CPO Stories: Nick Kenn - Winmau

Product managers need to be super commercially minded. And the reason I say that is because understanding the difference between a PE firm and a VC firm is fundamental to whether you'll be successful in that job if they're backed by one of those or not. Part A, PE firm, you're actually working for a financial institution ultimately, because that's the owner of the business. Part B, a VC firm, you're still working for a founder who's usually had some product or an engineering background. So that's quite different. Who's the boss here, ultimately? Hello and welcome to CPO Stories, where I speak to the UK's biggest and best executive product leaders as well as some of the up and coming stars of the future. If that sounds up your street, don't forget to dive into the back catalogue on your favourite podcast app or on YouTube. And of course, follow, share or drop me a comment or review. It'll help to keep the lights on. And if you're a CPO or want to nominate your CPO to come on, do get in touch. I'd love to chat and find out more. On this episode, I'm delighted to welcome Nick Ken. Nick's career has taken him through big names like Betfair, Redbubble, Chob and more before moving into interim and advisory product leadership roles, getting his hands dirty in a number of industries and working across PE and VC-backed organisations. These days, he's filling the interim CPO hotseat at Windmore, the world's leading darts brand and apparently the producer of the most advanced dartboard in the world. And I'm hoping he's going to have a lot to say about how product leaders can make sure they hit their targets. Nick, thanks for coming and welcome to the show. Hi, Jason. Thanks so much for having me. Really, really looking forward to our chat today. Absolutely. It's interesting because when you and I first chatted, and we should talk about this in a second, and you said you were currently working at Windmore, I'm like, that's a name that like, ever since I was a kid, you'd be getting like the old Argos catalogs out and flicking through and the number of dartboards that I've bought over that time. I mean, I'm terrible at darts, but like, the number of dartboards I bought over that time, you know, Windmore was just the name. It was you flip through, it's the page of Windmore. It's like, wow, that's such a cool company to work for. But I guess at the same time, many of my listeners may not have done any of that stuff. So it'd be kind of interesting to sort of understand from your perspective, you know, you're in the hotseat there. Like, what is it that the company does? I mean, we just talked about darts, so it's obviously dart related, but how would you describe sort of Windmore and the mission of the company and what you're working on at the moment? Let me tell you a bit about it. So Windmore is a hundred year old manufacturing business making dartboards. And it's the largest manufacturer of dartboards in the world. And we are more than a million dartboards a year and more than 2 million sets of darts. Believe it or not, 5% of the UK population play darts. Now it's just bigger than tennis. That's booming. Darts is booming. It's in a boom time. And so Windmore supplies the dartboards for every major tournament in the world. If you turn on your TV and see a darts tournament, it will be a Windmore dartboard that you'll see. So we've been doing that for a hundred years. And then about 18 months ago, Windmore was acquired by a private equity firm, Inflexion, and that private equity firm asked me to join to figure out a digital product around darts. And that's where it gets really exciting for me personally, because I never expected to be working in darts. It's a fun sport that you sort of play as a cheered and maybe occasionally in the pub. But here I am working in darts and you would not believe how booming this industry is. And the product that I'm trying to build around darts is essentially a home version of flight club, if you've ever come across that in your audience that's in that, which is a set of cameras that sit around a dartboard and detect where the dart lands and then can send that information to an app or a website where you can do interesting things like play online against people wherever they are in the world, do training, collect stats and heat maps and all sorts of interesting things with that data. So that's what I've come in to build. But that's obviously super interesting and, you know, flight club is one of the again, I don't know if all my international listeners will know about it, but you know, again, that kind of, you know, the social events and going out and as just darts, obviously these days, there's loads of different types of that type of thing, of all the different sports, but you know, like that is a certain sort of satisfaction, you know, the thing in the sun against the board went, but that's an interesting question because like one of the ways that you could do what you just said, you know, effectively have like, you know, at home, cool kind of connected darts and stuff is you could just have some kind of VR thing, or you could have, I don't know, just like some kind of magnetic things that you throw at the board or something again, there's this kind of, there's a very, I'm not even sure if it's the right word, but like a tactile kind of an auditory element of, you know, like again, that kind of thunk of the dart. So I'm assuming based on what you've described that kind of maintaining that really kind of realistic and somewhat traditional kind of feeling of playing darts is like at the heart of everything. Absolutely. And you, well, you literally hit the nail on the head there with the sound of it because yeah, that's that if you ever go to a darts event, it's that