CPO Stories: Shiri Mosenzon Erez - commercetools

The best way I've found to help the entire team move forward is with a what good looks like and a lead by example. And I don't mean just, you know, myself at all. I mean this example where my head of product made this decision, and I've had another head of product make a similar decision. If you celebrate that and you say, Great, thank you. This is a good move. We're moving towards the right outcomes that we want to achieve, more and more team members feel safe as well to do that. Hello and welcome to CPO Stories, where I take the opportunity to speak to the UK's biggest and best executive product leaders, as well as some of the upcoming stars of the future. On this episode, I'm delighted to welcome Shiri Mosenzon-Erez. Shiri started as a project leader, heading through consulting before taking her first proper product job at Tesco, working her way up through the ranks to head of product for a pivot into startup land and supply chains with Fabric, before heading back to commerce and product leadership at Ocado, eventually taking on the CPO role there before the same at Commerce Tools, an international leader in enterprise composable commerce, supporting thousands of retailers in hundreds of countries and enabling billions of dollars in revenue globally. Well, I'm sold. Shiri, thanks for coming and welcome to the show. Hi, Jason. Thanks for having me. It's great to be here, and I love the intro. Thank you. Well, you've got to give it the beans at the beginning, no pun intended, and then the rest of the podcast is just gravy. Right. That's fair. Right. So speaking of commerce and all things commerce, Commerce Tools. Now, I've just given the headline version of what I think the company does. You could also say, to some extent, the clue is kind of in the name. Why don't you give me the proper official version of what Commerce Tools does and the products that you offer to your customers? Well, you kind of made me promise that during the podcast I wouldn't be giving official versions of things, and I would actually be as authentic. As I can be. So let me just share how I see it, right? So commerce tools is really, you kind of said it, but it's a commerce engine. Well, kind of. Yeah, and we power commerce for many large enterprises all around the world, big global companies, brands that everyone know and love, but also a lot of B2B. So lots of manufacturers use commerce tools in order to drive their growth and their revenue. And another thing that we're very well known for is our resilience. So the brands that go with us, they go for the composability, the flexibility that you mentioned, but also the fact that with us, I guess the shop stays open and you can still sell, whether it's beans, whether it's BMW cars, or whether it's Lululemon clothes, shop stays open. So again, you sort of talked a little bit about enterprises there, and of course then that kind of reliability and your 99.5% uptime that people always aim for. Does that mean then that you are fully optimizing entirely for that enterprise end of the market, or have you also kind of got that bottom-end SME, so your mom-and-pop shop type thing going on as well? Like, where's your sweet spot? So we are definitely on the side of enterprise and very large organizations. You know, you were talking about powering billions of revenues. That's just one customer. No, well, it's actually tens of billions, and that's quite important. It's a big difference, and we are, you know, it's a growing company, and that's interesting from a product perspective. And a little bit different, you know, you talked about my background. I had a startup in there, so that was a zero to one. I also was at Tesco, which is a very mature corporate, and also led product at Ocado, which was a bit of a mixture because Ocado is a very large company and it's publicly listed, but it behaves, or definitely wants to be, a startup. And this one, commerce tools, is really at scale-up stage. So very, very interesting for me, you know, from a career perspective, and also the product organization is in a different place here. So the words composable commerce have come up a few times in our discussion already, and I've obviously looked it up and have a basic idea of what you mean. And as a former developer, I kind of know what all the words mean. But from a customer perspective, like, what is composable commerce? Like, what does that enable? How is it different to maybe some of your competitors? Like, walk me through composable commerce. Yeah, it means that you can—it's API first, which is really important these days, and very, very happy with everything going on in terms of the AI trend, right? Because we're now, of course, we've built an MCP layer immediately. AI, AI all the things. I haven't said it yet. I haven't said AI just yet. But no, maybe I did actually. But the composability is about the way that the solution is set up, which allows you to choose best of breed for different areas of your commerce journey. So if you think about—and this links to how I think about product—I look at the value stream. What is creating value for someone, for a customer? And a lot there is stuff that commerce tools does really well and is great for a certain set of customers. But if a specific customer wants, let's say, a different type of search, then they can easily connect with one of our partners, plug and play into, like, Algolia, for example, and that's easy to do. And that's the composability. And this is just one example. This happens all across that value stream, whether you want to connect to an order management system or anything else, you can just choose what do you want to take from commerce tools engine, and around it you can augment it with whatever helps make your