From Strategy to Execution: How Tiama Hanson-Drury Gets Teams Rowing Together Part-2

Transcript

[00:00:03] Tiama:  Most businesses are really good at setting a strategy at the top, and they’re really good at having people in the trenches who actually do the work. What they’re really bad at is how do you translate that to the middle management so that the middle management can then make that realistic for the people in the trenches?

[00:00:18] Intro:  Welcome to Signal to Noise by Riviera Partners, the podcast where leading executives share how they cut through the noise and act on what matters most. We go beyond the headlines to explore the pivotal decisions, opportunities, and inflection points that define their careers and shape the future of the companies they led. It’s time to cut through the noise and get to the signal.

[00:00:43] Glenn:  In our last episode, Tiama discussed tuning out the noise of legal tech, her pivot from being the smartest person in the room to a high-trust leader, and the three core signals she uses to identify elite talent. If you missed it, be sure to check out part one. In part two, Tiana dives into the technical and commercial side of her role. She shares her strategy for driving focus through metrics, the cultural differences between the U.S and UK tech scenes, and her rapid-fire takes on the tools and habits that keep her productive, including her surprising love for Swedish tech culture. It’s time to cut back through the noise and get to the signal. 

[00:01:16] Glenn: You’ve obviously slightly different topic, but coming from the States and coming over here, where one is kind of being a product leader in Europe and having had experience in the States. So, your overall take on that, but also the, yeah, not computer science background, not a maths whiz, but being a CPTO now and running the tech org as well, how you’ve navigated that. 

[00:01:38] Tiama:  It’s happened twice now, that is, no one is more surprised than me. I suppose what it does is it just comes down to that whole, you had asked a question in the early, leading up to this, on some frameworks, and actually, this framework leads into that answer. So, a previous boss taught me about this concept of MECE, which I don’t know. Have you heard of it before, Glenn? 

[00:01:58] Glenn:  No. 

[00:01:59] Tiama: Okay. So, it’s kind of like an old-school consulting one. A woman named Barbara Minto created I think she was McKinsey’s first female partner, and it was created as a communication tool. MECE is – Mutually Exclusive, Collectively Exhaustive. So, how do you take a problem and break it into mutually exclusive parts and make sure that all those parts are collectively exhaustive in terms of how you would solve that? And for me, that level of thinking has been incredibly important in allowing me to be an effective communicator, allowing me to understand businesses at their most abstracted levels. And as a result, I can translate, and I can see connections. So, when it comes to the first part of your question, U.S versus UK, I’ve been able to quickly understand that the UK and Europe, it’s like there’s tension. It’s like, on one end, they prioritize and are more interested in hearing about how you’re reducing risk than in the States. It’s about how you’re driving growth. But yet, on the flip side, they want to. They want to move into, how do you drive growth? How do you have more commercial thinking? I think that’s why you see a lot of GM roles now or CPTO roles, because they’re trying to be like, okay, product hasn’t necessarily worked really well for everybody. And so they’re trying to figure out how do you get use out of this? Right? How do you get the most out of product? And so they’re either collapsing them into tech because they’re finding that, you know, those two functions are not working super well together, or they’re turning them into, like, GMs because they’re like, okay, well, we have to be commercial. So, let’s have this CPO turn into a GM. So, that’s been fairly consistent in my experience. And so then what I try to do with the teams is talk to them about how risk management is important, of course. But we also need to lean into growth, and thinking about, well, how do we actually approach the European and UK markets in a way that the risk of inaction is greater than the risk of action. Right? And then that’s how you kind of start to try to break that down with those customer sets. On the technology side, it’s the same thing, mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive way of thinking about something and breaking it down to the smallest component parts, because then you can talk about them. It doesn’t matter that I’m not a technologist. Doesn’t matter that I’m not writing Python. Like, I can talk about them to my teams, and we can talk about why they matter. And I suppose that goes back to your question on interviewing. I’ve gotta have people who can abstract because that’s how we’re gonna communicate. Like, if we can’t break things down to LEGO parts, we’re not gonna be able to build ideas together. So I think, for me, that’s been the way it is. And I just hire or, like, in the case of MENA, have technology leaders who are not threatened by me and wanna partner with me and don’t mind me asking a million questions. And I’ve been lucky. It’s been manageable.