sound as it hits the board that resonates around the auditorium. And that's, that's absolutely part of the product that we're building. But some other things as well, I think what you, if you've ever been into a pub where there's a dartboard, there's typically a chalkboard next to that dartboard where people keep track and they count down from 501 to zero. We have an online version of a chalkboard. We have celebrations when you hit a 180. We have all sorts of things that you get in the, in the real world darts environment. So it's really exciting to be working on this product. It's pretty cool. But obviously you talked a little bit about like, you know, you never thought you're going to work at a company like this. You never thought you'd work for, you know, in this industry and stuff. Does that then imply that you've kind of got a bit of a darts background yourself? Like are you quite handy with the arrows or are you just going to pick a lot of it up on the way in and sort of sort of learn the industry. Yeah. Yeah. Good, good question. So I have worked on a lot of sports before. I worked in sports betting for a long time, so I worked on many different sports and gaming as well, but never worked in darts. And I had to learn the ropes. I'd played darts as a kid. When I joined, I picked up a set. When I joined Windmore, I picked up a set, darts and dartboard. And I've been playing it kind of two or three times a week with my family as well. And I can now, I can now, what's called check out, which means I can finish on a double, which is really quite hard to do and takes a lot of practice to get there. But I can actually do that now, so I'm proud of myself. You try, try and hit that double. It's quite a hard thing to do. So yeah, I'm proud of that. And my game will only get better when the product I'm building comes online and they can help me improve my training as well. So that, that's exciting too. Well, that's interesting, this kind of idea about training, because again, if I'm thinking about a lot of the apps that you see out there these days in, you know, try and help you with sort of digital sports again, which is kind of a little bit different to what you're talking about, you know, because you're still very much focusing on that kind of the physical kind of element of things. But just this idea of like, almost rather than just, you know, throwing stuff at a board, like actually being able to kind of almost have missions and stuff for people, and it sounds weird to call it like gamification because it's already a game, but like just this idea that you can start to do proper training and kind of missions and stuff to get people good at stuff rather than just sort of flinging. Yeah. Darts at a random board and hoping. So like, I guess there is that kind of up-leveling and sort of almost. Uh, yeah, it's sort of a trainer type thing going on as well, right? Exactly. I think, I think you're onto the right, onto the right track there. So most sports have an app, have a website, have some sort of training facility as Strava for running and Peloton for cycling. There's Carve for skiing. There's a swimming one that you name it. There's a track man for golf, but darts hasn't really got that yet. So there's a, it's rare actually that you get to build not only a product, but shape a whole industry, a digital product and shape the whole industry at the same time, but gamification rewards, streaks, practicing, trophies, badges, all of those things that you would have seen in other products, the Duolingos and Stravas, absolutely. We expect to be putting Inside of things is still run by the people that were already running it and you've had to kind of slipstream into that. I guess really the question is, how do you get that kind of traditional manufacturing mindset and the product mindset to gel together? How do you hand off between the two? How do you sync up? How do you make sure that both sides have got their voice and that no one side is kind of just, you know, doing everything one way and that there's kind of good collaboration and I guess alignment between the two sides? Yeah, I mean, I'm fortunate enough that I've actually managed to bring in someone who's a kind of an expert at connected devices to run the project to manage the hardware piece of this. And so syncing up the hardware and software has actually been easier than maybe you would think. But again, we are, we are kind of fairly early stages of this. And so we haven't, the rubber probably hasn't hit the road yet in terms of things that can go wrong down the track, manufacturing lead times and sourcing components and so on and coming up and installing software and hardware. There's a lot of things yet to complete. So I'm expecting a few speed bumps along the way. But yeah, I think having Winmore as a whole, a doctor digital products and kind of education around the business, it has been tough. It's been really tough and for both parties, as I said before, but it's about meeting regularly. It's about talking about progress updates. It's about being available to answer questions because the questions coming back from the traditional part of the business are, when are you getting this thing? Can we have a look at how it's looking? How many units are we going to sell? How many downloads are we going to get? And so just keeping the team, keeping the rest of the organization across the current plans. And this is not again, rocket science or difficult stuff. Everyone would expect to do this, but it's just about keeping people informed. So regular syncs, sharing documents, just being proactive around that. Yeah, I mean, obviously like bringing additional sort of expertise in is obviously always a smart move in that sort of situation. But I also think that it's an interesting