on the chessboard or also are we even actually playing chess? Which is often a very interesting, you know, because you kind of.

Christian Idiodi [00:53:52]:
So these are dynamics I need to go in. So I do a tremendous amount of discovery. I do a lot of insight. I mean, it's the same way I'll say, don't go build a product if you haven't spoken to, like, 30 customers. You have no right to tell a team what to build. In some ways, like, I have no right to coach you if I do not seek to understand what game you're playing, how you're playing, who the players are, your environment, your condition, your background you're in. So all my coaching will start with an assessment, you know, and it can be as soft and fuzzy as who are you? I want to get to know you to as concrete as your goals. How do you get bonus? What do you care about? What does your wife think about you? What are your kids want you to accomplish? I mean, that's why I get, people do forget all of these things.

Christian Idiodi [00:54:37]:
They won't forget that they told you these things, you know, because they care about the decisions you make that actually yield better outcomes for them. And so, you know, I always start with an assessment and then I spend time kind of working backwards on what kind of outcomes we want. Right. So I kind of want to know what goals you want, what can, and then how do we create that so we have a sense of where you are today and where you want to be. And my job is to, you know, it's a lifelong kind of relationship.

Andrew Skotzko [00:55:06]:
Yeah. One of the question on that topic that came up in a recent chat I was having with a friend, we were talking about, to use a sports metaphor, how in certainly in the very fast paced world of tech, where the pace is high all the time, especially if you're in anything like a startup or a growth stage company, there's always this enormous pressure and time pressure. And one of the things that feels like it can go out the window in a situation like that is practice time. It's a game day every day. And so the question is like, well, when do you practice? And so I'm curious, when you, when you think about this and whether you're coaching someone or when you were in an operating role, how did you actually create the conditions and the space for practice and what did that look like amidst all the pressure of performing?

Christian Idiodi [00:55:50]:
That's a great question. Well, I mean I had built a culture in my last operational role of ensuring that I did a boot camp, which was constant practice every quarter. And the goal was I wouldn't put a practice their individual craft. But I made you to practice with the team you're going to be working with before you actually work with them. And the reason I focused on onboarding or early stage is because that's when people have the highest amount of trust. They are not jaded. I mean, it blows my mind what people will do in onboarding. I mean they will fill out 5000 papers, they will take a drug test, whatever you tell them to do, and you haven't even paid them a salary, they will do in the beginning of every job.

Christian Idiodi [00:56:30]:
But you know, after 30 years you're like, I'm too busy, I don't know, have time. What is the one from me? Listen. Blows, you know that shifts, they've lost trust because you understand the environment. So it's the best time, you know, before a game to practice. You have inherent permission to practice before a game. But what I'm doing is that because there are new people coming into the team, I am pulling the existing team from their game time and forcing them into practice under the excuse of, like, Andrew is new. We need to know when to pass him the ball, how to pass him the ball, how he likes his ball passed to him, you know, and so we need to practice working with Andrew so that he doesn't disrupt our flow and we want to get him super productive when he gets back in the team. So I used to do that.

Christian Idiodi [00:57:13]:
Now the second avenue is. Many people waste something called meetings. They only meet to meet. It's the biggest waste of time. You know, team meetings, one on one. This is practice time, practice time. So, I mean, sure, there's business to discuss, information to be passed on, approvals to be made, decisions to be made, but I always want to carve out a second half of my meeting for practice. So, you know, Andrew is struggling with stakeholder stuff.

Christian Idiodi [00:57:48]:
And the way I say it is, if one person on my team struggles with something, the whole team struggles with it, because the team is only as good as his weakest player. You know, you need to understand that dynamic because that team collaboration, if you're struggling at communication, that person is communicating on behalf of your team in circumstances, your team is judged on all of his players. You know, it's like, oh, he missed the goal. The team missed the goal, quelly. I mean, as a team, too. So if you scored the goal, we also scored a goal. So I always want people to know, like, and the best people to help you through teamwork is accountability. Like, we talk to each other that way.

Christian Idiodi [00:58:27]:
So I'll say, you know what, team? We're struggling with communication, so we're going to practice, people. I'm great at communication. That's fantastic, because Andrew needs some more practice at it, and so we're going to practice at that. And now everybody's aware of where Andrew is getting better tomorrow. It might be someone else's thought. So I always beat in practice time into one on ones and team meetings.

Andrew Skotzko [00:58:52]:
What does it look like when you go into that, that part of the meeting? Like, could you give me an example of, like, let's say it's either a one on one or a team meeting. Like, what. What do you actually do to practice in that moment?

Christian Idiodi [00:59:01]:
So, remember, in a. Everybody's one on one, they do. I've probably done an assessment before, so I kind of know the things you want to get better at, and I know it overall for everybody.

Andrew Skotzko [00:59:11]:
Right?

Christian Idiodi [00:59:11]:
So, you know, if you're dealing with doing discovery or you're dealing with talking with salespeople, or dealing with annoying customers or reviewing data. In some ways, I would have created a development plan for you, a coaching plan. And I'm going to say, you know, andrew, by the next few months, we're going to work on this. And, yeah, the ways we're going to do it, you know, both of us are going to go to a data forum. I'm going to hook you up with a finance person to review this. So I have a practical plan for it. As you get through that plan, you need to practice what you have learned. So I'm going to say, hey, Andrew, in the next team meeting, you're struggling with dealing with data.

