How Tiama Hanson-Drury Leads Product, Tech, and AI Through Change Part-1

Transcript

[00:00:02] Tiama:  I don’t have any desire to be the person that knows everything. In fact, everybody I hire needs to be better than me in at least one area. Otherwise, I’m not hiring them. What’s the point?

[00:00:13] 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.

[00:00:36] Glenn:  Hi, everybody. Welcome to Signal to Noise. Today, I’m your host, Glenn Murphy, managing partner in Riviera Europe. Today, I’m gonna be interviewing Tiama Hanson-Drury, who’s an award-winning CPTO, Chief Product and Technology Officer at Opus 2. She’s an incredible leader who we’ve got to know over the years, who’s been through massive transformations across a ton of different legacy industries. So, she’s got a wealth of knowledge. She’s incredible at simplifying things, and she’s one of my favorite execs in the U.S or in Europe. She’s an absolute rock star, and we’re very lucky she’s agreed to join today. What’s the biggest signal you’re paying attention to at the moment, and what are you tuning out?

[00:01:17] Tiama:  So, I think I’ll start with what I’m tuning out. I’m working in legal tech now. I have been for nine months. And anyone who’s watching that space knows the velocity of new features and new entrants to the market, but also the incumbents are able to be adding value at just a really rapid pace. And that’s because, obviously, the language that underpins law is perfectly suited for LLM, specifically, GenAI-based work. I think what I’m tuning out is every post, every alert, got all my, obviously, my setups on new litigation tech stuff. If I spent all the time looking at everything, I would be distracted from my day job. And it’s a really motivating thing because it’s a great time to be shipping in this space, but I kinda have to put my blinders on and make sure that I’m staying focused on our opportunity. So that’s what I’m, I guess, screening out. What I’m listening to and tuning into is evidence, where our clients are really using the platform, including the AI capabilities, to create genuine blue space for them. And there is absolutely, for the same reasons that everyone’s being able to ship so quickly, there is actual differentiation that our clients are creating using our platform, at least in part, for it. So, I was really lucky when I first started. One of the first things I did, advisable or not advisable, I’m not sure is do a conference with 4 of our clients, and I didn’t know anything about legal tech. But what I did know is how to talk about competitive advantage. And we spent the whole time talking about how those clients were using AI, including our product, to create a competitive advantage. And I’m listening now for those signals. So, I’m listening for when a client says that the legal outcomes that they’re creating are being done more effectively, not because it’s faster or cheaper, but because they’re actually leveraging AI to help them spend time on the high-impact stuff, which is judgment, reason to judgment. And they’re able to get to that same level outcome, sometimes even better, with fewer steps or less time because it leaves them time to do the thinking and to do the reasoning. So, what I’m looking for is really signs that our product is helping to productize expertise at our law firms. That’s really what they wanna do. That’s why they win business is because of their unique approach to solving legal problems for their customers.

[00:03:34] Glenn:  Got it. Yeah. And you’ve always, ever since I’ve known you, as well, it’s been very clear you are able to tune out the noise very well, I think, and not just chase brand names or you know, tech trends that you think, I just need to get that on my CV or chasing team sizes. You’ve definitely seen a business opportunity. Because when I think about it, we’re working right now with Lovable, Legora, obviously, Opus 2, Granola, there’s so much good stuff happening. At the same time, where do you spend your time and energy? So, it makes sense that you are already looking and have been looking for that competitive advantage, which is awesome and not surprising at all. And if you don’t mind as well, yeah, tell us about a pivotal moment in your career or especially in your leadership journey. What changed, and how did you navigate that?

