Is What You’re Doing What You Should Be Doing? Absolute vs. Relative Decisions

Aydin Mirzaee (Fellow.app)  00:30

Jon, welcome to the show.

Jon Fasoli (Mailchimp)  04:31

Thank you and great to be here.

Aydin Mirzaee (Fellow.app)  04:32

Yeah, excited to do this. You have worked at two companies and so work at a company that I’m very familiar with. Today. You’re the chief product design and data officer lots of different roles there at Mailchimp, which I’ve been a very longtime user of and prior to that you were at Intuit for a very long time. senior leadership positions but you were there for almost 18 years. You must have liked it there.

Jon Fasoli (Mailchimp)  04:58

It was a great place. It’s a perks of a big companies, you can have many different careers under the same roof.

Aydin Mirzaee (Fellow.app)  05:03

Yeah, I mean, it’s not a thing that you see very commonly. I mean, these days, it seems like careers tend towards shorter and shorter lengths. But yeah, that’s really, really cool that you stayed there for that long and did so many different things. So do I have a track then that the first time that you would have managed to lead a team would have also been into it? That’s right. Yes. Yeah. So do you remember when you, I guess, first started to lead a team at into it? What were some of the very early mistakes that you used to make? Yeah,

Jon Fasoli (Mailchimp)  05:35

totally. So to this day, I still before I go to bed, write down in a notebook, the mistakes I made on any particular day, it’s a really great exercise for me to get some closure around the lesson that I learned. And then I will oftentimes knowing my team was sharing those lessons. So I have a really good recollection of the mistakes I made very early on. And they all fall under the category of not decoupling the people on my team and their personal development, from what the role, what the needs of the role, what roles were that they were in. So by way of putting this into context, I joined into it after doing some blackberry development to kind of give us a moment in time, this was the wave of mobile growth in the industry, I got very lucky and that my first project was an overnight success, a literal overnight success. And the byproduct of that was into his desire to grow a really big team, we didn’t have the mobile infrastructure at the time. So super early in my career, I wound up with a very big team. And that mistake I made over and over and over again of trying to mold and coach the people on my team into the specific roles that I needed. Luckily, after making this mistake, a few too many times, I had a coach at the time, one great perk of working at a company like Intuit as you’ve got legends in the hallway. So my coach at the time was Bill Campbell, Oh, wow. And what he helped me, he helped me to unpack so many things. But in this particular scenario, he laid out three things for me. So the first was that I’m not in control of somebody’s personal development, it’s a really obvious point, right. But as a coach, I’m here to accelerate where the people in my team want to take their careers. I am in control of the role on my team. But both of those levers can only go one beat up or one beat down. And my job is to ensure that those two things align. And sometimes what that means is, if the people on your team don’t want to develop into the job that you need to your responsibility as their coach to find them the job that they need. That was a massive unlock, and ended a series of many mistakes early on, in my experience.

Aydin Mirzaee (Fellow.app)  08:05

Yeah, that’s super interesting, and a few things to dig in there. So you’re not in charge of someone’s personal development. And just to really, I guess, drive the point home here, and also helped me understand was it that in these sorts of situations, you saw what the role needed? And you were basically trying to coach people to deliver what the role needed? And then was the unlock that? Oh, it may be that this role is actually not for this person, or they may not be want to be excellent at this particular role?

Jon Fasoli (Mailchimp)  08:41

Yeah, I mean, the easiest way, for me to bring it to life is when you go to hire someone, so you have an open role, that’s very clear. And when you go to hire someone, you are selecting someone that fits that role perfectly. But as my team was growing up, and bringing in people from other parts of the organization, teams were coming together, that choice of who to put in a specific role wasn’t always my choice. And I belaboured, that path of developing the person to be the same level of fit that I would have chosen if I hired them myself. And only after working with Bill that I realized my actual job was to understand where that person wanted to go with their career, what was the job that was going to advance them down that path? And then ask the question, is this role, the role that’s going to advance them down their professional path? And if the answer was no, is a very easy then to have a conversation around, working together to find out what that role was, instead of continuing to try to push them into a mold of something that wasn’t a good fit?