business as great for your customers as possible. Now, the possible risk there is you start to be seen as a bit of a point solution in between. So, because obviously you could be kind of connecting up a lot of different things, and maybe even the majority of someone could be using other stuff that's not yours, and they're just using the bits of you that they like. But I'm assuming from what you said, what with regards to having integrations and partners and stuff, that you still kind of want to own the overall thing, and they can just plug in, like you're the circuit board, and they can still plug in other stuff, but you still want to kind of own the majority of it, because that's how you get your edge, right? I think the most important thing is that we are the beating heart of the commerce, right? We are the cart, we are the order, we have the payment and those elements, and that is at the heart of what we do, and that's the stuff that needs to keep running. The catalog is always available. If you search for something, you'll always be served, et cetera, et cetera. But you're right, there are customers and businesses—actually, we see this a lot in B2B—that don't want to build their own ecosystem. They don't want to invest in that in terms of their IT teams or their technology teams in-house. They want to be investing in other things or in specific niche elements. And so we do also offer, we call it, it's the fine balance between fully composable and pre-composed. So we do offer pre-composed if that's what you want, but we still do it on the same foundation, which is in fact composable. That's the idea. Yeah, that makes me think, though, a little bit, because I've worked on sort of platform products before, which can kind of do a number of different things, like all of the things if it comes to it. And of course then you can kind of go out to market as you are, and you can kind of specifically focus on certain use cases and certain approaches, maybe kind of canned configurations that you bring out of the box and wizards that you can use to get people up and running. But at the same time... That composability and flexibility almost, to some extent, can kind of work against a company like that, right? Because they end up having to support so many different types of configuration and so many different types of use case that it starts to become quite tricky to do sort of prioritization and to kind of focus on certain areas, maybe strategically. Is that something that you feel is just part of the game, or have you kind of managed to bring in, as you know, because you've been there for a little bit now, like bring in some sort of focus in certain areas? Are there kind of things that you strategically like to work on yourself or like to focus the company on to make sure that it does kind of all hang together? So I think, and I've done this similarly in the previous companies where I worked, the most important thing is to be very connected as a product leader to what is this company trying to be? What do we want to be? And for commerce tools, it's we want to be the architects of commerce innovation. And that was there when I joined already, that sentence. And, you know, we sometimes laugh, right? Oh, you know, marketing. There's a lot of thought that goes into that, and that really does describe the essence of what commerce tools wants to be. And then from that, what I can do together with my team is think about, okay, if that's the company we want to be, what do we need to offer? What are the propositions that we need to offer? And that all links to that value stream map that I talked about earlier. And then I guess to visualize it, we don't have a whiteboard or anything, but we kind of draw circles around the areas in the value stream map where we want to either build, partner, or buy. And when you talk about this ecosystem and enabling this holistic pre-composed solution, we can choose where we want to partner and with whom, and we can have maybe tiers of partners that we work with. And this is something that we do in collaboration with, at Commerce Tools, it's called the customer team. They look after partnerships. And so the product strategy and the product team collaborate with them. And this is something that is ongoing, right? Because it can be very attractive to partner with everything out there, just like you said, so that we can be on the table in any discussion, right? But that doesn't really help you because there is value in saying this is a partner that completes us very well, or we want to be known for and known as somebody that works well with them. So we draw those circles around those areas, and then we work with the customer team to build the right partnerships to enable that pre-composed solution. Nice. So, sort of, you've got your kind of standardization where you need it, but you've also got the flexibility where you want it, which is useful. But when I think of commerce tools or tools for commerce, my thoughts inevitably wander to a little-known company called Shopify. Yeah. Obviously, you know, big player. I did some contract work with a Shopify partner a little while back, so I know a bit about the ecosystem. And obviously, Shopify supports, you know, famously quite a lot of those, again, really small shops, the mum-and-pop things. But also, they do have a lot of big businesses on Shopify as well. So I know, obviously, you're talking about composability and APIs, but, yeah, they sound kind of technical and a bit esoteric maybe to the person that's running the shop. So how does commerce tools differ from Shopify, like the big gorilla in the marketplace? Yeah. So it does link to that point about flexibility and composability, and we are—you're exactly right. So we are—commerce tools is not best fit for a mom-and-pop