[00:04:38] Glenn:  Love it. Yes. It’s one that we’ve, over the years here, it’s gone back and forth of, one year CPTOs on vogue, next year, we wanna split it all up and then go back to it again. So, quite often, you find there’s not that many people who’ve done it, especially like yourself, multiple times.

[00:04:54] Tiama:  I have to say it’s very fun. I encouraged one of my really good friends on the West Coast who works for, well, I won’t name her in case she doesn’t want me to, but she was getting pushed by her board to take the t, small t. She’s like, Tiama, I can’t do it. I was like, if I can do it, you can do it. Like so, and she’s doing it. She was, like, five months into that role, and she said she’s like, Tiama, you’re right. It’s so much easier to get shit done because you’re not having to kind of go through, it’s obvious, right, you’re not having to go through another person to translate, but you can only do it if you have a high respect environment, high psychological safety, and nobody’s embarrassed to just say, “Wait a second. I don’t get it. What are we talking about here?”

[00:05:37] Glenn:  Yeah. And you’re very good, I think, about building that type of culture where people are not afraid to make mistakes with that kind of growth-mindedness that you talked about. In terms of the legal sectors, obviously, a different one for you. What surprised you most about it?

[00:05:51] Tiama:  What I’ve been really, really surprised about is how willing to innovate our clients are. I expected when we came in that it was gonna be a situation kind of like when I came into fintech, where, you know, I was saying earlier, you have to basically be able to articulate that the benefit of doing something is so great that it outweighs the risk of making that change. And that’s very different than working in an environment that’s not highly regulated or very risk-averse. And I respect those industries and the way that they exist. But, I mean, legal has been out of control. I said it earlier, like our clients, you know, I’m inspired by some of the stuff they’re doing in terms of how they’re adopting AI across their organizational stacks. And the ways that our clients, our product is highly, highly configurable and it really, I mean, it basically, for those who don’t know what Opus is, it’s a collaboration workspace that’s built for high document volume collaboration, and it’s specific for legal. So, we build all our AI to be trained on our type of legal, litigation in particular, which is very different than doing because I’ve learned, very different than, you know, doing general research or a different type of law. What I found is super fascinating is just to talk to our clients about how they are actually using AI, using our product to do better trial preparation, to check inconsistencies with what witnesses are saying, to put together the issues that they’re going to try to prove in the courtroom. I mean, it’s just fascinating. So, yeah, I’ve been really, really surprised that I don’t have to convince anybody that we should be innovating. Like, they are all doing it. They’re all excited about it. They’re expanding usage. They’ve just been way more forward-leaning than I expected.

[00:07:41] Glenn:  Great to hear, and definitely not expected. I’m very curious as well. Obviously, you’ve had the gray exit to Mastercard as well. Just curious, was there, I imagine there were ups and downs, but was there ever a point where you knew it was coming? It was like an inevitability, and you were like, I’m sticking around for this, or did it come as a nice surprise?

[00:08:02] Tiama:  Oh my God. No. One, no. What world does that come as a nice surprise? I think you and I had breakfast right afterwards, and I was like, I just need to take a beat. I have more, those who are not seeing me, I have more gray hair here. You cannot see it because I’ve dyed my hair, but it is white now. It was really hard graft. No question. And I think, you know, for us, it really did come down to that hard work and hard discipline. Like, I think a lot of people think that, especially founders, people from the outside think that the way that you get acquired by a company like Mastercard is timing and luck, and that’s true. Or, like, being the flashiest, coolest product, and I think that’s true. But a big part of it also, like, and I know this, we just acquired a company, is you’re acquiring discipline. You’re acquiring the ability to stay focused. You’re acquiring a team who’s able to say no and say, this is what we’re working on. This is how we’re gonna build. This is how we’re gonna get velocity. And that was certainly the case with us.

[00:08:58] Glenn:  Love it. And were there, how many have to be, because I think your team was about, was it 50s at the time?