Aydin Mirzaee (Fellow.app)  09:49

You know, I liked that. You said that a lot of it was rooted in the fact that you know, you’re part of a team and then it grows. And then there’s new requirements and you have the same people or sometimes teams are merged This seems to also be a problem that emerges for fast growing companies in general, right? new stage of growth, different sorts of requirements. And you almost have to, to some extent requalify, even for your own job, but also like, you know, make sure that everybody on the team knows what is entailed in the next chapter. My question is, when you do these sorts of conversations with people, do you find that they do know what they want for the future of their career? Like, is that something that most people have a good answer for?

Jon Fasoli (Mailchimp)  10:33

No, while some people do, I never have myself. But generally speaking, I have learned from a bunch of really good coaches on how to derive motivators, right, so what gives the person on my team energy, what is the direction and doesn’t need to be refined to this specific degree, but you know, within 10 degrees in one direction or the other, what’s the direction that they would like to head. And that gives us a bit of a North Star, which can change on a daily, weekly, yearly basis. And when I do the evaluation of if the role is going to contribute to that path, it’s pretty easy to see if it’s outside of that band of direction or not.

Aydin Mirzaee (Fellow.app)  11:18

Yeah, and this is a thing like you said, that may change over the course of time, but it’s important to revisit these discussions and you know, some people do it quarterly, some people more more often than not. And yeah, it’s really cool to hear that. That’s something that you incorporate in working with your teams. I did want to jump back to the first thing that you said, though, which is you’re a ruminator. And you tend to write things down right before bed. And it’s very interesting. So what kind of things do you write down?

Jon Fasoli (Mailchimp)  11:49

Yeah, I got this advice, long, long ago to journal and I was very resistant to it to the point where I was writing in a journal as if I was writing to a pen pal. And therefore, I would pick up the habit for about three days before I would put it down because I couldn’t justify the time. And so I went, there’s a long period of time where I just stopped writing anything down at all. And I picked it back up, probably five years ago or so. And I literally just write bullets. So it’s not compose, it’s not elegant, it is really just a way for me to take what ever is spinning around in my head, put it on paper, and force myself to process it. And take it from like the short term ram down into my long term memory. And then I do try to sit the next day share that lesson with at least one other person. That helps me to take a more positive mindset to making mistakes. In the moment. It’s almost like a comedian, if they were in some terrible life situation can somehow spin it into this is going to be a great story, that song will enjoy some day, it’s the same thing, I probably make 10 mistakes, by the time I get to breakfast, and I can enjoy the fact that they will be useful in my arsenal, things I could teach to others and at a minimum have made me better.

Aydin Mirzaee (Fellow.app)  13:20

Yeah, that’s really interesting. So the bullet points that you write, it’s not all mistakes, right? It could be I assume that you write anything. So it could be like, wow, this person was really nice. In this way. You might write that or I learned this crazy thing. Does it include those things as well? Is it more like a brain dump of literally? Oh, wow. Well,

Jon Fasoli (Mailchimp)  13:40

I’m gonna say, and it sounds so negative when I say it out loud. But the reality is, whenever I go beyond that, I just I can’t sustain the habit. And I find that I’ve heard the same from other people, right? Like journaling is one of those great habits everyone knows about just like you should also like, eat your vegetables and exercise every day. But the only way I can sustain it is to think about it as just unloading. And therefore it’s just mistakes is just bullet points. I throw away the notebooks when they’re full, is more of the process than the outcome. Yeah. So

Aydin Mirzaee (Fellow.app)  14:13

you don’t really necessarily go five weeks back or five months back. It’s literally a short term. So this is super interesting. You’re the first person I’ve heard that does that and specifically does it for mistakes in that way. And this is maybe a very meta question, but how do you know that it was a mistake? Like is it a feeling that you had about this situation that you walked away not feeling good about it, but sometimes it’s hard to define something as truly being a mistake to?

Jon Fasoli (Mailchimp)  14:42

Yes, definitely. And I will tell you, I don’t overthink it. Because it’s such a curt exercise, I can really be loose with what falls into that category of the mistake. The real magic for me is being able to use it as a catalyst to share with the audience. I’m may have made a mistake with or an audience that I know may make that type of mistake in the future. Everyone knows and they probably roll their eyes when I started sitting with, Hey, I was writing in my notebook last night, because they know I’m going to come with something like slightly prophetic. But it gives me a daily catalyst to revisit a group of people to express humility and also express the fact that I recognize everything that I do is imperfect i, and hopefully they recognize my desire to improve as a leader, as a manager as a person. And I actually find it does build a sense of trust, or at least it helps to reinsured, those that my intent is always good, even if my actions aren’t always perfect.