shop, okay? It's best fit for a large organization that wants to control their customer journey really well and wants to be able to innovate flexibly as things change in how people shop, which is happening right now, and in how software is done, which is also happening right now. And so I guess it's very different from Shopify. Shopify is a, here you go, here's a set, and this works really well, and go, go, go, you can start trading. And yes, they do, I believe, have an offer for enterprise, but that offer is also still more boxed, right? Maybe you can comment if you've worked with them and if it's okay to share. But what we really want to make sure is that we allow the enterprises that we work with to innovate, right? The architects of commerce innovation, let's always go back to that. We want to do that, and we want to enable that for our customers. And that is something that Shopify doesn't necessarily do. So this is really important to us. You can choose, you can swap components if you want. When we talk about agents, right, the agentic ecosystem, we're gonna get there, right? We're gonna get there. We're gonna get there. So there's a difference between saying, right, well, we have an agent that updates your pricing, or to say— Whichever agent comes into the world that you trust, you can use with our platform. That's a different narrative, and that's where we are. By the way, yes, there will be areas when we think about that value stream where we also will, or are actually, right, building some agents because it's the right thing to do. Not everywhere, but there are areas where it's already mature, it's already adding value. Of course, we want to offer it. But the more important thing, I think, for commerce tools is that just like being API-first, being kind of MCP-first is the same, to say agents can plug in and reach in if you want them to. Well, that is a great segue because my next question was going to be about AI and AI agents, because I went to your website to kind of, you know, obviously prepare for these calls. You know, hilariously, I do prepare for them. And, like, the website is— I couldn't tell, Jason, I couldn't tell. But the website is all, like, it's all in, top to bottom, AI, AI agents, MCP. It's baked through now. And of course, you know, some companies are out there doing that, and it's all just hype and buzz, and some companies are out there trying to do something useful with it. Sounds like from what you were just talking about that you're trying to do something useful with it. But what are you seeing as being some of the sort of the key new exciting use cases that AI agents and all of the rest are kind of enabling through your platform? So I think first of all, by the way, I don't know if you did a podcast like this with Moonpig as an example, but a lot of our customers, including Moonpig, already have incorporated specific AI agents for elements of their proposition, if you will, right? So, for example, tagging of data. That's something that really lends itself very well. The technology is mature. There's, of course, these conversational assistants for customer support, so that's a good use case, which is already—we're seeing it everywhere. But again, from Commercetools' perspective, Commerce MCP is really important because it allows you to use whatever agent and allows that to reach into order, into basket, into the catalog, into all of these core components of your commerce engine and either read or write, right? So that is, again, the flexibility. In terms of the use cases that I'm seeing, I'm seeing more around this data augmentation. But also, there's a lot around answering questions for insights. So basically, to be able to use natural language to ask a question instead of looking at a dashboard. And another thing is to be able to say, well, I want to change this and this promotion to that and that, and to be able to execute that. So those are the type of examples that we have at the beginning. But what we also see from outside, not something that we've done yet, is around pricing. That's also happening, right? So looking at competitor pricing and then immediately changing off the back of that. That's an interesting case as well, which is very natural for agents. It's not very complicated, right? Yeah, kind of industrializing supermarket price wars, right? Like, I'm not sure if I'm for this or against it. No, as a customer—well, it's interesting, right? As a customer, you might say that's great. As a business, as long as I get cheap stuff and don't have to go to T-Moo, that's the most important thing. But it's interesting, though, because one of the kind of characteristics you might say of enterprise customers, of course, is that they can be pretty risk-averse and maybe not quite as bleeding edge when it comes to stuff like this. You know, maybe they want to kind of take their time or they want to just use it around the edges because, you know, they've got big businesses and a reputation. Are you finding enterprise adoption of these agents and sort of AI workflows pretty strong, or is it kind of a bit sort of softly, softly in some areas? I think that there will be like one or two main use cases that enterprises adopt quite quickly. I think that there is also this— Pressure probably from stakeholders in all organizations to see that the company is testing and learning, no matter what company. And that applies to how, you know, we look at our engineers and, you know, make sure, okay, are you, you know, have you tried Cursor as well, or are you only using, you know, this and this? So I think that that's something that every organization is working on to make sure that its team is up to speed with the latest and greatest. But there's a difference between going into that and using an agent for