Moving from service-led to product-led – Kirsten Mann on The Product Experience

Lily, I was thinking of what movies have the best quotes that are applicable to product people. I mean, there are great business movies out there, but it feels like all the best quotes are things about sales or greed or just not the kind of inspirational thing I’d hope that we aspire to.

Yeah, I know what you mean. There’s all kinds of things, from Wall Street or Glengarry Glen Ross or The Social Network, but not so much about the importance of discovery. What got you onto this topic anyway, Randy?

It was actually our guest today. She was so inspirational on the topic of moving your company from services to product, and at one point she gave us a Jerry Maguire quote. And no, it wasn’t “Show me the money,” although I did almost blurt that out at another point in our chat.

I know. I could see you holding yourself back with much restraint. You’re right, though. Kirsten Mann is the chief product officer at Prospection and she was amazing to talk to. But if you want to find out what quote she did use, you’ll have to check out our chat.

And if you do have any suggestions for great product-related movie quotes, let us know.

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Good morning, Kirsten. How are you today? Welcome to the podcast.

Hello. Thank you so much for having me, Lily and Randy. I’m going to say, super excited. I’ve been an avid listener of your podcast, I think back from when you started, so it’s surreal to finally be talking to you. And a huge call-out to the fabulous Lucy McClain, which I think was the one who connected me to you guys. So thank you so much, Lucy.

Yay. Go Lucy. Well, I’m really excited about talking to you today about turning services or service-led businesses into product-led businesses. But before we get stuck into our topic, it would be really great if you could give our audience a real quick intro to you and how you got into product and what you’re doing now.

No worries. And that’s an Australian phrase I’m sure you’ve heard a lot as well with the no worries. Look, I did, like most people in product I’ve come into product probably in a roundabout way. I did double degrees originally at uni in accounting and computing and continued through in the computing side. Started working out at Ernst & Young as an auditor, of all things, and within six months I was out of audit. I’m not sure if they were trying to get rid of me or if it was just natural intervention. But it was while I was finishing my third year of uni, started working and went in onto the consulting side. And ended up working on digital products, but it was more websites and things back then.

And E&Y actually sent me to the States. And it was right back in ’96, so yes, I am quite old, if you’re counting down the years here. And this little thing called Amazon and Google, well, not Google then, but Amazon had just actually launched. And so it was during that time that I kind of started to have this obsession with stringing things together, and that led me to leading product development teams in the States. And when I returned to Australia, I was wanting to go more to startups, to be where you would get to do the original stringing right from the beginning with the business model. So all the startups I ended up working were acquired, including my own. And I had this bit of a mid-career crisis by then, where I was like, “Oh, this product thing is hard.” You invest a lot of time and then the companies get acquired or it’s tough making it all work.

And so I had this dream of, “Oh, maybe my calling is to be a radio announcer and a personal trainer,” and I kind of did those on the side. But luckily, I’ve got kids with very expensive gaming habits, so luckily I stayed with tech. And went back in house and started building out user experience and product teams. And first one of that was at MYB, worked at another place. These are brands that are probably better known in Australia. Sensis, and then… So MYOB was kind of my first unicorn. Aconex was my second unicorn. What we mean by that, they became global success stories and were bought out and did pretty well. And it was really at MYOB that I was fortunate enough to work with an amazing founder. And it really cemented my love for working in founder-led businesses where you’ve got this founder who’s so passionate about the problem and about the customers.

So when I went to Aconex, another founder-led business, and it was there I, again, worked really closely with one of the co-founders, Rob Phillpot. We ended up being acquired by Oracle and that was really interesting in the sense that I joined their exec, me and Rob who was founder of Aconex, we were the two execs that came over into Oracle. Stayed there for a couple years, and thought, “You know what? I want to go back to founder-led businesses.” So that took me to where I am now with Prospection. And it’s a health tech startup. Startup, it’s been around for 10 years, though, so not totally a startup. And we’re on a mission to get the right patients on the right treatment at the right time time. So really, it’s amazing to be able to work on… I’ve always had things that had societal impact, or you know in products sometimes where you’re going… People get into these long discussions and you go, “We’re not saving lives, guys. Just make a call.”

