CPO Stories: Georgie Smallwood - Moonpig

And I've never worked in a business where it has been empowered teams every day of every week of every year. And I think it's naive if you think that a commercial organization that that can happen at scale. It's really dangerous to build a culture where it's not okay for something to come in from the top. Not because I think things should come in from the top all the time, but because when it inevitably does, it will grind your product organization to a halt. 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 favorite podcast app or on YouTube. And of course, follow, share, or drop me a comment or a review. It all helps. And if you're a CPO or want to nominate your CPO, do get in touch. I'd love to chat. On this episode, I'm delighted to welcome Georgie Smallwood. Georgie's career has taken her through a variety of countries and companies, including Sleevesup, Xero, N26, and T-Mobile before taking the chief product, technology and data officer role at Moonpig, a leading online platform for card giving and gifting. So I'm expecting a friends and family discount on my thank you for coming on the podcast card I'll be sending after the show. Georgie, thanks for coming and welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, Jason. It's good to finally be here. It's taken me so long. It's like I keep sending the cards and I keep sending the cards and I keep kind of coming back, you know, not at this address, but finally I managed to get through to you. So I'm looking forward to, you know, getting some good, almost like the inside of a greeting card kind of wisdom off the back of this conversation as well. I think this is going to be a really good one. After a couple of years at Moonpig, I'm pretty good at writing a greeting card. Yeah, well, hopefully we'll have time to get into that later because I'm very curious about your card writing etiquette. But Moonpig, let's talk about it to start with because obviously, you know, I know it, you obviously know it, but like, it's a very well-known brand in the UK and a few other countries as well. But just in case anyone doesn't send a lot of cards, how would you describe what Moonpig does officially? Moonpig helps you to connect with the people that you love the most. I think one of the greatest things about technology is that it's enabled us to stay connected with people across the world as the world has become a bigger. So in some ways, technology has made the world much bigger than it used to be. But in other ways, it's made it much smaller. And I want to work with technology that makes the world smaller, that makes us feel more connected to people. And so when I got approached about the Moonpig role, I mean, literally the purpose of the company is to create moments that matter between people who love each other. And that's what we do every day. I stand in front of the printer at our warehouse in Tamworth and I watch 15,000 cards get printed with all I see is love, love, love, love, love, love, mum, dad, miss you, hug you. It's a really incredible product to be a part of and to be able to give those moments to people around the world so that they feel connected with the people that are important to them. I bet they're not all love, love, love, love though. There's got to be some snotty ones in there and some, you know, troll ones in there that people are sending to their enemies as well, right? There are definite, there are definite specific pics that can come through, but those get picked up by our sensors most of the time. But you know, love comes in all shapes and sizes, Jason. We can't judge. We're not here to judge. #NoJudgment. But it's interesting to know what you talked about there because, you know, you might naively think, not you personally, but one might naively think that Moonpig's just a card shop, right? Like, you know, somewhere where you can just go and get that last minute card for your anniversary or whatever. Definitely never had to do that, of course, you know. That's something that I never have to worry about. There is a definite convenience use case there, for sure. Absolutely. But at the same time, you know, you kind of touched on it, this kind of, you're not really, it's that kind of, you know, drill versus hole kind of metaphor in it. You're not really selling cards. You're, you know, you're selling the connections that the card deliver. So does that kind of, almost, I mean, you talk a lot about technology as well. And obviously, you know, we'll talk about your remit across technology as well as product in a minute as well. But it kind of almost feels like, A, that, as you say, almost like the product is the emotional connection and the kind of the love that you bring together. But also that comes at a potential risk because that could mean that you could be kind of asked to build just about anything. Yeah, I mean, that is true. You could, it's quite broad, you know. I think we are very focused on making sure that we are the world's greatest gifting companion. We see gifting as the gesture of love. And I think that thinking about how tech has connected us across the world with instant messaging and social media and all of those different things, it's still really amazing to get a card in the mail and to open it up. And, you know, still when my friends and family are, you know, sharing their kids' birthdays or their parents' birthdays, what you see on Instagram is like a picture where you've got the whole dining table filled with cards and a balloon. And so I do really think we need to be really careful when we think about progress and technology about, we can rush blindly into the future of using technology to solve all of our challenges and problems, but we really do need to think about what we could potentially lose. And I think to make it really simple from my perspective, like one could argue that, you know, I send a WhatsApp message on someone's birthday, but it does not replace the fact that you, someone, one of your friends took the time to create the card, to put something special in it, to, you know, put their favorite stick, their favorite photo of you on top of it and took the time to get that to you for your birthday. If we lose things like the greeting card, we won't get them back. And we need to be really careful that we