production. And I think that, you know, big enterprises might be a little bit more cautious. But I think one or two things are already, even at Okado, you know, by the way, before I was at Commerce Tools, we already had built a recipe agent, for example, and that's live for Okado customers. So I think that there are a few things that are already out there. We just don't maybe even know that they're out there and being used, and that there'll be a few more that come through in 2025 still. It's evolving so quickly and maturing, right? The accuracy is maturing very quickly, is what I'm seeing. And when the accuracy goes up, then people gain confidence and it can participate in the customer journey. Why not? It's helping. Why not indeed? Well, watch this space. But you just touched a little bit on the team. You've got a team, obviously, yourself that you look after that's building all of this stuff. And again, I can't remember exactly how many months it is you've been there now, but it's been a few, so I guess you've kind of five months, so kind of got your feet under the table. You've surveyed your kind of your empire, and you're starting to kind of put your mark on it, I guess. But how does the team look at the moment? Like, how big is it? How is it set up? What does product management look like at Commerce Tools? Yeah, so the team is 55 or so. We have UX, or product design. We have product management, and we do try to trio to do the Marty Cagan. You know, you mentioned you and Marty Cagan are super, super tight. Well, you know, I wouldn't necessarily say we're super tight, but we've got each other's numbers. Exactly. We don't even have a—we've got each other's email addresses, I guess that's about the size of it. Okay, well, that's more than I have of Marty Cagan. Luckily, I have your email now, so I'm making progress in my social matter. There you go, there you go. But yeah, we do try to follow this trio so that we make sure that we have, you know, usability, feasibility, viability. In terms of how we're set up, we have one to seven, I think, a ratio between product managers and engineers, which I think is really good. We're a little bit tight on our design team at the moment, but we are trying to, you know, also leverage— Trying to, you know, also leverage the efficiencies that we can with generative AI and things like that to see whether that means that we can be a little bit more productive and communicate better with each other. And what's really important, by the way, or not by the way, what's really important, I think, is the pairing with engineering. So both in my previous company and also at Commerce Tools, we have a pairing. So the chief product officer is paired with the chief engineering officer. We call him the CTO at Commerce Tools, and the VPs are paired, and then the heads of product are also paired. After that, it's about domains, and then at that level, it's not paired. And I think that's an interesting, you know, observation or decision to make proactively, because what I've seen in the past, and I'm sure you've seen in other companies, is if you have a PM that is attached to a specific team, they will always be developing things with that team. And sometimes the product or the proposition or the value would have reached maturity. And so an important piece that really matters to me is to make sure that we're sticking to being focused on the value and not being set up based on the software stack, which is sometimes how companies evolve, right? At the beginning, if you think about startups, they grow often from the technology stack rather than from the customer proposition. And there is a stage where you've got to make sure that you're not just continuing to enhance a certain element of your software. You are investing in the areas, you know, again, back to that value stream map. This is an area we want to build. We want to build until we reach this value, and then. And then that's it. Then we want to look at other areas that are helping our customers or innovate something new. So that's an important part of looking at the team. But even before this, coming into an organization, it's all about people. And you talk about this a lot, that, you know, we can read all the books and we can have all the frameworks, but a lot of it is around, are people connected to the purpose of the company or what we're trying to do? And do they, you know, do they have the motivation to make these tough decisions and invest in the things that are valuable and to stop some things as well? And that's the hardest thing. And that's a lot of my focus is around the team and communication, really. Another one of your interviewers also talked about this. I think it was Maud. She said that a lot, she spends so much of her time—she's from Treatwell, right? That's right, yeah. Yeah. A lot of her time communicating, really, and just sharing what the C-level is talking about, what stakeholders are talking about with the team so that they can have the context to then use their product sense and product skill and make the right decisions and invest in the right areas. Sounds like there's a little bit of a kind of explore-exploit kind of loop going on there. I don't know if you've seen that model before, where you've kind of got the stuff that's the new things, the cool new stuff that needs lots of investment and exploration and, you know, innovation, as you put it. And then obviously then as that matures, it starts to become something, I think kind of touching on what you said, where it kind of gets—well, it's kind of done or it's more done than not. And therefore it's more about kind of optimization and kind of eking out performance and obviously money out of it as well. And then these people are then sort of swooping back down into the explore