We are saving lives now, so it kind of feels a lot more real when you’re dealing with that type of scope. I suppose the other thing that’s changed in the last couple of years is working more on boards now too. So I work on two boards as non-executive director, being a product advisor. So that’s another whole extension, gone from the journey to exec but also see the other half of the board. So lot of different perspectives now I’ve got in these roles.

That’s amazing. And it sounds like you’ve worked for so many really successful startups and big corporate businesses that have done amazingly well. So I’m not sure whether you’re just super lucky or actually you’re the one that’s [inaudible 00:06:59] this massive success.

Yeah, I don’t think it could be attributed at all to me, but it’s definitely fun being part of that journey. And I think it’s so much when you can look back at that. And at the time you’re not necessarily seeing, but there’s definitely ingredients that you start to see what makes companies be more successful. I’ve written an article about this on my LinkedIn if anybody’s interested, but it was how do you match-make to an organisation and they’re the things that I’ve laid down now and look for in my current and future roles.

Nice. Well, I think we’ll all be following very closely your career and working out where we should be working next. So at Prospection, you’ve been on a journey in that business to convert it more from a service-led business into a product-led business. And I’m just curious, when you started working with Prospection and when you started assessing how the business was operating and what the model was, how did you first think, this business could be a product-led business? What was the assessment that you made to go, “We can actually make this transition”?

Yeah. When I became aware of Prospection, I was informed that, “Hey, we’re going to be a product business.” So that was interesting. I was like, “Oh, okay.” Everybody wants to be a product business. So then, of course, you bring your perspective to that and say, how far from reality is that in terms of what people want versus that reality? In the case of Prospection, I think they were definitely on that journey already. They’d created a number of platforms and one had found market fit in Australia. It had been created for Australia, it hadn’t been extended to the rest of the world and things too. So they’d experienced a part of what product market fit is like and there was a lot of ingredients there to become a product company. Mainly, one of the most important things was the appetite at the board level.

It was really the board that were pushing Eric the CEO and the rest of the organisation to start thinking this way and to say, “Hey guys, what you’re doing…” And it wasn’t just, you could say, oh, because it’s investment and it’s a multiplier aspect. But it was also, “What you’re doing is amazing. You are never going to be able to do this at scale globally if you don’t start thinking differently. Stop just thinking about doing this for Australia and now APAC and things. How do you actually do this and do it quickly for the world?”

And that was the underlying motivator. It wasn’t just purely financial from a board perspective. So that was interesting and quite different. So the appetite was there. Then what came was how far from reality are we really? And so when I come in and I’m like, “Ooh.” And thank you again, actually, Randy. When Randy spoke about this topic, it made me think, oh okay, I’ll document my last couple of years and really reflect on that journey and what we’ve done.

And sometimes I just don’t think we take the time to do that, right? We’re caught up in this product whirl, and everything’s happening and things are moving. And we don’t really stop as we’ve done certain phases and think, “Oh, how have we done and what have we done to get here?” So going through this for you guys was fantastic because I actually took a step back and thought, oh, okay, what were all the pieces that have pulled this together?

Kirsten, going back to basics on this, I’m curious. I’ve been through God knows how many transformation projects in my life. One of the things that always holds them back is there’s no definition of success or definition of done. So you’re going on a transformation initiated by the board to become product led. How do they know when you’ve been successful, and how do you then explain that to people in, say, marketing or sales or other areas? Because when you say product led, it kind of implies that it’s not them in charge anymore.

