Ingrid: [00:00:01] Hello and welcome to Infinite Shelf, the human centric retail podcast. I'm your host, Ingrid Milman Gordy. At some point, we all find ourselves stuck in our mission to accomplish a goal. We're unable to move forward, solve the problem, convince people to see things in a new way. We just get frustrated. These are moments where the connections that we make with the humans around us make a huge difference. I'm incredibly lucky to have a group of trusted people whom I've met throughout my career that I can call to help me reframe narratives in my head, reconsider an approach I've been taking, and frankly, just tell me what I've been unable to see for myself. These are my lifelines, and I can honestly say that I wouldn't be where I am today without their caring advice, respect for me as a person and a leader, and just crazy off the wall intelligence. Michelle Bacharach is one of these lifelines for me. She is the Founder and CEO of FindMine and frankly, one of the smartest people I know. We had a fantastic conversation about how to set up our teams for success, and as always, I learned a ton from her. Here's my chat with Michelle. Hi, Michelle.

Michelle: [00:01:49] Hi, thanks for having me, Ingrid.

Ingrid: [00:01:51] Yeah, I'm so happy to have you. Michelle and I go back, way back, probably like over five years ago from my John Varvatos days where she came in and had this killer pitch for a product that once we signed it on, we turned her on, probably in like a week or two, super lightning quick, and immediately saw some results in our conversion rate. But I'll let her explain to you what her solution is and what the product is. Michelle, what's FindMine?

Michelle: [00:02:23] Yeah, great question, and it's definitely changed since we first started working together all those years ago. I think John Varvatos was literally our first ever customer. So now what FindMine is doing is we have a suite of artificial intelligence solutions that we apply to two areas of the business. One is sort of the content production process. So most brands and retailers have more products than they can produce high quality content for. So in fashion, it's things like complete outfits or style guides. In beauty, it's the beauty regimen that can help you achieve the anti-aging. In furniture, it's how the room decor comes together in a mid-century modern style. Think of it as almost like virtual mannequins or virtual window displays to show off exactly how to use the product. Normally that's being done manually, and anything manual obviously is limited by how many hours the humans have in the day to do it. So what FindMine does is we actually use AI to learn from the human creative process and then produce that at scale, so you can have multiple outfits for every single product that you sell that have enough variety that can be personalized to every single consumer, for example. And the second place we apply our AI is into the inventory dataset. So essentially what we're doing is we're detecting when a product is about to have to go on sale and pushing it through more assets and more content, so that you can increase the exposure on it before it has to go on sale, thereby saving some erosion in your margin or really popular right now is lots of supply chain issues. So something that you might have put in an asset might not actually have reached your distribution center and be available for sale, so you can actually see the click of a button retreat all of those products that never made it off the container ship from every asset, wherever they live within your ecosystem. So we're tying the marketing kind of brand storytelling together with the realities of supply chain and inventory and sell through rates.

Ingrid: [00:04:22] That's amazing. One of the things that I'm constantly thinking about is how to better sew the marketing with the sales and with the operational pieces, and it's just becoming so critical because we have to move ever so quickly. And being able to have insight into those pieces of your supply chain through your marketing just unlocks so much that we've never had access to before. That's amazing.

Michelle: [00:04:48] Yeah, yeah. And really, because like the thing we started out doing, which we were doing with John Varvatos was kind of the content and the storytelling. We had to apply so much automation to that we realized there was a real opportunity to take advantage of the changing data set from an inventory standpoint, like "This product is now out of stock." "This product is now overstock." "This product is performing behind plan." "This product lives in distribution center A." "This product lives in distribution center B." And then apply all of that because we're already using automation to produce content. Why not take advantage of all this rich data as well? And then basically help two completely different teams both achieve their goals rather than working at cross-purposes, which tends to be what happens in sort of the manual world.