segment again, where they can go and work on the next thing. So is there this kind of concept of like the, you know, because product management is all supposed to be about like long-lived teams that are all kind of focused on a thing. It kind of feels like the missions of your teams somewhat evolve and shift, but do they shift into completely different areas or just new areas kind of around the core area that that team is working on? So I think it's the difference between a software component and a domain is how I see it. And I'm actually quite proud. Recently, just a few weeks ago, one of my heads of product said, you know what, actually this team has been working on this, but now that I've been listening and absorbing and contributing to the product strategy, I wonder whether they should continue on this. Maybe they can support this effort over here, something that is kind of next to their—it fits within their domain knowledge, but it isn't what they were doing originally. And that's amazing for me. That's like a very proud moment as a CPO because he's basically saying, look, this might make my team smaller. The people that I kind of guide would be less people after we make this change, but for commerce tools, this would be the right thing. And I think that it's really important for people to see their domain as a value area. That way they can make better decisions around it rather than a specific part of the software stack. So I agree. And I've written Explore Exploit to kind of read that a little bit later because it sounds exactly right. It's really important. Yeah, it is. And I think it's interesting, though, because what you can have in these sorts of situations, kind of two biases that people can exhibit, right? One of which is people can get very attached to their thing. Like they're working on a thing, they get attached to it emotionally or kind of just professionally. That's the thing that they work on. They don't want to go and work on something else. Then there's also the sort of the sunk cost as well. Like you're sitting there saying, well, I've spent X amount of time working on this, you know, to the example that you just pulled up. Look, they've spent a bunch of time working on something. They realize maybe they could be working on something more impactful. And as product managers, we should sit there and say, well, of course we want to work on the thing that's most impactful to deliver the best results. But of course, when you sat there, put months into a thing, sometimes you kind of just want to get it over the line. So do you kind of find yourselves coming up against those biases, or do you feel that the team have fairly kind of evolved past them to some extent? I think it's different. Like, I think certain areas are at a different stage. I would love to say, yeah, we're past that. No problem. We got it. But I think we're still on that journey. But the best way that I've found to help the entire team move forward is with a what good looks like and a lead by example. And I don't mean just, you know, myself at all. I mean this example where my head of product, Yassine, in this example, he made this decision, and I've had another head of product make a similar decision. And I think that that is, you know, if you celebrate that and you say, great, thank you. This is a good move. We're moving towards the right outcomes that we want to achieve, then more and more team members feel safe as well to do that, right? Because if you're saying, hang on, the thing I've been working on with my team, we should probably be doing something else. There's a bit of risk there because someone else might be in that space. So what does that mean for you as an individual? We're all people, and, you know, want to make sure that the environment allows you to move on to something else and to stop something that you're doing. And I think the more we show examples of this and the fact that, yeah, you then move on to work on something else, which is amazing and valuable, the more people will feel brave enough to make those decisions. Yeah, I think that's an interesting and very important point, this idea that you have to make it okay. People talk about failing fast, experimenting, and having all these different mindsets. But if the leader is going to sit there and say, you know, I hit someone over the head basically because they got something quote unquote wrong, then you can be pretty sure that that team or that person is not going to make a similar sort of bet next time. They're just going to try and play it safe, right? So that kind of culture of, like, obviously it's not okay to fail as such, but it's kind of about reframing failure, right? It's not a failure, it's just a learning. But, you know, I see a bit of cognitive dissonance sometimes with certain leaders and companies, and it sounds like not with you, which is, you know, nice, since you're right here and I don't want to have an argument. But this idea, like, they say that they want one thing, you know, they want a risk, not risk as such, but they want people to make bets and they want people to be sort of super flexible and pivot and reactive, et cetera. But at the same time, if they don't deliver exactly the thing on time, then they get in trouble or they get told off. Or they want them to be strategic, but then they kind of just crush the strategy and kind of force them to do the thing that they already wanted to do. That kind of moves on to that kind of empowered teams thing, right? So do you feel then, you talked a little bit about Marty Cagan as well, do you feel that your team are very much on that kind of empowered track where they're sort of kind of given Broad goals to go after, and they kind of work out the way to do it, or is that in itself a bit of a balance? I think