Yeah, there’s a couple of elements there too. It’s the shape of the organisation I think is one as well. And it’s a really interesting factor, I think, when you… And this is for people approaching roles or they’ve come into a role and been told something and then they’re in this thinking, “This doesn’t look like what I’ve been told.” Look at the org chart and see where the allocation of people lies. And so in the case of Prospection, if you looked at the original org chart, very service and client focused, oriented, and lots and lots of touch. Everybody handholding, loving, serving customers. But again, not scalable and quite costly. That type of model becomes very costly to scale in particular. So one aspect is what’s the shape of the org and how do you want to change that? And we wouldn’t have been able to scale in the model we were in because we had very specialist consultants that you tap out at a certain point.

You just haven’t got that type of analytical PhD backgrounds of that type. There’s only so many of them in each country kind of thing. So brilliant people, but you tap out at a certain point. So shape of org is one. Revenue profile is the other one. Usually in service organisations, a lot of your revenue is coming from a couple of key customers and big accounts, big revenue ones. You get a lot of smaller guys, but typically as you start to get value, and this was definitely the case for Prospection, we had a couple pharma that just loved us. And they were starting to use us more and more and more and more, almost that we’re becoming this in-house group for that. And that was the case with a number of customers. So again, that’s risky. You don’t want your business to be linked and dependent on a couple of accounts.

So the profile and the composition of revenue was another aspect of success, Randy, that the board were very interested in changing. How do we get lots of customers, maybe not spending as much but not as dependent on a couple of these really key high profile customers, was one. Other aspect was growth across regions, so we want to actually start to see growth in Japan, US, and increased share of wallet. So again, unless you’re a product company, it starts to become hard to increase your share of wallet without additional resourcing on the services side. So they were some of the success levers and obviously had numbers and things associated with that that the board were looking for.

And you mentioned you had quite a lot of support from the board. Did you have detractors as well that you had to manage through this process? And how did you go about helping them through or persuading them to jump on board, or maybe exiting them from the business if it’s not the business that they wanted to be in?

Yeah, I would wonder if there’s ever a change initiative doesn’t have some detractors. There’s some people that just are not going to like this whatsoever. And so obviously, less so at the board. It was more that was within the business, or more pockets of detracting. And I’ve got to say, the exec team and everything bought into that vision. And there were a couple that didn’t and they’re no longer with the business, interestingly, so that they were some of the ones. And not for anything, “Oh, this is outrageous,” but the business shape, where it was heading, didn’t suit what they wanted and what their skillsets were, especially if they’d been more oriented towards service type of businesses. Detractors inside, again, sometimes people are really obvious and some people you don’t necessarily realise initially and it sneaks up on you. A clear, obvious one for us was our former customer success team.

I say former because none of them are there now. It’s a different shape of customer success for us now. But that was very tricky to deal with initially, because the whole model had been like they were the voice of the customer. So nobody else was allowed to speak to customers, it was the customer success side. So not great for product when you can’t actually speak to customers, everything’s third party. And there’d also been this whole dependency built around this function because everything had to go through them. So they felt very good about that. It’s quite, “Hey, we’re very important.” But you are also crippling the business because, again, not scalable to do something like that.

And ultimately, even if you think about customers increasing, you can’t keep that type of service levels either, because if you get more customers globally, how are you going to give every customer your mobile and say, “Call me whenever you’ve got a question.” That’s what used to happen. So all of that had to change and that was a hard pill for some people to swallow. So that was probably where the biggest resistance came from.

So how do you go about starting this transition? Who do you work with? How do you introduce it to people? How do you bring them on the journey?

Well, the first part is assessing where you are. What are we dealing with here? And then it was like anything with a product strategy or company strategy, thinking about where do you need to be and how are you going to get there, what are the steps in between to get there? So really the first part for me was that organisational assessment, people assessment, tech, products, tech, all the rest of it. Then saying, “Right, okay, how do we change this? What does it look like where we want to be?” And creating the vision for that and getting buy-in. So the first one was getting buy-in from the board and the exec, and especially the CEO/co-founder. So once that was accepted and seemed reasonable, of course, also involved in that is your leadership level as well. Because you’re working with them to get intel on the business and understand what the impacts would be of doing certain things.

