Karri Saarinen: commitment

Transcript context

…That's what I imagined you were going to say, and I love hearing that. For someone that wants to create a similar culture, is there tactically anything you find, just understand if your employees and engineers, designers have enough of that context and really understand the problem? I think it's always, different people in a company will have different understandings. It's not like you can expect everyone will every day go to see everything and has this. But we do sometimes sessions with the team or we do record videos with the customers, we write notes and we share this with people. I feel like again, it's fairly apparent, if you know your customers or the product, it's a very different way you can talk about it versus if you don't have any idea. I think if you don't have any idea, you probably don't even know what to say. So I think it's apparent if people have that then, it's not like every project's like we need everyone to have this understanding. Probably, usually enough if one or two people have that understanding or have different understanding of different things. So I think again, I feel like it's a culture thing. I think the other thing is you just have to kind of believe in it. I think sometimes people use data a lot or too much because they're worrying or they're afraid that, will I make the wrong choice? And I'm using data to make the choice for me. But then you might still feel like this is not the right choice, but the data is telling me is the right choice and then turns out maybe it was the right choice or not. But it's more like, again, like a practice thing. I think the company and you need to be okay that sometimes we make mistakes and we made the wrong choice and then we just can fix it. But at least we made that choice and the data didn't make that choice for us. The data didn't make that choice for us. What's interesting about this is if you've heard the episode on RAMP and how Ramp builds product with Geoff Charles, there's such different ways of building product. Ramp is all about velocity, shipping all the time, metrics, measuring everything. And your approach is almost the opposite. And I think what's interesting there, as a takeaway, is just there's many ways to do it. You just have to do it almost fully and you have to have really specific people. It feels like the people want to work in a certain way. And a lot of it I think also is the founder has to be natural to the way the founder operates and thinks about building and building a company.…

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