[00:04:19] Tiama:  I think we get a lot of feedback in our careers. Women in particular get a lot of feedback on how to be effective, how not to be effective. And I think a pivotal moment for me was actually when I rejected some coaching that I was given. The coaching was given to me that I needed to be the smartest person in the room. I needed to be the person who had all the answers. I needed to not have the reliance on asking a team member, hey, you know, give us the most up-to-date information on this. And that came from someone well-intentioned, I think. They were coming from their perspective of how to lead, but I operate in a much higher trust leadership environment. And I also know myself. I’m nicknamed as the octopus. I do have eight arms going and eight brains going at all times. But for me, like, what motivates me is to be the best trainer of firefighters, not the best firefighter. And so I know where I get my energy from, and it’s when each of those eight octopus legs is creating more impact and more leverage, so instead of listening to that, and it was hard to hear. I remember it really, especially because that person was in a position of power over me. It shook me for a while, and I had to contemplate on it. Every time I was in an exact meeting, I knew they were judging me against that. Every time I was presenting to clients, I knew that they were judging me against that. And in the end, I just rejected it, and I just said, look, I’m gonna do what I do really well. My motto is repeatable, scalable. I get the most satisfaction, I would say, actually, from seeing my teams achieve those goals as opposed to me achieving those goals. And so, not that I don’t carry the responsibility, ultimately to meet them or not. And so I just continued to double down on my leadership approach, which is build systems where the right decisions are made when I’m not in the room and give those teams a chance to step up and shine. That was a pretty pivotal moment for me because it was that moment of just saying, I have things that you could see as an advantage or a disadvantage. I’m attention deficit that I’ve learned through a lifetime of how to create hacks so that the diversity of thought and sometimes hyperactive thought is actually harnessed. And if I partner well with people and empower them to be able to take that stuff and execute on it, then we can have a massive impact, and I can be a high-impact player much more than I would ever be if I were just that best firefighter.

[00:06:30] Glenn:  I love that because I think there are so many people who would have just taken that as, and your career would have gone in a whole different direction, right?

[00:06:36] Tiama:  It really could have. I talk about it very succinctly now, like, oh, well, you know, I wonder why I thought about it. It was a real challenging period of about six months where I just, like, I wasn’t my normal self because I just felt like I was being criticized and judged every opportunity. I knew that to succeed in that person’s eyes, I was gonna do something that felt really, really inauthentic to me. I really had to come back to my values and think, life is too short, like, what am I gonna do? Am I gonna win for this person right now in a way that makes me feel inauthentic, or am I gonna double down on what I know works and go down that path?

[00:07:09] Glenn:  You’ve definitely stayed true to your values there. I am curious how you identify a great talent as well on that theme of kind of you’ve obviously coached a lot of people, and I’m sure met a lot of people, but how do you identify great talent, maybe especially from diverse backgrounds or different skill sets, and identify those kinds of characteristics you want?

[00:07:28] Tiama:  I think, well, first of all, I know what type of leader I am. So, I know that there’s certain people who are gonna enjoy working with me, and there’s certain people who are not. So, I always try to be really upfront and honest about that. Because if I pick the people who are gonna thrive, as I always tell the teams, I’m looking for someone who’s gonna thrive, not survive. So, if I pick the people who thrive, they’re gonna get the best out of it. I’m gonna get the best out of it. And as a result, our clients, our shareholders, our investors, etcetera, they’re gonna get the best out of it. But there are three signals that I know work very well for me. The first is the ability to abstract and clearly communicate. So, I need people who are able, those eight legs I’ve got going, right, like, I need to be able to contact switch quickly. I need people to be able to keep up with me as we’re going. And I also need to be able to learn. I don’t have any desire to be the person that knows everything. In fact, everybody I hire needs to be better than me in at least one area. Otherwise, I’m not hiring them. What’s the point? They’re better than me in all eight areas. That might be scary. Maybe they need my job. But I need people to be better than me in at least one. So, what I’m usually looking for when I meet people is the ability to abstract. We can go into that more if we need to, but they need to be able to very clearly communicate something to me without jargon. And they need to be able to break it down to those smallest pieces and explain why whatever it is that they’re saying matters. Because that’s gonna be a signal that they’re gonna be able to be influential. They can organize information well. They can communicate well. You need that in most roles, but you certainly need that if you’re working in product and technology. The second one is, I wanna make sure that the people I hire are self-aware. They are growth-minded. They are looking to evolve. And usually, the way that I see that is they can answer a question with pretty quick specificity about a time that has really evolved the way that they work. And it doesn’t always have to be a positive. It can be a negative. They don’t have to sit there and say, oh, gosh, you know, it’s a tough one. Let me think about it. Like, it’s fine. That’s totally fine. But it shows me that they haven’t really self-reflected on the areas that had really been step changes for them in their career. And I’m looking for self-awareness because I’m looking for people who wanna be the best. They wanna lean into that coaching. They wanna lean into that growth together. And then the third one is the org fit, or the stage of business fit. I’ve worked for businesses that are a billion dollars, and I’ve worked for businesses that were sub 1 million. And the thing that matters most is, are you right for that stage of business? Because what it takes to win in a sub-1-million business versus what it takes to win in a billion-dollar-plus business are totally different, and you could hire someone who is amazing at the distribution phase. But if they’re in a 0 to 1, like, it’s not to say that they can’t be successful. There’s just gonna be so much context to build and so much competency to build. So, I usually try to just be really clear to the extent that my teams tell me I scare people away. And it’s true. I do. But you know what? It’s for the benefit of those candidates. I don’t want them coming at being really unhappy.