Aydin Mirzaee (Fellow.app)  15:52

Yeah, super interesting. I’m glad that we dug in. And, yeah, there’s many ways to journal. And you’re right, it’s a very difficult thing to stick to. But those that stick to it, swear by it. so awesome that we went through that one other thing I want to chat about. And I’m starting to get the sense, Jon, that you’re very purposeful and deliberative about, you know, the way that you think and the way you structure and organize things. And so one thing I know you care a lot about is just creating a culture of innovation. And you’ve worked at, you know, starting your career, small teams, but progressively larger and larger ones. And today, you’re responsible for IT teams, a lot of the creative functions at Mailchimp. How do you think about, you know, making sure that there is a culture of innovation? And it’s specifically because this involves behavior at a large scale? What are some things that you’ve learned about this?

Jon Fasoli (Mailchimp)  16:47

Yeah, for sure. I think most likely perspectives might be a little bit different than the mainstream. So I need to preface with that, and that your results will vary if you try any of these specific things, but I will say that, for me always starts with Do you have enough curious people on your team, truly deeply curious infectiously curious people who really just want and need to understand how something works or understand a specific problem almost agnostic of their industry backgrounds. If you have those people, then the next step is giving them the tools. And those are sometimes literal tools like the actual prototyping tools. But others I have been a great beneficiary of because they’re built into the company that I worked for. So recruiting customers, methodology. So Intuit has a very mature methodology called D for D or design for delight. Pretty sure it’s publicly available for a quick Google. But these are methods that allow the super curious people to take an idea and turn it into data is experimentation, but not experimentation and the traditional Korean Navy Test, but experimentation in channeling that energy towards talking with customers and actually refining and getting data so that you can bring it to a forum for prioritization. And this is where I go slightly on a different branch than most other people. I personally do not advocate for creating incubation zones on my product teams, or creating these shelters for innovations. So the team operates in a vacuum. I know why those exist, right? It’s really hard to go from seedling or sapling. But in my experience on my teams, when you take away that vacuum, whatever, you’re growing dice, right, it didn’t grow in its early life with challenges and the headwinds that it will face in the real world. And therefore, what we’ve done is develop a little bit of a methodology. But more importantly, just create the forum for these prioritization conversations where we can challenge where we are in investing. And we create a handicap for you new ideas. So if you’re a an engineer, a marketer, data scientists, designer, anyone on the team, if you have an idea, you have the tools to translate that idea into data through experimentation. Then you have the data to bring to that forum that I create, to challenge our investment decisions. And that path of predictability around how do you take an idea and put it into customers hands, it creates a really positive feedback cycle where energy is translated to talking to customers. Yeah,

Aydin Mirzaee (Fellow.app)  19:51

so this is super interesting because like you said, a lot of people think about this as Yeah, we’ll create innovation zones will create some sort of Incubation Center or, and you know, we’ll have a section of our people go there and not be in the main office. I mean, these days offices are not as present. But yeah, they’ll go there because they’re they can really truly innovate in a vacuum to some extent. But you have this stuff as part of your team, because it forces you to prioritize in the same kind of like budget, as opposed to, we have 10% for innovation, and it’s in this separate location, all of it is prioritized together.

Jon Fasoli (Mailchimp)  20:27

Yeah, you’re hardening the concepts. And it’s early phase, right. And so you’re giving, you’re holding the same bar you hold when you take the incubation zone away. The other thing that this creates is the ability to apply innovation for both new products. So kind of adding breadth to your product portfolio, but also existing products. So incubation zones generally don’t work when you’re adding depth. And that depth is so critically important, particularly when you become a large organization, and you find teams just adding more and more and more breadth. At a certain point, you will lack the capacity to support and add the depth for each one of those new things to be competitive in the market. And so if you want to drive innovation, if you want to keep your existing products one step ahead of your competition, in my experience, incubation zone methodology doesn’t work well.