[00:09:04] Tiama:  50, 60 I think I had about 75% of the org reporting into me, which was hilarious, also. It was a small business, right? Like, we were a small business. We did the whole 1 to 10 million journey, and it was really interesting to have that. It was almost like being a COO. I could actually, I think you and I talked about when I was leaving, like, well, what do I wanna do? And, like, we’d even said, like, you wanna do a COO type of role.

[00:09:24] Glenn:  Yeah. Because it’s when we look at that path, I think you’re primed for that and CEO type role as well. I think you’ve always since we’ve known you, you’ve been one of the more commercially minded product leaders we’ve ever come across. I think both here, or in the States, and that’s only being proven out at the moment. So, I’m curious as well in terms of some of these. Like, this one is how do you keep people running in the same direction? I think you’ve talked about that quite a lot. Platform thinking in a zero-trust economy.

[00:09:51] Tiama:  Let’s talk about the rowing in the right direction because, actually, that is something that so many people can learn from. So, because it’s very practical. It’s not, like, wishy washy. So, what we did is we had something that, to the point that my nickname was Tiama Flywheel Hanson-Drury. So, we really knew our fly, we knew how we were supposed to guide our product decisions on what we did because we understood we were a B2B2C ecosystem play, right, which is difficult to do. So, we were selling to banks. We had a subscription management product that was, you know, put into the front end of Capital One, put in the front end of Lloyds, ING, etcetera, so that when Glenn logs into his banking app with one of those banks, he can identify subscriptions. He can cancel them. But we also sold to the subscription merchants, Netflixes of the world, Amazon Prime, Spotifys, etcetera. We knew that flywheel. We knew what had to happen to make that spin. But as we started to approach the next funding event or potential acquisition, we really identified that, and this was due to some commercial stuff. We had moved our pricing model to be performance-based. So, we knew that we would only get paid when a subscription was successfully managed. The real game changer for this, in terms of how do you get people rowing in the same direction, and this is a very practical one that I think lots of people could learn from, is we understood that the metric that actually mattered was shifting for us as a business. It went from adoption to success rate. That subscription had to be managed effectively. And so then we got into a place where we knew that we had to be focusing every day on what we were doing to increase success rate, zeroing in on that one metric was the thing that was gonna matter the most for a good funding event or a good acquisition event. And so once we aligned on that, everything snapped into focus, and it was a cross functional organizational approach. So, we had a cross-functional team that was product, engineering, marketing, operations, finance, commercial, and we met weekly. And we actually met multiple times a week, but we had one, like, where we all came together. So I forget what it was, but, like, Mondays was operations day, Tuesday was sales day, Wednesday was product day, you know, like, we had everybody knew how they were moving that metric, and everybody was doing experiments, sharing the learnings from those experiments, and then we were operationalizing what was going right, and we were killing what was going wrong. That was so important because that’s how we actually moved every week. It was a fundamental differentiator for us because we built so much IP through that process. But also so, like, if I wasn’t there, everybody knew why we were going after success rate. I didn’t have to be in the room. I didn’t have to be in the meeting. Like, people knew. So, they were all rowing in the same direction. And what was amazing about that is some of those people, they’ve gone on to have incredible careers even in the short period of time at Mastercard because they got to show their stuff. They got to stand up on Tuesday and be like, here’s what we’ve done. This has made this impact. We brought this merchant onto the network. And I just think that was such an amazing way to drive laser focus on a metric that mattered, commercially driving impact, and do it for the benefit of the team. Not only are they all rowing in the same direction, but they’re getting the glory of it too.

[00:13:02] Glenn:  It sounds genius, and it sounds so simple again, but it’s actually doing that meeting and getting value from it.

[00:13:07] Tiama:  It was so not simple. It was so hard. And there’s so much stuff that doesn’t work, and keep try just try administratively keeping track of all that. Like, okay, what are we doing? This experiment. What happened with that one? Wait a second. Did someone drop the ball on that? Who’s, you know, like, there’s so much, so it’s not easy at all.

[00:13:23] Glenn:  What was your role in it? Were you leading most of that?