So once that was there, I put in place a strategy that was accepted at the exec team level. And then saying, “Okay, what would we need to do, not just on the product front to do this?” Because believe me, there was a lot of work we had to do with the product and engineering to get there. But in the rest of the org, what else needs to change? So I couldn’t just be thinking about my product area and function, I had to think end-to-end. And so like what I said right at the beginning of my career, it’s been about stringing end-to-end experiences. And same with Aconex and same with MYOB.

My roles were always never product, it was how do you extend the experience? And so exactly same thing applied here. I had to think about how would our sales process have to change? How would our customer success? How would our support process? What would we have to do? And not necessarily own all of those but help the people who did own those understand what needed to change and why, and what could we do and help to make that happen?

So we actually had to work not just on the product parts we were creating, but is there a system part that we need to create to support the consultants? And there was. And I’ve talked about this in the post I’ve done, where in a sense we’ve got two sides to our product. It’s the customer facing, but there’s also the consultant tool. And that was pivotal in being able to take the consultants on this journey as well. And so Randy, I mean, it’s ultimately about saying, how did people come on this journey? It’s not just thinking this is a product thing and “Hey, everybody, are you excited about the product strategy?” It’s thinking how would this impact the whole org and how do I help those areas understand that and work and come up with a plan that supports this as well? And all those pieces, it’s not this beautiful, linear, let’s do one then the other. They’re all kind of working at the same time.

And so that was really important to also consistently bring to the exec and say, “How are we going with this? Where do we think we’re not getting it, or where are we falling…” And have that kind of transparent discussion at the exec level. They were two pretty pivotal things in that change. Also being able to call out the elephant in the room. Sales was the other area that was a detractor inadvertently, because initially it seemed cool. “We’re going to have these products, isn’t this awesome? Got it. Oh, hold on, I can’t just sell anything now.” So then changing that and getting the sales guys. And also that means your shape of how you’ve been getting revenue’s going to change as well.

So there’s lots of implications and lots of quite hard pills to swallow. And again, there’ll be parts where you’re kind of on these journeys and people will go, “Oh, this isn’t what I expected.” And so you just have to not react too much and think, okay, that’s cool. How do we actually work through to see that this will be okay? But it’s not maybe as fun and sexy as you initially thought.

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And in that transition, obviously, you have customers who are expecting a certain type of experience with you as a business. And then you’re trying to create this new type of experience. How do you or did you either migrate the customers to the new experience, or did you continue to support the customers with the old legacy style way of working whilst also trying to build out the product-led version of the business?

Prospection was almost four businesses in one in some ways, so it was very complex coming in to it. I love this question, though, because there was a lot in this, as with all of your questions, there’s never any little surface pieces here. What we did was we said, “Okay, we’ve got to have a platform to go forward with, and it’s got to be the global platform. And guess what? We’re going to have to bring all the Australian customers, our existing customers onto this platform.” And that meant that we had to make sure that, one, there would be features we would have to replicate in this new platform, the go forward platform. But we didn’t want to just take everything over that was already in the Australian platform. Because, as you know, a lot of those things aren’t necessarily always used.

People say they’re very ordered and then they’re not. Now, how do you work that out? Well, part of it is usage statistics. There wasn’t usage statistics on the platform so we had to instrument pretty quickly and say, “Hey, can we at least get a snapshot and a feel for where are people using things”? And I almost did that day three. “Is there instrumentation in this? No? Get it in, I want it in.” And so the other part, though, of course, is the discovery side. So pretty quickly we got ourselves in front of customers, existing customers. And so kind of stopped that, from the customer success guys being the voice of customers. We said, right, product need to get in front of customers and really understand what are they doing, because we might be switching things off and customers won’t be happy.