[00:10:25] Glenn:  For sure. Yeah. We have the same mindset here as well. We’re probably over the top talking about the intensity and pace. If you wanna push yourself and evolve, then it sounds like the same with you. It’s much more of a good self-selecting tool.

[00:10:38] Tiama:  It’s one of the things that, from recruiters that I look for, is, are they able to really get a sense of our business and what it’s gonna take to win? Because I want them to be doing that for me. Right? I want them to be screening the candidates to be like, hey, this person is awesome working for Vivint Meta, but not gonna be great for you working at a boring old Opus. Right? Or, you know, like, whatever, but you know what I mean? Like, it has to be exciting and compelling to the person, and that comes down to stage of company a lot of times.

[00:11:04] Glenn:  Yeah. And there are very few people, I think, like Avid, for instance, who could come out of Meta and go somewhere much smaller, and it’d be pretty seamless. But that’s often you find those people who wanna make that switch because they know that they’re getting pigeonholed. So, a big part of where we were, earn our money, I think, is that same way of actually, I know they’re coming out of Meta or Google. For these reasons, we think they could actually be really good in a much scrappier environment. Our reputation’s on the line. But how do you, curious when have you seen network well, or what do you do in the case where you think someone can contact switch and it comes, and it’s not working out?

[00:11:40] Tiama:  Like, recently, is a good example. I hired a very senior person from JPMorgan’s AI division because on all paper, he would not be the right fit for this company. He’s worked at Microsoft. He’s worked at JPMorgan. He’s worked at other big brands. I can’t remember. And a lot of people would be like, well, why are you hiring that person? Like, how are they gonna do well in a $100,000,000 company that’s PE backscaling, right, especially in an industry that he hasn’t worked in, which is legal tech. But what I knew was that, two things: he had the frustration with not being able to ship. He was tired of POCs and not being able to get this stuff into production. So, that showed me he was outgrowing this kind of organizational environment that he was in, and he was passionate about legal. And, like, access to justice and powering justice mattered to him. He was to the extent that he was thinking about building a startup on the side, right? So, those were two signals. Now he’s coming in. Am I having to coach him hard on he’s gotta communicate much more effectively because there’s not the layers that then take what he said and simplified, simplified, simplified upwards? Yes. I am. Right? But I’m open with him about that, and I’m giving him the feedback on that, and he’ll be better for it, or he’ll go back to JPMorgan. But, hopefully, he’ll stay with us.

[00:12:55] Glenn:  Yeah. It goes back to your having people from diverse backgrounds as well as experiences rather than just, yeah, continuing the same trend. On the kind of trend side of things and the tech-wise, what’s one recent trend that you think is overhyped, and what’s one that you think is underappreciated?