Ingrid: [00:05:28] Yeah. So you're kind of like now you've done a lot of... Like you started with doing a lot of automation for marketing roles, and now there's quite a bit of automation for frankly, like a merchant role, right? You're able to see what you're actually able to sell, what's selling through, what isn't and then adjust then downstream the marketing that impacts that. So it's more like collective suite if I'm understanding it correctly. Right?

Michelle: [00:05:50] Yeah, absolutely.

Ingrid: [00:05:52] That's very, very cool. One of the things as we talk, you and I have become friends after all these years, and we are always able to just kind of bitch together about certain problems that we've been having with getting things done and some of the internal issues that we run into with different organizations. And you just have such a great eye for organizations that are really able to get things done and what happens within those places that enable that type of yes to innovation and things that are going to streamline process and things that are going to make everyone's lives easier, including the humans that work within organizations and the other humans that they're trying to service and also some of the ones that don't. Right? And so I was hoping that in this conversation, we can touch a little bit on what are the elements that are maybe holding larger organizations or maybe just less efficient organizations back from being able to innovate, test, and learn, and pilot things?

Michelle: [00:06:56] Such a great question and so much depth to it that I don't even know where to start, but I'll go to my kind of go-to one first, which is we work with a lot of innovation organizations or innovation teams within these big organizations. And I've noticed a really stark difference in the types of innovation or the structure of that team as far as like whether things get done or whether they don't. And I think the biggest one is budget, just giving the innovation, team budget and autonomy. Give them their own legal resource or give them their own like short form boilerplate legal agreement to work off of and give them budget to actually go pilot things. Because a lot of innovation teams don't have budget, and then they either expect a free pilot, which sometimes that works for the startups business model. Sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes you just can't give away a free pilot. And if you're assuming everyone's going to give a free pilot, you might be missing out on innovations from bigger companies who aren't startups by definition, they're not looking for their very first customer, but they came out with something new and interesting that they're looking for test partners in. But they're medium sized companies now, too. They have to charge for it. So even just applying like a little bit of budget to the innovation team unlocks this whole opportunity to say yes to something, whereas when I've noticed that teams haven't had budget, they can say no, but they can't say yes. And those innovation teams tend to have really high turnover because think about being in a role that's supposedly innovative, but all you can do is say no to stuff. You can't actually get anything done. You have to shop it around the rest of the teams, get them to sponsor it. The chance of something getting through is very few and far between, so you might be in an innovation role for two years and launch one thing and like, what a disempowering kind of a job to have. So that's kind of the first hack that comes to mind and kind of how to structure the organizational role if you're going to name it innovation. And you totally don't have to do that. You can get great innovation in your organization without having a team that's named as such. But if you're going to have a dedicated team to it, empower them, give them the resources they need, including the budget and the authority.

Ingrid: [00:09:07] I love that. I mean, before you even move on to the next thing, there's just like so much there that I want to just dig into. And the first thing you said is just giving them a budget and you're always like, the first thing you do is you end up having to follow the money when you're trying to figure out whether you actually have the ability to make this decision. And so when I'm making decisions, I'm like, "Does this this fall within my budget? Ok, great." That unlocks like 16 different roadblocks that could arise if it wasn't within my budget. So giving your innovation team budget first and foremost is crazy important, and I think it's also helpful.

Michelle: [00:09:45] I was going to say the other thing is, like a lot of times, innovation lies in this no man's land where it's not really marketing and it's not really merchandizing, and it's not really fulfillment and logistics. So no one knows what to do with you and then it doesn't get done. And it's such like silly procedural reason to say no to a brilliant idea. But just because of the way a lot of these organizations are set up, you can't really blame the people for not moving forward with it because they're like, "Well, I have to kind of get this committee together to do it. And I have all these other things on my plate, and if I'm going to stick my neck out like that, I'm exposed to more risk in my career," and maybe more reward, too, but all else equal, I'm going to go for things that are 100 percent in my purview because it's just more straightforward. So an innovation team that has a budget can catch those opportunities that could be really great for a lot of different departments, but don't have maybe the senior executive level sponsorship they need to bridge all those VP level PNLs.