Aydin Mirzaee (Fellow.app)  21:29

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Jon Fasoli (Mailchimp)  22:56

Yeah, I’ll give two examples that are almost completely different sides of the spectrum. So the first is a major feature that we just launched inside of Mailchimp, is called campaign manager basically allows you to automate omni channel campaigns across multi channel campaigns across an entire month versus just sending one campaign to the platform. That was the result of someone in our strategy team having a coffee with somebody in our product team for so conversation idea or actually realization that they have the same idea. Normally, those ideas don’t go anywhere. And even when they do go somewhere, there’s a call, it’s called like a big company frustration, right? Like there’s this accepted, like, oh, we work in a big company, that’s going to be so much work and overhead to get that into customers hands. But they knew that in order to bring that idea to the prioritization forum where we make decisions around how we’re investing, that they needed to do some experimentation, and so they recruited a bunch of customers with one of those tools. They ran some experimentation with one of those tools to validate the hypothesis that they had. They built prototypes, they sent it to user testing to get slightly more scale. And then they started developing a pretty rudimentary v1 to validate that what we call a leap of faith assumption, right? The core hypothesis, what they’re building. So that’s one example of something that came to life and that whole process, by the way, it was probably six months or so afford to live major feature in the product.

Aydin Mirzaee (Fellow.app)  24:36

So just ask you about that. So in this particular case, I mean, you know, famously, Google, at some point had the 20% time and they had ways for people to spend the time on these sorts of things. Some companies do hackathons or hack weeks are just a way to give people the time to do that. How does that work at Mailchimp is it you have major projects you have to deliver and then I’ll tell you that you can work on these sorts of things. How do they time allocate?

Jon Fasoli (Mailchimp)  25:04

Yeah, great question. I’ve been in the job for a long time. So I’ve had the benefit of being exposed to many different methodologies. So Intuit similarly had a 30% time, actually, the percentages are even more permutations that I’ve experienced. So we’ve gone from 10% to 30%, as Google has. And those are really important when it comes to new product offerings, things that are just barely adjacent to what you’re currently working on. And the model that I’ve seen be super successful, which is going to be somewhat hypocritical to my incubation zone PS, is setting up the screen team behind that investment. The difference between coin and incubation zone. And what I’m describing is, the only thing incubated Here is the money. So we’re saying we’re going to durably invest in this particular team that’s going to focus on this particular problem, it doesn’t mean that they aren’t held to the same standards. When it comes to prioritization, the only difference is, I’m going to go into one more framework, apologies, but the at Intuit, we use a horizon framework. So horizon one, two, and three, Horizon three are what we’re talking about right now, brand new innovation new to the world. And succession from Horizon three to Horizon two is product market fit. So you need to prove that you are able not just to solve a problem, but that you’re able to acquire customers with it. Horizon two is focused on customer growth. So the success metric for Horizon two project would just be customer growth, and then the graduation to Horizon one is around revenue growth, right. So being being accreted to the business. The reason that framework is super important is one, it sets the common currency, the common metric for those projects. And then the prioritization criteria that we use in a decision forum I mentioned before is keyed off of it. So if your horizon three projects, then you have three years to bring to life, what the impact is going to be to customers and to the business. If you’re competing with the horizon, one, they only have 90 days. So that is a different denominator that allows horizon three to be a part of that process in a fight for your right to party is sometimes what will refer to it as an unlevel playing field.

Aydin Mirzaee (Fellow.app)  27:29

Yeah, that level playing field, I could see how it really helps make decision making a little bit more fair, I guess, with different sort of time horizons in that way. But just to understand, so is it that for example, if I have an idea, and I work at Mailchimp, is the idea that I can come in, maybe write a pitch, and then show that to you or someone else at the company? And then and then if that seems like a good idea, then you would just put an investment behind it to say, okay, like, this is the team, like, Let’s go prove this out to the next level and generate data.

Jon Fasoli (Mailchimp)  28:06

Yeah. So if you came with the pitch, my coaching in this scenario would be to take that, turn it into some experimentation, and build a sufficient level of data, that would close any of the holes that might be behind what’s presented in the pitch. So if you’re coming in that pitch, without any experimentation and saying, Here’s what I think the impact might be, based on market forces, and any proxy data, I would send you back and say, Hey, this is really exciting. Go experiment with customers. These are the big questions that I have here are questions from other people on the leadership team, get some data to address them, and experiments in a very focused way, and then come back. And then we’ll look at the data in a higher confidence way and compare it relatively, to other things that we’re working on to the side. Where does it sit in that backlog?