question. And again, you've talked a lot around kind of like the history and the kind of the traditions behind the company. And I'm sure you've got some very passionate people within the organization that are super expert at, you know, darts and everything to do with darts. And then it kind of brings to mind this, this general debate around like whether product people should be industry experts or sort of subject matter experts or whether they should be product management experts and they can kind of come in and they can pick the industry up. Now, I know that from what you've just described, it's kind of early in that journey, but like, how do you see that progressing? Like, do you think that you're going to be building a bunch of product managers out of darts enthusiasts or a bunch of darts enthusiasts out of product managers? Yeah, I mean, again, a good question. What I'm lucky enough to have done so far is find product managers and product designers and actually engineers who have an interest in darts. And I think that really helps. One of the things I've learned in my career is that I'm really passionate about consumer products and that is because I can touch and feel and use those products quite easily. Whenever I've worked on B2B products, it becomes a lot harder for me to really feel the pains of users if I'm not a natural user of that product because I'm not a business or have a need for that product. So again, this is not rocket science, but just making sure that you have a passion for that product really, really does help. And you'll find insights and people will be able to go that extra mile if they are passionate about it. So I'm looking for product managers, engineers and designers who have an interest in darts. And yeah, that's my stance at the moment. And I think it's really hard if, if you come in and you don't have an interest in darts because it's quite a niche or you think you, you're not going to have long-term interest in darts. It is a niche and you do need to feel the passion and the example you said earlier about the sounds that are connected around darts and the kind of tactile nature of it. All of those things, you have to live and breathe it to build a world-class product. And I expect my team to be living and breathing it. So they have to have a passion around it. Yeah, it's again, that kind of tricky balance, I guess, because if you look at it on the other side, you might sit there and say that someone that does have or people that do have that passion for it, maybe they kind of constrain their thinking a little bit because they, you know, they know enough about that world to kind of know how things are done and, you know, maybe they wouldn't make the big, bold moves that, you know, maybe someone that came from outside, uh, you know, got some different ideas would maybe try and do now whether or not they would work or not, that's a whole different question. But I guess that's really the kind of the fallout there is whether you think that it's possible to bring in subject matter experts and people that are passionate about space, but kind of still encourage that divergent thinking so that they're not just kind of just reinventing the same wheel again and again, but they're actually able to kind of make step changes when, when it comes to it. Yeah. And actually answer this in a slightly different way that I think it's really important for product teams to be looking at not only their competitors, but parallel industry or other industries to source inspiration. For example, I use Revolut bank. I think they've got one of the best user experiences around banking apps. I hope to bring some of the look and feel or kind of features that, um, you know, user experience of that into our darts experience. I hope to do that. Um, and my product manager and designer and engineers are kind of equally looking at outside inspiration. But competitor intelligence is a real, really important undervalued piece of the product stack. And it's something I'm super passionate about. I actually built a product around it called Outfox a few years ago that went off and scraped data on your competitors, pulled it into a dashboard. So you can do interesting things with that. And I, and I built that product because in every company I'd worked at up until that point, product managers hadn't spent enough time looking at their competitors and that is, I'll be explicit here. That's not to copy them. It's to differentiate from them. You cannot build a differentiated product if you don't know what you're differentiating from. So I fully, fully expect the teams, my teams going forward to be looking at competitors to differentiate from them and also looking at outside reference points so that they can get inspiration from them. Um, these days it's much easier to do all of that through AI and I definitely wouldn't have built that product if I was starting now, but it's given me an appreciation of how you can really differentiate if you spend some time looking at and talking about what's happening in your market and external markets. No, absolutely. And I think, you know, it's that kind of old cliche. I don't know if it's actually an actual phrase, but, you know, like, be really conscious of your competitors or your competition, but don't copy them. But, you know, but you do need to be aware of them. So, you know, because, you know, on the other hand, and, you know, as I say, if you're, you know, have been active in this space, you'll, you'll know all this stuff better than I do. But like, there's just this idea of like, well, it can be really tempting. And I've seen it myself in a bunch of different companies where it's like, oh, they've done this, so we've got to do it. They've done this, so we've got to do it. Or even with