Ingrid: [00:10:45] Right. That that makes total sense. And I think it's like great work on the organizations that have identified that they need an innovation department and people that don't necessarily sit within those very specific business units who have the opportunity and probably even like the luxury of head space and time to go out and explore what's new and next and ways that they can better evolve their offerings, whether it's technological or just actual product offerings. But then if you're only going 50 percent of the way by determining that you need an innovation team, but then not actually giving them a budget so that they can be empowered to make decisions, it doesn't really allow anyone to do anything. And it's probably going to take the people who are on that team and just really disempower them and make them feel unsatisfied. And so there's like a retention rate issue there, too, because if I'm part of this exciting innovation team, I'm going to be stoked. But then the second that I meet someone like you and have this really cool tool and I don't have the power to actually make it work, then I'm going to be continuously frustrated and then I'm probably going to end up switching companies because it's just like, who wants to live like that on a day to day? And then the other piece that you brought up was trying to figure out how to templatize legal and procurement and all of that. And there are so many boilerplate MSAs and boilerplate things that we can do with legal that if you're also not empowering your innovation teams to move quickly and actually innovate, completely understand that you need to go through legal and there are all of these things that you have to make sure in terms of data security. And no one's saying that we should do that in a half assed way, but how do you do that in a way that is still effective and efficient? And so, yeah, I think that's a huge lesson in driving innovation from an organizational standpoint is like, give them a budget templatize and simplify the legal component and then let them off the ground running. The piloting piece for free is a whole other concept that came to mind when you were talking about that. We are all now at least in the stage that we are in with technology and startups is everyone now is trying to become profitable. There was like a good 10 years where growth was the only key metric, and so people were giving away things for free, left and right because they were like, "We don't actually care how profitable we are. We just want to have more clients. We just want to have more daily active users." That growth, growth, growth, growth, growth. And now we're in the phase that pendulum is swinging toward that profitability. And so even we've set this precedent where everything is expected to be free for a certain amount of time. But in actuality, now if you're not profitable, you're in a much, much different place than you were maybe even five years ago.

Michelle: [00:13:52] Yeah, and I think it's almost counter. We've done free pilots in the past. We don't really do them anymore because what we found is that the people who want a free pilot don't have enough skin in the game themselves. It's almost like a filtering criteria just to put even $5,000 at work. I think the John Varvatos pilot was like $3,000, and we made like a 600x ROI or something really stupid. That's really instructive for both the startup to kind of refine their pricing model and for the company who's buying it because they know what the ROI is, what they can expect to kind of scale it out. So it's almost a way for the company who's purchasing the software in the long run to get more favorable pricing because they can say, "Well, I paid you three thousand and I got this much money out of it. So I expect that same ratio when I go to the bigger scale." So it can even be like a procurement team member's dream to have actual dollars at stake because you have a real relationship between value and cost. So I think it actually works in both parties favor to have some economics associated with even a short term test or a POC or anything where there's value to be had, because then you could get that relationship documented.

Ingrid: [00:16:20] I think even just setting up the pipelines for payment and that kind of thing, but skin in the game is another huge component, whether you have skin in the game monetarily or otherwise. It's like, how do we make it so that we both are in this together and we're both able to test and learn how we work together, how we optimize this particular feature? I think there's huge benefit to both having skin in the game, for sure. What was your second one? I know the first one was just like chock full of things and I was writing furious notes, but what was the second one?