that most of them are. I think we still have some very big influential customers, and we still have a very strong sales team as well. And so there are a few things that we are probably doing because some very big customers call them as important. But I have to say that even in these, they're not as common as, like, there's not, it's not as many of these as I've seen elsewhere. And I also see that the way we implement these things, we try to make it match our strategy as much as possible. And we also communicate about it quite clearly with the team to say, well, okay, the customer's asking for this. What KPI are they trying to move? Do we have a better idea for them on how to move that KPI? A better idea not for them, for all of our customers, for the commerce tools offering. And if so, let's have that dialogue and put that in front of the customer for visibility so that they know we're aligned with them. We want to move these same KPIs. If we don't have a better idea and the idea that the customer brought is relevant and valid, and it's the best idea we have to move that business KPI, then that's okay that it came from a customer. That's great. That's customer insight. But what matters is to have that dialogue and not just be doing something because someone asked for it, but because someone asked for it, we understand the KPI, the business KPI it's moving, and ideally it fits our strategy on which areas of that value stream map we want to invest in as commerce tools. I think we are doing this even from before I joined, but I mean, I don't know because the team seems quite open to it and skilled at this. So I'm quite happy with that side of things. Oh, hey, hey. Sounds like you're doing what Lee's trying to do, things in the way. So there's going to be that one customer that comes in this week that's going to blow that all up. But there always is. But, you know, Jason, I found that the best defense for big customer requests is excellent forward communication of your roadmap, which is a challenge, right? Because the roadmap might change, and it's very risky to talk about what we think we're going to do not in the now, but in the next and the later. On the other hand, when you show that, it gives the customer confidence that you're thinking about the same metrics that they're trying to move, and then that kind of potentially helps. It depends on the character, you know, the people in our customer organizations. But I think for the most part, they are really trying to achieve a... They're measured by their OKRs and their KPI. And so if we can present a case that helps improve that, then they don't tend to care whether it's done this way or that way. Absolutely. Many paths to success. But given this kind of API-first, headless nature of the platform, and the fact that I assume that many of the people that you're working with at the customer side are themselves pretty technical because they've got to start kind of composing all of your composable elements of your platform, do you tend to focus then on very sort of technical product managers that understand all this stuff and can kind of, you know, maybe even start to vibe code some of their own solutions, or do you kind of have a kind of a wide array of different sort of, I guess you'd call them types of product manager with different sort of sets of skills? So I think that we have had a vast majority of quite technical product managers at Commerce Tools, and I think that where we are headed towards is we are making sure that we have a mix, okay? And also the people that are technical, you'd be surprised, like with the right guidance and questions, they... Get strategy really, really well. It's just about opening that up to them and saying, you know, get the business, putting them in front of customers more and more. And I think that that's something the team makes sure to do with our product managers. But yes, we do have a lot of people that are quite technical. And we are also finding that, you know, commerce tools, yes, a lot of the users are engineers, but more and more it's about business value. And so the people that should be most excited about getting commerce tools into their companies should be the people that own the online trade or the B2B trade, because it allows them to create the best propositions for their customers, which increase revenue and increase profitability overall. So the conversation with the business customer is growing more and more, and that then in turn, or that's something that our product team mirrors, if that makes sense. So a focus on the business user, business outcomes more and more. But that's then another interesting point, sort of kind of touching back on your role again as well, this idea that a big part of your role is to kind of connect the rest of your team to the rest of the business, right, and kind of give them that strategic context that you were talking about, making sure that it all kind of hangs together. So how do you see your, or how do you balance kind of your need to be that kind of executive leader within the organization that's kind of advocating for products at the top table and all of the things that you need to do to be successful in your role with kind of connecting that to the day-to-day work of these product managers? Are you fairly hands-on, hands-off, somewhere in between? How does that go? So I think that I need to do more, to be more hands-on in certain areas where we've had topics come up. I dived a little bit deeper into the stack and spent time with product managers, but actually I should do that much more. And I think while at the beginning, you know, I've been here five months, and a lot of what I've been doing is talking to the team members, I guess more at the leadership level within product, but still, as