don't, you know, use technology at the expense of the things that we have had in the past. And I think when you've got kids, this is something that is, is really clear. Like I watch my teenage children communicate with their friends asynchronously only. Right. And, and they are, they lost something. We lost something along the way, which was synchronous communication. And we didn't realize we were losing it until it was gone. And it's really, really hard to get back for those people that have grown up in an asynchronous communication world. And we're not just losing conversation, we're losing all of the things that come alongside that type of synchronous communication. So I'm really, really passionate about making sure that we leverage technology to really serve the, the things that are good about life. But we don't lose the things that maybe aren't that technology kind of driven in our minds, but that doesn't mean that there's not a huge amount of value in them that we can't replace digitally. I was going to say, if I were going to be slightly cynical, I might say that someone who's the chief product technology and data officer for the leading gifting and physical gift card, you know, supplier might say exactly all of those things because of course, you know, someone who worked for a tech only company that was doing NFT thingies or whatever, right. Maybe they would say completely the opposite. But it is a nice interesting balance there, right? Because you sit there and, you know, Moonpig's what, 25 years old now. It's a pretty ancient in internet standards, but it's also that of course, cause makes it an established, well-known brand with lots of scale behind it and a lot of history, a lot of experience. How do you see the mission of Moonpig and I guess your mission as well as in the position you're in to try and do all of those things that you just said and, you know, make sure that we keep the human connection and the physical at the center of everything, but also kind of trying to stay at the forefront of technology as best you can. Yeah. No, it's a really good question. And one of the reasons that I find my job so interesting every day, because consumers are changing and, you know, what was accepted as valuable 15 years ago is, is not okay anymore. So how do we, how do we continue to increase the value? And a lot of the time this comes down to words like personalization or segmentation or those kinds of buzzwords. But how do we deliver the experience and the expectation that the customer has when those expectations are coming from a very, very digital world and instantaneous behaviors, et cetera, into something that by its very nature, one of the reasons why it's so valuable is it's not instantaneous. So, I mean, I faced this in other roles that I've had before, right? In, in banking, we were building the bank of the future, right? It's all digital. And N26 was one of the first banks not to have branches. You know, it launched Revolut. Now none of on kind of using AI within the organization, but are you seeing any early signals of kind of shifts in customer preferences or maybe competitive landscape where you're sitting there saying, well, actually, we've not only got to change our own operating system, but also to some extent, try and keep up with the changes to our consumers and recipients' operating systems as well? Or are people still staying kind of people? I mean, I think it's, again, I go back to, you know, what type of company, product you are and who your customers are. We have a, we are a mass market product. Like one in six people in the UK are a Moonpig customer. And that is, that's important to understand because in our little tech bubble that we live in, we think everyone is all over this. And the reality is that, you know, it is a epic race in technology and we are all in it and we are running as hard as we can, but a good, good product people work out how to use that technology and how to stay in that race and use the innovation, but surface it to our customers in a way that they can consume and a way that they feel comfortable consuming. So what's really interesting is that we, you know, stickers, we launched stickers right inside cards a year or two ago. People love them, right? People know what stickers are in real life, in tangible touching terms, and stickers decorate things, right? And they make them personal to you. AI stickers is something that we've launched quite recently, and it is booming, absolutely booming. People love AI stickers because they can relate it to stickers. And because writing a short prompt about what you want your sticker to look like doesn't feel to most people in the world like you're actually using AI. It's just magically generating instantly, which you'd already expect, the sticker that you wanted, right? So making sure that we are using technology but surfacing it to customers in a way that doesn't feel bracing or too much friction or too much change. You need to take consumers on a journey of using technology and how they integrate it into something that from their perspective, they've been doing for 25 years. So you don't need to change it fundamentally, but actually if you look back at the cards that Moonpig was creating five years ago, and you compare it to the card that you can create today, there is a huge amount of innovation and technology in it. But the art is not alienating your customer while you do it. Kind of almost just changing it little by little like the ship of Theseus or something like that where you're sort of sitting there and in a couple of years or 10 years or 20 years, it's a completely different ship. But yeah, every single bit has been replaced part by part, but kind of the technical. People need it. It's just human psychology, right? Like even if we're talking about AI and AI just in general, humans will lean back from change, right? We do, rightly so. Like we feel good and safe in the thing that we know. So how do we get, how do we embrace innovation? And how do we, you'll always have an early adopter customer or an early adopter employee who is diving headfirst into the unknown and not afraid of it and gets energy from it. But they really are early adopters. But if you want to bring the mass with you faster than your competitors are, you need to take them on that journey