Michelle: [00:16:55] Oh, the second one is really about kind of organizational structure in terms of like breaking down silos because we're a small company, we don't have this problem, and so it's very easy to stand on my pedestal and say "You shouldn't have silos in your organization," but I've also worked in large corporations, most recently at Univision, which is a media company. And they were organized at the time by Linear television which is like broadcast and cable networks that you watch on your TV, desktop and tablet and mobile. And if you think about an average consumer of a TV show, do you even really notice where you're watching the show? I have a sticker over the camera on my phone. I put it in a plastic bag. I watch it on my phone, in the shower, because that's the one time I can be away from my son and not have him insist on watching pony shows on TV. And then he goes to sleep, and then I'll like stream it to my television via our Apple TV. But it's not actually on TV. It's not coming in through the broadcast. And then I'll flip over to cable, and I'll watch something there. So that was a really big lesson in just putting yourself in the consumer shoes. And I think in retail, the same thing is true. Everyone talks about omnichannel, but there are still digital merchants and visual merchants, and there's still email teams and mobile teams and app teams and stores teams and yes, you have to break it down some way to get your arms around this large organization and have enough kind of structure in place, but I think the way you break those things down can be more horizontal rather than vertical, so that it cuts across the entire consumer experience. And maybe it adds a little bit of overhead, but I think you actually get more innovation and better customer experience outcomes and better revenue outcomes associated with it when you think of it in a more horizontal way rather than in a vertical specific way.

Ingrid: [00:18:54] Yeah, I experienced all of that, both inside organizations and as a consumer. And it's so confusing to me that decision makers still can set up teams in this way when we, as consumers and them as decision makers are all experiencing the world in the same way, like everyone has a really similar story to how they watch television or where they buy a blouse or where they buy a car. There's just no differentiation between where they found Everlane or where they watch a particular show or whatever the case might be. It's just the show is the show is the show.

Michelle: [00:19:41] And the shoe is the shoe is the sho.

Ingrid: [00:19:42] Exactly, exactly. And the brand is the brand, so they don't actually care if they're in-store or online. And I think that's the reason why omnichannel has become such a big buzzword to the point where it's like people don't even want to say the word omnichannel because it just comes with all of this baggage. But in reality, it's not omnichannel, it's omnibrand. And so you have to set up your organization in order to be where the customer is. And the customer frankly, is just everywhere, especially in this post-COVID world.

Michelle: [00:20:14] Yeah, and I think you have to, there has to be a baton pass at some point. If you're doing it based on moments in the user journey instead of platforms the user or channels the user could experience your brand in. So you have to break it up somehow. You can't just have a monolithic organization where everyone works on everything. And so if you break it up into like discovery, add to cart, or consideration, purchase, post purchase...

Ingrid: [00:20:41] The clock model. Do you know about the clock model?

Michelle: [00:20:45] No.

Ingrid: [00:20:46] Oh man. Yes, I mean, that's how I set up my team at Nuun, actually. So imagine a clock, and the first portion of my team is that 12 to 4 where it's acquisition and awareness. And so just people like knowing that our brand exists and knowing the types of products that we sell and how we fit into your lifestyle. And then there's the conversion. So imagine the bottom of the clock 4 to 8, and that's truly like they have, they're in charge of making sure that the transaction happens and that the revenue is there. And then the 8 to 12 portion of the clock is loyalty and retention, so making sure that after they make that initial transaction that the people are coming back and are loyal. And all three of those pieces of my team and the clock model or however you want to call it, are working in conjunction with each other, but they have totally different KPIs. So the KPIs for acquisition and awareness are engagement, reach, impressions like all those really, really broad, just making sure that we're getting on people's radar KPIs. And then the next person is they're pretty much ROAS focused, making sure that everything is working, that conversion rates and ROAS are the world that they live in. And then the last people, their KPI is lifetime value. So just making sure that once we get them, that they're part of our email and they're part of our loyalty program, that they're part of our SMS and all of that. And I think that because they're able to like very, very specifically focus on their particular KPIs, it doesn't weigh down everything else. Whereas in the model you were saying, that monolithic, it's like, how can you truly, truly do awareness and brand building if you're always super focused on what you're ROAS is? It's such a important metric, but it's such a specific metric. And so, yeah, I love...

Michelle: [00:22:48] It's almost like inherent conflicts of interest then too.

Ingrid: [00:22:51] Yes.

