 Thank you. A little bit about me before I get started. Vivek Betty, I was, I went to, who's from Jersey? Anybody from Jersey? Okay, I was like a happy, Rutgers University? Stretch? No? Nobody? Okay. So I went to, I grew up in Jersey, still live in Jersey, was born in Jersey, I'm born in Jersey, right? Computer engineering, computer science major. I'm gonna be an engineer for the rest of my life. Was at Goldman Sachs for 13 years. Three years in I had an inflection point in my career and like we all do and I said, I don't want to be an engineer. I went to school for it, but that doesn't really excite me. What excites me is why are we doing things? Why are we building them? Who are we building them for? Product, right? Nobody goes to school for product. That's why product school exists, right? You come into product and you slip in it from other disciplines and I did too and I realized wow I really love products, but I don't know what the heck it is. So I spent a lot of my time at Goldman building out digital solutions, voice video, mobile, social. How do you get 33,000 angry bankers to work with each other and their clients, right? A lot of interesting successes. Then I went to a startup in the exciting, exciting world of background checks. Really kind of building out, you know, how do you take a antiquated paper-based industry? How do you modernize it, right? I know a lot about background checks, more than I ever wanted to, but think about companies like Uber and Lyft. Driver's license checks are important. There's a whole world out there. We did some amazing things and the company got acquired by Goldman Sachs. Irony to the story and I felt like wow I can never leave Goldman, right? And then that's where I met Alexa who runs LearnVest and I ended up at LearnVest. If you don't know much about LearnVest, it's really fixing America's wallet. So it's really geared at collecting your financial information through digital channels and then introducing you to a virtual planner that walks you through Money Management 101. Really getting your wallet in order. About three months before I joined, they were acquired by Northwestern Mutual, the big life insurance company based out of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. That's a strange marriage, right? So the talk for today, and I actually have two titles. I am the head of product when it comes to LearnVest, but I'm also leading a product team in Northwestern Mutual. So I have an amazing set of our team here from both Milwaukee and New York and we're going to go into a panel session later on so you can really kind of see and hear from the team, not from me, on some of the struggles that we had to go through. But it's really centered around how do we bring these two cultures together that are very different from New York, Milwaukee, but also from the way that we work. And there's pros and cons to both and how do we bring that together to do what we do today? And I'm actually very proud of the things that we've done in the last two years and I'm very happy and excited for the team to share some of your stories about that. Before we get to the panel, a little bit about disrupting product cultures. Culture, just a quick poll, like what's the first word that comes to your mind when someone thinks about, what if I said what is a company culture? Values. Values. People. Behaviors. Sorry? Vision. Okay, it's a lot of that, right? Like I think of like Apple, they have an interesting culture. It's a user centric, right? It's obsessed about design. It's simple, but then you have Ikea, right? Who has its own culture and it's not, I'm not saying one's better than the other, but it's low cost furniture, simple furniture that's easy to assemble, right? Every company has their own culture. We had our own culture at LearnVest. We also had our own culture at Northwestern Mutual. But culture is really all of that. And I think of it as a lot around feeling, behavior, the way the team feels, the way people perceive you from outside of the industry. Fun fact, I think it just happened in the news today. Northwestern Mutual is starting a venture capital fund in Milwaukee. They're investing five million in startups in Milwaukee, okay? In New York, we take that for granted. There's a lot of startups in Milwaukee. We're building a community there. So it's really, who would have thought Northwestern Mutual is doing that, right? So it's really about creating that culture of not how the team works internally, but how do people perceive you? When I first started at Northwestern Mutual slash LearnVest, I remember, Brian, you weren't there yet, but I said, who owns mobile? And somebody raised their hand, I kind of do, but I wait on her. And she's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, I wait on him, right? And it was no one was really saying, I own it, I own it. So that's what we've done. A lot of our bringing these cultures together is there's clear ownership and there's clear way of thinking about things. It's not, you can't push culture. It doesn't come from a memo from the manager, the CEO, that we got to change our culture so we should do it, right? You can't really force it if there's sensitivity around it. My son is eight. He's obsessed with soccer. And our daughter, we want to get her into soccer. And whenever we say, you should play soccer. She's like, no, daddy, I'm never going to play soccer, right? So we subtly started bringing her to some of my son's games. She kicks the ball around with us now in the backyard. And the other day, she came to me and said, I want to play soccer. And we're like, really? Yes, you should play soccer if you're interested, right? It's a lot about kind of, it's really about the small changes that really make the bigger difference. So one important thing that I learned is you can't really force cultural change. It's a lot like I was joking with someone on my team, Scott, he always makes fun of my vests game. I have a lot of vests in different colors. And it's a lot, not that I am anybody to talk about fashion, but it's a lot like fashion, right? Things spread with fashion. And Scott has amazing fashion. But it starts with a small change, spreads from word of mouth. There's ambassadors. There's evangelists that help you with the culture. Culture cannot be switched on and off. It's going to take time. And you're going to have to disrupt and push it through. And you have to spread the word. Word of mouth is a very powerful tool. Six levers that I think of, some are formal, some are more informal. The formal stuff, leadership, yeah, no brainer. It's got to come from the top. People have to be vested in. I love that even today Mark Zuckerberg goes to a board meeting dressed like this, right? Because that's the culture who wants to instill. Same thing with Steve Jobs. He used to come with the black shirt, right? So it really starts from the top on how you're going to perceive your culture. Second, clear roles. We have a pretty vast organization around two disciplines. There's design, there's marketing, there's all the things that you guys are doing. We're very clear about who does what and what responsibilities. It's very important to do that when you're changing a culture. If you have a lot of ambiguity that causes issues where your culture doesn't evolve by itself. Reward people. Yes, money is important. If anyone tells me money isn't important, they're lying. But there's many other ways to reward culture. Recognition, speaking events, getting the word out. We've spent