[00:13:25] Tiama:  My functions were reporting it to me. So outside, it says sales and finance reported into my partner, as did our growth path, which is merchant strategy. So, three of those functions aren’t mine. But, like, when you have a two-person exec team and one CEO, like, everybody’s yours, you know, and so, yeah, for me, what my purpose is, making sure I was responsible for getting that success rate up. That was, like, so important. My teams touched it. And so I was just there with my teams trying to make sure that they have the context. They’re getting the right support. They’re being kept on focus, and I would unblock them where I could.

[00:13:57] Glenn:  Because, again, I think you need a high level of trust in that everyone there is team first as well. So, that’s probably the first thing, but keeping that unity and having that psychologically safe environment, how do you go about doing that and building that type of environment?

[00:14:12] Tiama:  I think you just have to show it through experience, honestly. I’ve always had global teams, I think probably the first time I actually have, maybe now, and a little bit at Minette, you know, I actually have my direct reports working with me. I still don’t have my manager working in the same office. I’ve always operated in a global world. And so I have a bit of a command control approach there, which is, like, look, you give out the vision, the strategy, the way that we’re gonna get there, most importantly, the messy middle that I expect to happen between now and there, name it. Name the behaviors and the culture that will be accepted. I have this saying that’s, like, you gotta be able to bring the sandwiches and say where are the sandwiches. So, say you and I, Glenn, are going out and we decide we’re gonna go for a multi-day hike, something I will never do, but my sister is an outdoors person, so she will. And you are supposed to bring the sandwiches, and I’m supposed to bring the tent. If we get to the first milepost day one of our three-day hike and you haven’t brought the sandwiches, I need to say, like, where are the fucking sandwiches, Glenn? Like, we gotta eat. We’re supposed to be eating. We’re supposed to be eating so we have the energy tomorrow and the next day to get to that. If I forgot to bring the tent, you need to say, Tiama, I can’t sleep outside. It’s freezing. Like, what are we gonna do? You were supposed to bring the tent. And I think you have that by having clarity of, like I was saying, command and control. You have an idea of the vision and the strategy where you’re trying to get to. You have the idea that there’s gonna be three days that milestones that you gotta get through, and you know what your responsibility is for that. And so I think the way that works is, like, you give them that clarity, and then you show them that you will both ask the question, where are the sandwiches? And you will be asked the question. And neither of those do you take it personally because you have a shared goal of getting to that place. And you sat down together and said, we need sandwiches, and we need tents.

[00:16:00] Glenn:  Love it. People know what they’re accountable for and get held to account as well. If you’re up for it, we can do these rapid-fire questions.

[00:16:07] Tiama:  Sure. Hit me.

[00:16:09] Glenn:  I might hear you have a couple of surprise ones as well. So, first one, what type of sandwich would you want on a multi-day hike?

[00:16:16] Tiama:  Oh, I love food. So, can I have a few sandwiches?

[00:16:21] Glenn:  You can have a few. No PB&J, though?

[00:16:23] Tiama:  No. No. No. One would be a sandwich that we used to eat growing up. I grew up in LA, and we would always make these tuna fish sandwiches with hot sauce, crystal hot sauce and cheddar cheese and take those to the beach. So, I take my beach sandwich. That was really, really good.

[00:16:37] Glenn:  Very nice.

[00:16:38] Tiama:  I think I’d take American style Thanksgiving sandwich with some cranberry sauce, some turkey, some lettuce, mashed potatoes, and gravy, basically. That would be one. 

[00:16:48] Glenn: Nice. Quite a heavy one.

[00:16:51] Tiama:  I’m here to eat, man. I gotta eat.

[00:16:54] Glenn: Love it. I love it. And then favorite book you recommend for any leader?

[00:16:59] Tiama:  Move by Patty Azzarello. Absolutely. It is so good. Okay. So, that sandwich thing, actually, that’s inspired by a lot of stuff that I learned from her and her books. She is just… I’m coaching a CEO right now, and I just said the most important thing for you guys is to get your whole team to read this together and talk about how you’re gonna do it. Because what it says is most businesses are really good at setting a strategy at the top, and they’re really good at having people in the trenches who actually do the work. What they’re really bad at is how do you translate that to the middle management so that the middle management can then make that realistic for the people in the trenches? So, it’s how do you move as an organization more effectively?