Michelle: [00:22:51] So like, if you have 50 metrics you have to care about across the entire funnel, then there's one that's going to bubble to the top and you're going to kind of like prioritize against the other ones. The trade off with that, though, and I love the clock model being like circular, so one feeds into the next and then you can carve it out into like slices. It's a lot easier to say, like "12 to 4" rather than like "this first third of the pie." So I like that framing of it. But the challenge you have there is your people who are focused on ROAS don't care as much about lifetime value, so could they make decisions that sacrifice the lifetime value just to get the immediate return on ad spend? There's always going to be a downside, no matter how you organize the org structure. But I think this one works much better for the customer because usually things that are good for ROAS aren't bad for lifetime value. Like the times those are going to be in direct conflict, are going to be fewer and farther between. And you can give people like aggregate bonuses, people can have, like overall revenue goals tied to their bonus, in addition to the one specific metric that they focus on. So they're not throwing the other teams under the bus somehow. I think it's much easier to do it in that sense because then you're thinking holistically about where transactions are happening in my entire ecosystem, whether it's at the multi-brand retailer that I'm selling my products at that I don't have any control over, but I still need my end customer to buy, or it's in my direct to consumer channel via our SMS marketing strategy. Because I think the technology itself, like the medium, is specific and it has some nuances to it that you need to be aware of, but it's not so specific that you have to specialize in it. Like in today's modern organization, you need to be tech-savvy enough to understand the mechanics of some of these, all of these platforms basically. You can't get away with not understanding digital, even if you worked predominantly in a retail-only environment. And then you can have kind of specialists that you can tap for the more technical elements that really need someone to go deep on, like mobile messaging or the Metaverse or whatever kind of the medium is. But I don't think that it makes sense to structure your organization where those people who just own those, because then they have these huge blind spots on either side of them where customers might be coming from or going to as they kind of move through platform to platform and not really notice that they're moving from platform to platform.

Ingrid: [00:26:37] You're also blinded by the subject that you are an expert in, right? So the inclination for everything to be under technology, I have seen in like CPG companies like more traditional CPG companies, that all ends up being under the CTO. And so then you have all of these consumer-facing experiences and consumer-facing products that are up to the CTO to ultimately bring to market. And that person looks at the world through a very, very different lens than someone who is more experienced and professional in customer experience or marketing or connection to a brand. And so it's funny in this transition from things being really analog or physical into digital where it's like, "Oh, that person is good at technology. So let's make sure that all the technology goes and sits under the technologist." And it's like, no. And more and more so with the generations that are coming up now, technology is just part of our lives. Right now electricity is so integrated into all of our lives, you wouldn't put every single thing in your house under electricity, under the one person who knows how to use the electricity box. I don't even know what it's called, and I use electricity all day.

Michelle: [00:28:03] Yeah, I think that the difference is organizations that view tech as a means to an end and then organizations who treat them like they're the end in of itself.

Ingrid: [00:28:12] Yes.

Michelle: [00:28:12] And that happens with AI all the time. There are all these startups out there pitching investors who are like, "We're AI for X," and we totally do it too because it is different. It's still differentiated. It's still not the main way most companies achieve their ends, but it will be. And it's going to be like saying, "We use the internet for banking." Well, duh, every bank is on the internet now, guys. It's just not a differentiator anymore. There's no reason to talk about it. And I think that the newer stuff tends to have that "Let's put it under the technology organization," or not give it a home, a proper home, in the organization because it's new and it still feels like it's the end of itself versus like the way we achieve our normal goals, which are ROAS, which are retention, which are awareness and brand building. It all really needs to come back to that rather than now you can sell stuff on Twitter. Let's have someone who's an expert at Twitter own that. It's like where does Twitter fit into your clock? Like which part of your clock is it going to be a big part of? Is it part of one or both or all? Maybe. And then how are you going to maximize against your KPIs for where it fits in? That's the lens I think every new technology should be looked at through and then some of them go away. There's technologies or like platforms that were really hot and de rigueur for shopping, and now they're not. And I think it's a lot easier to de prioritize them when they fall out of favor if you're using the clock model, then having to fire your whole x y z social media team.