quite a bit of time putting our people in front, right? Driving big projects, that's important as well. Some of the more softer things is changing behavior. I think that a lot of what we do is we have pizza pie teams now. I'm gonna talk about this. Anyone know what a pizza pie team is? Amazon term? Yep. So we always go with two because some of our, yeah, some of our engineers like Anthony like to eat more slices than they're supposed to, two pizza pie teams, right? A team of about four to 10 design, QA, engineering, sit together, they think together. They're really working together. Two week sprints, they're putting something out whether it's a copy change or whether it's a big feature release. We get in the cadence that we're putting out releases, right? And that's really changing the behavior. Gone are the days that we will come back to you in 12 months and we come back to the business and they're like, that was 12 months ago. The entire business has changed, right? So it's really getting in the cadence of delivering releases faster. What I'd say about role models, I think that's important. We have a lot of mentoring systems and training in the organization, but I think softer role models. I think the team comes to a lot of people looking for guidance and really helping spread the word and networks. We created a product specialist team. You're probably wondering what the heck that is. But that team is not product managers. They don't have their own pizza pie team, but they're evangelists, they're advocates. They go out and tell people whether it's advisors in the field, whether it's customers, whether it's business partners. Here's what the product team is working on, right? Here's how they're working. Let me bring them in and show you wires instead of bullet point presentations. So really kind of spreading that word through networks of communities we've created internally to help cascade the way our culture is changing. Any questions on that? Yeah, workshops in person. We just went to Denver last week with the team. Then we went to, we were visiting our second top producer in Northwestern Mutual the week before we were in Indianapolis, our third top producer. And you know, we walk into this room and it's like wealthy folks talking about their investment strategy and we come in and show them presentations of wires of clickable mockups of how things could look like. So it's really kind of a lot more show and tell. I always take the mantra that I tell the team, always put on a great show. Don't give a great presentation, right? It's all about the storytelling aspect of it. So a lot of our evangelists are helping cascade and do that. Yep. So first thing is, I never call them marketing. Not marketing, but their role is very different. So they are one of their actually stakeholders is marketing, right? But their job is to help spread what we're doing as a firm to the internal audiences as well as external audience. We've created a few groups called Dell, 500 advisors that we reach out to that are more kind of tech friendly and we'll reach out to them through this program. We've created 4,000 clients that are paying customers where we'll bounce ideas of new things that we're gonna explore. So it's inward, outward, any way you can look at it, even within the organization. And we can talk more about that. So what's happened with some of the change we've done? Two years ago, this was the client experience, okay? Clutter designed a lot of information. Number one feedback is in order for me, and I've actually been a policy holder for seven years, ironically, before I started here, and shame on me, I used to log in once a year. It's life insurance. I'm logging in once a year to check my bills and make sure nothing's changed. It's a whole life policy, it never changed, right? But I needed my advisor there with me to talk it through, right? That's not what a consumer experience should be. It should really be more self-sufficient. Here's what the experience, oh, by the way, a lot of important features were missing. Didn't have a mobile presence. We didn't have a pre-client experience. The only way you can log into a digital experience is after you've bought. Before you bought, it was all word of mouth, meeting your advisor at coffee shops. There was no digital experience to log into. Sharing was a big issue. We used Gmail, which isn't secure. We tried to extend out some internal tools to try to make it work. Self-service was a big challenge. 850,000 calls a year used to come into our operations desk around can't pay my bill, don't know how to pay my bill, can you help me change the frequency of my bill? These are things that advisors shouldn't really be focused on. They should be focused on the relationship, right? How do we bring some of that self-service tools into the forefront? I'm so proud to say, thanks to this amazing, when I first started of our 4 million clients, we had about 150,000 that used to come to the digital experience, we just crossed 1 million folks coming to the digital experience, right? In 18 months, yes. In 18 months, that's an amazing accomplishment. You can sell the design as very different, clean, mobile, we have a mobile app. We're one of the few life insurance and financial planning companies that have a mobile presence. Yes, we have Android too, any Android users, there's always one or two, yep, we have an Android app as well, right? The impact, we now, you know, going back to my story, I used to come once a year, we really thought about how do we create stickiness? How do we get people to come in more than once a year and stay? We wanna be at the center of people's financial lives, right? The irony is on the LearnVest side, we're doing something like that. Link your Bank of America, link your credit card, show me how my money's being spent, how much is going to groceries, how is my net worth? Those are the things that betterment, who's heard of it, personal capital, who's heard of it, a lot of tools are doing that. Why don't we bring some of that magic into the Northwestern Mutual so I can get my NM assets and my non-NM assets together, and I can paint my net worth and I can start sending notifications on top of that and really driving people to come in more often. That's driven us to have, thanks to Scott and his team, who you're gonna meet, over 50 billion in external assets by clients are now aggregated into Northwestern Mutual. Two years ago, 0.7% under 1% used to aggregate their external stuff. Of course, our core business is insurance and investments. We've done a lot of work there to kind of modernize that look and feel. We recently launched our NM.com website, our public-facing website. If you saw this 30 days ago, you would have seen a completely different experience. There's a beautiful family swimming in an ocean, but it's actually created a lot of people to come back more often. We measure our metric of success by this metric called bounce rate. Ever go to a website and then just exit out, right? If you go to a website and actually click on something, have intent, that's saying that you're kind of sticky. You took two action steps. Before, 23% of our people used to click on something. A month in, we already have 63% of our people are clicking on something and staying, right? So again, really driving people to create stickiness to the experience. We have mobile, Brian's gonna talk about it. Anthony's here about our login. You ever go into Gmail and you get that text message that says put this code in and you put