well as other stakeholders and customers, and spent a lot of time with customers as well. I have, of course, met every single product manager in UXer. I have, but not enough. Like, I challenge myself, and that's the thing I need to do next, is to really make sure that I spend time with each and every one and to understand, you know, why are we making certain decisions? What's driving each domain area that we talked about earlier? So that's something that I definitely strive to do more and more of in the next few months. For me, I write myself as a little minus there. Should have done more, unfortunately, but you can't do everything. So you've got to prioritize. You've got to prioritize. But I guess because there's kind of two almost clichés, I guess, one of which is the kind of the person up in the ivory tower that no one gets to talk to. And then the other is the kind of the person that's in there still thinking that they're a cool young IC that can kind of just get involved in all the work and, like, the balance of those things. Definitely not cool and young. You don't need to talk to me about that. I don't get that anymore. But yeah, I think that actually I really care about, what is it, the Daniel Pink framework, the autonomy, mastery, and purpose thing. And it links to what I was talking about earlier about connecting people to the purpose, right, of what kind of company we want to be and empowering them. So I like to think that I'm not meddling into, we should do this feature and we shouldn't do that feature at all. Still, there is, like you say, there is still a level of detail that maybe I would like to know more about in certain areas, and I haven't yet been able to do so. So you said to be honest and authentic, so this is kind of the thing I need to still do. Well, the danger, of course, is that people from your team listen to this and they start bombarding you with context and meeting requests. So, you know, be careful what you wish for. But yeah, since then, you are then focusing a little bit more, as you say, on with customers and with leadership peers and stuff like that. And there may be this slight gap so far, at least with some of the day-to-day work. That potentially means that you need to have, for example, good lieutenants that can kind of look after those things, and I guess that gives them an opportunity as well. But it also potentially means that, you know, your team might not know a lot about what you're doing on a day-to-day basis or kind of the value that you're bringing to the team. And obviously there is some, and I'm sure that it's invaluable. But if one of your team was sitting here now and wanted to kind of know something about what you're doing for the team that maybe they don't get to see on a day-to-day basis, like what sorts of things would you kind of bring up as examples of, like, this is how I'm helping you, as you say, being empowered, move forward and be the best product manager you can be? So I like to think that they do know, actually, because we do have a lot of these all-hands and these sessions and meetings. And again, it's a team of 55. At Ocado, as an example, previously my team had 300 people, and that was much harder to get to know every single one. And I think I do know the vast majority of my team, and they do see me, so I'm exaggerating. At Commerce Tools, we're also very much spread geographically. So this is another communication challenge, which is interesting. We have offices in Munich, in Berlin, in Valencia, in London, in Boston, and we have quite a few people remote still as well, which I think during the company during COVID and whatnot. And so that also makes it quite hard to communicate. But I think the main thing that I've done is something that they do see, which is how to, you know, liaise with the CEO and the board and kind of the C-level to make sure to circle back onto the strategy with that product strategy lens. So it's not a one-way street, right? So there's the company strategy and what company we want to be. We then work to create a product strategy, which then the— A product strategy, which then the teams translate into what are the propositions that we're offering, and therefore what's the roadmap. And at the end of that, there's features and then there's tickets. But from the product strategy, even before the roadmap, there's a loop back into the leadership team of the company and into the board. And that's kind of what I've spent my time doing, creating that entire flow all the way into the roadmap or empowering the teams to be reshaping the roadmap. There was a roadmap before, of course, right? The company's alive and kicking and growing. But, you know, what have we changed? You know, we talk about commerce MCP, we talk about an AI hub. So how do you link with the commerce that starts from a chat line, right? The conversational commerce, these kind of things, places that we want to be. We've stopped a few things and then did the full circle back into the company strategy, and the company strategy has then refreshed and added the types of things we want to do. As an example, you talked about plug and play, right? Being able to connect into commerce tools really easily. Now with Gen AI, integrations is an area that I think is going to be extremely disrupted, as well as the commerce journey. And so a lot of, if you think about, you know, what's my contribution? Hopefully it's around framing, okay, what's the future of commerce? What's the future of software? What's our product strategy? And then looping that all the way back through so that we can kind of become this product development well-oiled machine that is focused on the things that the company is trying to do for its customers. So they would know, I think. Oh, I'm sure. Maybe we'll ask him