Ingrid: [00:29:57] Yes, definitely. And I think that like it's taking the actual goal of the program with its KPIs and with its purpose for existing and putting it into the area that it actually belongs in under the human, the people internally that belong making decisions on it, not just the very, very specific technical subject matter experts. You're going to need those people probably to get it going and to do a little bit of education within the team. But then frankly, the people that are responsible for the actual goal, be it the merchant or the marketer or the sales rep. That's where it actually should be living.

Michelle: [00:30:42] Yeah, for sure.

Ingrid: [00:30:45] So how do you... Going back to like the innovation teams, right? So I definitely see the benefit of those teams being separate from the individual business unit. So but how do you see them integrating, let's say, ok, they go and they pilot test mine. Fantastic, they have a budget, they have this legal template. They're often running, they're paying you a fair amount for your work and for your software, and it works. So then in this dream scenario, what happens next?

Michelle: [00:31:17] So I've seen it done a few ways, and I think the dream scenario is they become part of our sales organization to sell it in to the business. So there's the whole like building the business case, getting in front of the executives, getting it approved. And then there's like the bottoms up part where if you have day to day people who are using the software, they can't feel like it's getting foisted on them by some team that says, "We did this test and here." So there's definitely a friction point there, but a good innovation team will recognize that and they'll know how to help navigate "This person is going to be really cranky about this, and so I'm actually not even going to, like, bring you to them. I'm going to tell you how to get to them, you're going to go to them yourself," and then they can feel much more ownership over it than it got rammed down their throat by innovation.

Ingrid: [00:32:05] That's brilliant.

Michelle: [00:32:06] Or this is how we sell into our CFO because this is what she cares about and they become an extension of your sales team to help repeat the sales process now with the benefit of the business case you built from the innovation pilot. And that way, I think you get into more places across the organization. If the organization is siloed and most of them still are. Most of them are living in our dream world of how these orgs are set up. So you're going to still have to go to marketing, you're still going to have to go to retail, you're still going to have to go to the email teams and the eCom teams and the merchants all kind of separate. And the innovation team members know those people really well. They understand the organization. They know who the power players are. They know who's going to derail this. They know who they've had success with in the past. They know who like a sleeper hit is going to be who you might not ever think to target, like the supply chain manager or something like that, because you just don't think your technology serves that type of role. But then the innovation person can tell you like, "Well, actually, no, this person has this crazy interest in sustainability. They'll really get this one kind of feature of what you're doing, and they're really well connected in the organization." The innovation team can be like your man on the inside.

Ingrid: [00:33:20] I love that, and I think that speaks to those of you who are putting together innovation teams or reorganizing innovation teams internally is you need the people that are ears to the ground and open to finding the FindMines of the world, but then also are connected enough and have strong enough internal relationships who can actually make things like this happen? Not just like, "Oh, it's a great idea. We piloted it and here you go, boxed up and ready to use and drop whatever else you're currently doing and use this." And no one's going to fall into that. Everyone's going to be a little cranky or be a little bit confused and not have been brought along on the same journey that that innovation team was a part of. And so creating that innovation team that has both the eye on what is going on technologically as well as those connections and how to then sort of mobilize, if I'm hearing what you're saying correctly, mobilize a team like yours, your actual FindMine sales team to then go and speak to that supply chain manager or go speak to that email manager that's going to be a little bit cranky, but needs to feel like they're part of this journey. I think that that is probably the best advice I've heard in a really, really long time in terms of like how to make things happen organizationally. No, it's so true. It's so practical, but it's just really, really helpful. And that's I love hearing that. Thank you.