and give them the steps that they need to embrace this technology in a way that they see value in and they see why they're being taken on that journey. No, absolutely. You don't get to one in six by just concentrating on early adopters, right? So obviously something's working. But product management, let's dig into that. So product management at Moonpig, obviously part of your responsibility alongside data and technology as well. But specifically considering like the product team, the product organization that's kind of looking after all of this stuff from your side, like how does that look at Moonpig? Like how big are the teams? How have you laid them out? How do they kind of connect with each other and the rest of the business? Like what's the landscape look like there? Yeah, so I think we have in product and design, we have about 40, 41 people. It's not rocket science. I think this is my... Don't tell them that. I know, not the Moonpig structure, but I think product structures in general, right? I've been... This is my third executive product role. And I promise you I have done every org design that exists, some that don't exist and didn't for very long either. And what I've learned is that whether you set your teams up in a customer journey flow or you set them up in tribes or you set them up in full stack or you have, you know, front-end and back-end or you have... It doesn't really matter as long as you don't have a fixed approach to it. You need to be able to flex technology, humans, consumers, business is moving so fast. And it feels even faster since COVID, I think, just because, you know, we had this big line in the sand drawn and we went from hyper growth, especially in like pre-IPO VC companies where there was heaps of funding and everything was boom, boom, boom, boom to just a grinding halt. For Moonpig, it was brilliant because, you know, you can't get to the high street shop to buy those gestures and be that ultimate gifting companion. And all of a sudden, people realized that Moonpig was there. It was there and it was solving that problem for them. But yeah, I think COVID and the timing of COVID, like I said, drew a line in the sand. And since then, there's been, you know, a lot of disruption globally. Political world is noisy. There is a lot of things going on. Consumer spending is up, it's down, it's up, it's down, it's down, it's up. So, you know, trying to set budgets and targets and things for companies across the world since COVID has been, you know, incredibly difficult. It's not really a stable environment. Okay, so we know that, right? So, like, my ultimate mantra to myself in life is, like, control what you can control, right? And what can I control? Well, I can control what we are doing at the moment. And I control how the teams are set up and is that the best thing for the next six to 12 months? Or do we need to adjust it? How do we need to change it? And making sure that you don't lock in plans, teams, structures so hard that they're impossible to change. Even though we all know as good product people that change, you know, it causes disruption and it causes challenges to planned roadmaps and impact and all those kinds of things. So, we don't want to create orgs so that we can change them, but you also don't want to create orgs that you can't change without a huge amount of friction. So, whether you are growing and you're taking things from small nimble teams and then you want to move to a, you know, consumer journey flow, that doesn't really matter. What you... The thing that I do think really matters and the teams that I always see working brilliantly, there is a PM, an engineering manager and a designer and the three of them work together, right? Product trio. Product trio, right? Like, just go back to the origin. There's a reason why it exists. And, you know, sometimes you have to make do across teams and you've got people split across things and you've got to do what you've got to do. But it works best when the three of them are there and they're humming along. I always notice at every, like, every meeting about product roadmaps or something that I've had in the last 10 years, if I think about the teams where I was like, wow, God, I'm excited about that. It's generally because that trio is really humming. Well, talking about humming and also to some extent about your kind of comment about, like, you know, some of the stuff isn't as complicated as maybe some people might try and make you think around, you know, like the kind of tried and tested ways of working that seem to, you know, as you kind of put it, kind of work the best and like that whole trio dynamic, absolutely 100% agree. But there's also this kind of concept of, like, well, team empowerment and all of the kind of, you know, what you might call the kind of Marty Kagan school of product management where everyone's empowered around missions and you kind of lead with commander's intent and someone like yourself would be setting the overall vision and strategy and then the teams would kind of work out their own ways to get there. Do you feel like you're kind of on that track in Moonpig or is that something where maybe due to some of the dynamics of the business and the kind of the market characteristics that you kind of sometimes have to maybe do a few things that aren't quite like that, but, you know, but you do your best? Like, how do you see that kind of empowerment journey for Moonpig? Yeah, I think it's always a blend. I think you... I think that business means that things come in from the sides, you know, markets change, consumer spending changes, which means that you need to change your plans. I do absolutely believe that when cross-functional teams come together, and I don't just mean product, engineering, data, design, when cross-functional teams come together to solve problems, that's how we get the best outcomes. I do think that sometimes the time that you have to make the impact means that that isn't feasible. And I've never worked in a business where it has been empowered teams every day of every week of every year. And I think it's naive if you think that a commercial organization in a world Or a security engineer or an IT service desk person. So there are lots of roles in my organization that I, I haven't done, and I can't get into the nitty-gritty