So let’s be preemptive about this, and did the pitch for us speaking to customers. And there was a lot of resistance around that because I didn’t come from the pharma or health industry. “Will you be able to have a conversation with customers and they’ll think that it’s credible?” And I thought, “I think I’m going to be okay.” But there was a trust aspect there. So we enabled the CS or the salespeople to come on that call. They could see how we were doing it. It was all very professional, the rest of it. But part of that was really understanding and getting to the bottom of need and real value and what were the key things that from a customer… The analytics always tell you the what, they don’t tell you the why. Can we get a bit more colour around that why and form a view there?

What we ended up with was then saying, we have a pretty clear idea of what’s going to need to be replicated, and let’s start getting that into the new platform. But let’s also start planting the seeds with customers that things are going to change. So we knew that to get to new platform was going to be a nine to 12 month programme. Gives us time to plant the seeds and start to let customers know things are going to be different. So all of those were the pieces. And then, of course, so this was part of the strategy I put in place was it was called split, switch and scale. So that’s part of the other thing with a product strategy. I think you want to be able to make it something that people can remember and recite. And so I would hear everybody go, “Split, switch and scale.” And it’s going, “Cool, they’ve got it right.” And what does it actually mean?

Well, they knew what each of those phases mean as well. And they knew once we got to switch, we were going to be ready to bring customers over. And so when we started to get there, we were taking customers and taking them through that transition. And of course, there’ll be things we’ve missed. And again, you need to be transparent about that and saying, “Hey, we think we’ve got a pretty good group here but we haven’t got the crystal ball. There’s going to be things that we just don’t know.” And again, planting the seeds that so people aren’t, “How did you guys not know this?” All of that stuff. Making sure people were going to be aware that there were things that we’re still going to have to do that we might have been unaware of initially. And of course that happened but they weren’t huge so we were able to deal with that as well.

But I think there’s a number of pieces there of it’s kind of that plan of how you’re going to take customers through this change. And how would you feel as a customer if this was happening to you? Another decision there which was interesting was price. We had an increased price for our customers for a while. And so initially there was like, right, they’re coming to this cool new platform, they’re getting all these other additional things they haven’t got before. We should increase price. And I said, “Now, let’s actually get them to the platform. Don’t give them all the other things and say, ‘Hey, this is in your future if you’d like them,’ but don’t automatically give that away, but don’t change and increase price.” Because suddenly you put a barrier for switching. We need everybody on the one platform, creates efficiencies for us, then we can upsell the other stuff.

Kirsten, it sounds like you’ve been through this a bunch of times. You have a whole lot of skills around this, both dealing with customers and dealing with other parts of the business. I’m curious, getting the right product team in place, what do you look for in that team? What kind of skills do they need to have to go through a transition like this?

Yeah, it’s a really great question because you think having done this a number of times, you’ve got this playbook. But I find every time I go into one of these companies, sure, you’ve got things in the tool kit, but it’s different because you’re dealing with different products, different industries, different people. And so you can’t just pull out the same playbook of it. And it’s one of the things I think unfortunately I’ve seen time and time again. So in coming into this, I potentially made the same mistake thinking, “Ooh, I know. There was these great product people I’ve worked with before, they’ll be awesome because they can deal with everything.” And Prospective’s a different company again. And I guess what you need to really have, a strong interest and acumen for data. And so what I realised is, so Randy, to your point, initially I would’ve thought coming into this product people, if they’re smart, capable and curious and things like that, that you’d be fine, you’d be able to work it out.

And we had some of those people. I pretty quickly saw that wasn’t the case. And it was another learning for me where I had to say, “Wow, okay.” And why was that? They were struggling and they weren’t happy. And they were like, “Oh, man.” Because health tech sounds sexy and interesting. And everybody’s like, “Ooh, this is really cool.” And then you get into the data and it’s really dry and it’s very complex. And people go, “Oh my gosh, this is really killing me.” And so their souls were getting drained and so it wasn’t bringing them the joy that they thought that they would get by being in this sexy health tech company. And so that was a lesson I had to just take a step back there and go, right, the profile of product person that worked in a different organisation for me isn’t going to work here.