the code in and there's text-based verification. When we first launched this, our call volume on the home office spiked up. NM site has been hacked. They're asking me for text. Northwestern Mutual would never do that. This is way too revolutionary. Somebody has hacked your site. So after going through some of those and Anthony remembers those days, now 30% of our clients are actually using it, right? So really adopting a lot of that to bring it. So as you can see, a lot of results have come putting these two cultures together. How did we get there? Historically, we used to be a project management company. Project managers are great at kind of big projects bringing things together, working with the business, coming back and forth. It's waterfall, Northwestern Mutual had pretty much a waterfall approach of we're gonna do things in sequences and bring them together. We moved to more of a product model, right? The product manager really kind of sits at the intersection of consumer, business and digital. And the product manager is really focused on increasing the revenue, obsessing about the user. It's not always gonna be right. You gotta be okay with taking risk at times. There's a lot of risk in our culture as well. We gotta be okay with failing, learning from it and adapting. Otherwise we wouldn't be doing two-week sprints at the cadence that we did today. And we iterate, right? We try to get things out with this evangelist group. Even before we bring it to our tech team, we try to come up with a wire, validate it with our consumers and our advisors, course correct, redesign it, move to deploy and then keep obsessing about it even more, right? I always tell the team the project's never done. We keep working on it. We keep making it better. Scott's a great example because he's been here for two years and we've went through the accounts page numerous times, right, Scott? So it's iterating and iterating and really refining it. So one thing I'd say about Agile and Waterfall, and I don't sign up to any of the processes, by the way. I'm actually writing a book about this. I think all the processes are okay. Nothing beats just getting people together and figuring out a way to work, right? It's more about the people than it is the process. While Waterfall you'll get somewhere, I think if you have more of an iterative approach and have releases over time, you'll actually get to where the market didn't expect you to get to, right? So you'll actually find yourself surprised. How did we do it? We changed the way we work. We've created these pizza pie teams. I think we have about 20, I lose track. There's a mobile pizza pie team. There's an investment pizza pie team. There's an insurance pizza pie team. There's a login and registration, nm.com. We have pizza pie teams and you're gonna meet the team here that's leading a lot of those teams from the tech and the product side. This team is chipping away at the roadmap. They have a detailed roadmap for the next 90 days. They have a quarterly view out from that. They're validating all their research but qualitative and quantitative feedback. They're out there just owning it, right? And I think that was a big change from my story of who owns mobile. We now know who owns mobile. Brian does, right? And it's his job to bring it into fruition. This is the makeup of a pizza pie team, right? We have a dev lead. We have a product manager. We bring in QA, UX as needed. There's usually four to six full stack developers. That team is sitting together and really kind of chipping away at it. The other thing I'd say is the way we release, right? We went from, the reason we release at such a fast cadence now is we're putting things out and we're okay with it not being perfect. I think that's the important thing, right? A lot of big companies, and I remember from my days at Goldman, we would wait for perfection. But by the time you release, if you're waiting for perfection, everything's changed around you, right? I remember if you ever get a chance, Google the first version of Facebook. It looks nothing who has someone's done it. It looks nothing like the way it is today, right? So you have to take the risk and put something out. So it's hard. We get a lot of feedback and noise about putting it out, but we got in the cadence of putting it out, yes. Depends on the feature. If it's something bigger, we'll do some MVPs and we'll have some versioning. But we'll try to generally not get stuck in where we're gonna release in pockets and pockets and pockets. We'll have some few test pilots, but then we'll try to release to 80% if we can. Can you tie that to, do you get it under LearnVaster? Sure, I'm gonna answer it, but I really wanna save this stuff for the panel if you can hold up, but we use all of it. We use A-B testing, we use experiments. We'll put out wires of things with communities before we actually release. So we found ways to have a mock up of a release before it's actually live and run it by different communities. But I'll let the team chime in more in detail if you can hold off. So here's the impact of it. 2015, NM had about 90 releases. Last year with LearnVest and NM together, we had around 200. We're already at 937 and the year isn't even over. We're easily gonna break 1200, right? I even think Scott, this number's outdated the last time we checked. So we're putting out more releases. This is small stuff, big stuff, anything, right? So we've gotten to the point with this pizza pie concept and bringing these cultures together to get to this cadence. Quick case study, this is what the accounts page look like. This is what it looks like right now, beautiful. But I think just to show you how the team works, right? There's a team in both regions. They're sitting together. They're analyzing data. They're looking at the traffic that comes in. They're getting feedback from our field. They're getting feedback from our consumers. And we literally iterate, iterate, iterate over and over. And from some of that magic, this is what things look like. It starts as a black and white chalkboard, right? It turns into something with black and white colors on a digital experience. And eventually it turns into something beautiful, right? And then now when we release this, we're not done. We'll nitpick at each one of these features and refine them and make them even better. And while we apply that mentality on the accounts page with Scott, with Brian, Anthony, Kim and Corey, we're able to use that principle and methodology over and over again. NM.com, this is what it looked like. The public facing website. Now it looks like this, right? Our prospect experience looked like this. Now it looks like this with online plans and goal tracking. Our mobile app looked like this. And now it looks like this, right? So with this iterative process, we keep going. We keep going and obsessing. Some stats, million users, 48 billion in assets, paying back loans from the digital experience and we're just getting started, right? Yep. Or was it really something that added to the top line, like a revenue-driving product that they could use? I may be confusing, like you're a vest versus Betterman, some of the other like financial self-service platform, but I understood it to be more like a wealth profile that guides you to make financial decisions rather than already an insurance product that is being directed to you. So. I think you guys are agnostic of the security. Yeah, so I'll answer this in a few ways. I think Northwestern Mutual A is a Fortune 100 company, 160-year-old company. They've gotten selling life insurance and investment products. 