[00:13:12] Tiama:  This was a funny question because it just felt very obvious to me, and it’s the same answer, actually. So, it’s agents. I think last year was definitely the year of agents. This is the year of, like, okay, what are they doing? I think agents are great, and I have the privilege of having built some agentic systems already. What I think is overhyped is the idea of an agent that replaces Glenn or an agent that replaces Tiama, right? That’s, at this point, fairly routine. Not that it’s easy because in production, it is difficult, but it’s pretty well understood, and it’s pretty everywhere. And I actually think there’s a lot of people who are just taking an AI workflow, and they’re calling it an agent, and that’s fine. What I think is underhyped and really much more interesting is how do you build agents that resemble the most high-performing teams? So, how do you have those agents who are subject matter experts? Glenn is the expert in recruiting. He’s the expert in European recruiting. Tiama’s the expert in product and bringing a U.S and a UK focus. How do Glenn, and Tiama, and the agents that are built for them work together to find the best candidate for this new client? And how do we make sure that Glenn is bringing his subject matter expertise and challenging the Tiama agent? How do we make sure that there’s a Rivera brand agent who’s also coming in and saying, “Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Both of you have really good ideas. But, look, this is not on par with Rivera. Rivera does this.” Right? Those are the systems that I find very, very interesting, and I wish I saw more people talking about.

[00:14:38] Glenn:  I haven’t heard a lot about it as well, and you’re getting me excited just hearing about it. But is there anyone doing something similar at the moment, or companies that you really admire, who you think actually they’re gonna buy the right one?

[00:14:48] Tiama:  One of my old companies is doing it, and I think they’ve done a phenomenal job. So that’s Zapier. They’ve built an amazing approach for what would take Pepsi or would take Coca-Cola, an agency approach, as well as internal creative teams, as well as internal decisioning frameworks to build and launch an ad or create a new product, and they built an entire agentic approach for that that allows them to get that done in fraction of the cost, fraction of the time. And, actually, I mean, it’s been a while, but last time I caught up with my product team friend there, they had said that, like, they were actually, the quality of the new product ideas were being selected above the traditional approaches. So, I think Zapier is doing some interesting things in that space.

[00:15:32] Glenn:  And where are they based again?

[00:15:33] Tiama:  I think their headquarters are out of London now. They may have returned to the U.S. Yeah. But they’re a global company. They service global brands.

[00:15:42] Glenn:  Amazing. And then in terms of Opus 2, kind of, and going into a legacy industry where the automatic thing is tons of regulation, deeply entrenched workflows, what about your first 100 days there? Like, how did you identify what truly mattered and how to find the highest leverage opportunities?

