Jennifer Tejada: Operations, Culture, Sunny Delight | Turn the Lens #03

>> Hey, welcome everybody. Jeff Frick here in the home studio. I hope you're having a good day. In today's look back I wanted to go back to 2016 actually and look at an interview that we do with Jennifer Tejada. Jennifer is currently the CEO of PagerDuty just had an earning announcements a couple of days ago. I think it was a great quarter for her and the team, which is good to hear. But prior to that, Jennifer was at Keynote Systems interviewed her there many moons ago for women in tech feature. But this interview I want to highlight today was from again, Girls in Tech Catalyst and Phoenix and it was April, 2016 and it was between gigs. So Jennifer was not tied up in a job. So she was doing her bit to help the community and really bringing a spotlight to operation to something as she said it's often underrepresented at tech conferences.  Not enough people talk about operations, is something that's near and dear to her heart. And so let's talk about it. She was here, she's talking about ops. Let's hear about her session and why Jennifer Tejada thinks operations is so important.

>> My presentation is called the Ops chops. It's something that's very dear to my heart because of the pragmatism of operations and how underrepresented I think it is at conferences like this. We've seen many inspiring speakers in the last two days talking about their paths to success and to leadership and giving the women in the room a lot of great advice on how to manage everything from your career development to work-life balance, to conflict, to challenges, how to really navigate the tech industry, which, if someone could send me the book on that, that'd be great, but no one's really talking about, I think where the rubber meets the road, which is operations. I believe operations is the bridge between strategy and the execution of great results.

And there's a lot of math in operations. In the tech industry right now, we're hearing a lot of storytelling and narratives about great new companies, new products, and the vision for how we're going to change the world, et cetera but at the end of the day, if you want to be successful you have to set goals that are helpfully aspirational but realistic. And then you've got nail your delivery because, if you miss a bit, you don't have a lot of time to make up for that miss and you've got investors you've got shareholders, you have employees that expect you to deliver. And so operations, they think is a great mix between art and science. The math of really measuring your business the rigor of measuring your progress, really understanding the underlying financial drivers in your business and then orienting your culture and your people around the best possible execution that gives your strategy the most potential to be successful.

>> I love that, gives your strategy the most opportunity to be successful. So many things here. Just the pragmatism of operations, underrepresented at those conferences and a great quote she had there that ops is the bridge between strategy and getting great results. And obviously great results are all about execution, right? And we hear it time and time again AWS reinvent is happening right now. Jeff Bezos and Andy Jassy and team have built an execution culture. It's really about execution and operations and ideas are great but until you put them in play, they don't really mean much. And the other thing I think was pretty important in that last clip is she talked about really understanding the drivers of your business. The math behind the drivers of your business. What really moves the needle on profitability and what really moves the needle on the metrics that you need to keep track of.

And it's a great segue to the next clip where she talks a little bit more in detail about metrics. And especially in kind of a Silicon Valley context where we hear a lot about how much people have raised and what's their valuation and how much are they spending and how much are they burning? And I think we saw recently Uber divested their flying taxi business, which is fun and interesting but is it really a core piece of the business? Can they afford to make that investment? And it sounds like they can't. So I think knowing your metrics, keeping track of your metrics and really understanding your metrics is a very important piece of being a good leader. Let's listen in to Jennifer's take on metrics.

>> I've been around for a little while. I've seen the market cycles in the technology industry and we're certainly seeing a connection now and a lot of businesses that marked themselves and measured themselves on how much money they've raised or how much money they've spent are now trying to figure out how to generate cashflow and how to survive over a longer period of time if the market does soften. So, I have a lot of respect for people who know how to generate cashflow and deliver results and deliver revenue and measure their business on the basis of growth, customers that vote with their dollars. And so, yeah, I think operations, it's the unsung hero when it comes to business outcomes. And so we're going to spend some time today talking about what I think is the quiet achiever in leadership.

>> I love it, the quiet achiever. Well, Jennifer is certainly not a quiet achiever. She's got a lot of great content out on YouTube and in the internet. So you can keep track of it and follow her there as well as here. The next thing I want to talk about is machine learning and artificial intelligence. And Jennifer talks a lot about machine learning and artificial intelligence. Again, this was 2016, April still kind of the early days of this conversation. If you go and watch any of Jennifer's keynotes from the last few PagerDuty's you'll know that they're really bring artificial intelligence and machine learning to bear inside the company. Again, very specifically applied to specific processes and tasks. Let's listen to Jennifer on the impacts of machine learning and artificial intelligence.