20% of the business also sends investment projects as a managed service. They got that down pat, right? I think the number one driver of the acquisition was really around what you're gonna see today from the panel is bringing cultures together, the talent, thinking about how to pinpoint talent from both areas, blending them together. Half of my team, just as a quick way to, another way to answer this question, half of my team is actually Northwestern Mutual Employees in Milwaukee. Half my team is here in Union Square, right? It's a blended product team that works together, same thing with our CTO. Half of her team is in Milwaukee, half of her team is here. So it's really about kind of blending those cultures together and really figuring out a better way to work. Okay? So I'm gonna stop talking because Scott knows that I can talk forever, picking on Scott, but why don't we have the team come up and then they can answer some amazing questions that might be on your mind on how we were able to do all this. So team, do you mind coming up? I'm gonna, let's see, I'll move to that side. How's that? So why don't you guys introduce yourselves? What your role is and what location you're from and how long you've been at Northwestern Mutual and what you're working on? Yeah, definitely. So my name's Corey Pinkner. I'm from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Oh yeah, that's right. I should talk a little louder then. You wanna talk into my chest? Just wanna walk around. Hey, is that better? Yeah. Okay, cool. Yeah, so my name's Corey Pinkner. Product manager out in Milwaukee, Wisconsin under the Northwestern Mutual LearnVest company. Really, my role is the consumer website which Vivek showed, but basically focusing on anything insurance-based-wise. So that definitely can be a lot if you start thinking of Northwestern Mutual and what it stands for. Hello, I'm Scott Yim. I am based here in New York. I live in Brooklyn. I've been at LearnVest Northwestern Mutual for, it'll be two years in April. And similar to Corey, I work on the client website. So desktop and mobile responsive. And the specific experiences that I look after there are what we call our summary page which is the first landing page that users hit when they log in, as well as what we call our accounts experience which you got a glimpse of in Vivek's presentation. And effectively what that is is our, like personal capital mint.com platform where you can link your external financial accounts and see all of your finances in one place. Hi, I'm Kim Zhang. I'm actually the product manager responsible for the public-facing website, which we saw earlier, which we released in September. So it's been really exciting. I've been working at LearnVest for two years and I also live in Brooklyn. And you're from New York. Yeah. Hi, my name is Anthony Grove. I'm the engineering lead for the log in registration team. We kind of handle all the authentication and verification methods for the client experience based out of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. And I've been at Northwestern Mutual a little over a year. Hi, I'm Brian Plumacher. I'm senior product manager for the NM mobile apps. I'm probably the shortest tenured one here. I've been here for about six months here in the New York office. So we have one team here. The iOS team here is here in New York and then our Android team is actually based in Minneapolis. So as you can see guys, Milwaukee, New York, LearnVest, been here for a while, just joined. This team, you can see, it's like a really a blending of culture of everywhere, right? So the first question I have for you guys and by the way, if anyone has a question, please raise your hand. We want to make this as interactive as possible. But Anthony and Corey, coming from Milwaukee, right? And you guys have been here for quite a bit of a while. Can you answer what was the culture like maybe two years ago? And how do you think it has changed now with LearnVest and Northwestern Mutual coming together? Yeah, definitely. So I'll actually take you back four or five years ago when the IT concept started coming out of the basement of the buildings. And then basically where we came is this concept called agile. And you're supposed to iterate. But it was more to the degree where you were by the books meaning you basically had a scrum master that was kind of overlooking you and making sure everything was running right. The product person really was just kind of accepting requirements from a business stakeholder. Engineers were kind of just told what to do from basically what the business stakeholder told the product person to then what the engineer would build. So there was not a lot of collaboration or thought put behind a lot of this stuff. Then really where we started going is two years ago LearnVest was acquired by Northwestern Mutual and this whole startup company came. It's like, what the heck is this? They got beer in the cooler. Northwestern Mutual is not allowed to do that. Things like that, you can't make that happen. So it was kind of this like cool culture coming into this. Yes, that was on behalf of me actually. That's a good call out. But so yeah, where Northwestern Mutual, this older kind of company, 160 years old and the LearnVest where it's a startup, how does this blend together? And there was definitely a lot of clash between the cultures because Northwestern Mutual was like, okay, hey, this is how we do it. Well, LearnVest like, well, we got to move fast. This is how it's going to get done otherwise we're going to fail. And really not where we've kind of got to is this culture where it's combined and it works where we're all kind of sitting here together between two different cultures to kind of iterate between product and engineering design and whoever else is on there. But we've definitely grown to a massive kind of stakeholder concept as well where everyone's kind of accepting this. But where we started was definitely the base of the development. There's definitely a lot more to go. Anthony, what about, you know, I always balance because I don't want people to think that it's just a product deal and then we'll get to your question. What about the engineering side of it? Do you still hate us or? Oh, well. Yeah, so what was it? Two years ago? So I've been here a little over a year but the team when I joined was very much in that kind of five years ago mentality. You know, they may be deployed like once a quarter if they were lucky. So that along with some technology platforming, like my team now, like we don't even, we're like what I consider a true agile. Like we don't even follow the two-week sprints. Like I deployed maybe 10 times in the last week. So like, yeah. So it's much more of it's empowering the teams to actually do what needs to get done and do it on their own cadence. You know, actually self-organizing teams versus, you know, agile versus actually being agile and responsive to the customer's needs. Got it. Question. So I have a question for you, Millie. How long have you been in the? Yeah, seven or five years. Five years. So, I understand it seems like you were just a project manager, how did they just do it? Yeah. Like just sign up or just post? Yeah, that's a great concept because yeah, when I started it was, oh, you're two years in, well, I've been here for 40 years. And you know, you look at you funny. But at the end of the day, I think it's more of, you