And just because you’re interested in data or you’re interested in health, that’s not enough. You have to have shown that you are very passionate about data and worked deeply in it because I don’t think you’re going to survive if you’re not. And so we had to change that profile of person we recruited, Randy, and that was a couple of iterations, but also respectfully from both sides. So product people, some people who would’ve been great in another organisation, and I’d worked with before and I knew culturally that they were a great fit, it just wasn’t their joy. And also the stage we were at, to your point with transformation, some people think transformation sounds fun and lots of change, but guess what? People don’t like change. A lot of people like certainty and they like to know that things… What am I going to be doing for this week and the following week?

And guess what? Half the time you are running crazily in these environments. So if you are about to go into an organisation that’s talking about lots of change and you think, “Oh, that’s a bit interesting things,” what it typically means is that you have to be very flexible, adaptable, and resilient. Because a lot of the things that you think are your tools that you have, you just have to be able to change and adapt. And again, a different profile of person. So there was a lot of lessons in that for me, Randy, of the people I initially thought I really had to rethink. And now we’ve settled into what I think is the right profile, but guess what? In five years that might be completely different again as we’re at a different stage.

And just thinking about the different relationships and the way that those different functions are operating, how did that impact the technical team and the technical department? And what was that like working with, I guess, your counterpart CTO or whatever was the head of the technical division and changing the way that you’re working from very much servicing customers and delivering features for customers, presumably, to a much more product-led way of working?

Well, I think one of the lucky things in my situation was the CTO and the engineering org were really ready for this. They were sick of being factory feature-led and really wanted change. So wanted that change but didn’t know how to make it happen. And it was really, I think, when I did the interview, met Ricky and everything, who’s our CTO, I was like, “Oh.” I felt like… Have you guys seen Jerry Maguire? I don’t know whether I was Tom Cruise or Ricky was Tom Cruise. But I felt like that scene where Tom, who’s Jerry Maguire, he turns to Renee Zellweger’s character and says, “You complete me.” And this is what I felt when I got Ricky. And I was like, “Oh my goodness, where have you been all my life? I’ve worked this long in tech and it’s taken me this long to find you.” And why is that?

I remember even saying to Ricky… It was week three or something like that, and I said to Ricky, “In six months time, if we’re talking, what do we want to see?” Exactly to your first question, Randy, “What’s success for us? What do we want to see happen?” And Ricky said to me, “I have to think about it, Kirsten. But even having you here is just better.” And I was like, “Oh, you complete me.” So his attitude and everything is wonderful. But that permeates right through the engineering team. And what’s the essence there? It’s that nothing is ever too hard. Or you strike some teams sometimes where they’ll use excuses to avoid leaning into the problem. “Oh, that will take us six months,” or blah blah. You’re like, “Okay, I can see you really don’t want to do this.”

It’s never that. It’s, “Let me understand the problem, let’s share this together of that understanding, and how can we work together to resolve that?” And having that in an engineering and product relationship is so critical. It makes everything so much easier because you’re in step, you don’t have to try to convince somebody else of what you’re trying to do. And so Ricky has been that whole… And the engineering side has just made this possible. If we had that resistance there, we would not have done what we’ve done in the time that we’ve done it.

And coming in, believe me, you guys would’ve been the same. You deal in environments where you’re thinking, this is hard work and you’re subservient or whatever it is. Seen that with Ricky and I could see right from the outset that was going to be a different situation here, and it’s been exactly the case. So having somebody who’s really geared towards working together in partnership and taking their teams on that journey as well is pivotal.