some industries where it's almost like every single, uh, company within an industry had to have like a checklist on their website of all of the features that they have. And sometimes even compared with all of their competitors. So you could literally sort of just run your finger across and say, Oh yeah, they've all got the same things. It's like, like you say, like differentiation is important. And we all know that our competitors are building stuff that that maybe ain't getting used or that is costing them too much to serve or that didn't really make the impact that it could have done. And they're looking at all of our stuff and they're thinking much the same thing as well, right? And that, you know, they're, they're kind of, you know, they've got green eyes and jealousy over the things that we're building, but at the same time, they, they don't know what of our stuff is working or not as well. So, so kind of this weird dance of people that don't quite know all of the details, just trying to work out what's, what's going on and sort of just getting jealous when they see something that looks cool on a website. Absolutely. And maybe just to kind of close off this one, the user experience I hope to build around, around this product here at Winmore, I expect it to be the best user experience in darts, but that's not good enough. I expect people from parallel industries to be looking at my app and say, wow, we'll take some of this and move it into whatever, banking app, as I said, with Revolut or a different sport or a different parallel industry. That, that's, that's what I'm going for here. So that's the level I expect. And that's how I encourage my teams to think it. We, we don't just want to be the best in darts. We want to be the poster child for how this can manifest in any industry. Big aims and yeah, If I take myself as an example, if I'm looking at other interim people, and there are other interim people in the company and other companies that I've worked at, I quite often catch myself thinking, maybe I won't raise this topic with this person now, wait until the permanent person gets here because then that's the final final answer and definitive direction for this thing. So it is inevitable that people are thinking about that like that about me right now. So it's inevitable. So I kind of expect that to be true. And I think then there's a sense of kind of, you have to have a higher level of resilience to be able to kind of still carve a path and get the things done because ultimately the reason you're being appointed as an interim is to is actually to deliver, is to deliver a theme and it isn't actually to build really strong relationships and kind of get on super well with everyone in the org, which you should do as a human being, but it's about you're being brought in because there's a thing that needs to be done in this period of time, so you're in here to do it and just keeping kind of laser focus on actually that's what I'm here to do and what I'm here to do. And this is, in this case, it's build this product and launch this product. So I'm super focused on on doing that. And, and I'm aware that at some point this will come to an end, but I want to leave here having known that I have launched a world-class product and I'm super proud of and there's a team in place who can take this on. And maybe it's me hiring my successor, maybe it's not, they hire around me. Either way is fine. But I want to leave with my head held high that I've actually delivered the thing that I came here to do, which is not build great relationships around the business, it's deliver this product so that the business, our customers have a better experience and a higher valuation. Every dart that hits the uh the dartboard will have your name on it. But it's an interesting thing around goals as well. And this is something that you and I spoke about before we started recording, because, of course, you've, this isn't your first interim gig. You've done a bunch of different companies. And you've also done that across both sort of PE backed companies like where you are at the moment and also VC backed companies as well. There's kind of a bit of, I don't know, chatter, I guess you'd call it in the kind of the product community about some of the potentially differences between the types of goals and, you know, like what success looks like in both of those types of environments, right? Because, you know, there's a very classic example or classic cliche of, you know, VC firms are investing in a bunch of companies and only one or two have to hit and the others could all die by the wayside. If it comes to it as long as I get the big returns on some of them, then it's succeeded. And you've kind of got then the more the PE mindset, which is like, well, actually they've all got to kind of succeed a bit and it's all about kind of, you know, bringing up EBITDA and reducing costs and stuff like that. And again, you know, I'm sure that there are, you know, that those are somewhat cliches and there's a lot of complexity in and around, but how do you see the difference between being, you know, CPO interim or otherwise at a sort of a strong PE backed firm and a VC backed firm? And like, how does that change the role or the kind of the kind of what you're measured on? Yeah, I mean, I'll answer that by starting with kind of a framing comment, which is I firmly believe that product managers need to be super commercially minded and the reason I say that is because understanding the difference between a PE firm and a VC firm is fundamental to whether you'll be successful in that job if they're backed by one of those or not. And so the main difference here is that a PE firm actually owns outright or a majority stake in a firm, whereas a VC firm typically owns a small