Aydin Mirzaee (Fellow.app)  29:00

Yeah, so one of the things I know, you know, before we hit record we were talking about was just the process of decision making, to allow you to make these sorts of choices, I wonder for decision making in general. And we can talk about product decision making as well. I imagine like, again, you come across many decisions throughout the day, some which are simple and some which are very complex. Over the years. Are there any particular ways or frameworks or methodologies that you’ve kind of learned or started to use yourself to help you make these types of more complex decisions?

Jon Fasoli (Mailchimp)  29:36

Yeah, for sure. This is one of my favorites soapboxes. We developed something called the build method, which I will not unpack at all, but at its core is making training leaders to make relative decisions versus absolute decisions. An example of an absolute decision is something that feels really good. So you may have a team I’m saying like, we need additional people in order to build this. And the leader in the room says, Yes, I approve those people, right? Or we need to make a decision if we’re going to include this in our plan. And the leader says, Yes, leader says, No, it feels really, despite decisive, it feels like a decision, but it’s absolute. It’s not relative. And therefore, it’s not a real decision. It’s a fake decision, for lack of a better term, a relative decision is one where the trade off is explicit. And I think the greatest leaders are the ones that actually don’t accept the decision or make a decision, or believe a decision unless that trade off is made extremely explicit. The challenge with that is, most decisions are apples to oranges, there’s the most frequent situation I have faced my team has faced is a very big, ambiguous concept, versus a very small tactical yet important thing. And those two are impossible to trade off. And so that’s why we develop the build method, which essentially just categorizes big things, medium things, small things. So that when you bring a decision to the table, it’s always big versus big, medium versus medium, small versus small, those lists are managed independently. And then if someone comes with a request for a decision, and they don’t have that trade off, it’s very easy coaching, ask them to go back, discover what that trade off might be. Bring another person to the table, if that trade off is not within your team, with data on both sides. And that is a recipe for very fast, very real decision making.

Aydin Mirzaee (Fellow.app)  31:49

Can we get I mean, this is a very interesting concept. And I love the way that you described it on what an absolute decision is, can you give me an example of a relative decision?

Jon Fasoli (Mailchimp)  31:59

For sure, I made one this morning. So there was a specific piece of work for one of our international markets, came in hot, came into our leadership team meeting as something that a decision that we needed to make today, and it is 100% aligned with our strategy. And there is no scenario where us as a leadership team would say, No, like the answer was was going to be yes. An absolute version of this decision is we would say yes, and then the downstream impact to the team is would just be bulldozing, right? And we will be completely ignorant to what did the team stop doing in order to start doing that? Instead, a wonderful leader on my team was able to quickly pull up the priorities for this particular altitude, this altitude, we go projects, pull up the projects for this particular initiative, their prioritize and ask the question, where do we think this sits in this prioritized list? As we have a great debate, the debate was based off of data, and we landed, essentially is is it mean number three. And so the decision was made, it’s number three, we’re very clear on the things that the team would push out in terms of their plan to accommodate it. But at the same time, we did not create a fire drill for the rest of the organization to have to put out

Aydin Mirzaee (Fellow.app)  33:23

so when you make a decision like this, how is it communicated? Because part of it is like, I’ve seen the bulldozing nature of some decisions that get made, I remember working at a large company, and I you know, something would get passed down. And it wouldn’t be quite obvious, like why but and then you would ask, Oh, the leadership wants this. And so that was a reason not to ask questions. And just to like, just go, go straight ahead. And so how do you avoid that? So it seems like it’s a yes. And here is the parameters of this decision. But then how do you make sure that everybody understands that?