Christian Idiodi [00:59:50]:
You're going to present this data report to the team. Team Andrew is working on data stuff, so we need to be critical and give him good feedback on it. And, you know, so everybody goes through the same motion. So everybody already, because the team is accountable to each other. If you struggle to do that in your team, you don't have enough psychological safety. Thing you need to work on is psychological safety. I need to coach that. So because you need, people need to be able to be like, all right, and we got you.

Christian Idiodi [01:00:19]:
You see? Yeah, it'll give you feedback and stuff like that or help you with it. It feels like homework. It feels. But that's how you get better. Like, you. So imagine you have to do it in one on one support to know it's not a surprise or, like, got you. Or an embarrassing thing. People are excited.

Christian Idiodi [01:00:36]:
People are the team judges all around. It's like, yeah, good job. You scored a goal. That's what you want the team to be, you know, because in the real world, we want you to do that job. We don't want you to learn how to do that job.

Andrew Skotzko [01:00:48]:
Right, right.

Christian Idiodi [01:00:50]:
Frustrating if you do it poorly and hurt the team than if you were embarrassed because you were practicing in the team. And you see what I mean? Like, it's actually to all of us if you just go mess up, you know, like, I struggle at presentation. Well, the first time you're going to present is to the CEO and the all hands. Like, can you imagine that embarrassment? Everybody's like, ah, shame, not on my team. You know, kind of thing. Present. Let us give you feedback. You know, let me act like the CEO.

Christian Idiodi [01:01:17]:
You act like the head of sales. Let's try to ask you questions, you, confidence, you know that, you know, the team has your back. You know, people are in the meeting you look at, they will clap for you. They'll remember those things. That's the magic man, great team.

Andrew Skotzko [01:01:30]:
I love it. I love it. No, thank you. For that example. It's, you know, one of the things that it strikes me is that, you know, to your point, people, like, people love getting better. We all want to get better. And it's motivating that is inherently motivating. And it's.

Andrew Skotzko [01:01:41]:
There's a phenomenal book. If you haven't checked it out, you might. You might like it. It's called an everyone culture, and it's a book about. It's a bit of a mouthful, but the concept is a deliberate, see, I flubbed it right there. A deliberately developmental organization, a DDO. And what I love about this concept is it's looking at the workplace itself as a vehicle for personal growth and development. And one of the key insights of it, and I think this is what I was hearing in your story just there, is that we actually already have everything we need for this in the work itself.

Andrew Skotzko [01:02:16]:
Like, we don't have to go, like, spend a ton of money on other stuff and take, it's already all baked in there. We just got to take it and use it.

Christian Idiodi [01:02:23]:
Yes. We don't execute against it very well. But you can understand why. Like I said, the reason most people don't give good coaching is because they've not experienced good coaching themselves. They don't have any mental model of what good looks like in that way. So I am hoping that it only takes one good experience. People, you know, they tell the story that was told to them and how it transformed your life. There it is, back to in the beginning, right? Because if you're transformed with a good practice session, you're going to get your team transformed with a good practice session.

Andrew Skotzko [01:02:56]:
There it is. Well, that is a beautiful full circle moment, my friend. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you for the work you're doing. It's always a joy to spend time with you. Just in closing out, Christian, what would you like to leave folks with? And where can. How can folks be useful to you?

Christian Idiodi [01:03:10]:
Oh, boy. In this day and time, you know, I send a message of kindness to people, and I tell people it's a choice on how you treat other people. And, you know, so I always leave people with that. If you have asked me a message to spread why you can bring joy and peace and love to everybody, you know, you can choose to be kind in all your interactions and everything you do. How people can help and support people have been amazing in supporting the work that we do in SVPG and the Silicon Valley product group. I recognize we talk about how to do the best work in the industry and how the best companies are built. It might feel like people are like we are so far away from that, but we champion the good because it is good and because it's to do, you know, because everybody deserves to do good work and work in a great culture and the world is better for all the great products that have come out of great product teams and great cultures. And so we will always challenge people.

Christian Idiodi [01:04:14]:
And I've always asked people to be patient as we continue to do that, to seize the hope that comes out of that and to believe that they, too, can be part of that narrative and that story. And as always, I do a lot of work in Africa and around the world because I do believe everybody deserves an opportunity to learn and cultivate great product communities and cultures and so continue to spread that one out and champion that everywhere.

Andrew Skotzko [01:04:45]:
Yeah. Where can folks support that work if they're so inclined?

Christian Idiodi [01:04:49]:
We have a conference you can go to, inspire africa.com. you can follow us on LinkedIn or social to see the work that we're doing there. And also the Innovative Africa foundation walk where we focus on really trying to enable, accelerate the use of technology in Africa.

Andrew Skotzko [01:05:08]:
Fantastic. Well, we'll have links to all that in the show notes. But Christian, again, thank you for being here. It's such a joy to hang out with you and real pleasure, Christian.

Christian Idiodi [01:05:15]:
Christian Andrew, always a pleasure. Thank you for having me. Have a wonderful rest of your week.