know, change is hard for anyone, whether it's agile, waterfall, whatever other methodology you have. Really, it's seeing the progress of those numbers right there got a lot of people on board and saying, this is what we're gonna do and this is where we're gonna run with it. So really seeing the metrics behind this is really what's leading people to kind of jump on board and go forward with this. Yeah, I think the results are in there. Yeah, second, is the result really changing how people are, because people are, or must be used to walking at a certain pace. Now the pace is really fast. How are they resistant to that? Yeah, so again, it still is this, I think it's more of now we're moving really fast but it's a happy medium now because there's this big company where there's a lot backing it. Then there's a startup mentality where you gotta go, go, go. Well, at the end of the day, it's this happy path that you kind of gotta go with. At times it's okay to deploy 10 times a day. At other times it's gonna be, well, the business isn't ready for it. The tech's not ready for it. Design's not ready for it. So you kind of gotta slow down a little at times. So I always say there's this happy path now. You know, I wanna just add to this and then I wanna introduce the other three and then we should get broken up. And maybe my questions aren't even necessary because you're a rowdy bunch, it's great. The one thing I would say is being on both sides from Goldman and a startup. I remember when I first walked in, the mobile team, it wasn't you, Brian, but they were mobile, drawing something up and they're like, we're gonna push this out tonight. I'm like, cool. And then when I went to Northwestern Mutually, they're like, we're gonna push this out because we gotta go through the process. We gotta talk to compliance, reputational risk. Irony is when LearnVest, we pushed it out. We got a lot of problems on that release that we did. With Northwestern Mutual, we were doing it the right way. What I've come to realize is the answer is actually in the middle, right? Yes, you need to be more agile and fast to what Corey is alluding to. And yes, you also need to worry about reputational risk, compliance, especially when you're in a regulated industry like we are. So what we've come to learn is the answers in the middle and we have to find the right path for us and we've spent a lot of time kind of thinking about that. Before you get to the next question, do you mind if I introduce the other three because I wanna make sure we're getting everybody out? I do have a question for you guys. Coming from the LV side, how has the culture changed when you first started? I'm sure you probably thought I'm coming to work at a startup. Whoa, now I'm working on big company problems. Has that changed and how has that experience been for you two and then we'll get to you. Yeah, so just to give you a little bit more about my background, I come from Startup Land. So I've been at two startups before this. I actually don't have experience from a Fortune 100 company. So the typical profile of a startup, we were subject to revenue issues, headwinds in the business. Typically you take stock options in favor of a lower salary because you're really bought in, you get equity, et cetera, burning that midnight oil. And so the thing that I joined 10 months post acquisition, so the thing that I found most refreshing about the acquisition was that we weren't innovating and building software based on what's gonna close the next sales deal, but instead we were truly focused on putting the user first because we didn't have those revenue issues. And so we were able to truly focus on innovation which was really refreshing for me given that a lot of the other features that I've worked on were to close the next biggest deal for the sales team. So that's one thing. The second, I mean, I had to get used to the legal and compliance and going through certain channels and all of that and I came from a company where we were releasing Monday through Thursday and it was 120 people. So what I would say is similar to kind of echoing what Corey said was LearnVest came with that speed but Northwestern Mutual really offered us stability as well as scale. So things that we were unable to do at LearnVest or at one of my previous startups just as a team of 120, I mean Northwestern Mutual being a Fortune 100 company and again we're at one million users right now. That scale is almost, I mean it takes years and years and years for a small startup team to reach. So I found that one of the biggest changes and the most refreshing. So actually come from the opposite background where I came from very large banks. So I worked at Bank of America for a while. I worked at HB Morgan and then I just wanted to come to somewhere where I could move fast and really impact the consumers. And so when I first got to LearnVest, the company was much smaller than what I was used to. So I was like, great, I can make a huge impact. But what I saw was that because we didn't have that big of a user base, it was more difficult to experiment with different things and get results faster than that. And so when we started going with edm.com for example, we were able to see results immediately and it was really great to see that. And not only that but the culture. So we started out with having small team meetings and things like that in New York. But once I moved to the NM side, it was, my entire engineering team for example was in Milwaukee. So we have a lot of virtual meetings and things like that. And it's actually been really great because we're really transparent with everyone. So it hasn't actually been an issue at all. Cool, Brian, I wanna ask you one question and then I don't think I have to ask any more questions because I can already see some of my hands. So you've got the Northwestern Mutual side of it, right? And coming to work with LearnVest, you got the LearnVest side of it and now working with Northwestern Mutual. Brian's in an interesting boat. Both of the teams really didn't have a great mobile presence and he's running a mobile team. And you've really been here for a lot less than six months. That's six months? So knowing what you've known about LearnVest and Northwestern Mutual coming together, what attracted you to this and why did you come here? Yeah, interesting. So the reason I knew about the company, so I used to work with someone who is now at LearnVest. We were employees who worked on the mobile team at a company called Faxette. So I know she was here for a while. I know she liked it. She joined about, I think about a year and a half ago. Started looking, just wanted to get, this is now my fourth product management job. Third one in mobile, so started looking. I know she really liked the environment. I came in on an interview, really liked the recruiter we have, spoke to who's now my manager. The next day, so three days, three interviews, three days of interviews, I meet with Vivek, I meet with the VP of engineering. I think seven people total. And I got a really good sense. It's a long interview, right? Like you're a product manager, you're in the middle of so many different organizations. So there's someone from design, there's someone from marketing, there's someone from the higher levels of product, from engineering. And it was really nice to get a sense of the culture. And just after the interviews were over, we walked around. I saw the beer in the fridge too, I was like, oh, cool. I used to work in financial companies. Yeah, you