of the day-to-day work with it. I thought that would be an issue when I started. One of the things that I've always been really passionate about and proud of is that as a product person, I can get into it with a, I can't design, but I can definitely get into it with the designer and a product manager and, you know, story map and break things down and unblock problems or, you know, you talk to customers or speak to stakeholders and I could do all of those things. But coming into this role, what I really faced was that at scale, I couldn't run the org that way because, and so because of that, how do I work out, well, firstly, like, where does my credibility come from? Because I think it's really important in a leader. And the second one is, how do I work out like what's going on and if it's the right thing or we're missing a trick or something's, you know, blocked, but no one's seen it yet. And so on the first one, like, where does my credibility come from? Well, it had to come from not from being, you know, knowing the answers or, which I'd already faced in the CPO role, right? When you get into an executive leadership role, you are not there to have the answers, right? You are there to ensure that the answers get created, but you are one brain and there is 40 underneath you as a CPO. And 40 people need to get better answers than one brain. But it is difficult when you know how to do the job. And so when I, when I started this role and I had, you know, a quite a large engineering organization and quite a large data organization, I spent a huge amount of time listening and asking, like learning how to answer, teaching myself like the right open questions to answer so that I could get the information that I needed so that I could understand. So I do a lot of seeking to understand and sometimes that means, you know, I am asking the stupidest questions in the world. I always play back my understanding of architectures or, you know, data platform technology stacks or something like that to make sure that I've at least got the base level understanding so that we can then continue a conversation where I can add value. And so what is really interesting about that is that I would argue that many times if you asked a product manager, an engineer, and a data analyst, that if I'm a good leader, the engineer and the data side would probably be like, absolutely. Like, you know, she seeks to understand, she tries to add value where possible. She unblocks her. Whereas with the product managers, maybe sometimes they're like, yeah, she could maybe come up with a little less ideas on what we could do. But I think there's a really good book called RISE by Patty... I can't remember her name, but I'm sure we can find it and put it in the notes. And she talks about leading teams where she wasn't a functional expert in the role and how it does make you a better leader because you cannot solutionize. You also need to figure out how to tell when someone knows what they're talking about or not. Whereas with product, my brain immediately goes to, I, yes, this person knows what they're talking about because I'm hearing them and I know that thing too, or this person, they're not getting it because I get it. And, you know, they're not on the same page. But that's not really a great way to do it. It's better to have a way of working out if someone knows what they're talking about by asking them different questions, right, and seeking to understand more and more and more. Now, I do not get this right every time, right? Like on no level. In fact, probably, you know, six times out of 10, I'm completely getting this wrong. But I do think that leadership is something that is quite intangible. You don't realize quite how difficult leadership is until you are there. And once you get there, you also then just get more senior in leadership. And then in my head, I thought, well, once you've been a leader, you're doing it for longer, it gets easier. But actually the more leadership is required, the more difficult it becomes. And in my role, the bit that was the interesting part was leading product needs different things to leading engineering, needs different things to leading data. But I still need to be consistent across the board. So I need to work out what are the things that I do that are the same and you can rely on me for that every time. And then what are the things that I tweak the dial on slightly because I'm talking to a different function and a different job and therefore different people in those jobs. No, absolutely. Best piece of career advice you've ever received? Best piece of career advice. I think it's my own, that I've developed over time and it definitely is feel the fear and do it anyway. The best things are always the scariest. And sometimes they work out and sometimes they don't, but I don't regret any of them. Embrace the discomfort, get comfortably uncomfortable. Final question. Why should product people consider joining you and the team at Moonpig right now? Moonpig is a place where you actually get to positively impact people's lives. Like you're really like what is better than connecting people with their loved ones? And I think that sometimes when we're building products, you know, we talk about purpose-driven and we talk about lots of other buzzwords, but at Moonpig, you get to use the best technologies to actually connect people across the world. And I just don't think that there's a better thing that you can do with our talent. No, hear, hear. Well, where can people come and find out more about the company and I guess about yourself? Maybe connect up and reach out. Yep. You can connect with us on LinkedIn. The Moonpig LinkedIn page is brilliantly run by our fantastic talent team. Feel free to connect with me myself. If I don't get back to you, chat with the girls in the talent team. Never happened, George. You always get back to people instantly, George. We all know this. Only three years, Jason. Only three. Well, look, I'm looking forward to having our next chat before that. But anyway, now I'll make sure to link that all into the show notes. Try and find that book as well and hopefully have a few people come in and changing the world with you. But all I can do now, Georgie, is thank you very much for taking the time to share your CPO story. Thanks, Jason.