Jon Fasoli (Mailchimp)  34:01

For sure. Two parts to that if I could decompose it. So the first is, is going to cascading what the decision was, really, I have experienced so many different versions of methods here. We currently use one called the site, it’s that but they’re the most important thing is it’s just standardized. So we create something called the site, it’s a templated. Doc, and then we post it into a Slack channel. And that’s it. So it’s really I think, disagreeing on, where are you going to put it and then having a discipline to put things there? The other part of your question is, is one that took me a really long time to arrive at, which is whose responsibility is it to provide the content for a relative decision? And this is where maybe, again, slightly controversial, but I put that on my team. Meaning if I’m coming to them with a bulldozer, I will in that moment say Hey, this is a bulldozer because I was is not armed with what the relative options were to make this decision. And so I need you to army with those, it doesn’t mean you need to write a brief or anything, it just means that the team needs to manage it in one place. And I will go to that place so that in real time, I can see what the trade offs are and, and have that discussion. That creates a really powerful feedback loop. So it only takes a couple bulldozers coming through your neighborhood before that, those that live there, say like, Hey, what can we do to stop the bulldozers? And the answer is very clear. Well, we need to be very organized around what our priorities are the data that supports that, so that we can give me in this use case information to advocate for the priorities that we have for a framework whereby new work can be prioritized against the priorities we

Aydin Mirzaee (Fellow.app)  35:54

have. Yeah, I mean, I love how well thought out all of these things are, it definitely shows that you take this style of decision making very seriously, you something you said just in passing right now, though, was? So once a decision gets made, it sounds like there’s like a decision template format. And did I get that correct that you have a decided channel in Slack? And like just decisions get posted there? Yes. So okay, this is very tactical. But are those product decisions? Do the product leaders have access? You know, does the whole company have access? Yeah, talk to me about this is very interesting. Yeah, yeah,

Jon Fasoli (Mailchimp)  36:31

no, Mailchimp has a whole company channel where you know, that level of decision, like those are fairly big decisions, typically. And then purpose built channels for the smaller parts of the organization. So if the product part of the organization or marketing part of the organization, the one I would say, gets the most traffic, or the most utility is our collective leadership team. So we just called senior leadership team, but have a channel so we ensure that all the leaders have that shared consciousness, and we take advantage of the leverage that you get from people leadership to then cascade those decisions down. Yeah, super

Aydin Mirzaee (Fellow.app)  37:12

interesting. So is this like a very high traffic channel? And there would be a lot of decisions, or like you said, it sounds like it’s only the big stuff. And when it comes in, it’s the sort of thing that you do want to read?

Jon Fasoli (Mailchimp)  37:23

Yeah, these are the larger decisions, the ones that will have implications on other teams. So generally speaking, if it’s the example I shared earlier of a new piece of work that’s coming in that that wouldn’t be worthy to share with the broader organization. But the things that would have implications on our strategy always go there.

Aydin Mirzaee (Fellow.app)  37:44

Yeah, this is, I mean, this is very awesome. Lots of great insights. And, and I think as we get close to time, there’s been a lot of really great topics we talked about, we talked a lot about decision making. I love your process of journaling and writing mistakes, right before you go to sleep. And then of course, sharing those things to make sure that other people can learn from those things as well. And all the different frameworks. I mean, it’s very interesting. Like, it seems like as companies scale, you really want people to follow the same set of frameworks. We talked about D for D, we talked about the different horizon methods. So lots of really interesting topics from today, the question that we always like to end on is for all of the managers and leaders constantly looking to get better at their craft. Are there any final tips, tricks, or words of wisdom that you would leave them with? Sure. Well,

Jon Fasoli (Mailchimp)  38:40

the first one is keyed off what you just said, Aydin, I’ve got some great and repeated feedback early in my experience, being a manager and a leader, that things are not real, unless they’re written down plans are not plans unless they’re written down. I got some questions from another legendary Intuit leader that I’ll stop naming trapping, would ask me questions like, what’s your strategy? I would answer that question. And he would say, Okay, send me the document and be like, Oh, actually, I haven’t written down. It’s like, Oh, you don’t have a strategy. Writing things down is how we’ve landed all these frameworks, and not a huge framework person, believe it or not, but I have been pressed many times that leadership is not just how you operate today, it is how you’re creating a way for the organization to operate without you. And that means that it has to live outside your head. It has to be operationalized and be on paper. So that would be one. The second though, is that great coaches have coaches, and I am the beneficiary of so many great coaches. I hope that I never have a day in my life where I don’t have someone who’s my primary coach. I have one now that I’ve had for a couple of years and I’m intentional about trying to get a new coach every two or three years just to get that that perspective.

Aydin Mirzaee (Fellow.app)  40:07

Yeah, that’s great advice. And great place to end it. Jon, thank you so much for doing this.

Jon Fasoli (Mailchimp)  40:12

Thank you for having me. It’s great to be here and great to meet you.