can't do that. So we did see that. I believe it was Vivek who did offer me one after my second or third hour in the room. But you did get a really good sense of the culture and speaking with all the guys, with everyone in the interview, the pace they're moving at. And one of the key parts they mentioned is the startup mentality of the speed and iterating, not being afraid to take too many risks, but setting up those quick releases and iterations with the proper analytics to evaluate them by. And therefore not necessarily correct mistakes, but improve upon your products and your releases very quickly. On the other side of the coin, 160 year old insurance company that's basically been around since like the Civil War. So they have tons of financial backing. And I think a lot of us come from, I've worked at companies that don't necessarily have a solid financial backing like Scott mentioned, right? Start a mentality, you have to get the releases done to drive revenue. We're okay with that. We can focus on the user, we can bring a lot of utility to clients. So the mix of both was good. Culture's a big fit and it's been a good experience. We had an iOS team. The Android app is brand new. And the whole team we actually built in the last few months out of Minneapolis, which is basically a satellite office. So we've been able to work with the process and adjust it, which it was with LearnVest and NM as a combination for iOS and use that process and improve upon it, collaborating with everyone on the team and then working with everyone in Minneapolis who's all had experience to build out that team and then really combine them together and work with all the, everyone here across a lot of projects and it's been a really good experience combining the two. So you got the LV side coming into NM. You got the NM side coming into LV. You got someone new who's coming into both of it. What questions do you guys have about these cultures? Obviously we've disrupted it. Sure. I'm curious. Corey Scott, Kim, Anthony, Brian. Just a reminder. I'm looking at this from a vantage point of working at like a financial service. And I'm curious how, I guess your background at Northwestern Mutual and the banking industry, how technical were you at your job as a product manager there? Because I find that our product managers are not technical. We rely a lot on business analysts for that and they don't understand the business. Product managers do, but it's not, you know how to say it in language. Who wants to go first? This is interesting because I do have a technical background. So I kind of use that and leverage that to communicate with people. And I thought it was really useful because I was able to speak the language of both the tech side and the business side. Especially now, there's just stakeholders. For such a large website, obviously there's people in the insurance space, there's people in the marketing space and design and all that stuff. So you kind of have to find a happy medium where everyone can kind of communicate, but you just have different language of communication with the different people. And if I could ask, your technical background was like a coder or? Yeah, I was an engineer. Yeah, so I guess I came from a developer coder, engineer, whatever we call him now. Kind of role as well, starting out. But I wasn't necessarily good at it or really got enjoyment from it. But it definitely helped me to understand and respect that area, which I think is a bigger deal. Because I don't think you have to be good at writing the actual software. But I think you have to be able to understand it and be able to communicate with an engineer like Anthony and just have that one-on-one kind of collaboration of where this is going and respect for what they do. Because I think that is more crucial because that solves the problems and things like that because you have someone with that technical background. One thing I'd add is we still have business analysts in my organization, right? Things like CRM systems, big systems, we still have mainframe systems that Anthony can spend time afterwards telling you about. There are complex situations where the product team isn't as aware. I like to always say there's product managers and then there's platform managers that kind of go the next layer deep. So we have business analysts, we have platform managers as well and they play an integral role in a lot of these pizza pie teams as well. So we can talk more about that afterwards. Oh, wow, okay. Sorry guys, I'm gonna go ladies first. One of the pizza pie teams has a dependency on something another team is dealing with. How do you manage that? Have you ever tried to piece self-containing or just like? Yeah, do you guys mind if I take a quick stab at this and then I'll give it to you guys? The one thing, Scott, I promise that we'll talk too much. Having so many pizza pie teams, it gets really difficult to make sure that Kim is talking to Corey, who's talking to the other one, right? And I always say I don't prescribe to too much process, but what we try to do is a weekly, bi-weekly meeting where we get all the product managers together, right? And this is not about PowerPoints or presentations or selling the story to the rest of the team. You literally walk through, here's the things I'm working on, here's the things that are at my dependencies. What comes out of that meeting is, Brian's like, whoa, I'm working on billing on mobile and Scott's like, so am I. Uh-oh, you two should get together. Don't solve it in this meeting. That's not the point. It's really about making connection points and we've started doing that internally. We've started it doing it with the tech team. We've started doing it with our business stakeholders and it's really getting in the cadence where it's not a meeting to show off, present or do any of that. It's really a meeting just to find dependencies. So as the pizza pie teams grow, it's an ever-growing challenge. We're using connection points to really pinpoint issues and then have people get empowered to go and figure those out. That's one thing we're doing. Anything else to add to that, guys? Okay, sorry. Shh, sure. I'm gonna get to you, man. All right, I'm gonna go with you. Our engineer will answer that one. So for me, I'm pretty obsessive about this stuff. I look at the metrics daily. I, we have a tool called Heap Analytics that actually, I can make funnels, particularly through the registration or our login experience and see where people are dropping off. Then I actually go in and stalk those users to see, okay, where did this person go? Why did they not complete it? I look in our more on the tech side of, okay, did something go wrong? Or was it just a bad UX? Maybe the design's weird. Something along that. And if, then I reach out to product or design or fix the tech side if it needs to be fixed, but that's kind of. So I think that's really amazing. Definitely. So we're doing that, right? We're just looking at the analytics. But as far as user feedback, also to compliment that from communities that we reach out to, we can give you that too. And that's amazing that our team's doing that. So we actually look at analytics a lot too. And we just look at, we look at drop off rates to see why people are not completing different forms. And we're conducting A-B tests like probably every few weeks or even more often, just to see if things are improving or if they're not, we just change it right away. So we're just looking at things all the time. You alluded