and not a minority stake in a firm. So there's usually a founder who still has a majority control. And so that changes things fundamentally because in path A, PE firm, you're actually working for a financial institution ultimately, because that's the owner of the business. Path B, a VC firm, you're still working for a founder who's usually a product person if it's a founding business and he's been there or she's been there since the beginning. They usually have some products or an engineering background. So that's quite different. Who's the boss here ultimately? Are you working for someone who's a bit like you or are you working for someone who's probably not like you because they've come from a finance background? So that's the biggest difference and really kind of understanding that. And then the next layer down from that is, and then what do they expect from you? And this is the sort of commercial acumen piece. So if you're working at a PE firm, really, they work on a cycle of three to five years. So they're investing and they expect a return within three to five years, which means selling that business. And so you're immediately that might change how you think about building products, right? Because your horizon is a lot more. Exactly. Your horizon is a lot more condensed. VC firms will have a longer expectation, as you say, that kind of one in X will pay off is the mentality so they're actually less involved in the day-to-day running of the business. And so you are building products as your listeners and watchers will kind of recognize in a classical way there, you have to, you can use all the tools and tactics and frameworks that you would. And that's okay. And an example there is doing discovery, right? That's okay in a VC world because it's a risk, it's a bet. We don't know. We need to validate, take some time. Let's just figure stuff out before we move into delivery. Now, that's anathema in a PE backed world, right? It's like build the thing, give me the return, give me certainty. Anything that kind of slows you down from delivering the thing is not a popular choice. regardless, I'm not saying that's the right or wrong, because I understand the pros and cons, but that's the mindset that you're working with. And so that's creates quite a different culture. This is more delivery-led on the PE side, build, build, build as fast as possible for a definite point in time, which is an exit. And this one is about actually, we still might need to find product market fit or pivot to something else or whatever it is. There's a lot more options, I'd say here. There's a lot more options for you, your career, your products, because everything's on the table. Whereas this PE is like, we've got a plan. It's usually called a value creation plan and you have to get used to the language. It's quite a niche set of vernacular that comes with private equity. We've got a value creation plan and this is what we deliver in this timeframe. So we need to build it. It's quite a different mindset. Do you think then, I mean, we talked about books earlier that if, we talked exactly about what you've just mentioned there as well, just this idea that obviously, yes, it's different. The goals are different. But do you think then that the books that people always waver at people and read at people and authors go on podcasts and stuff, that they just represent something different to the reality that product leaders in a private equity owned firm would have? Like, or is there, I mean, I guess the question is, is there a slow and steady progress possible to get to the point where things are more like that? Or do you think that it like more like the books, or do you think that actually they're never going to be like that because of those kind of competing goals and the timeframes and just mentalities and that PE product leaders just need to accept that it's a different game and adapt accordingly? No, I mean, I would, I would say never say never. First of all, I've never read a book that is or watched or listened to anything that has really described what I've just gone through in the last year working in this five equity environment or the previous one. So I haven't read and they're all tailored towards the other option, which is kind of traditional products and doing the best practice in the right way. So I haven't seen that. And maybe that's a niche. Maybe you should, someone, one of your audience should start to do that because because there are more and more private equity firms investing in more and more tech companies. So there, there is a demand. There will be a demand and it's an unmet need at this point in time. So I think that that's important. That content doesn't really exist today. And it's certainly, it's certainly. Yeah, I've painted a picture. I deliberately use kind of maybe more extreme language to kind of highlight the differences, but it's not like the people in the private equity firms aren't aware of, of the other, the other option. And, and they just typically are making a choice to go down this path. So I think occasionally you come across an investment where maybe it does have a longer time horizon or occasionally they have bought a smaller stake in, in a business. And so there's kind of different investors with a different mindset. But, but those are usually those are outliers, I think. So it's not always like I've described, but probably more often than not, it is. And is that going to change in future? I would doubt it. Not in the next few years, at least because this is a very popular investing model and it's working. So why change something that's working? Exactly, you know, just keep, keep going and uh double down what you need to. Keep an eye on it. Maybe someone listening to this and going like that book as well