afterwards, but... Exactly, you should. Yeah, no, I mean, again, it's one of those things where, like, it's a balance as well, right? Because, of course, if you're spending all of your time doing, you know, hanging around, then people would be getting cross with you for doing that as well, right? So there's this kind of balance. But I guess there's an interesting point there around that kind of leadership level and trying to make sure that you can advocate for these people and making sure that you're advocating for the strategy. And it sounds like from how you've described it that maybe some of that thinking was already there across the leadership team, like as in they kind of understood the value of product. But it's not something that people, all people at least from a leadership team, always naturally understand, especially if they've been with the company from the start and they've kind of seen it grow. So have you found any kind of, or do you kind of take any standard approaches to continuously advocate for good product management practices, however you see them as good, but like to actually advocate for those with the leadership team and make sure that product is kind of given that equal weight at the table? Yeah, I think that's something that I definitely encountered in my work before Commerce Tools. In Commerce Tools, I'm quite lucky that actually our CEO is ex-product. And I don't know how often, like how many of those are. I think there'll be more and more, right? We know a few, Jason, you and I. Definitely we know one more lady at least. But I think that that is a benefit on one hand. And then in companies where that's not the case, I think it goes back to their relationship with the commercial side of the organization and being able to add value to them and help them and understand these stakeholders, what are they trying to do? Because they're trying to get their job done, which is, you know, do deals, generate growth, etc. And so for me, one of the critical things, and I definitely worked at this a lot at Ocado as well at the time, was to build the relationships with the commercial organization and to have a roadmap that they are proud of and they can share with customers. And it's that same point from before, because if you don't share a roadmap that makes sense to the customers or the potential prospects, then something will come back in as a request or an expectation rather than a dialogue. And so I think, again, to your point, it's all about relationships and around people and about motivation. And I think that the best advice I'd been given in the past was to, you know, look at the other person next to you at the table. What are they trying to achieve? Understand their perspective and then see, can you be helpful to them while being helpful for the company? And that's that kind of Venn diagram is where you can build a healthier leadership for the company. Yeah. You're nodding your head. I'm a bit worried. You're normally more... No, I try not to interrupt as often as... Sounds good, and sounds like something we could and probably should talk about for hours. But, you know, I also realize that you're also a very busy person that's got lots of things to do. So I'm going to finish off with a quick lightning round just to get people to know the real you. So, what's one skill every CPO should master? Ooh, communication. Is that too broad? No, well, I'll take it. What's the most important trait in a product manager? Big ears. Big ears? I mean, to listen. I mean, to listen, of course. Not like an elephant, but, you know, two ears, one mouth, all that sort of thing. Yeah, exactly that. If you could have dinner with any famous figure, alive or dead, who would it be and why? Oh my God. Probably like Sheryl Sandberg. Sorry. I would love to have dinner with her. But is that because you've read the new Facebook exposé and you want to see if it's true, or is that more of a lean-in thing? I mean, I think it's not a lean-in thing. It's about, you know, the journey that she'd been on and everything that she achieved. I think she's quite amazing, and I'm sure it would be a nice dinner. Absolutely, as long as she's paying. Exactly. If you had to start your career over, what would you do differently? Oh. Oh my God. Learn to code in Python. Oh, you're a frustrated data scientist, are you? I don't know. I can only do C-sharp, and it's quite embarrassing, so my level. No, there's nothing wrong with C-sharp. No, C-sharp's amazing. My level is poor. I would probably spend more time building things, and I hope to do that in the future. All right, final question, as I know that you need to go and save the world of commerce. Why should product people come and work for Commerce Tools? Oh, okay, because it's really interesting. It's a problem space that is a good space in the world, right? People want to buy things, they want to buy food, they want to buy. It's something that we do every day. It's really changing now, so it's a great time to be there. And we are an extremely diverse company in our culture, with offices in some really cool locations and with some great, great people. So you really should join. Oh, absolutely. Well, where can they come and find you or Commerce Tools after this if they want to kind of maybe try and connect or come and have a look at your jobs page? Oh, just go to Commerce Tools website and you'll see us there. Or if you search in any of the chatbots, because all our documentation is so exposed, you'll really get a lot of good information about us. So yeah, enjoy and welcome. Well, I'll make sure to link it all into the show notes. Hopefully you get a few people coming and finding out more. But all I can do now, Shu, is thank you very much for sharing your CPO story. Thank you very much, Jason. It was a pleasure.