to this in your presentation. But a few people mentioned having dependency and having regulatory compliance, stuff like that. How do you reconcile, let's say, organizations that don't operate agile, agilely with your agile teams? And what do you do when there's dependencies that might affect releases that you can use? Deployment or release trains, how do you, because that's an issue I've run into in the past where not everyone's bought into the agile thing and now they're kind of like out of those in a completely different way than we would. Yeah, I can take that one. So Vivek did say he's got 20 pizza pie teams. There's also, I don't know how many other product teams that are under Northwestern Mutual as well, meaning, okay, this is a disability product team and that's all their applications they're associated with. Well, from a consumer website perspective, those are all our dependencies because all these data sources, all of their operations processes kind of depend on what we change or vice versa. And right now, yes, they're not fully agile yet, but it's getting them to the degree to understand of what we're doing and where we're kind of trying to get to. Again, at the end of the day, I think everyone wants to increase speed and do it right. And it's, you just kind of got to put your ego aside and be like, okay, this is what we're gonna do. With enough lead time and communication, I think anything can be possible with working through these dependencies as long as you kind of show the results and I think that's really what matters is the data-driven decisions. The one thing I would add just that I've learned in my career is the best way to get someone to do something is show what you've done for others, right? So I'll give you a great example with Corey and the risk side. We've done some amazing stuff on the insurance side, right? And we recently went to our investment business stakeholders and was like, what are you gonna give me that love? I wanted that on the investment side, right? And now we're sitting with the investment team and saying, what can we do? So I think a lot of this is to break the walls in certain business areas or certain areas where there's reputational risk, compliance risk. We really end up showing the wins that we've made and that's a lot in that deck and really saying, we can do that for you. Let's partner, join our pizza pie teams, right? And that's really worked well. Yes, I'll come back to you. Sorry. When you're driving, how do you bring a lot of music to the stakeholders? Do I feel like in those side games that the deaf teams are usually kind of eager to go through of the stakeholders? Yeah, you guys want me to take this one or you want to take it? You take it. So yeah, I think that's a really good use case and it's interesting, it depends on the company you're working with, right? Like if it's a large matrix type of organization, there's a lot more approvals, fewer, like stakeholders, compliance, there's a lot more people to talk to and get their buy-in. It's really the issue is almost saying that the requirements are going to be built from, some of the stuff is top-down, but looking at them from the ground up, like from the development, sizing everything up with design, then looking through development, building the requirements that way and seeing how long it would take and we'll use the relative scrum example of two-week sprints, right? That as opposed to the top-down, we want this feature done by March 31st of next year and that's that it, yes, it does sort of take away a little bit of the control. What I have, a lot of it is more constant communication and more feedback loops, which is the important part. Definitely, it's a product manager. Really working with the executive stakeholders, whether it's design or working with another team for basically one of the businesses is the communication is pretty key and it can be a lot of meetings, it can be a lot of emails, but the communication aspect in getting those approvals and really just, and then on the product side is staying organized with sort of what you have to do and the various approvals you have to go through can help a lot, but yeah, and then at the end of the day, the results kind of speak for themselves. So if there is, I think, some fear about not having everything done by a certain date, that iterative aspect of the way that we work through our releases really helps. So if things can't be done, we can meet a deadline. If we strip some features out and make an MVP, fast follow items next sprint, maybe two weeks later. So I mean, I think it's a lot of falls on communication and really just getting as much buying as you can from other verticals. Sure, sure. So also kind of to follow up on your question, I think, but so at Northwestern Mutual, I mean, leadership actively bought LearnVest to probably help drive this change. So from the top, they had that motivation and like you said, engineers are like, yeah, let's do it. The kind of the worker bees wanted this change. So it was kind of, I'm not sure how middle management kind of handled it, but there was definitely, we had to go through a restructured and to kind of get into this mindset. So it was a process to make that change. The only thing I would add is like, so our CEO was in on Friday, I believe, and he's like, so what are you gonna present to me? And I'm like, no, we're just gonna show you, right? So it was wires of what he's doing, she's doing and he was like, walked away with like, wow, you really showed me. So I think when I try to think of executive buy-in, I try to go in with a completely different mindset, that they're just like us. They want good for the firm and they wanna see things, right? So we actually came out with his Android device because he's an Android user and we downloaded the app and we started walking through some of the mobile experiences. That was much more rewarding than giving a talk or a presentation on what our strategy is. So we try to really, as an entire team, we end up using envisions and wires and mockups a lot more than we do power plant. All the way in the back. You guys want me to take this one? Okay, so LearnVest is still a separate product set. Stippert Entity Cody is on our team who's an ex-product school alum is managing the pizza pie team looking at LearnVest. We still build out the LearnVest base. The way I think of it is there's no integration, there's no customers moving from one. The LearnVest client is probably not looking to buy life insurance or financial planning. The LearnVest client is probably looking to get their life in order, right? But one day, just like I did, I got married. I hope my wife's not watching. I had kids, I bought a house. So one day those folks will be ready for life insurance, right? So we think of that as the acquisition channel, nurture them, get them ready, be at the center of their life. But right now, two separate entities, two separate client bases, cool? Great story, guys, the digital workplace where the employees are the customer. How would you rate the quality of the digital workplace at your company? Who's gonna be the bold one for this? Before I go, you have a story. I guess we do have a ping-pong table, like you said. I use Gmail and you use Microsoft. Exactly. No, I think the bigger thing is from a workplace perspective is we're all kind of sitting next to each other, which might not seem like a big deal, but it's huge. I mean, I sit next to all the development teams and instead of meetings, actually, what