[00:17:38] Glenn:  Love it. In one word, what does great product leadership mean to you?

[00:17:42] Tiama:  Vision.

[00:17:43] Glenn:  Vision. Favorite AI tool at the moment?

[00:17:47] Tiama:  My eight legs have lots of things that I’m working on all the time. And so what I’ve done is I use AI a lot. And as all of us who do know, different tools have different strengths. So, I have projects across all the different ones. I have projects in, like, Claude. I have projects in ChatGPT. I use Perplexity for very specific things. And I just use those projects a lot, and I feed the context and make sure it’s staying up to date. And it’s so helpful because I can just pick up where I left off. again, that attention deficit hyperactive disorder. I mean, this is like, oh, only I wanna jump to that. Okay. Let me talk about it. Let me think about it. Okay. Cool. Pull that in. So, honestly, very boring, but I did do that. And then the one that so many people don’t really know about, and so I just feel like I need to communicate it. Like, they know about it on LinkedIn, but then in day-to-day when I talk to people, they don’t. It’s just NotebookLM. Like, I just find it so brilliant. It’s so great.

[00:18:39] Glenn: I don’t know it.

[00:18:41] Tiama:  You don’t know? Oh my God. Okay. So, NotebookLM came out of a little, innovation team in Google. What you can do is you could take any information you wanna learn, and you chuck it into NotebookLM, and it turns it into a podcast. So, the same way you would do a prompt. So, what’s something you wanna learn about, Glenn?

[00:18:59] Glenn:  Oh, that’s a good one. French. I’d like to learn more French.

[00:19:04] Tiama:  Okay. Do you have a basic understanding of the language already or no?

[00:19:09] Glenn:  Yeah. Yeah.

[00:19:10] Tiama:  So then, and what would be a good example of an outcome that you would have learned more French? Is it like you can speak conversationally? Like, what would be something that would show you you’ve done that?

[00:19:19] Glenn:  Yeah. I think when I answer in French in Paris, that they respond to me in French.

[00:19:24] Tiama:  Okay. Perfect.

[00:19:25] Glenn:  They don’t just speak back in English.

[00:19:26] Tiama:  Perfect. So what I would do then is I would take, I would find a few pieces of content that are gonna be important to that. So, maybe it’s a few examples of really good conversational French. Maybe it’s a dictionary list of words that you really, you know you don’t know, but you know you should know because you’re gonna be checking into hotels or you’re gonna be ordering a coat to have made, and so you pull out your vocab. And maybe you pull, like, something on the way that the French language is created and hacks on how to learn it. Maybe those are your three sources. You chuck them into NotebookLM and you say as your prompt, “I want to go from where I am today, which is I understand the language, and I can speak basic things, and I wanna be able to have great conversations when I go into my favorite restaurant in France, and that restaurant is this,” same way you do a prompt anywhere else, right? Give as much context as you can. You set enter. It creates a five-minute podcast interview. Glenn and Tiama are suddenly it’s not us, but it’s two people, and there’s a man and a woman. They’re suddenly creating a podcast talking through everything that you put into it in a way that you will learn from. And so it’s a really nice way to learn. People think of it as a research and learning tool. When I left MENA, I put my resume, and I put, like, all my public speaking things into it. And I said, talk to me about how to market this person. And it was really, it was very humbling and interesting to hear a podcast discuss me and my career. It was very interesting. So, NotebookLM is another one.

[00:20:59] Glenn:  Amazing. I can’t believe I’ve never heard of it. Favorite film?

[00:21:03] Tiama:  I’m not a big film person. I’m a murder, like, Scandi Noir TV watcher.

[00:21:08] Glenn:  Oh, any good ones at the moment?

[00:21:11] Tiama:  Oh my God. I mean, I think I’ve watched them all. I literally just binge them. It’s horrible. I think Department Q was really good. If anyone has seen that, I’ll give that a shout out because my team’s in Edinburgh, and it’s set in Edinburgh, so.