>> I do think that machine learning and artificial intelligence is progressing rapidly. And I think we're moving away from the automation of process to the automation of getting to the answer. I think analytics without action though leaves you kind of empty handed. Like so great, I have a lot of information. I have all this big data. I need the small data. I need data in the context of problems that I'm trying to solve whether I'm thinking about it from consumer perspective or a business perspective. So I see a real convergence between analytics and applications coming. I think LifeLock has a funny commercial where they talk about alerting and don't just point to the fire. Like help me put the fire out. Help me figure out how the thing caught fire. And I think that's where machine learning and artificial intelligence can be super helpful.

I also think that we're a long way away from really being able to leverage the true power of all this data. If you think about digital health, for example and all the proprietary data stacks that are being built through your Fitbit or your iPhone, the way we're censoring our personal health and fitness but where's all that data going. Is it really contributing to research to solve health epidemics, right? No, because those stacks are all proprietary. No one wants to share them. So we need to get to a universal language or a universal technology platform that enables the researchers of the world to get a hold of that data and do something super meaningful with it. So I think with progress you also create open-ended questions and I think it's all positive, but I think we still have a long way to go to see that big data environment really deliver great results.

>> Again, some great quotes that analytics without action leaves you empty handed. It's all about execution. And the other one I thought was pretty interesting that she said that, we're moving from an automation of the processes to an automation of getting to the answer. And again, in the context of PagerDuty, she talks about this a lot because you got super complex systems. You've got all these interactions with all these different applications with all these APIs and interfaces and all these layers within the platform. And if you have a problem, you got to get to an answer fast. You don't just need to know, I have a problem and you need to get to an answer and get it resolved and get it resolved quickly because there's a lot of money on the line when apps are not performing in case of app monitoring. So really great take on kind of seeing where the impact of artificial intelligence and machine learning was coming down the road.

Good stuff. Let's shift gears a little bit now and talk about leadership development. Has mentioned a number of times and Jennifer spent her early days of Procter & Gamble. In one of the other interviews, she talks a lot about hustling with that with Sunny Delight in Downtown Cleveland and the tough lessons that she learned in that context. I was fortunate when I got to the Bay Area it was because of the Macy's management trainee program many, many years ago, which was a very formal, almost like an extension of school class. Or even though I had grown up in the retail industry I learned a lot of new vocabulary words, new processes how the big guys did it in the context of of Macy's. She got a lot of great learning from Procter & Gamble. And unfortunately, there aren't a lot of formal leadership development programs around as much as there used to be. And really, I think it's an opportunity to bring that back and really have some more formal processes around leadership. So let's jump in and listen to Jennifer's take on formal leadership

>> Leadership development is a topic that is of real interest to me. I was so fortunate and am so grateful for the opportunity I had at Procter & Gamble. I spent nearly six years there and a big chunk of my time was spent in a leadership rotation program where you got to participate in a number of different projects and jobs but you had mentorship structured training in education around what it takes to be not just a good manager, but an effective leader. How you build a culture, how you engender people's commitment and dedication, how you really make the best of the resources that you have. How you manage your management, whether that's a board or that's a CEO, or that's your shareholders how you think about those things and really tactically, what works and what doesn't, and being surrounded by people who are experts in their field.

That was a long time ago, Jeff and I don't see as many companies in the tech industry investing in that kind of leadership. And for kids coming out of college today, they're not rolling into structured leadership training programs. And so if you fast forward 20 years what does that mean for the boards of the future? What does that mean for the global 1000 and how those businesses are run? The good news is, there's technology. There are plenty of amazing inspirational founders out there that have figured out how to build businesses on their own. And there's plenty of people like me who actually want to mentor and help to build out the skill sets of these founders and these executives. But I do think that like many other areas of training and education, which have been democratized in the industry, there's an opportunity to democratize leadership development and leadership training. And so that's something I'm spending a little bit of time on now.

>> Love it, such important work. And there's so much stuff going on there. She talked about the mentorship and structured training in education and moving beyond just learning to be a good manager. And she used a very specific word, an effective leader and a lot of the softer skills in terms of motivating your team, managing up, figuring how to use your resources and allocating resources according to what you have to be effective. It's a great choice of words that she chose with effective as opposed to just good. Really important stuff on leadership. And hopefully, we will see kind of more investment in formal leadership programs. 'Cause I do think, there's certainly a time and a place for those types of things early in people's careers. I think there's huge benefit. So let's shift gears a little bit from there and talk about culture.

And Jennifer's talked about it kind of under the surface and the answer to all these questions but culture is super, super, super important. And culture comes down from the leadership and you don't have to look any further. I know I probably overuse sports analogies but if you look at winning organizations in the sports world or winning organizations in the business world, generally the best ones, it's getting leadership from the top and leadership is driving and keeping those organizations and their teams executing at a high level. If you just watch the recent Andy Jassy keynotes at re:Invent, he talks about executing at a high level and they've been doing that. I just saw Amazon now has over a million employees. So the magic of Amazon is really this execution machine that they've built and a culture that enables them to push that out and push that down to a million employees and to execute. So culture, it's an important piece. Let's check in and listen in on Jennifer's take on culture.