they said, I can't call them meetings anymore, they're imprompt chats. But at the end of the day, it's the same concept of meeting, but we're just hashing it out at our desk instead of setting up a formal meeting and going through a PowerPoint and going through that. No, it's just we're all sitting together. So I think that's the bigger advantage that we've had now with these pizza pie teams in the digital workplace. So my team's in Milwaukee, but we actually have conversations like all the time and we're all pretty much friends. So we joke around, we joke around on Slack, we print jiffies, whatever, all day. But we actually get things done very quickly. I think it hasn't been a problem. It's been a great workplace. Yeah, I think the communication aspect is important, too. It's nice to have the development teams there, but in 2017, we can really get around not being in the same physical space. We do have the digital tools. We do have the communication tools to get around that, but it's super helpful. I mean, I've worked at other companies where it hasn't been that easy and it's been speakerphone, right? And we've used Google Hangouts. I mean, Slack, you can basically just do instant screen shares. Slack is on everyone's phone. So it's an hour time difference between here, Milwaukee, and Minneapolis. It's not that big of a deal, but just having that digital platform, Google Hangouts is what we have now. I mean, it's worked really well. Like Kim was mentioning, it's like, you build that relationship with your team. You joke around with them a little bit. You ask them how much of their kids' Halloween candy they stole yesterday, and find out what they actually like. So, I don't know. Yeah, I heard him. He didn't say steal. He said, how much did you eat last night? I would like to add it's not perfect. We use Google. They use Outlook. We use Hangout. They use Skype. So, yeah, we're coming together with Slack as a proof for everybody. So we're getting there as far as the tool set to integrate it, but I think the team's hitting on the fact that it doesn't matter where they are. The teams really feel blended, right? And I think that's really the key. Kim goes out to Milwaukee often. Anthony and Corey come out here often, right? And I think nothing beats that face-to-face as well. I think we have five minutes. I'm going to take two more questions. I'm looking at you because this is like the perfect question for you. Yeah, so that's a great question. Just to repeat it, the question was, how much ownership do you actually feel? How much autonomy do you get as far as creativity, managing your own process, that kind of thing, right? So I would say that we're really empowered to kind of run our teams and our workflow in the way that works best for us. So I was actually working with Anthony for about a year. We kind of jiggled the teams around and I work with the team based in New York now. So for both teams, my process typically is to sit down with that pizza pie team. And I basically have everyone sitting around the table, and I let them know that the way that the teams run is that each person is an owner. And so there's no sense of, you know, product is above engineering or design. We all kind of are three key components or puzzle pieces that are all required and have our own domains and expertise. So it's not that, you know, I just welcome people to have an opinion on things, whether it's a feature or the direction we're going. It's, I expect you to have an opinion, and when you're working on something, you need to be an owner from your own area of expertise. And to get that kind of buy-in from each person, one of my, I think the best product managers are the ones who make it very clear why you're working on something and what impact it has on the users. For me, when I sit around the table, whether it's a feature or some kind of kickoff, you know, I very much go through the drivers of, hey, this is the qualitative or quantitative data that drives the reason behind what we're doing. And I pause and I look around the room and I say, does anybody have any questions about why we're working on this? Does anybody not understand the driver or the prioritization and the reason why behind it? And once you get that buy-in, and people know that as the product manager, you're willing to roll your sleeves up, get your hands dirty a little bit, and kind of do whatever you can to remove blockers and you keep that user first, I think that trust from your developers, your designers all just comes along with it. And if you say, hey, you know, for instance, the decision that we made was with backlog refinement, right, before the sprint planning meetings, I asked them, I noticed we were doing it once a week for an hour. And I said, hey guys, is this valuable to you? And I said, hey, we're doing this at 40 minutes, you kind of drop off. And we came to the decision as a group that we would do two sessions, Tuesdays and Thursdays, 30 minutes each, because our developers were saying, it's just easier for my time span and less disruptive to the kind of chunks of work that I do with coding. So that's like one example of just being flexible and realizing that you don't have to follow a strict process and instead just do what works best for your team and you really only get that by listening, right? We are all going to stick around by the way, right, team? We're all going to stick around before we go drinking. So we'll be here for questions, but I'll take one last question for many brave soul, you. So why doesn't everybody say there are one or two things quickly? I'm going to keep it short, just get stuff done. I wasn't expecting to go this quickly. I'm actually going to bring it back to me. I'm going to think about that for a second. I would say transparency, making sure that everyone has a seat at the table. Yeah, I like the ship it gets stuff done. Yeah, I would say more on the realm of transparency and bringing everyone together early in projects and the phases, getting the buy-in and really getting a sense of what the stakes are going to be, what the business value is, what the technical value is, and then any future iterations off of that. I got it, I got it. I agree transparency is great. The one other thing is not acting like you know as the product manager, so being really aware of where your boundaries are and deferring to the expert in the room, whether that's the UX person or the designer, the copywriter or the front-end dev, and saying, you know, even if you know the answer, I do this a lot. Even if I know the answer and I have the data, I'll leave it open and I'll remain quiet. I think that's like the most courageous thing a product manager can do is to one, admit your mistake, but then also to admit that you don't know or that you may not have the best perspective, so you defer to someone else, and I think that's really, really empowering for another person on your team. I would just add, for me, it's building relationships. I think it's really important. I walk into any meeting, any relationship, and really thinking about how are they working on things. I don't judge. I really, Anthony knows. I was just in Milwaukee the other day, and we were shooting whatever about some tech stuff, right, and about some YPM-based FRs that were trying to convince to buy investments products. So it's really about just kind of building those relationships and reading how everybody can add to the piece of the puzzle. Thank you to the team. Thank you guys for coming. Thank you.