Amazing. And then there was just one more question that I think we have time for. We’re really running out of time. This has been so good. Like, “Quick, I need to ask you more stuff.” You mentioned about pricing earlier and that switch from, I guess, the kind of custom pricing for the individual customers that you have and then more switching them over to product pricing. Tell me more about that pricing change and how you were working before. Because I think it was a subscription model with a bit of service attached. How did you go through that assessment? And was that very much led by product or was that led by the board, or who was making the call on where the pricing would be set?

Was this the last little question at the end?

Just a tiny question.

[inaudible 00:35:46] question. Look, pricing is always a challenge. I mean, any organisation I’ve worked in, it’s challenging. And I would say we’ve suffered the Goldilocks experience in the sense of Australia had set its prices too low and they had basically set an expectation in market which is quite hard to move from. Because competitors have entered, used that as their pricing level and then you haven’t got a lot further to come up or down. So when we went into Japan, we had gone the other extreme and almost too high. So the porridge is too hot, too cold, too hot. So we wanted to get just right in the US. And so part of that was, Lily, to answer your question, it’s a cross-functional team effort. And different people, product obviously part of that.

But also we’ve really lucky that we’ve got a strategy group in our company as well. Our chief of staff is very strategic and has a strategist that works with him as well, and so would contribute thinking to that model as well. And also experts from each of the regions. So it’s coming up with pricing, you can’t just say, “Oh, this is what we’re doing with the product side.” It’s okay, expertise in the people who’ve dealt with that data for a long time. How have you priced that previously? What have you done? Even when you were doing services, what was included in that service? And trying to get a real read on value. How do we price value? And that’s really challenging. So typically, like anything with product, we did a straw man, we iterated it, tested it with friendly customers. Are they dying at [inaudible 00:37:39]?

That’s maybe too much. Next one, coming back. And then really the ultimate test is that you’ve then been able to sell it at that level and thinking to new customers. And so that’s exactly like you would approach a product. I don’t think pricing’s ever a static thing. And you’ve got to have strawmen of what goes into it. Making sure people understand the levers across that. And things like, we weren’t very sure initially of the cost to serve. We didn’t have a lot of data that had been recorded. We had a few guesses and things, but there wasn’t a lot of historical data. And again, you want to be factoring all of those things. What’s your cost of acquisition? What’s all of these things across that value chain need to be factored into your pricing. What do you do if you haven’t got it?

Well, you take a step, and then you be prepared to iterate on it as you start to see the data and if it’s real. So again, setting that was going to be the expectation with how we were going to approach pricing was very important. This isn’t just going to be this one-off thing and everything’s magic and hey, wow. We’ll do this in iterative stages. We’ll get feedback in different ways. This will be the type of feedback we’ll be looking for. Some of it will be data, some of it directly from customers, and we’ll evolve that pricing. So I think it was another thing of thinking in bits and iterating on it. And that’s been kind of the language that we’ve used more and more across the organisation. I also had some terrible mistakes there, too, where I was like, “Ooh, where drugs, where…”

Because one of our key customers is pharma, so I was like, surely pharma who have really expensive drugs should be paying more for our product. They get more value. Can’t we do that value-based level? And of course you start to research it more and think about that. And usually they’re doing rarer drugs, means less patients, so they’re probably not going to get the same return that we are thinking because they’re finding less patience through our product. So things like that, you initially come into it and then you actually learn the reality.

But if you do ever find someone like Martin Shkreli who’s trying to charge a million dollars for insulin, then you can charge as much as you want for somebody like that.

There’s a little ethical thing there, but we won’t go into that.

Yeah. Kirsten, this has been fantastic. Thank you so much for joining us today. This was great.

Thank you so much for having me, and look forward to you guys coming to Australia sometime and joining us here.

Yeah, absolutely.

Sounds good.

Get the barbie on. Oh no, I can’t do that.

Put the shrimp on the barbie.

The Product Experience is the first.

And the best.

Podcast from Mind the Product. Our hosts are me, Lily Smith.

And me, Randy Silver.

Louron Pratt is our producer and Luke Smith is our editor.

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