>> I think culture is so important to the success of a business. There are some investors that think culture is like an afterthought. It's one of those soft topics that they really don't need to care about. But for employees today, culture is everything. If you are going to spend a disproportionate amount of your waking hours with a group of people it better be on a mission that's meaningful to you and you better be working alongside of people that you think you can learn from, that inspire you, that stretch you to do more than you thought you could do. And so, for me it's about creating a culture of innovation, of performance, of collaboration, a real orientation around goals that everybody in the organization understands in a way that is meaningful to them within their role in the business. And that it's fun. Like I won't do anything if it's not fun.

I don't want to work with people who aren't fun. I was really excited, two of the women who were on my leadership team at Keynote flew here just to join me today and support me as I'm giving a talk but also to go out and have a drink because that's what we used to do after a long day at work. And I think you have to be able to create a fire in someone by making sure that they're being stretched that they're learning and developing in that process, that they're part of something bigger than them. And that they can look back after week after a month after a year in that business with you and realize that they made an impact, that they made a difference but that they also gained something from it too. And I don't think we can ever underestimate the value of recognition, not just money, but like, are you really recognizing someone for their commitment, for their emotional commitment to the business for the time that they're spending and for what they've delivered for you, for the business, for your shareholders, for your customers.

>> It's all about culture. And she's built a culture at PagerDuty and she had a great culture you could see it just a Keynote again, ringing the bell at the end of the quarter to make it happen. So culture is super, super important. And we're going to close out this segment, really talking about a final topic that's getting a lot of action as it should. And that's diversity on corporate boards and that's for women specifically, but also people of color and underrepresented groups because boards should look more like the customers that they serve. And again, we've talked about it nauseum that diversity of thought, diversity of opinion, and diversity of point of view leads to better business outcomes. So not only is it the good thing to do and the right thing to do, but it actually results in better business outcomes. It's a place that Jennifer has spent a lot of time, at the time that we filmed this interview she was on the board of Puppet.

I don't think she's on the board of Puppet anymore. You saw that in the lower third a couple of times. Now she's on the board of Estee Lauder and let's jump in and listen to Jennifer Tejada on diversity and board.

>> I wish that, and I hope that the market starts to really think about diversity at the board level from a longer-term perspective. It's not just about how you find the women now. And by the way, there aren't that many female CEOs, but those of us who have sort of ticked that box and had that experience, we are available. And there are places where it's easy to find us. The board list for instance is one of them, The Athena Alliance, Coco, the founder of that business is here, Women in Tech. I mean, it's out there. It's not that hard to find us. The challenge, I think is the depth of bench strength. Like who are the next female leaders that are coming up that have functional expertise. You may need someone who's a marketing expert. You may need someone who's a product expert. You may need somebody who functionally knows consumer software.

And it's really being willing as a recruiter, as a recruiting executive, as a board member on the governance and nomination committee to say to your recruiters, to say to your investors, we want women on the short list, or we want diversity on the short list like gender diversity, age diversity, racial diversity, our diverse board makes better decisions full-stop, delivers better results. And I think we have to be demanding about that effort. The recruiting industry needs to hear that over and over again. And then on the flip side, we've got to develop these women, help them build the skills. I mean, when I talk to women who want to be on boards, I say tell everybody you want to be in a board. Be specific about the help that you need. Find the people that are connected in that network.

Because once you're on one board you meet board members there they're on other boards. It does snowball. And in fact, then you have to really choose the board wisely because it's not a two year commitment. You're in it for the long haul. So when you make that decision to choose the board, make sure it's a business that you have a real affinity to that these are people that you want to spend time with over several years. And that you're willing to see that business through thick and thin. You don't get to leave the board if things go badly. That's when they need you the most. So my hope is that we become much more open-minded and demanding about diversity at the board level. And equally that we invest in developing women, men, people of different ages and bringing them to the board level. You don't have to be a CEO to be an effective board member either. If you have functional, divisional, regional expertise that is a fit to that business, then you're going to be a very effective board member.

>> That's great. And Jennifer has been working on this very hard does a lot of organizations out here working hard on it. She talked about The Athena Alliance with Coco Brown and we talked about Girls in Tech the event that she is at. There's Trewstar with Stewart. There is FirstBoard.io, a lot of of organizations out there really actively looking now to put women specifically in diversity more generally onto corporate boards. It's an important thing and it's going to result in better outcomes. So I hope you enjoyed this look back at Jennifer Tejada's interview from Girls in Tech Catalyst, 2016. As I've said, she's a really one of my favorite executives, we're really happy and feel fortunate to have gotten to know her a little bit over the years and get to watch her in her execution 'cause she's really a special leader and really happy to know her.

So hopefully you enjoyed this Live Look Back. I'm Jeff Frick, thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.