[00:16:01] Tiama:  Well, first of all, I’m a total nerd, and I actually really like, if you look at my career, like you said, you will see a trend, and it’s not always obvious to people who don’t understand what I’m doing, but it is actually going after legacy industries and bringing technology and innovation to them. And I usually do that, just a sidebar, when I see what I call, like, the holy trinity. So, there is a business problem, there is a technology that’s meeting that moment, and then as a result, commercialization is happening. And when those three things come across, that’s the holy trinity, not religious. That’s usually a signal like, oh, this is an interesting time to get involved. And I like that. I really enjoy it. I did it with market research. I did it with advertising. I did it with marketing tech. I did it with banking at MENA, and now I’m doing it in legal. And for us, it’s GenAI is meeting that moment of the need is these multi-step reasoning workflows, because that’s what lawyers and that’s what lawyer teams do, is they make judgment-based decisions off of a lot of sequential steps. And the market is nuts, so it’s a really good time for litigation tech in particular. So, what I’ve done in my first 100 days actually looks very similar to what I did at MENA, what I did at Dynata. I start with listening to the customer and really try to. I was raised by two psychologists, so it’s easy for me to talk to people, and I try to just listen. I listen to my clients. I listen to them tell me what’s working, what’s not working. I want them to just kinda talk to me, and I just try to say as little as possible. And then I also listen to the teams who serve them internally. That’s the first thing. The second thing, then, is that I try to do something that is deceptively difficult. People usually think when I say this, they’re like, yeah. Well, everybody knows how a company makes money. Like, do you really, really understand? Have you really abstracted out how your business makes money? This you have to do if you’re gonna create a good product vision and strategy. So it’s usually, A, is something you’re selling, an orange, B, unit of how you sell that in some way or increase the number of oranges, minus C, cost of growing and shipping those oranges equals your revenue. And so that’s the first thing I try to do, is say, okay, how does Opus 2 actually make money? I’m not gonna talk about that here. But I try to do that, and I do that almost immediately because it’s not necessarily gonna be right, but it’s gonna help me filter out that noise. That’s one thing that’s gonna happen right away. Then I try to map what value looks like for our clients. So, in this case, it was, what does a commercial litigation dispute look like? Where does it start? Regardless of where our platform is, where does it start? Where does it end? I wanna understand that workflow. It’s almost like a service now. And then fourth is I dog food the hell out of our clients’ experience. So, I try to really understand how well are we doing this? Those four things, and I can usually get those done in sixty days if I’m lucky, depending on the state of the internal teams that I’m coming into, they give me really good indications and bets. And I start to then talk with my team, my execs about, like, okay, am I right on this? Does this make sense? Is this looking right? And it shows me those kinda low hanging fruit things. It allows me to not make decisions and act too quickly, which, you know, the listeners here, you know, the more senior you are, the easier it is to get in and operate. Almost like the same way you suddenly, well, I don’t drive anymore, but the way I used to leave my house in Seattle and show up at my work, right, without even realizing that I was there. So, it stops me from doing that because that’s dangerous. And then it also gives you the themes. And those themes tend to show you, like, okay, this is gonna be the value themes that we’ve got, this is gonna inform the road map, this is gonna inform the strategy, the vision, etcetera. So, that’s what I’ve done. And at Opus, there was massive, we had massive AI traction when I came in. But, actually, you know, boringly, a lot of the stuff that I chose to have us focus on was stabilizing those foundations before we started to scale those things, on the innovation, because I could tell that we had, like everybody in the world, moved quickly, and we don’t have the benefit of hundreds and hundreds of people working on this. And so we needed to stabilize some of those core FinOps pieces and core foundational architectural pieces. So, that’s what we focused on.

[00:20:03] Glenn:  Amazing. Yeah. It just sounds like you’re world-class at simplifying things. Even that example of figuring out how you make money, I often have it with a lot of our clients, and sometimes we won’t be able to get deep enough from thinking, what is the actual model? I rarely hear execs talk about it because it’s almost like given that if you were to actually really go deeper with people, a lot of them don’t know.

[00:20:24] Tiama:  Yeah. But, again, it’s leaning into my weaknesses. I was never very good at maths. I was scared of it. I was like, oh my God. This is nervous. But that, like, it made me really nervous. I sucked in my math classes. I didn’t do computer science because I thought I had to be math-oriented, but then I got into sales. I was like, freaking hell, I know how to manage numbers, like, this is fun. And then I started to invest my money, and I was like, oh, I also know how to manage numbers. And so I started to think about numbers in terms of business models. And that, really, I know how much confidence it gives me when I can make decisions quickly because I remember, look, this doesn’t increase A, the value of A. It doesn’t increase our velocity or number of B, volume of B. It doesn’t drive down C. Why are we doing it? Like, why does that matter?

[00:21:11] Glenn:  Yeah. Which, in this day and age of AI, is very easy to forget. Just chasing things. 

[00:21:16] Glenn: That’s all for part one of our conversation with Tiama Hanson-Drury, Chief Product and Technology Officer at Opus 2. We’ve just scratched the surface of Tiama’s philosophy on leadership and the signals she looks for when hiring elite talent. Join us next time for part two, where Tiama explains the holy trinity of tech innovation, her MECE framework for solving complex problems, and why she thrives as a CPTO despite not having a traditional computer science background. She also shares her 100-day plan for joining a new organization and why she believes humans can always do more than they think they can. If you enjoy the show, subscribe, leave a review, or share it with a friend. Thanks for listening.

[00:21:57] 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.