Michelle: [00:34:50] Yeah, no this is like a topic I love to geek out on. I actually wrote my thesis, my honors thesis, in my senior year of college on managing innovation in multicultural organizations because there's actually like we bring our own kind of cultural context about creativity and being the person who's sticking your neck out and being like a rogue person or whatever or not to the table. And I'm not being very eloquent in explaining the thesis because it was like so long ago at this point, but...

Ingrid: [00:35:22] No. I'm with you.

Michelle: [00:35:24] I just thought it was so fascinating to learn how innovations come about at the organizational level, the group level, the individual level can be so influenced by all these external factors that humans are always influenced by. So it's really important to just keep them in mind that how someone's relationship is with their boss can make or break whether they want to use your software in their day to day. And I think so often software sales teams, forget about that that it all comes back to human behavior at the end of the day.

Ingrid: [00:35:59] That is so true. And that's the whole purpose of this podcast is just to talk about the humans behind these decisions to bring a particular feature to the other humans that are on the other side of purchasing your product. And I think that there are plenty of conversations and podcasts about the great technologies of which FindMine sits with. However, if a tree falls in the forest and no one's there to hear it, then what the heck is the point? So you need those internal buy-ins, and you need that innovation team to be enabled with a budget and a fast track in legal mumbo-jumbo? Appropriate, necessary, very important mumbo-jumbo, but still mumbo-jumbo, mostly because I don't understand all of it. And then obviously, you need those people inside to be the advocates for what the actual tool is going to be and who are the humans that are going to take it on and see if it is going to be successful or not.

Michelle: [00:36:59] Yeah. Totally nailed it. that's it. Print it, ship it, tatoo it on everyone's forehead.

Ingrid: [00:37:08] {laughter} Perfect.

Michelle: [00:37:08] If only it were that easy, though.

Ingrid: [00:37:09] I know.

Michelle: [00:37:10] It's so much easier said than done.

Ingrid: [00:37:12] It is. It is, but I think like everything, you just need a North Star. And if the North Star is, "Hey, we just want to do this in the right way, we have set up the things that are going to set it up correctly," you're at least giving it a fair shot. Whereas I think there's probably a plenty of times that you walked into a boardroom or a meeting and you're like, "This is not going to go well," right?

Michelle: [00:37:37] Yeah. And also, like a lot of the times, it's because people are working at cross-purposes because they don't have the same North Star and that's no one's doing things maliciously, but everyone is sort of oriented in a different direction.

Ingrid: [00:37:50] Exactly.

Michelle: [00:37:50] And then you can never resolve it, and you almost can't even figure out why you can't resolve it because it's not overt necessarily that not everyone's working towards the same North Star.

Ingrid: [00:37:59] Yeah, you have to be at an organization for at least like six months to a year, working full time to truly understand that, "Oh, their North Star is totally different than mine. And that's why we haven't been seeing eye to eye." The obvious ones... So I work in DTC and eCommerce, and so there's always our team is always thinking about the consumer experience and like the shipping getting there really fast and the box being really beautiful and all those things that are connected to customer experience and the ops team, every ops team, not just our ops team, is like, "How do I do this really, really, really, really, really cheaply?" {laughter} And those two North Stars are completely in different worlds.

Michelle: [00:38:41] A different sky.

Ingrid: [00:38:41] Right they're in totally different universes. And so they lead to different decision making and different vantage points from which you make decisions. And I think just aligning the top, top, top leadership needs to align on everyone's North Star and then everyone can use their particular subject matter expertise to help us get there in the most efficient way.

Michelle: [00:39:06] Yeah.

Ingrid: [00:39:07] Yeah. Well, Michelle, I can talk to you for another two hours, {laughter} but maybe we'll have you back for some more conversations.

Michelle: [00:39:16] I'd love that.

Ingrid: [00:39:16] But thank you so much for sharing your experiences. And yeah, truly you have to come back and chat with us a bit more. This has been really fun and enlightening. Thank you.

Michelle: [00:39:24] Awesome. Yeah. Thanks so much for having me on.