[00:21:23] Glenn:  Yep. Very, very good show. Product leader you would love to have been mentored by?

[00:21:29] Tiama:  Oh, probably Elena Verna, Growth Woman.

[00:21:32] Glenn:  Oh, Lovable.

[00:21:33] Tiama:  Lovable now, but, I mean, she’s been at Sign. She’s been everywhere, right? Like, I started following her really, really early on. I actually had her on my podcast when I used to do the podcast with PLA. And I just love the way she thinks. Like, it’s a different, I think commercially too, but I’ve never done growth. Right? I’ve never done that growth mentality. And I think right now in an AI world, it’s so important. Like, I know someone who’s building, the way they’re building product right now is literally they’re just doing little client hackathons every week. And then anything that comes out of a client hackathon, their teams take to 10 customers and see, do those customers wanna buy it? And if they do, then they get put into the road map. That’s an example of, like, growth thinking in a way that I just, you know, I don’t have that as my DNA. And so I think it would have been really cool to spend a year under her tutelage.

[00:22:20] Glenn:  Very cool. Yeah. I was lucky enough to speak to her a couple of years ago when she was doing her own thing, I think it was solopreneur that she was talking about, and just so authentic and so to the point. I just absolutely love it. That’s it. We’re working with Lovable at the moment. I’m not working directly with her, working with Anton, but even on LinkedIn, she’s probably my favorite read on LinkedIn. I’m just so to the point, so no nonsense, but so smart.

[00:22:46] Tiama:  She’s got, like, a sister in it. Like, not a real sister, but Leah, who does the B2B side of, like, growth. Do you know her?

[00:22:53] Glenn:  No. No.

[00:22:54] Tiama: I think it’s Leah Tharin, if I remember correctly. But I kinda think of them as a blonde and a brunette. I kinda think of them as, like, growth sisters, and, like, one’s more consumer and one’s more B2B.

[00:23:04] Glenn:  Love it. And company to watch out for in Europe outside of Opus 2?

[00:23:08] Tiama:  I actually think Legora is doing awesome things. That’s probably a faux pas to say that. Or also, Wordsmith is doing amazing things, too. They’re both different parts of the legal sector, and I just find it fascinating. Legora probably has a little bit of my heart because of my time in MENA and Sweden, and I just know how Swedish companies are built. I really respect and love that culture. So, yeah, I’m rooting for the category.

[00:23:30] Glenn:  Lucky enough to work with those guys as well at the moment, and I know the team. I’m not working with them directly, but the team are loving the culture, and they’ve built such a nice team that’s also so high performing. So, yeah, it’s a fun time.

[00:23:43] Tiama:  That Swedish culture is unlike anything I’ve ever gone through. I will never forget doing, like, a town hall wearing a unicorn outfit. That was just, I’m never gonna be repeating again, I’m sure.

[00:23:56] Glenn:  That is brilliant. We’ve got quite a few clients now in Stockholm. It just seems like a really cool place to be at the moment.

[00:24:02] Tiama:  It is. One of my old investors, Eric at Zenith, I love watching his LinkedIn because they’re just doing so many cool things there.

[00:24:09] Glenn:  Love it. Love it. Thanks so much, Tiama. Is there anything else you’d wanna get across? Or…

[00:24:15] Tiama:  No. This has been really fun. Thank you for having me.

[00:24:18] Glenn:  That wraps up today’s conversation. Thank you so much, Tiama. I hope you guys are listening to get something from this and take some of the lessons that she’s got around simplifying, getting into the abstract, and communicating while also keeping people rowing in the same direction. Keep an eye on Opus 2 and the changes they’re making. And, again, thank you, Tiama. Hope you all enjoyed.

[00:24:43] Outro:  Signal to Noise is brought to you by Riviera Partners, leaders in executive search and the premier choice for tech talent. To learn more about how Riviera helps people and companies reach their full potential, visit rivierapartners.com. And don’t forget to search for Signal to Noise by Riviera Partners on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or anywhere you listen to podcasts.